Really enjoyed this one. Some further reading which really illuminates how the press work:
o Heroes (or pretty much anything really) by John Pilger.
o Flat Earth News by Nick Davies.
o No contest by Alfie Kohn.
I also had a similar experience to Caitlin when I was just out of university. I worked for a company that created personalised need feeds for clients.
My job involved, essentially, reading and categorising offered releases to make sure they went to the right people. Two absolutely key things I learnt from that:
o The vast majority of the news you read is a combination of news agency wire clippings, corporate and government press releases, and quotes from officials taken from, you guessed it, MPs press releases. What Davies calls Churnalism. Moat 'journalists' spend their days doing a combination of cutting and pasting and editing. This is why all the papers are identical, they take the same stuff from the same sources. 'No Contest' explains the mechanism for this - it's competition. Read that book for further details but suffice it to say that everything you think about competition is very likely to be inaccurate.
o There are obvious linka the press never looka at, and they're generally linked to raw materials. I can't tell you how often I'd see a combination of press releases that went something like this:
'MPs condemn brutality of the civil war in x region of y African country.
Rip Tinto announces immense diamond mine in x region of y African country. (And it was often Rio Tinto, those guys are absolute scumbags).
It doesn't take a genius to work out that there's something fishy going on when a corporation is perfectly happy to open a goddamn diamond mine or whatever in what's supposed to be the midst of a bloody civil war. Read between the lines a bit and it's very obvious that one or both sides must be getting paid off - how else could the mine stay open?
This, btw, is why clues up activists as well as business types but the Financial Times. Because the FT openly lays out those kinds of facts.
Really enjoyed this one. Some further reading which really illuminates how the press work:
o Heroes (or pretty much anything really) by John Pilger.
o Flat Earth News by Nick Davies.
o No contest by Alfie Kohn.
I also had a similar experience to Caitlin when I was just out of university. I worked for a company that created personalised need feeds for clients.
My job involved, essentially, reading and categorising offered releases to make sure they went to the right people. Two absolutely key things I learnt from that:
o The vast majority of the news you read is a combination of news agency wire clippings, corporate and government press releases, and quotes from officials taken from, you guessed it, MPs press releases. What Davies calls Churnalism. Moat 'journalists' spend their days doing a combination of cutting and pasting and editing. This is why all the papers are identical, they take the same stuff from the same sources. 'No Contest' explains the mechanism for this - it's competition. Read that book for further details but suffice it to say that everything you think about competition is very likely to be inaccurate.
o There are obvious linka the press never looka at, and they're generally linked to raw materials. I can't tell you how often I'd see a combination of press releases that went something like this:
'MPs condemn brutality of the civil war in x region of y African country.
Rip Tinto announces immense diamond mine in x region of y African country. (And it was often Rio Tinto, those guys are absolute scumbags).
It doesn't take a genius to work out that there's something fishy going on when a corporation is perfectly happy to open a goddamn diamond mine or whatever in what's supposed to be the midst of a bloody civil war. Read between the lines a bit and it's very obvious that one or both sides must be getting paid off - how else could the mine stay open?
This, btw, is why clues up activists as well as business types but the Financial Times. Because the FT openly lays out those kinds of facts.
I would add Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc to the list. Great book about what happened behind the scenes during election coverage in the U.S.
His vampire squid Goldman Sachs article is absolutely essential reading too.