9 ms·

“News is what somebody does not want you to print – all the rest is advertising”

• pixel_tracing 4y ago
  • Successful launch of a shuttle • Breakthrough in physics • Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history • Election results? I mean title is fairly click-baity
  • habibur 4y ago
    Some of the originals used the word "journalism".
  • pjkundert 4y ago
    - why a successful shuttle launch doesn’t mean it is a worthwhile expenditure - reasons why breakthroughs have become so rare vs. recent history - how discoveries invalidate accepted dogma written by victors - election results not matching validators/checks harvested from non-regime-controlled sources These are news. Reporting the obvious in a way agreeable to the regime isn’t.
    • mrkstu 4y ago
      No, that is analysis and commentary of the news.
      • pjkundert 4y ago
        Providing evidence counter to the evidence presented by the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma. Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere.
        • danShumway 4y ago
          I feel like on some level this is a more round-about way of saying, "real news is politically useful." To me that seems like a fairly obvious reduction of the scope of news into a pure propaganda tool. It is true that a lot of even objective news is inherently political and has political implications, and it is true that which facts reporters choose to print and what context they choose to supply around those facts carries an editorial message regardless of whether the facts are true. What stories a reporter chooses to focus on is itself an editorial decision. But the quote itself is an oversimplification of that more nuanced truth. Some more specific objections: --- > Providing evidence counter to the evidence presently the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma. Commentary is a necessary foundation to empower citizens to form educated opinions and to combat dominant narratives. "Commentary" is not a dirty word, it is a legitimate thing that gets built on top of news reporting and on top of neutrally presented factual information. Separating reporting from commentary does not delegitimize commentary and it shouldn't be treated as an attempt to delegitimize commentary. Commentary is important, and forcing it to masquerade as news reduces the scope of how we can use it. And of course there isn't a binary distinction between commentary and reporting (see my first paragraph), but that doesn't mean there's no distinction at all or that different pieces don't stray more towards commentary than others. --- > Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere. The US is a country that is fairly evenly divided between (at least) two very different viewpoints about how the world works, and each side is convinced that the other is stewing in "a one-sided, vacuous environment." I find this argument pretty unconvincing because it's difficult for me to think of many news stories nowadays that don't fit into this category. It doesn't really eliminate much; pretty much all reporting is something that somebody doesn't want printed, and most reporting can be characterized as "establishment propaganda" from people who want to dismiss it. The hard part of reporting nowadays isn't writing headlines that will make people angry, it's writing headlines that won't be immediately interpreted as a direct political attack. And in pretty much all of those cases, you'll be able to find somebody that doesn't want that headline printed. And as a quality metric in general, it doesn't seem very useful or strongly correlated with quality. I can print some pretty nonsense, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Conservative establishments angry that it was published. I can also print some pretty nonsensical, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Liberals angry. That's trivial to do, on both sides of the isle. It's trivial to do outside of politics as well --- heck, I can come up with headlines that will make native developers and web developers respectively angry. But doing that doesn't mean that what I'm printing is more likely to be legitimate or newsworthy. What's worse is that the reduction of "news" to be things that make my out-group angry encourages me to lean into that kind of editorializing; and it encourages me to phrase pretty straightforward announcements/discoveries/research-projects as if they are combative towards my out-groups, even it I have to do worse reporting to make that happen. I would argue that "news has to make people angry" is a big part of how we get incredibly angry, polarized societies in the first place.
  • FatActor 4y ago
    Granted this isn't even a well-thought-out essay, it is someone trying to research a quote. I don't see that as click-bait. To counter your point: do you refer to "Popular Science" as news? or "Scientific American"? Scientific reporting isn't "news" in the context of the OPs query. The implications or context would be though (like how much it cost from a budget and if it was worth it). I'm sure you understand the point of the article because being on HN you are smarter than the average person, or are you mayyyybeee just trying to be click-baity yourself?
