An important article on the press from, believe it or not, townhall.com

[fpb]

Paul Weyrich is a man who has been in journalism for nearly half a century. That does not necessarily make him wise, but, in this case, it means that he has something to say about the way we receive the news - and it does not matter only in the case he describes, but also, for instance, in the increasingly obvious matter of slanted and manipulated news from the Middle East and collapsing news standards. (Twice recently the BBC has interviewed "men in the street" in two murderous tyrannies, Cuba and Iran, without so much as suggesting that such interviews has all the evidentiary value of a read of the official Press: people are certainly not going to bad-mouth the Government on a foreign TV screen that shows their faces uncovered!) http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/PaulWeyrich/2006/08/22/tragedy_and_media_irresponsibility

Comments

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you could pull something meaningful out of this nonsense. The best I could come up with was, "And if it still doesn't make any sense, it's probably because it was reported by PR people."

[chuckles]

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

"The news business is a shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.

"There's also a negative side."

- Hunter S. Thompson, deceased

* * * * * * *

Newspapers aren't immune. Weyrich had a good editor, but maybe the story just wasn't "big" enough. I will, however, give him the benefit of the doubt since it was 43 years ago. Times were a lot different then in the media. In my dreams I used to imagine I wrote and edited for a newspaper back in the 1950s, when a newspaper's reputation mattered and few of them had squads of PR people or firms to smooth things over. Of course that was back when I worked at a newspaper in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So I'm biased here.

The TV news, any of it as far as I know, is just one step below and to the left of schoolyard gossip. When reading or watching the news nowadays the old adage "Caveat emptor" so very much applies.

Re: [chuckles]

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you read ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, the defences against bad stories were still in place. Woodward and Bernstein kept trying to force the pace, because of their enthusiasm for the story, but there were plenty of people to remind them of the decencies. And once or twice when they took one risk too many, they landed the paper in trouble, and have the decency to admit it. The routine they evolved was that if they did not have two independent sources for any piece of information, they would not publish it. Woodward and Bernstein are the founding myth for every newspaperman today, but the truth is that if the practices they followed then were followed today, half the stories on the front pages would never get there.

Re: [chuckles]

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

...the truth is that if the practices they followed then were followed today, half the stories on the front pages would never get there.

True. Unfortunately, it's both a big money game and a cultural clash. Only two of my friends in the newspaper, the radio and the tv business aren't what I would consider biased toward on very narrow portion of the political spectrum -- and quite often it shows in their reporting or lack thereof. Many today are out of the business of questioning things that, as some will confess, "they know to be true." It doesn't matter whether or not what they "know" is objectively true or not.