News and Culture of Lying

With media companies relentlessly snapping up properties, it's easy to forget that the values of journalism on the one hand, and business (and especially the entertainment business) on the other, are antithetical. The former should be about truth and understanding; the latter is mostly about moving product. Paul Weaver remembers. His argument is that contemporary journalism doesn't so much report on reality as it creates and markets the product called "news," that is, reality strained to the breaking point through a distorting lens of crisis and emergency response. This slant tends to reduce journalism to a handmaiden of such centers of power as activist presidents and public relations-minded corporations. The remedy, concludes Weaver, is for the press to reorient itself toward readers rather than advertisers and to emphasize deliberative stories over crisis-oriented ones.