"We create our own reality" A statement on the state of US mainstream media today.

An interesting statement on the state of US mainstream media today.

Laura Bush's Mission Accomplished.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/opinion/08rich.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th

[excerpt]

"We create our own reality" is how a Bush official put it to Ron
Suskind in an article in The Times Magazine during the presidential
campaign. That they can get away with it shows the keenness of their
cultural antennas. Infotainment has reached a new level of ubiquity
in an era in which "reality" television and reality have become so
blurred that it's hard to know if ABC News's special investigating
"American Idol" last week was real journalism about a fake show or
fake journalism about a real show or whether anyone knows the
difference - or cares. This is business as usual in a
culture in which the Michael Jackson trial is re-enacted daily on
cable and the most powerful television news franchises, the morning
triumvirate of "Today" and its competitors, now routinely present
promotional segments about their respective networks' prime-time hits
as if they were news.

No wonder many local TV news operations thought nothing of
broadcasting government video news releases in which fake
correspondents recruited from P.R. firms pushed administration
policies; in some cases, neither the stations' managers nor
journalists even figured out these reports were frauds. Now that
public broadcasting is being turned over to Republican apparatchiks,
such subterfuge could creep into the one broadcast news organization
that, whatever its other failings, was thought to be immune to
government or commercial interference.

The more the press blurs these lines on its own, the more openings
government propagandists have to erect their Potemkin villages with
impunity. "Our once noble calling," wrote Philip Meyer in The
Columbia Journalism Review last fall, "is increasingly difficult to
distinguish from things that look like journalism but are primarily
advertising, press agentry or entertainment." You know we're in
trouble when Jeff Gannon, asked about his murky past on Bill Maher's
show on April 29, moralistically joked that "usually the way it works
is people become reporters before they prostitute themselves." No
less chastening was the experience of watching Matt Drudge, in
conversation with Brian Lamb the same day, sternly criticize Fox for
cutting off the final moments of the Bush news conference for Paris
Hilton's reality series. When Mr. Drudge is a more sober spokesman
for the sanctity of news than his fellow revelers at the
correspondents' dinner, pigs just may start to fly.
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