Vyoos on news
February 5th 2010 02:57
News is a quirky beast, and shaping it can be a bit like building a sand castle with quicksand.
Like everything in today’s instant information world, news is not always what it’s supposed to be, and often it doesn’t finish the way it started.
News is man bites dog – the unusual, the quirky, the rare and the wonderful. Today, however, news is also a commodity, a manufactured oddity assembled on the production lines of political and celebrity marketing ambition, polished by media industry reporters and packaged by editors.
By the time it reaches you, the consumer, it can have the same relationship with the original story that beer has with hops; that the sun has with a telescope.
The line between news and entertainment is fading. Even the serious, and seriously ethical, presenters of news, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, have reporters and readers who speak with exaggerated tonal stresses, a journalistic equivalent of canned laughter.
Did we mention journalism? It’s a dying art, slowly suffocating under a growing need to help people not to think.
image: www.mediaaccess.org.au
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Comment by Norm
Consumption Malfunction
Equal and Opposite
Arses and Elbows
Footy Power
Whatever it is, it's nothing like a compass. It's more like a quicksandcastle.
Comment by Chris Champion
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I'm off now for a weekend in Sydney. I'm leaving you in charge.