Must be a slow news day, eh? It seems that even the current news story about the freeing of three women held captive in Cleveland for a decade isn’t immune from mainstream media, um.., massaging.

 

First comes the following link to a nice catch by attentive skeptics of what passes for “coverage” by our increasingly brazen news alterers:

 

 

As the linked commentary asks:  

Why bother to cover up the fact that the “House of Horrors” has flown a Puerto Rican flag on its porch for quite some time?

 

To which I’ll add the questions:

Who doesn’t want Puerto Rico to enter the public “consciousness”? And why?

 

On a more comical note we turn to CNN. Isn’t that where everyone goes for comic relief?

 

 

Ah, synchronized traffic. How perfectly sublime. Why not add a little drama by simulating a satellite interview between two women reporters? Or is it just that CNN simply can’t cover a news story straight-up without injecting their own element of fiction. After all, they’ve been doing it for decades as the following link proves:

 

 

I think anyone with even the slightest exposure to how journalism is, or has been taught will recognize what is going on here. Take me for instance. 

 

Forty years ago I took a high school (seriously) journalism class (hat tip to Earl Stinson) that laid out the principle at work in at least the CNN brand of reporting. It’s known as ‘New Journalism’ wherein the writer/reporter is actually a part of the story rather than just reciting it. Our text book was a then-new book by Tom Wolfe entitled appropriately enough, The New Journalism. It included assigned reading such as Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. I’ll be the first to admit that it was astoundingly entertaining. But journalism?