There was all this enthusiasm about amateurism and the idea that people could now just make videos in their bedroom, or blog news stories and share it online, and isn't this great? Now we can do it just for the love of it and not try to be professionals, corrupted by careerism.
But me contradicting a news story is not going to make my words fact. It will just create a new news story.
If the breaking news story had to do with hard news, politics specifically, I had a lot to do with it. If it had to do with music, Kurt Loder was more involved.
I met journalists that were on both sides of things. People who are young, enthusiastic and hard working journalists working on the online side and people who had been there forever. There was one journalist who had running shoes under her desk in case she had to kick of her heels and go out and cover a breaking news story.
What's so ironic is that CNN's doing reports on fake news, and they have someone who writes one false news story after the next.
When I see a news story on a site, about a movie that I'm interested in, it's like the mouse going for the pleasure button and I click it. But then, when I see the movie, it's like, "Oh, I would have enjoyed the movie that much more, if I hadn't known that. "
I haven't left my house in days. I watch the news channels incessantly. All the news stories are about the election; all the commercials are Viagra and Cialis. Election, erection, election, erection! Either way we're screwed!
Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it's a good story or just a seductive one?
People can get their news any way they want. What I love about what's happened is that there are so many different avenues, there are so many different outlets, so many different ways to debate and discuss and to inquire about any given news story.
When you go out for drinks, tell people to bring in a news story that made them say "Oh my god. " Talk about it.
Other than that one year, Salon has been very cautious about the way it spends money. For instance, since last year, we've had virtually no marketing budget. It's just word of mouth. And our circulation continues to grow that way by breaking news stories.
Almost everything I say, no matter how innocent my intentions are, seems to get sort of manipulated and sensationalized and turned into some ridiculous news story.
Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.
I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.
Writers don't often say anything that readers don't already know, unless its a news story. A writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a writer can do.
A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power. And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.
Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.
When "news stories" are broken, do we not expect a certain amount of fact-checking or source-checking? One has to ask if this falls under the guise of sloppy reporting or deception as a source of spin. We seem to accept a certain amount of deception and we seem to be helpless to doing anything about it, as illustrated so clearly by where we are right now in this moment in our history.
Out of the 10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life?
Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting 'facts' in news stories is something else. . . . The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations' editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.
