No. The Wall Street Journal has a motto which goes, “All the news that’s fit to print”. Our newspaper prints everythig else.
A reporter in our town saw an opportunity to boost his career based on feeding the public gossip presented as truth. This started a firestorm of gossip. Eventually his article turned into national stories. He has bolstered his career by destroying the reputations of a number of people.
News, like so much of the rest of life has become a marketable commodity. A newspaper or news show cannot keep running if people will not read or watch it. So to deal with that, they have turned actual news into dramatic “stories”, as they call them now. Drama titilates, it entertains, and sometimes it qualifies as actual news. And unfortunately there is also a blurring of what constitutes actual news. I have personally seen gossip printed as fact, which is then combined with a few legitimate facts. People read it, they believe it, then it goes on to national news, and whammo, you have a national story.
I’ve seen it happen so many times now, I rarely bother to read or listen to the news anymore, because these days I ask myself, “How much of THIS news story is true?”
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