Newspapers are not news papers
Most newspapers (certainly national newspapers) are political organs.
They aren’t really news papers, in the strict sense of being a paper full of news. They are full of political bias and commentary, but they aren’t very reliable as reporters of factual news.
Now I realise that what I’m saying is obvious. We all know that:
Guardian= liberal
The Sun= conservative pornographers
Telegraph= conservative
The Daily Mail= fascist
and so on.
I’ve always known this, but the other morning when I was scanning the headlines on the major papers (outside a supermarket) I could suddenly see how ridiculous our faux-news really is.
The Sun had manufactured a story that connected a mother’s grief to Gordon Brown; The Mirror had concocted its own outrage about something they’d decided David Cameron had done; the Daily Mail was frothing about immigrants; the Guardian was pulling eveything to the left.
Altogether, this montage made news look a little hopeless.
Our newspapers do not just report the news. They promote their agenda. They snipe at their enemies. And occasionally they report the news.
I wish I had been taught this at school: Newspapers are not reporters of the news. They are political organs that manipulate news to further their cause, be it political or financial.
And there’s another thing: newspapers are businesses. And that’s a whole other problem…