News Coverage: Do You Believe?
by Reg Seeton

Here's a news flash that most entertainment webmasters will relate to: Writing for the web can make for a lonely, solitary afternoon. Especially on a slow news day when you're trying to keep your eyes open after four hours of sleep. Aside from answering calls, setting up meetings, doing interviews, responding to e-mails, and writing content, there's not a lot of extra room for peripheral stimuli. Most days I simply turn on the news in my office and bounce back and forth between various networks to stay in touch with the outside world. Every now and again something catches my attention that prompts the question, "Are people really buying into what these analysts are selling?" After suffering through the endless Democratic nomination marathon, not a day has gone by in the past few months where that very question hasn't played over and again in my mind. In an age of seemingly constant spin and agenda where journalists and anchors now offer their opinions and speculate on various events, do viewers really take news analysts verbatim at their word? Seriously, I honestly wonder. Do you?

Sure, we here at The Deadbolt love the movies, TV, super heroes, Indiana Jones, and everything else that gets discussed online ad nauseam, but there's a lot more going on in the entertainment world. How is the news entertainment, you might ask? Well, this might mess with your mind but former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura hit the nail on the head recently when said to CNN anchor Campbell Brown, "You're not in the news business, you're in the entertainment business." It blows my mind to think that some people might not be able to separate the entertainment news format from the actual news itself.

Here's the deal: I ask the question above because I so often hear talking news-heads serve up information that's in fact, questionable. Just because someone on television says something, doesn't mean it's true. Just because someone writes something on the internet, doesn't mean it's fact (including this). Just because someone says the same thing a hundred times on the air in one afternoon, doesn't mean it suddenly becomes true the more times you hear it. Now that news anchors and reporters share their own opinions and speculate on the outcome of various world events, fact and fiction are almost inseparable. Throughout the years, news anchors and reporters didn't give their opinions for a good reason. As the messengers of news, they risked blurring the facts for public interpretation. In the 2009 news world, I wouldn't be surprised at all if at some point in the near future any one of the major news broadcasts began with the Twilight Zone theme. Hell, at least I'd KNOW not to take it seriously.

While cruising the net for research, I stumbled upon a forum agenda from 1998 in which journalists met to discuss how news was seemingly evolving into entertainment. It's interesting to see that a decade ago, concerned journalists were already seeing signs of the many challenges in front of them in the face of a rapidly changing news landscape. Among a number of challenges on the docket for discussion, one in particular stood out, "The second is that due to federal inheritance laws and a lot of other things, the ownership of the press itself is changing. So that Ted Koppel becomes an employee or cast member of Disney; and if it's not Disney it's General Electric or Westinghouse. And there's not much we can do about that..."

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