Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques the shift in journalism from sharing informative content to spreading misinformation.
P. J. O'Rourke's quote highlights a concerning trend in modern media. It suggests that the original purpose of news broadcasts was to convey valuable information to the public; however, it implies that contemporary journalism often prioritizes sensationalism and the dissemination of ignorance, rather than factual reporting. This statement serves as a commentary on the state of information in today's society, where sensational stories may receive more attention than substantive news.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a press conference discussing media integrity, someone might quote this to illustrate the changes in journalism.
More from P. J. O'Rourke
All quotes βAlways read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
Similar quotes
I really do think we're going through a period of concentration of ownership of media, and we're starting to see the effects at the editorial level, and it's all bad. This increased pressure for profits every quarter, smaller news hole, less coverage of important stuff - the extent that it's become one giant infotainment industry.
It's great to engage with the mainstream media to get messages out, but the most empowering tool is to create records of our lives, and our own images, which are not filtered through judgements, biases, or misunderstandings.
Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities β for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
I suppose popularity is measured by ratings. If a broadcaster is known as the leader because of ratings, then that's where people most want to be seen and heard, so there's no question that there's an advantage.
The news as entertainment is the real danger, because the truth or accuracy of what it is reporting becomes irrelevant.