I am shocked — SHOCKED — to find that TV journalism is scripted, shallow eye candy. -- Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. 1999)

Don’t trust the scary bad interweb. Do trust us, your local TV talking heads, who will do all the scary thinking for you!

Seeing local TV devote air time to discuss fairness and accuracy in journalism is a good thing. But when scores of newscasters read word-for-word the exact same statement, which blames social media, complains that “some media outlets publish these same fake stories,” and warns about “some members of the media” who “push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think,'” the whole thing looks very suspicious.

The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to a democracy. –Every one of the reporters featured in this clip.

Source: How America’s Largest Local TV Owner Turned Its News Anchors Into Soldiers In Trump’s War On The Media

https://content.jwplatform.com/previews/wIs4mmG8?exp=1522551360&sig=6fcb25f26ad201b6700c6f94d377349d

Similar:

We are in a golden age for journalism

The Rivals at Seton Hill University

Vincent Connare, Inventor Of 'The Most Hated Font,' Defends Himself

Slate: "Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide" | Notice how writing style frames a story? Gr...

A 10-page paper? Are you serious?

Apparently Facebook Doesn't Know Me Very Well

8 thoughts on “I am shocked — SHOCKED — to find that TV journalism is scripted, shallow eye candy.”

I doubt this has the impact they want it to have. No one under 40 watches local news and looking at the locations of Sinclair owned stations…it’s not a bastion of liberal America. It’s almost all red state conservative areas anyway. They know this crap would never get eyeballs in a place like Chicago.

I stopped watching TV news in 2001.

I think the only movie I can differentiate from shooting script versus movie is Beetlejuice, just because they wrote a plot-heavy script and threw it out in production, replacing almost the entire script with improvised dialogue and surrealist set-pieces.

Memories of reading the Star Wars novelization, and Splinter of the MInd’s Eye (1978, what would have been a lower-budget Star Wars movie, scrapped when Lucas got a huge budget for Empire). For some reason I read the novelization of The Black Hole, too. I was a bookish child.

I remember reading Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Aliens and concluding he must have been writing from the script, because he had Burke being sarcastic with the line about building a campfire and singing songs, while in the movie Paul Reiser actually delivered the line pretty straight.

You’re undoubtedly right- I had read an article recently about the era in which sci fi novels and television/films were developed concurrently and almost always diverged from each other; one author killed her protagonist somewhat spectacularly before the book’s climax, was then told that was going to be a recurring character on the series, and refused to rewrite.

I’m pretty sure the miniseries came first, then the novel. As a teenager I wrote a letter to Ann Crispin, in part because the death of one of my favorite V characters was handled almost parenthetically in the novel: “The weeks that followed were full ones. So-and-so died on a raid.” I think I also complained that in one of her Star Trek novels, she overcapitalized. (E.g. “On the way to the Biology Lab, the Captain encountered the Chief Grammarian.”) Crispin put me in touch with her editor, who ended up critiquing some of my short fiction (for $25, as I recall).

Currently reading A. C. Crispin’s “V: The Visitors” (made into a famous miniseries and then television series decades later). Seeing this video supercut, after reading about a Visitor-forced statement of highly similar kind, was eerie.

Similar:

8 thoughts on “I am shocked — SHOCKED — to find that TV journalism is scripted, shallow eye candy.”

Leave a Reply to Dennis G. Jerz