Someone on a BBS pointed this excellent editorial out to me...
Ignore the silly blurb and just read the article below it. It's a killer nonpolitical summary of the U.S. news media's inability to simply report the news.
[...]
The media don't cover the news. They hunt it down, beat it to death, resuscitate it, and beat it to death again. Television news programs aren't information outlets so much as guess-the-news game shows where "experts" analyze the unknown and pundits predict the unknowable. When there's nothing left to say, they enter the realm of fiction.
"What if?" is the question that drives all fiction. The writer sits down before a blank page and asks herself, "What if this happened, what if that happened?" And the Muse begins spinning yarns with the threads of imagination.
Journalism, which traditionally seeks answers to who, what, when and where, serves a different Muse. Or it used to. With the explosion of alternate media, including "citizen journalism," the lines between fiction and journalism have become perhaps irrevocably blurred.
Speculation is the new journalism. In the absence of facts, speculation may nourish curiosity, but it also distorts both perception and reality. The media can't be seen as separate from the events they cover, especially when coverage is itself a creation.
[...]
[...]
The media don't cover the news. They hunt it down, beat it to death, resuscitate it, and beat it to death again. Television news programs aren't information outlets so much as guess-the-news game shows where "experts" analyze the unknown and pundits predict the unknowable. When there's nothing left to say, they enter the realm of fiction.
"What if?" is the question that drives all fiction. The writer sits down before a blank page and asks herself, "What if this happened, what if that happened?" And the Muse begins spinning yarns with the threads of imagination.
Journalism, which traditionally seeks answers to who, what, when and where, serves a different Muse. Or it used to. With the explosion of alternate media, including "citizen journalism," the lines between fiction and journalism have become perhaps irrevocably blurred.
Speculation is the new journalism. In the absence of facts, speculation may nourish curiosity, but it also distorts both perception and reality. The media can't be seen as separate from the events they cover, especially when coverage is itself a creation.
[...]