Comments on: Real news vs. fake news

By: Billy Smith

Billy Smith — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:20:56 +0000

I don’t believe people care about celebrities all that much. It isn’t that we demand news about them, it is simply all that we are offered.
Maybe 1 in 100 people care about the latest ridiculous development in Britney Spears’ life, and yet the media refuses to let her (and so many others like her) fade into obscurity.

That said, people don’t seem to be demanding much “real news” either.
Easier to stomach, celebrity gossip beats depressing current events hands-down, and we seem not to mind being force-fed flavorless filling with little substance.

Foie gras, anyone?

By: John

John — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 15:01:38 +0000

I’m going to show my age.
Back in the days of Walter Cronkite etc. the airwaves were viewed differently. I think this was because back in those days, the available frequencies that could be practically used was limited, and because the range of an AM station could reach a large portion of the country only a few stations could be licensed. In order to get a license you had to show that a certain percentage of the broadcast time was spent doing things for the public good. Every few years a station had to defend its right to have the license. If enough people complained they could lose it. Since a particular license was very valuable, there were plenty of people encouraging you to voice your opinion in hopes that the frequency would become available. One of the ways of defending your license was to have a good, well funded, unbiased news department. Other ways were kids programming and Sunday morning programming. It also encouraged stations to have concerts and more socially responsible programming. Repeats were limited, because they could be viewed as wasting a “national trust”. This was one of the reasons for the golden ages of radio and television. It also meant that there was a lot of self imposed censorship, limited experimentation, and few things that were highly controversial. People certainly wouldn’t use a curse word. Since there were so few stations, every station had lots of viewers and was very profitable. They had money for expensive programming and didn’t need to cut cost with repeats, poor news coverage and shows that were inexpensive to produce.

With the large number of stations and the internet etc, there is no way to go back to the way it was and few people would want to. The network executives are acting just like most other corporate executives by chasing this quarters profit. This creates a herd mentality and a different kind of censorship. Remember that in any society, the difference between censorship and just being socially responsible is a fine line that is open to greatly different interpretations. Like many other corporations, following the herd will lead to degrading quality and profits. Then someone different comes along and puts them out of business with a superior and imaginative product. CNN did it once, but now they are worse than most. FOX did it when no one thought that you could create a new network. Someone else who has guts will do it again in a different way. I just hope its soon. I’m tired of 500 stations and nothing to watch. But it does give me a chance to read books and do other things that are more productive. Perhaps what we have is actually much better for the nation :)
Johnwrt1@yahoo.com

By: Deanna Hoak

Deanna Hoak — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 02:30:05 +0000

These are really interesting thoughts, all. I’m lucky to have such thoughtful readers.

By: Corey J Feldman

Corey J Feldman — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:01:33 +0000

Humans are social creatures and gossip is the natural result. Ancient nomad or Modern city dweller, your survival depends on understanding group social dynamics. Celebrities are people of influence, regardless of the positive or negative nature of that influence. It is only natural for people to be drawn to their stories.

By: Chris Billett

Chris Billett — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:36:36 +0000

Thank God that if you see the news in the UK, it isn’t quite that bad… yet. Even the worse news sources, like news.bbc.co.uk, are pretty good at having some real stories… you just have to go to Most Emailed and Most Read to see what’s really depressing… doh.

By: Holly

Holly — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:38:33 +0000

Honestly, I think that celebrity gossip seems more important to the general public because it is what we are bombarded with on a daily basis. I think the media tries to dumb us down and they are succeeding. Besides, the “news” isn’t really news anyway.

By: Alana Abbott

Alana Abbott — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:00:09 +0000

Wow, I like Merrie’s answer. I was just suspecting that it’s long been tradition not to discuss religion or politics in polite company (as it’s likely to make someone upset). Celebrities, however, are perfectly acceptable topics of conversation in polite company, whether they’re people we love to love or love to hate.

By: Merrie Haskell

Merrie Haskell — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:53:57 +0000

I’m sure that there’s a basic social structural difference between gossip and news. Gossip is supposedly a universal human trait:
http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/anthropology.php?p=1275&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

And you can see how gossip was all about learning what your neighbors did, even if you didn’t know them very well. In fact, it’s much easier to gossip about someone you don’t love, but just see across the village, or so I think… Paris Hilton lives ALL THE WAY across the village. :)

And if you think about “news” as in “the doings of the state” and how little of human (pre)history has had a state, in the long term, well, we probably aren’t very hard-wired to be terribly interested in things that don’t actually directly map to our own experiences and won’t impact us or someone we know.

We can discuss the war ’til the cows come home, but for some of us, it doesn’t become real until our neighbor’s kid–or our own–goes to Iraq.

Obviously some people out there feel like they live in a global neighborhood, and identify more broadly with the state, and are biased *towards* news (and politics) and *away* from gossip, but I suggest they are not the norm, or even possibly they’ve managed to rewire their brains into what they consider fulfillment of the gossip urge.

By: Robert Legault

Robert Legault — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:36:24 +0000

I’ve speculated about this a lot, especially those occasional late nights at [popular national weekly] when I’m carefully editing something about Cameron Diaz’s eye shadow or what Eva Longoria wore to some awards show I’ve never heard of. I don’t think there’s any one reason. It’s a multitude of causes. First of all, celebrities have a small army of PR people and publicists devoted both to getting them into the news and to doing damage control when something negative gets in. Second, I don’t know about TV news (though I imagine it’s similar), but magazine publishing is now all about getting celebs on the cover, because that fuels newsstand sales. So getting A-list celeb on cover = favorable coverage of celeb’s new movie. And similarly with Britney, Lindsay, Paris and friends: a TV show that has some exclusive coverage of them is going to get high ratings, which = ad $$. It’s sad but true.

Pervez Musharaf or Hugo ChÃ¡vez probably has a PR apparatus and publicists, or their equivalent, but they’re not really concentrated on the prime time.

To actually have a commitment to inform the public in a serious way about the improtant issues that face us is beyond what corporate news is all about, which is all about sugar-coated nuggets that will get high ratings.

In the days of, say, Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, there was some effort by the old-school newsmen to actually cover real news, however stage-managed it was by the corporate parents even back then. But as a few conglomerates have dome to own most of the big media, there’s no real motivation anymore to do anything.