Quote approval

H

hornpharmd

5,000+ Posts
I was watching the new HBO series Newsroom recently and started thinking about journalism today. In that show details how the corporate and special interests have too much influece on who covers the news and what is allowed to be covered. Due to this we have seen an ever dwindling of decent news shows to the point that we almost all cable news shows that I can find are either opinion heads, biased to a singular viewpoint, or simply cover material that is better suited for TMZ or hardcopy.

I also watched a recent interview with Dan Rather on Bill Maher a couple of months ago and he talked about how he now counts only about 5 corporations that are controlling the news in the US. This isn't a good thing. He didnt' say this but I would say that we are effectively being censored by corporations on cable TV, not our government. It doesn't seem that we have real journalists and news organizations that are holding gov't and corporations accountable.

Today I saw this editorial by Rather discussing what he calls 'quote approval'. We are in a Presidential campaign year and it scares me that our media is so weak that they are basically giving the pen to the candidates and allowing them to write their stories. I am not sure of the solution to this.

www.cnn.com/2012/07/19/opinion/rather-quote-approval-reporting/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

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Dan Rather speaking about "honest brokers of information". That's rich. He needs to disappear. Rather has pretty well proven his inability to broker honestly. He tried to fix an election for God's sake.

I have found Brett Bayer (sp?) on Fox to be one of the more honest brokers of news.
 
The solution should be to only watch quality shows. If nobody watches MSNBC, FOX, and CNN then the programming will change. If there is a niche for honest news I would hope that some new start-up would fill it.

I don't know if you are aware, but public news (NPR) has facilities that absolutely blow away their rivals. From their drives, they collect much more money than they need and then just throw it back into the business. I would hope at some point NPR would be a possibility to fill the niche for honest news.

And yes, NPR leans left but at least they provide a lot more breadth and depth than everyone else. They cover international news, science, and have special interest programming. If I want to find out about a potential volcano in the Ha'apai islands, that would be the only place to hear about it. What they lack is field investigation but that is true of all news these days. It just doesn't pay.
 
Newsroom is the most inaccurate piece of ideological **** I've seen in a long time. And yet I can't stop watching. ******* Sorkin.

It actually reminds me a lot of several posters in here, two of which have posted on the Ernst & Young thread. Like Jeff Daniels' character, the new trend these days is to attempt to pass yourself off as a conservative or middle of the roader, when that is purely a guise for your raging liberal tendencies, so that you appear more palatable to a wider array of readers / viewers.

So, Sorkin writes very, very well. While the dialogue is infuriating - you don't have an entire office full of people that quick-witted, smarmy & verbose - the logistics of the newsroom environment utter bull ****, and the political bull **** intolerable, I still cannot give it up. Surprised there hasn't been a thread on this yet. Newsroom thread on another horns site is 200 posts deep.
 
I don't watch the show, but I do read the Television Without Pity recaps - they're much more funny and pretty accurately reflect my contempt for Aaron Sorkin.

I loved how he conveniently set up the interview with the immigration "nuts" because Governer Brewer cancelled, and apparently the only other people in the world who could talk about the law from the conservative side were militia types, bimbos and creepy Dr. Mengela type academics. Heaven forbid he should actually allow honest debate on his fake news show - which come to think of it does remind me a lot of ACTUAL news shows.

One of Sorkin's real weaknesses as a writer is his utter inability to relate to people not like him. He can't write women characters, the only minorities he writes about with any depth are the wise old grandfather figures who are always right about everything and wheeled out whenever a 'Moral compass" is needed, every conservative he tries to write about positively is generally just a liberal who agrees with everything he believes but just happens to call himself a republican.

Basically in Sorkin's world, everything would be wonderful if everyone were just like him.
 
People who get their "news" from television are idoits, to coin a term. There is no depth in NPR or any where else on the air. It is not possible to deal with anything in depth in one, two or ten minute swatches. Or an hour.

They show you some pictures, tell you about something blowing up or a couple of "leaders" disagreeing and then it is on to a commercial about how to make your dick hard for a few more years.

Read books and scholarly quarterlies for background. You can use the WSJ or NYT to brush up on current stuff but the rest of the media is nothing but a conduit to deliver customers to the people peddling stiff dicks and asthma remedies and the like.
 
I hate the idea of quote approval but it has become necessary in today's world of twisting quotes, taking things out of context, and turning a minor verbal slip up into national news. I would rather get a sterilized piece of news than a piece thats been twisted to hell in an obvious attempt to fit some reporter's fantasy land view of the world.
 
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