Monday, February 03, 2025
COMMENT - NEWS
To a "genuine" news organization, "news" is a piece of information that catches the eye or ear of the customer or potential customer. Their continued existence depends on keeping and expanding this group.
Therefore the news that sparks interest is the news that is presented. Being "professional journalists", these reporters of news present it in a manner to provoke the most interest and response....usually in the form of outrage.
Just like "news photos" which have been set up or cropped so that a few people in one spot appear to be a mob taking over a city, written and spoken news is presented to give the appearance of something big happening when the actual event or utterance would normally mean little to most people in the ebb and flow of daily life.
To get people to read or listen to their news, professional news outlets create headlines that ignite interest and leave the customer wanting to know just what in the hell happened.
Most people don't make it past the headlines. They assume the headline to be the news, when it is often incomplete, misleading, and inflammatory.
Unfortunately, we cannot be everywhere observing every event ourselves, and have to trust professional news organizations to provide us with the information we need to make intelligent decisions.
Sadly, sometimes it seems they are too busy trying to stay in business and ahead of the competition to give rational representations of facts in an understandable manner so that we, the citizens, can make our own decisions based on reason and belief.
Don't even get me started on the untold number of "citizen journalists" expounding on the "news" without training or knowledge, but with tons of opinion and hubris, pick words and sentences out of "real news", and present it as fact in order to prove the validity of their position or belief.
In the land of the Internet, once a "fact", real or otherwise, hits the screen, it assumes a virtual life which can never be extinguished. Every day I see "news" that is either patently false or which has been massaged and manipulated to look worse than it is.
Every day, I get emails, and read comments on social media, from reasonable, reasonably intelligent, and well-meaning friends and relatives who have fallen for the headline and hype without bothering to research the facts.
I guess that in my way, I contribute to the problem by the fact that I have, in the past, "liked" or "shared" information which may or may not have been correct because I agreed with the intent, if not the facts. Recently, I have backed off from even that, which may be why I don't have so much to say...except when I type up long diatribes such as this.
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Labels: commentary, current events, donovan baldwin, journalism, news, opinion
# posted by Donovan Baldwin @ 11:40 AM 
