Word: truths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Back in the heyday of "yellow journalism," the likes of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (upon whom "Citizen Kane" was based) were not afraid to embellish or even invent news when things were slow. They learned that the truth often got in the way of the stuff that sells newspapers. People preferred to read about fabricated news rather than pedestrian real-life stories...
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...
...first the crop doesn't sell, journalists find the answer in volume: Keep giving more, and then more. These journalists do not lie; they simply overflow the media with truth about the chosen journalistic cash crop. They inform some more, recast the characters, take new polls and provide new interpretations to ponder. After a while, the news becomes newsworthy, and the media has raised enough content to match the form it has provided. Then it starts to report on its own successful raising of such a spectacle: Has the Media Gone Too Far? they ask themselves...
...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--let's call it the cash crop theory of journalism...
seem to increasingly stand alone as news," Bennett said. "We need to remember--perhaps more than ever--that powerful people have never had a monopoly on the truth, nor are they all primarily motivated by the truth...