  • version_five 4y ago
    I'd argue all those (except elections) are at least potentially advertising. It's not just from public interest that these things would get promoted. A space launch is a great example, look at the history of the space program, it's largely an advertising campaign. Re elections, the real results are something that in many places lots of people will not want shared, and this is an important function of the press. Yes, news publications have lots of facts like your examples they think people will want to read, but the core of news (as opposed to books or magazines) and the idea that the press gets a special place on society is definitely aligned with the quote I'd actually further suspect that the quote rubs many people the wrong way now because of the whole "misinformation" thing where they actually want their "news" source to be a propaganda organ of their political alignment, rather than an actual unbiased reporter of facts
    • danShumway 4y ago
      > I'd actually further suspect that the quote rubs many people the wrong way now because of the whole "misinformation" thing where they actually want their "news" source to be a propaganda organ of their political alignment, rather than an actual unbiased reporter of facts I don't think I agree. In a divided society, it is very easy to find establishment players who will object to a propaganda headline being printed. News framed to suite either a Conservative or Liberal perspective will make the other side angry, regardless of its truth value. "I made someone angry that I printed this" doesn't really imply, "it's good that I printed it." Making people angry is incredibly easy to do, especially in a polarized society, and optimizing for outrage and the thinking that outrage makes news more "legitimate" is arguably one of the reasons we're in a polarized society. ---- Aside: other commenters have already mentioned, but just quick reminder again that this article is not about whether the quote is true, it's trying to investigate its origins.
  • boomboomsubban 4y ago
    The article is investigating the history of the quote, something that is clear both while visiting their website or by looking at the source URL. All their articles are titled with the quote they are investigating.
    • derefr 4y ago
      Proper editorial technique would be to put the headline itself in quotation marks, then.
      • tomrod 4y ago
        In this instance, we can replace "Proper" with "My preferred" and as a result have improved fidelity as there is sufficient information in the article and the URL to adjudicate.
        • derefr 4y ago
          I’m not speaking of preferences, but of what you’re taught to do in professsional journalism/editing programs. Headlines are read before article bodies / before other meta-information like URLs. Often — especially when a headline is a link embedded elsewhere, but also when a headline is one among many on a multi-article layout — only the headline is read (because the reader decides they’re not interested and moves on.) In the inverted-pyramid style of news-article structure — which is so commonplace that people intuitionally expect even non-news writing to also conform to it — a reader is supposed to be able to stop at any point in reading and have received all the important info; and an editor is supposed to be able to cut any article from the bottom up for space reasons without damaging the article’s meaning. Thus, readers expect a headline to be a most-condensed summary for an article; something they can read without reading anything else, and still come away informed. This leads to guidance for writers of headlines, even in non-news traditions: write the headline such that a reader can read a headline, decide they now know enough, and stop reading/move onto something else, without doing so having resulted in the reader being misled. An article whose headline is a quotation, but which does not quote the quotation, is misleading to those readers who read nothing else. This is, from the headline-writer’s perspective, bad praxis.
  • peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Successful launch of a shuttle the country launching it is advertising their result, their adversaries definitely would like to cancel it, making it newsworthy. example: Russian propaganda around Sputnik, seen from the US side. > Breakthrough in physics > Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history the way the media treats these arguments resemble much more clickbait than news. see: nuclear fusion or the coverage on Musk's bs about anything remotely science related, but there are times when this can actually be news, even though it can be more often closely affiliated to advertising to attract tourists. For example the real archeological breakthrough discovery presented in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" barely made the news. In this particular case, many archeologists would prefer it never happened. But mostly is reporting the progress of something that's been slowly going on for decades. > Election results there are definitely many people who would like to not see them published, every time an election is held. edit: anyway, that's not what the linked article is about, the poster simply tried to track the origin of the quote.
  • corndoge 4y ago
    You should read the article, it's pretty interesting!
  • javajosh 4y ago
    All of your examples are news by the quotes definition. Plenty of people don't want any of that printed. Much of it comes down to fights over zero-sum pies. Successful launch of a shuttle? We're wasting money on space and the media is shilling for the industrial/military complex, as usual. Breakthrough in physics? That discovery is just careerist researchers making shit up to get more grants. Election results? The result is a complete fraud that steals my victory away from me and printing this only proves media's bias in favor of my opponent.
    • psychphysic 4y ago
      To be fair most of that stuff is propaganda gold. Why state media loves tech it's advertising for government.
    • actionablefiber 4y ago
      I think we've reduced the headline to something that is not useful. For instance, I don't want advertising to be printed. So, I guess advertising is news?
