journalism-pr - The Monday Morning Memo

“Whether you read a newspaper,
watch TV or follow the news online,
only 14 percent of the stories you hear were
developed by journalists defining an issue and pursuing it.
A staggering 86 percent of the stories were fed
to broadcasters by official sources and press releases.
In 1960 there were only three-fourths as many PR people
as there were journalists. Today the ratio is 5 to 1.”

– The Death and Life of American Journalism,
by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney

We now have 5 times
as many PR people as journalists.
And 86 percent of what you think is news is actually just
an edited press release written by a public relations person
whose job is to sell you a perspective, a belief, an opinion.

Wait a second… isn’t that essentially the definition of propaganda?

-Indiana Beagle

“

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.”

“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

“This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.

“

- Terry Pratchett, from "Men at Arms," (book 15 in the Discworld series,) explaining why it is so expensive to be poor. Sent to us by Jeffrey Eisenberg.

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