Is Your Next-Door Neighbor A Terrorist? This headline causes people to immediately perk up and read the rest of the article. What is actually in the article is a story about an interview with one of the neighbors who, for a time, lived next door to one of the terrorist cells that attacked the World Trade Center. No need to get out your lie detector and shotgun and force your neighbor to take the test. This is just a made-up example on my part, but it epitomises fearmongering.
Fearmongering is just one the cases where non-news is reported as news , according to Drew Curtis, who is the founder of fark.com, a site devoted to pointing out ridiculous non-news stories. In this book, he points out the different ways that media spices up stories, changes headline content, or just outright invention of so-called news, all in the effort to raise ratings 9for TV news) or sell papers.
One of my favorite chapters was the one on how celebrity quotes were mangled to mean something entirely different from what they actually meant. Case in point Sharon Stone believes kids should have more oral sex. What really was said by Stone was that she tells young people that she believes oral sex is much safer than vaginal sex. Not so shocking is it? Unless you are a pude, I mean.
The interesting thing is how blatant some of these media people are to get a story out, even resorting to witnesses, who are not really witnesses at all. The chapter entitled "Equal Time for Nutjobs". Here whackjob theories are supported by interviews with whackjob "experts". And this is in turn reported as news.
Eye-opening, maybe, but definitely entrtaining, this book is for someone who is tired of all the time he or she has wasted reading an article or watching a news broadcast only to find that the story has nothing to do with the hype that preceeded it.
I give it 6½ stars
No comments:
Post a Comment