Happy News Year: "The News Dissector" Looks Beyond The Top Stories of the Year to Examine the News System
By Danny Schechter
New York, New York: At year end, the news agenda fills up with stories on top stories, a chance for networks to repackage footage or highlight favorite newsmakers. These stories rarely look at the news system that picks them or why.
There are two news systems in America---the official parody of journalism that represents most of what the mainstream or what some call the "lame stream" media offers.
These are the "products" an "official" news business, an industry now under growing pressure from within and without to maintain a semblance of credibility with an global audience that has so many other divergent sources to rely on or suck information from.
A part of a global entertainment combine, the advertising sponsored "news biz" also spends inordinate amounts of money marketing itself and referencing its own output.
It is that system that has become one of the major pillars of established power like the institutions of government and the office holders it covers to a fault. Official news tells us what politicians say, and say about each other. Some of the stars of the news world move into politics while former politicians become our pundits and meaning makers.
The system is interconnected and symbiotic. It looks diverse but it US News operates in an ideological framework as surely as Chinese News. No wonder that critics now speak of a military-industrial-media complex.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
