The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
Interpretation
News reporting often serves commercial interests rather than simply informing the public.
Christopher Lasch critiques the way news is presented, suggesting that it often prioritizes the promotion of commodities and the manipulation of events through imagery, rather than delivering unbiased information. This perspective urges the audience to question the motives behind news reporting and to recognize the potential biases that influence how information is conveyed.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the ethics of journalism at a conference.
Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
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.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
Television will do anything for a rating... anything!
I can swear on a stack of Bibles that not once in doing the 'CBS Evening News' for 19 years - well, I take it back. Once perhaps. But during 19 years, with perhaps one exception, was I ever aware of any political or commercial pressure on that broadcast whatsoever.
I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst.
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Media outlets that are exploiting Ebola because they want a sensational story and politicians using it to their own ends ought to be ashamed.
It is not entirely true that a TV producer or reporter has complete control over the contents of programs. The interests and inclinations of the audience have as much to do with the what is on television as do the ideas of the producer and reporter.
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