Sorry for the late reply. Just came back from abroad and jet lag is killing me....
sixstop wrote:it sounds good to say the media and politician are shaking hadns to do eachother favours, but it forgets the basic idea that privatised news companies are businesses and have to make money, usually through advertising.
If there is no advertising revenue, then no amount of handshaking in the world will save a news network unless they are bought by the government under federalization. and just what we want in america, another federal agency that doesnt fire its bad eggs. . .
Misty said pretty well about the competion so i'll just comment on hand shaking. Yes, they must get advetisers and how they get them? By running 'cool' (see definition below) news that attract as many viewers as possible. Example. We both saw the footage from 'embedded' journalists. Of course people are gonna watch footage of military machines doing their stuff, if you get my meaning and to my knowledge ratings were pretty high...
If I remeber correctly, Pentagon (thus government) somehow ranked which news networks would be 'favourable' and gave best positions to those channels before the invasion. I'm sure possibilities for handshaking would boundless on this field.
Hey, we're gonna invade Absurdistan. Crank up some patriotic athmosphere and make us look good (and them bad) and we will give you good positions and nice some nice exclusive footage from pentagon..... Just a theory of course 8)
sixstop wrote:what motivation does a no-profit government run news network have to be A:impartial, B:fast, C:complete and thorough?
Exactly that. No-profit, they don't have to please the advetisers and canconcentrate on journalism. If you watched 'Bowling for Columbine', there was a nice interview with the news crew and producer of 'Cops' about what news they would air if they would have to choose between drowning and shoot out.
Of course, media also needs it's independent watchdogs and fortunately most countries have some....
btw, heres something nice. Times & BBC reported how the whole 'saving private Lynch' was a big hoax.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/c ... 028585.stm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 17,00.html
I did not find a mention of this report on CNN or abcnews (or maybe I just did not look hard enough) but Fox had something. O'reilly factor tried to convince that BBC, L.A. Times and Toronto Stars as worthless publications and reporter who wrote it is anti-american.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,87495,00.html
