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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (46381)	7/22/1999 8:43:00 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 108807

Nah- its nothing so complex. You are dealing with the phenomenon of human inertia. There is always a resistance to new ideas- and thank goodness since lots of ideas are crackpot ideas. I think this must be an evolutionary advantage to a society (and as you must see, societies in many ways mimic individual organisms) to behave this way. One way societies protect themselves and their stability is by resisting new ideas- imo. "They" don't want to keep a lid on information that is not generally well known. "They" just don't want to accidentally put crackpots or kooky information on TV or in print- because "they" don't like to make huge mistakes and be ridiculed for bad journalistic decisions. With all the competing fringe ideas out there it must be very hard to decide which to represent- if one wishes to represent any of them. AND since one is catering to both a fixed and average population (which one has presumably done market research studies on) one knows what one's readers are interested in. News, like breakfast cereal, is a product. It can be packaged and sold for consumption just like anything else. This does not make it a conspiracy, this makes it a business. People who want to give news away for free (and are not limited by either sponsors or subscribers) could say anything they wished- but since the whole enterprise requires money I don't see how such people would get a viable news organization together. NPR is a bit like that- and since they have so many fringe people on it's difficult to trust the quality of any of the information (although I do enjoy some of the musical programs and some of the non-news features.)