Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 11:09 PM 2/12/02 -0500, Kevin Argue wrote: > I agree this a capitalistic society and media giants are expected to be >profitable. However, are we as readers or a society of tv viewers only >interested in entertainment not being informed. Should American media have >put the world trade centre on the inside or back while arts and >entertainment on the front. Do readers not have the right to be informed as >to what is happening in the world. Or are things so great in america the >rest of the world doesn't matter. I went to cover the Canadian military in >the balkans. Canadian peacekeepers died trying to stop horriffic things >while americans didn't care. I personally have seen the bodies and the mass >graves. While you may not care about bosnians dying, should the rest of the >world not care about americans in new york. News must cover the world, good >bad amd even julia. Ah, Kevin! But let us not confuse "news" with "entertainment". The World Trade Center bombing got front-cover treatment as the people in the US really CARED about it, so it was a perfect merger of "news" and "entertainment". The folks in the US never gave a damn about anything in the Balkans (hear that, Elected Politicians?), so what happened to a US soldier there was of no news nor entertainment value, much less what happened to a Canadian troop, however lamentable, or to a local citizen. This was true of all the commercial outlets in the US, and was even more so on the oestensibly "pure" outlets, National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, both of which display a decidedly anti-military bias. If no one cares, it doesn't get published. Your real complaint, probably, is about the death of "news" as a feature of publishing and broadcasting independent of "entertainment", and in this complaint I join you. However, I would suggest that you review the history of broadcasting and publishing in the US, and you will find that it is more than a bit of a myth that there ever was a time when the news guys were REALLY independent of the entertainment side of the house. William Randolph Hearst (the progenitor of "Citizen Kane") instructed his newspaper publishers that, "it's news only if it sells newspapers", and Edward R Murrow had one HELL of a fight with Pauley at CBS to simply ESTABLISH a separate radio news section -- read Shirer's THE NIGHTMARE YEARS for discussion. We have to take the world as it is. We can try to change things we dislike but, in this case, you are simply beating your head against a very massive mountain, and the end result will only be a bruised head. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +276/343-7315 Cha robh bąs fir gun ghrąs fir! - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html