News today is not real. It's like wrestling was in the 70's. You know there's a hint of truth about it. But it's all entertainment. Even Colbert in The Colbert Report uses a term "truthiness" that implies there is no real truth just a semblance of it.
With the Colbert Report, Jon Stewart, The Onion and This is That satire, for example, the line between the news and entertainment has never been so indistinct. For those who have watched the recent US election coverage you'll know where this has taken us. Journalist are now politically aligned pundints. You throw in a few anecdotes and you then draw your conclusions. It may be highly entertaining but not informative. And as we see in the Mitt Romney's campaign in the US, if you tell a big enough lie long enough, people believe it. It's all marketing.
Blame it on the toxic bipartisan polarization that exists now but I think you can also blame it on Halloween in 1938 and the radio drama "War of the Worlds" by Orsen Welles. Orsen Wells used a news-bulletin format. If you came into this program, after the notice at the beginning that it was fiction, you were scared to death that Martians were invading. This marketing gimmick worked. The entertainment industry took notice. This is when people started purposely confusing news for entertainment by not giving any notice about the distinction. Now we confuse entertainment for news.
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