(3089/898) Breaking the News

1785) The function of a good newspaper and therefore of a good journalist is to see life steady and see it whole.

Charles Prestwich Scott
quoted by James Fallows in
Breaking the News (1996)

1786) We're against people who push people around.

motto of the New York newspaper PM (c.1940)
quoted by James Fallows in
Breaking the News (1996)

1787) Journalism is not mere entertainment. It is the main tool we have for keeping the world's events in perspective. It is the main source of agreed-upon facts we can use in public discussion. The excesses of journalism have been tolerated because no other institution can provide the benefits journalism can.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

1788) If the [...] press somehow vanished, and if all of us could, through the Internet or 500-channel TV, get exactly the information we wanted, we would still want some way to compare impressions, to put things in perspective, to ask other people, "What do you make of this?"

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

1789) [The] real purpose [of journalism] is to satisfy the general desire for information to have meaning. People want to know the details, but they also want to know what the details mean. [...] What we read in the papers and see or hear on TV and radio should provide context that gives meaning to information.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

1790) What bothers me is that the hyper-adversarialism that has ruined the American legal system is now really corroding journalism. [...] It is driven by the TV shows. You get two people who are adversaries and watch them fight. The more they fight, the better TV it is. It conditions people to be adversarial - and unlike in the law, this kind of adversary process is not even useful. It's adversarialism as a pure sport.

Jonathan Alter
quoted by James Fallows in
Breaking the News (1996)

1791) If trials were conducted the way most opinion polls are, the jury would be asked its opinion on the defendant's guilt or innocence before any arguments were made or witnesses called - and then the attorneys would make their argument match what the public already believed.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

1792) If it bleeds, it leads.

media consultants' recommendation to local TV news to
feature crimes, fires, autowrecks, etc (c.1990)
quoted by James Fallows in
Breaking the News (1996)

1793) Even more than broadcast coverage of national or world events, local TV news suggests an environment of generalized menace that cannot really be understood but that viewers should try to insulate themselves from. [...] The accumulated impact [...] [is] to give citizens a nightmarish view of life in their own community.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

1794) Journalists are not like scientists, observing the behavior of fruit flies but not influencing what the flies might do. They inescapably change the reality of whatever they are observing by whether and how they choose to write about it. [...] The conventions of choosing "the news" are so familiar, and so much of the process happens by learned and ingrained habits, that it is easy for journalists to forget that the result reflects decisions, rather than some kind of neutral scientific truth.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

1795) It's absolutely correct to say that there are objectively occurring events [...] Speeches are made, volcanoes erupt, trees fall. But news is not a scientifically observable event. News is a choice, an extraction process, saying that one event is more meaningful than another event. The very act of saying that means making judgments that are based on values and based on frames.

Cole Campbell
editor, Virginian-Pilot
quoted by James Fallows in
Breaking the News (1996)

1796) Michael Schudson, a professor at the University of California at San Diego who is a prominent academic theorist of the news, has used the thought-experiment of a news establishment that suddenly vanishes, in order to show the real value of journalism.

Suppose, Schudson has said, that the elite press, which filters the news in a way may people dislike, went out of business sometime in the near future. Suppose further that, thanks to imminent advances in technology, each person could get exactly the information he or she wanted, with none of the annoying "spin" from editors or commentators. With a vastly expanded system of cable TV, each viewer could watch sessions of each congressional committee, each state legislature, each city council. Through the Internet, people at home could instantly find the latest research reports about heart disease, or AIDS, or the effectiveness of different exercise schemes. Through fully indexed online version of the COngressional Record, they could find out what any congressman said about any theme. On Court TV and its many channels [sic] they could follow all the major legal battles. If they wanted to know the crime rates for each part of town or the crash rate for each commuter airline company, they could pull up that information too. The media establishment as we know it would seem to be short-circuited. And yet, Schudson wrote in his book The Power of News, "Journalism - of some sort - would be reinvented."

People would want ways to sift through the endless information available. What is more important? What is most relevant? What is most interesting? People would want help interpreting and explaining events. [...] It is hard to picture the contemporary world, even in the face of a technology that makes each of us potentially equal senders and receivers of information, without a specialized institution of journalism.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)
quoting Michael Schudson from
The Power of News (1995)