Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/12

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Subject: Re: [Leica] The Decisive Moment
From: Marc James Small <msmall@infi.net>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 00:05:04 -0500

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!

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