News Lies

The lies on the evening news are mostly lies of omission. It rare that a network news program will allow an outright lie. However, they will allow the perpetuation of lies that are already believed by many.

For example, they'll let us assume that they produce their own news stories, and that they are in fact all news, as opposed to advertising. This isn't true however. The commercials you see between the "stories" are not the only advertising and marketing going on. In fact, many of the stories themselves are advertising produced to look like news, and used as such.

These are called VNRs, or Video News Releases. They are created for companies and governments by marketing firms that then distribute them to networks. VNRs are now used several times per month by about 80% of U.S. news directors according to one Nielsen Media Research Survey. All the major television networks now use them. They will likely become even more common as the costs of producing real news gets more expensive (the number of foreign correspondents has already declined by more than 50% in the last twenty years for the same reason).

Yes, these are essentially "planted" stories or propaganda passing as news. You will not be notified when the "news story" you are watching is one of these ads. I go into more detail about this and other news lies in my book "You Aren't Supposed To Know - A Book Of Secrets."

Can News Be Objective?

Perhaps the biggest lie that the news programs and newspapers perpetuate is the idea that news can be objective. Most people believe this lie, and so they feel that they just have to find the news source that they can trust to be most objective. The truth is that there really is no way to be objective. If you ever get the opportunity to watch news coverage of any major event from several foreign sources, you'll immediately understand that the same event can be looked at many ways without any lying at all.

There are unlimited "stories," but limited time or paper. Should a reporter cover the building of a new school, or the opening of a new clothing store, or the famine in some African country? Even if every fact is correct, choosing to cover one story over another reveals a bias, as does choosing how to cover it. It is better to simply understand what those biases are than to pretend that news can be objective.

In this respect, the "alternative" press can be very useful to understanding the world. Each independent source has some obvious bias, but rarely do any of them outright lie (too often). Because the bias is out in the open, it is easy to get good information from many different alternative sources while not adopting any of the biases present in the individual sources.