Word: hearstly
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...there is such a thing as a secret American Dream, it has many more rooms than inhabitants and gold-plated fixtures to boot. We all crave stately pleasure domes, such Xanadus as William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon and Bill Gates' new ode to monstrosity in Seattle. But only the occasional hyper-mogul ever attains one. These opulent shrines to capitalism we regard with a mixture of envy, awe and abhorrence: "Isn't that ridiculous--nobody needs a house that big." Or, "Just think how hard it would be to keep that thing clean." The fact that...
...whom the rest of us beat up in the playground could make it big in the land of opportunity. But the world's richest man made the classic hubristic mistake: building what one newspaper called the "new Xanadu" and bragging about it. Gates' high-tech haven would top even Hearst's epically garish San Simeon as the most grandiose castle in America. But as Hearst once quipped of his estate--which housed, among other things, a large zoo--"Pleasure is what you can afford to pay for it." And Gates is richer than Hearst ever dreamed of being...
Today journalists may be more reliable than their predecessors in providing the truth, but new methods of increasing circulation (and ratings) have made them just as irresponsible. As Hearst's and Pulitzer's market mentality influenced journalism at the turn of the century, marketing strategies are influencing the way news is reported today...
When selling cars or movies, market segmentation doesn't bother anyone. In fact, people probably like their tastes so particularly catered to. But in the media, this personal attention is dangerous. News is a powerful weapon, as Hearst and Pulitzer proved when they "manufactured" the Spanish-American War in 1898. Today's large mushy media stew has little responsibility to cover comprehensively the day's or week's essential news events. With this responsibility lifted off its shoulders, it has found a fertile way to take the truth and stretch it so as to keep circulation and ratings high...
...challenge of the media and does not plant the most marketable journalistic cash crop in years--impeachment. In surreal horror the nation reads and watches the emotional display of the media's spawn. The news has taken on a life of its own and become larger than itself. In Hearst's and Pulitzer's day, journalists took less-than-newsworthy prose poems and from those made a war. Today, all the media has to do is write the prose poems themselves, and the less-than-newsworthy start battling...