Sunday, April 22, 2007

Why I never buy newspapers

"nor do I watch news on TV."

The Spirit's Sword: adpapers
A newspaper is, first and foremost, a business, and the purpose of any business is to make money. As is well known, newspapers do not make much money from selling newspapers. They make the majority of their money through advertising. This means the paper you buy is not- repeat, not- the foremost product of the company. Their main product is, in fact, you. To repeat, what a newspaper is selling is not news to readers, but readers to advertisers. To put it another way, when you buy a newspaper, in fact you are being sold to advertisers. (When you turn on the tv the same thing happens, except in most places you don't pay anything to watch tv.)

I am not a product and I will not be sold by anyone to anyone, especially not by morally vacuous editors who could write such a defence of their paper's disgusting stand.
I would have to agree. I hate watching the news because it is so vacuous. You are NOT assured that you are getting all the NEWS nor are you getting just the news. Mostly you are getting what will attract the most viewers. Talk about the lowest common denominator.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, what twisted logic. So where do you get your news if you never read newspapers or their Web sites, never listen to radio news and never watch TV news since they would all be selling you to adverstisers? I am curious, where do you get your news? Or don't you care about the world around you?

KaleJ said...

I get it from anonymous comments on my blog.
heheh.
Obviously I gather news somewhere because it is a majority of what I blog about.

I read some papers online (for free) and I pay attention to the world. News doesn't just happen on TV you know.