Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
"It seems what young student journalists would be 'learning' from this experience is how to take a free trip and meals from one of the company's larger corporations," wrote University of North Carolina business journalism professor Chris Roush. He had just received an email from one of General Motors' PR people, asking for help in promoting GM's "First College Journalists Event," in Las Vegas on September 9 and 10. "GM will pay for travel, hotel and meals for students that attend," GM's Diedra Wylie wrote. "While in Las Vegas the college journalists will have the opportunity to meet with professional journalists and GM executives." The event might be an extension of GM's previous efforts to buy favorable news coverage. Three of the 36 video news releases tracked in the Center for Media and Democracy's "Fake TV News" report were from GM, making it the most frequent fake news client of the report.
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jupiter replied on Permalink
Whether or not the news is
Whether or not the news is fake, and how much of it is fake, is one matter.
It obviously comes from a very warped and single strata of social perspective (corporate), rather than from any cross section of society. (Sometimes the news is made to APPEAR more or less from a cross section of perspectives, or it even does when the matters are more or less trivial and non-threatening to corporate agendas.)
Anyway what I wanted to harp on was the bone-chilling report done on one of the major evening news broadcasts the evening after Steve Irwin's tragic death.
His death was so very tragic to begin with, but what I found somewhat bone chilling was how on their news report they could only excitedly talk about the genetic make-up of risk takers.
This was a death God damn it and here they were in their usual excited pep talk voice, excitedly talking about the genetic make-up of risk takers. Obviously they were not prepared for a story on his death and were just grabbing something out of the hat.
Since this pep talk voice was business as usual, I was not too very shocked. But nevertheless I did find it a morbid and inappropriate way to announce a death, and proceed with a "story" on it. It was not about his life so much as excited talk about his hot genetic make-up, like it was a hot commodity or something.
Anyway this is going to sound even more morbid yet but to be frank, they sounded like they just couldn't wait to dissect his body to find his valuable genetic make-up (since he had "risk taker" genes), and like market up his genes or something. That is exactly how this news story sounded to me.
No they did not actually SAY they wanted to dissect him to harvest his genetic make-up. But the way the story was reported, it might have been little wonder if they had said this.
Anyway what sort of perspective it is that we get our news, to me is obviously something weird.