September 4, 2002
Beware of Media Burn!
Peter Preston in The Guardian pleas for some sanity in the normally insane American media in a piece appropriately called "The Source of All Evil."Very little integrity is left in the American media system, and we are not referring here to anything as lofty as moral integrity, but something as fundamental as logical integrity. Very little of it even makes sense anymore.
Preston suspects that the U.S.' most popular news channel, Fox News, is really Ruppert Murdoch's trashy English tabloid The Sun "cloned electronically and allowed to shine 24/7" with no regard for the truth at all.
"The point is how, after prolonged irradiation, fiction turns to assumed fact; how coincidences become plots; how fiascos become triumphs; how agendas rule," says Preston. "That isn't newspaper business, nor the news business either. It does nothing for readers. It leaves nuances out and truth trailing. And what, I sometimes wonder, does it do for our leaders, the Blairs and the Bushes who get to read this stuff first? Do their brains rot, too?"
-- By David Cogswell