      • javajosh 4y ago
        First, I just discovered Androids keyboards weird symbols mode. ¥°¢{×`÷|π|√∆}£][™®. Nice. Second, I feel like you're making the mistake of saying if you object to anything then the thing you object to is news. The original statement is pretty short, but I take it to mean that you object to the content of the item and not the genesis of the item or the motive of the author itself. Of course, this distinction leads to all kinds of uncomfortable situations. For example, you might be against propaganda itself, but you might be very much for the position espoused by certain propaganda. I think the narrower content oriented aspect of being against something is what we're talking about. Because otherwise it gets a bit silly. You could argue that the westboro Church thinks that gay people are news, for example.
        • actionablefiber 4y ago
          The point of my comment is to object to your characterization of things like a breakthrough in physics as "news" because there are people somewhere who find it objectionable for some reason. It is a semantically valid interpretation of the post title but incongruent with its spirit.
  • oldgradstudent 4y ago
    Science journalism is where this quote is most important for practitioners to internalize. > Successful launch of a shuttle Investigative journalism on NASA ignoring problems prior to the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have prevented both disasters. > Breakthrough in physics Investigative reporting around, for example, BICEP2 instead of just spell checking the press releases would have easily exposed the fiasco. > Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history So many artifacts were later turned out to be frauds, and even the ones that aren't outright fraud are often way over-interpreted.
    • pfdietz 4y ago
      Oh, the irresponsibility of journalists with respect to the Shuttle runs far deeper than that. They largely acted as cheerleaders for a program that made very little sense. They largely didn't ask the hard questions about whether the Shuttle was worth doing at all (spoiler: it wasn't.)
      • _a_a_a_ 4y ago
        > spoiler: it wasn't. Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.
        • oldgradstudent 4y ago
          > Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position. It could, and it was. http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.html http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...
          • _a_a_a_ 4y ago
            Huh. Touche.
            • 4y ago
  • notatoad 4y ago
    i first heard this as "journalism is what somebody doesn't want you to print, the rest is PR" which rings a bit truer. somebody's success that they desperately want you to report on (like a shuttle launch or election win) can be news, but it's not actually journalism until you start reading beyond the press release and finding additional context.
    • jfengel 4y ago
      It's truer because it's tautological. Either somebody wants you to print it or someone does not. I suppose the middle case is "nobody cares one way or the other", and it's true that if nobody cares then it's not news. That is at least a definition rather than a tautology.
  • duxup 4y ago
    Pretty much any local news. Construction proposed. Local events ongoing/ upcoming…
• CommieBobDole 4y ago
  The enduring popularity of adblock apparently means ads are news too now.
• fullshark 4y ago
  Seems likely a saying that was uttered in many newsrooms and misattributed multiple times as it spread for years.
• tomalaci 4y ago
  News as a term is rather abstract and can be interpreted in infinite ways. I mean, if you want literal translation you can easily find it in dictionaries. If anything, I feel like post is quite sensationalist. From my personal experience, I don't find general news helpful at all (doom and gloom happening on other side of the world most of the time), you usually want to find various specialized news sites that focus on specific areas. Also, one thing I noticed quite often is that you rarely get to comment or see other people's comments on many news sites. I am quite thankful sites like Ars Technica and HN exist because you can usually find some extra info related to the original article from those comments.
  • ArjenM 4y ago
    >you can usually find some extra info related to the original article from those comments The real values of being lazy to a fault, reading the comments that come floating above with an experience. These relatively small and fractured communities are what contains most of the uncluttered sources of outside information, organically getting reprinted for judgement by it's observers once more. "News" sites are once more the old 1999 closed boxes asking for coin to enter.
  • chiefalchemist 4y ago
    > From my personal experience, I don't find general news helpful at all The issue here is that's not actually news. Something happening - because LOTS of things happen - is not news. Content focused on "increasing engagement" (to increase ad views) is not news. News has relevance. News has importance. News' priority is to inform and clarify. All too often, most news is not news (at best it's current events). It doesn't help that parroting press releases and narratives that force feed "conventional wisdom" is passed off as journalism. Collectively, we need to stop giving credit where credit is not due. A barking pet is not a cat. Sure, the abnormal has been normalized. But that doesn't make it right.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      What's relevant and important? If the political situation in, say, Nepal is reported on in The Economist that's certainly relevant and important to--not only the residents of Nepal and perhaps nearby countries--but those who do business with or travel to the country. However, many people in the West and elsewhere would perhaps be forgiven for giving the article a cursory skim or skipping it entirely because it's not relevant or important to them.
