What Do You Think About The News?

[Seil]

And I don't mean "Tucker Carlson's an asshole," or "O'Riely can do something very inappropriate." I'm talking about news in general, from magazines, to newpapers, to TV and Radio... whatever.

I heard today about Cheque-book Journalism:

chequebook journalism
n
(Communication Arts / Journalism & Publishing) the practice of securing exclusive rights to material for newspaper stories by paying a high price for it, regardless of any moral implications such as paying people to boast of criminal or morally reprehensible activities

Now, I've heard that CBJ is illegal, as you can't really pay someone for information and exclusive rights to a news story, or something to that effect, so corporations have been getting around it by stating that they're paying individuals for "Photographs," and "Cell-phone videos."

And there's a quote from Cracked:

This wasn't as much a problem in the old days, of course. Some of us remember having only three channels on TV. That's right. Three. We're talking about the '80s here. So there was something unifying in the way we all sat down to watch the same news, all of it coming from the same point of view. Even if the point of view was retarded and wrong, even if some stories went criminally unreported, we at least all shared it.

That's over. There effectively is no "mass media" any more so, where before we disagreed because we saw the same news and interpreted it differently, now we disagree because we're seeing completely different freaking news. When we can't even agree on the basic facts, the differences become irreconcilable. That constant feeling of being at bitter odds with the rest of the world brings with it a tension that just builds and builds.

Which is true, I think. So why is it that when you hear a news story on CNN, then on FOX, then on local news, why do they have a different story? Michael Moore is talking about how "greed killed the newspapers.