hmmm....ever notice how every time a Science Scare story runs in the New York Times there is always a BIG EEEVIL CORPORATION to blame?
Monsanto hasn’t been clean as the wind-driven snow over their seeds, though.
They have been going after “seed cleaners” who help farmers use their crop for next year’s seed, even when it isn’t Monsanto seed to begin with.
They are also suing farmers for having cross polinated crops - it’s the insects’ and wind’s fault on that.
Ever notice how we call them ‘stories’ and not news?
I hear the word story, I think fiction. I think plot, characters, conflict, story arc, crescendo, denoument.
News, to me, is a report of the facts of something. Findings of fact. I use to read news, and sometimes still do in the WSJ, where you hit the end of an article and feel like, “Wow, the end sort of happened here very suddenly.”
Then I think, “That’s what you should expect from news - here’s the facts as they are today - you want a story, go to a book store.”
One really important aspect of the series “From Earth to the Moon” was their treatment of the Apollo 13 incident. NASA couldn’t get the news media interested in the moon anymore - they had made spaceflight look as easy as airplane flight.
Then Apollo 13 hit. Now you had a story.
One of the writers commented in the backstory of how the series was made that reporters started asking the question, “How do you feel?”
He noted that the question was puzzling in that it doesn’t have anything to do with the facts, but that’s where journalism had changed forever - the triumph of feelings over facts.
Many stories have morals to them. Almost every news story has a moral. It’s part of the formula - the hero’s fatal flaw. News is dying because all the stories now sound the same, and the facts have been standing in the way of selling fiction from 1960 or so until today.
With the internet, fiction is free, as is propaganda. One no longer has to turn to “Dan Rather” or “Katie Couric” for their entertainment mixed with facts.
Entertainment is ubiquitous. Fox isn’t much better, but they are the only thing on the right you can turn to.
Drudge is king in journalism right now because the stories are pared down, and the news isn’t something you can readily find in one place somewhere else.