• lubujackson 4y ago
  ...leaving out the vast swath of information that is neither promotion nor expose, in other words, the original definition of "reporting".
• karaterobot 4y ago
  The third case is the weather report, let's not forget that.
  • kmoser 4y ago
    Even printing the weather is subject to opinion. Good weather? You're promoting the fallacy that things are good. Bad weather? You're promoting the fallacy that things are bad. Neutral? You're wasting precious space for something as useless as news.
    • karaterobot 4y ago
      I don't think that changes anything. The important thing is it's not advertising for anything.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• danShumway 4y ago
  Might be helpful to change the title here to reflect that this is an article about the origins of this quote, not about whether the quote is true. I think a lot of people are entering the comments thinking this is a debate about the quote itself.
  • version_five 4y ago
    I'd guess that every reader knows that. Unsurprisingly, there is a much more lively debate that laypeople can weigh in on re the validity of the quote, as opposed to discussing the origin, so that's what gets more comments
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    The domain in this case provides that context.
• boomboomsubban 4y ago
  Imagine trying to properly attribute that quote around 1925. You remember you heard it or read it somewhere, but you're not entirely sure where you heard it and the only option is to dig through years of multiple papers hoping to find the right one. And even if you pulled off that headache inducing task, you have no real way of knowing if the source you found did the same work to properly attribute the quote. It's really easy to see how it'd be misattributed/altered over time, and reminds me how great grep truly is.
  • uvesten 4y ago
    Didn’t see that plot twist coming!
    • version_five 4y ago
      Personally I'd like to see more parables that end with a lesson (however tenuously connected) about the value of a particular gnu/linux tool and that's how I came to truly appreciate nl
      • dotancohen 4y ago
        Thank you, I've been piping to cat -n for line numbering. This is really flexible! ... and that is how I came to appreciate curl.
  • braingenious 4y ago
    Imagine trying to properly attribute that quote in 1000 BC. English hasn’t yet been invented. You’re stranded; a time traveler with one pointless mandate from an internet poster’s imagination. How do you subsist?
  • ghaff 4y ago
    William Safire had a column "On Language" in The New York Times for many years which, as I recall, would sometimes get into the etymology of words (which dictionaries like the OED often document to some degree) and phrases--and maybe quotations. I think some of the research was what we would now call crowdsourcing. Of course, the flip side of this for many people is that if something isn't on the Web it doesn't really exist.
• pnf 4y ago
  This is largely correct. All major news outlets are information distribution platforms to reach particular demographic segments. The principal customer is not the reader but the advertiser or interest that controls the publication. It isn't necessary to be an advertiser in the traditional sense to control the news. Mostly, control is exercised by hiring the right people who are ideologically aligned with the target readership. Only management needs to receive marching orders and truly understand who they really work for. It's more accurate to think of newspapers as political party organs. This is their original function and remains so. They signal to their readership the acceptable bounds of opinion, beliefs, and facts. Even publishing the results of an election is an attempt to control discourse and to dominate the minds of the population. Gumshoe investigators aside, corporate journalists are mostly discourse police and propagandists. They are some of the lowest forms of human life. If you know one, the only reasonable feelings are contempt and pity, never admiration. Science journals are completely co-opted by interest groups and cannot be taken at face value. The only true news is sports scores.
  • guerrilla 4y ago
    > The only true news is sports scores. Nice twist :) but I have to add that the weather section can be quite useful too.
    • taormina 4y ago
      I mean, the NFL & co wants you checking on those sport scores. The weather is actual news.
      • notart666 4y ago
        Not just that many sports have their own backings and beliefs which tend to skew towards whats popular at the time but also some questionable stuff at times. Fun fact the lighting of the bonfire at the Olympics was first done by Nazi Germany
      • Phenomenit 4y ago
        Maybe past weather but the forecasts are mostly qualified guesses.
