Comment on Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’
ramirezmike@programming.dev 6 months agoI studied news journalism in college and they kinda hammered in that in news journalism it’s more important to communicate information consistently and to target a wide audience than it is to make “good writing.”
There are style guides you have to follow and words like “slammed” end up getting used a lot despite not quite being accurate because they’re words that are used a lot.
The other thing is that usually the person writing the headlines isn’t the journalist… and sometimes they do a lot of versions of the same headline and when people click more because of the word slammed it ends up sticking.
theluddite@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.
I’ve been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it’s everywhere