Posted by: Roy Greenslade
Author: Richard Peppiatt
Publisher: Guardian News and Media Limited
Date published: March 2012
Theme: Truth
Fiction
Newspapers
Summary of text:
Richard Peppiatt comments on his time as a journalist and the behaviour and reception of the audience as well as the journalists themselves. He states that he wrote articles that were concerned more about the emotional fracture on the audience and actually having any substantial information or real contents of the relevant to their lives.
He states that as soon as an individual and the story that companies them enters the media they leave their assumptions of being an individual behind and automatically become a caricature of themselves. This caricature is emphasised and exacerbated by more and more median notice and attention being drawn onto the subject.
He argues that journalists think themselves of a higher credibility than the rest of society, knowing and seeing all. Yet by the very nature of this the journalists lie and then create their own reality that then themselves become the spectacle of. He argues that this sensibility and disregard for social and moral issues is disregarded for the newspapers a gender to be fulfilled.
He draws light upon society and the journalistic behaviour by saying and concluding that "But until a distinction between the two is recognised I fear the truth-seeking impulse of journalism proper will always be tainted by the excesses of its entertainment-driven cousin, and in doing so public trust will remain in the gutter."
Key points of the text:
- Journalism favours entertainment over truth seeking and informing.
- Once people enter into the newspapers and the journalistic stories they become caricatures.
- Journalists leave moral and social issues and beliefs when writing for a newspaper and adopt the newspapers agenda.
Key Quote 2-3:
"Everything I wrote was designed to appeal to the emotional over the rational, the knee-jerk over the considered, assumptions reinforced rather than challenged and all presented in an easily digestible style that celebrated its own triviality…"
"Entertainment has to some degree always formed part of a newspaper’s output. Crudely, news informed, comment entertained. But today the prerogative to entertain has superseded that to inform, with comment indistinguishable from news, fact indistinguishable from conjecture."
"‘Celebrities are fair game. They make millions off their image, so they can’t just turn it off and claim privacy when it suits them.’ This argument is constructed around the premise that the simulacra and the real are one and the same. The underlying assumption is that the celebrity of the red carpets and chat shows exists beyond a media construct."
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