• blowski 4y ago
  If the article and discussion here show anything, it's that it's impossible to come up with a universally accepted definition of news.
• password1 4y ago
  Very very very shallow statement in the title. Doesn't make me really want to click and read the article.
  • raymondh 4y ago
    The title is THE most accurate summary of the content.
• gretch 4y ago
  Okay I know the article is about the origin, not the accuracy. But I just can’t help pointing out all the hilarious holes in it. “But the new Ford 150 today!” -> Chevy truck team: “curse those foul journalists!” The criteria that you just need someone to not want you to print it is an amazingly low bar
• __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I've long wanted to interfere in the publication of ads. I think they're harmful to society. Turns out that by not wanting them to be printed, I've converted them to news. I did it guys, I killed advertising.
• bjoli 4y ago
  News is anything I might want to know. Sorted by someone trusted.
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  I'm reminded of the hypothetical conversation about what is news? Complainer: These editors can't judge the relative important of a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization! Editor: Not true. We know exactly which one is the better story.
  • cactus2093 4y ago
    Is the joke that the news would rather report on the bicycle accident in this case and not the collapse of civilization? I can barely tell what you're going for here, I feel like you couldn't have picked two worse examples. Road deaths are an everyday occurrence that we've all just accepted as normal so those barely make the news, and bicycles get even less attention than cars. And the "collapse of civilization" is the kind of thing people are shouting about literally every day and it's always an exaggeration and pure opinion.
    • AlbertCory 4y ago
      When you have to explain a joke, it's not funny anymore.
      • aidenn0 4y ago
        You only have to explain it if it wasn't funny to begin with
        • AlbertCory 4y ago
          Or if the listener just didn't get it.
        • AlbertCory 4y ago
          OK, why don't you and cactus2093 tell us a joke YOU think is funny?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• paulpauper 4y ago
  Too many google ads and bad navigation. I tried to read it but gave up. So ironic that it is guilty of the very thing it accuses the media of.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ralmidani 4y ago
    I saw zero ads on iOS Firefox. Weird.
• JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  Doesn’t that also cover propaganda?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• shapefrog 4y ago
  "The News" is what somebody wants you to print – all the rest is advertising
• AdamH12113 4y ago
  It’s interesting that older variants of the quotation sound less like platitudes. “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news.” -1918 “There are but two classes of people in the world—those who have done something and want their names kept out of the paper, and those who haven’t done anything worth printing and want their names put in.“ -1894
  • gpm 4y ago
    > “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news.” -1918 I like this version, it's not so much a definition of news as (arguably slightly immoral, arguably not) business advice. If someone wants something published, get them to pay you to publish it, even if you would prefer to publish it for free over it going unpublished.
• WeylandYutani 4y ago
  Be tech website. Do investigation on Musk. Tech bros get mad. Less eyeballs means less money from advertisers. Good journalism doesn't always pay the bills.
  • 40amxn40 4y ago
    In what world are you living dude? There are hundreds of articles critizing Elon Musk every fucking week. Same as there are hundreds of articles criticising crypto every week. There are hundreds of articles about "online extremism" every week. In the NYT, The Atlantic, WaPo, etc. They are all cheered on here, in Twitter, etc. If anything, anthing "pro-Musk" is the minority today. But that doesn't even matter, because the REAL, the IMPORTANT stuff is not commented on. Such as the authoritarian creep in the West, the progression to cashless society and 24/7 surveillance. I'm not going to list every point all but you get the idea. Deeply rethink things, and check if you can find the blind spots.
