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Flawed News And Public Opinions Essay

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Flawed News and Public Opinions
TV Journalism has been degraded to the point in which true factual and informative reporting free of bias has been replaced with short news bytes centered and focused on its entertainment value alone. Within the political process, this has mostly served as a disservice to both politicians and the general public audience.
Edward J Epstein published a book entitled “News from Nowhere” in which he observed NBC’s news department and how decisions were made on what was news worthy. He discovered a decline in television network ratings and profits caused executives to change marketing strategies. This new direction in news reporting would be tailored to an audience low in sophistication with the network defining what would be newsworthy. Epstein wrote: “Dull and complicated stories would need to be of enormous importance to get on the air: but relatively trivial stories would make the cut if interesting enough”. (Edwards, p. 406). Supporting this observation Washington Post editors Leonard Downie Jr and Robert Kaiser argue that “Entertainment has pushed out information in the TV news business and that the history of TV news can be summarized in a couple sentences”. (Edwards, p. 406). An exception to this practice would be networks assigning their best reporters to cover major events or “Lead Stories” at well-established sources such as the White House, Congress, or the Pentagon. During the 1991 Gulf War, 50 per-cent of the stories came from these

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