• chaosbolt 4y ago
  Didn't know earthquakes don't want news printed... Had to type it because it sounded funny in my head. About news, we just lost that, there is a reason most of human history is full of dictatorships where the peasants/plebs/... get the fantasy version of what's happening, X declared himself king through violence and treachery? Well god put him there of course. etc. Some can say we had a nice period where newspapers cared about their reputation and you could just pay 50 cents to buy today's paper and know what was happening that day, is this true? probably not, why not? well this assumes everyone working in the press is some sort of angel devoid of greed, fear, etc. which is not the case, people are people: personaly if I had a news paper agency, and saw that some news could be dangerous, I don't think I'll stop it from being printed, but again I think tomorrow I'll wake up early and workout, and I think that I'll continue learning and working hard to build something, will I do it? well I think so, statistically will I do it? No, I'm human, we are failible, etc. Today on the other hand it's a total shitshow, the news today is just comedy to anyone who's not totally gullible, why? the internet happened, natural selection killed those who stuck to the truth and promoted those who went with clickbait, natural selection also killed those who ran out of money and promoted those who accepted investments from X and Y... For example, did you know the Gates foundation (not a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist by the way you can verify this yourself) basically owns Kurzgesagt? Most research papers Kurzgesagt uses are published by subsidiaries of the Gates foundation and they donated to them many times so they basically own them, what if I was Kurzgesagt and I was married and had kids and I had a choice between accepting free money from a well respected foundation who does good research as far as I know, and my channel failing and my wife and kids suffering the consequences, would I refuse the money? of course not do you think I'm stupid? Whose fault is that? well it's the system's fault, the internet is just more stimulating, and as humans, we don't give a shit about the news, we used to watch it to feel empathy, sadness, happiness, etc. now you can feel a diluted version of most feelings by visiting a porn website, a gore website, a social media website, etc. We didn't care about the Israel - Palestine conflict, which is basically an Apartheid, and we didn't care about bombing a country for oil and killing a million people, why would we start caring now about the elections, politicians being corrupt, etc... ? If we can improve the system, aka build a protocol for the news, we can have something better, but how do you build a protocol for the news, Bitcoin was a protocol for cryptocurrencies, it needed people to spend computing power to get coins, how will a news protocol work? something that can't be controlled by X or Y, can't be faked, closest stories to reality get the most attention, etc.. is something like this even possible? who knows...
• srj 4y ago
  While I admire the journalistic pieces that display integrity I think those are far too often the exception. Instead news media like all media is just after attention, and that doesn't so neatly align with this quote. The New York Times, the pinnacle of American newsrooms, is ultimately just competing with Netflix as an entertainment platform.
  • eevilspock 4y ago
    Theres also writing what its target audience wants to hear, much like how political parties work. Principle always loses when money and power are involved.
• Ericson2314 4y ago
  Unlike most quotes, I think the antecedents are better!
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    I'd argue that's often the case. First expressions tend to be less clear, concise, or pointed. Polishing frequently improves.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • Ericson2314 4y ago
      Hmm? I am saying in this case refining made it worse!
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  Similar sentiments, from the 1880s: "There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." -- John Swinton, ~1880 Cited (anonymously) in Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, 1909 <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/2/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...> Befitting a QI discussion, the original form may have been different: <https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/LIE/lie.html https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/LIE/lie.html>
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• beambot 4y ago
  I don't want them to print the advertising, so I guess that makes all of it news?
  • shyn3 4y ago
    The story is the advertisement.
• jawns 4y ago
  The sentiment expressed by this quote is why First Amendment auditors do such a valuable public service. There would be no need for the First Amendment's protection of speech if the things that we said never offended anyone, never made anyone uncomfortable, never was targeted for suppression. There would be no need for its protection of the press if the press were always welcome to report on matters of public interest. There would be no need for its protection of religion if no one ever experienced interference with their religious beliefs or practices. There would be no need for its protection of the right of assembly if protestors never experienced attempts to quash their activities. The First Amendment exists precisely because there is speech that others would prefer we not say, there are religious activities that others would prefer we not practice, and there are matters of public interest that others would prefer journalists not report on.
• heresie-dabord 4y ago
  Advertising has its place. I assert: "In a democracy, news is the information that people need to participate meaningfully in the growth and success of their democracy. Everything else is pandering and propaganda." At its best, advertising does not undermine democracy.
  • pnt12 4y ago
    Advertising is propaganda. Some frame it as informational, but advertisers don't just announce items with their kits of pros and cons. They make a story which manipulates your feelings into buying their stuff.
    • tremon 4y ago
      Stop destroying words. No, advertising is not propaganda, unless you have a 5-year old's capacity for nuance.
      • pnt12 4y ago
        According to the Cambridge dictionary, propaganda is: > information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions Its examples are indeed only about political propaganda, but the definition fits like a glove for ads: they want to influence people's opinions such that they buy their stuff! So I'm confident and happy to say no words were destroyed in the writing of this post!