"WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF ENTERTAINMENT"

I've always believed that newspaper columnists' jobs (and more recently the jobs of subs and editors on news pages) was to feed the prejudices of their readers. If not exactly lying, they were at least very selective in the way that they presented the facts.

Wings has repeatedly talked about how the headline (which is what we all may see on newsstands even if we'd never buy the paper), doesn't necessarily reflect the truth. That is only revealed in the 6th paragraph on the page 6 continuation.

People want to read what they already believe. "National" readers want to hear good things about the Greens and the SNP; "Daily Mail" readers want to read bad things about them. Their job is to give their readers a fat dollop what they want to read, and in so doing, confirm that they, the readers, were right all along to believe that Nicola Sturgeon is indeed genius, or all foreigners are evil... depending on what paper they read.

We all tend to judge people (sometimes wrongly, but frequently correctly), by the papers they read. Intellectual ability, political bent, class... is all supposedly easily discerned by a quick look at what your neighbour is reading on the train of the bus. Although in more recent times with Murdoch's acquisition of "The Times" and the Barclay's of "The Daily Telegraph" this has become more difficult. And what used to be considered the "middle road" papers like "The Daily Mail" and  "The Express" have are now more or less indistinguishable from "The Sun" and "The Star".

What they all have in common is that they twist the news to suit the way that their readers expect to hear it.

Frank (one of the Munguin Press Empire's highly remunerated photographers), noticed this comment in the "Daily Mail", which both he and I thought illuminating.

 "The columnist is expected to be a master of the grand and pompous proclamation – of the Olympian assertion of how things are and how they will be, the sharp-bladed conviction that one is right and that anyone who disagrees with one is not just wrong but clearly a blithering idiot.

"In short, we are ghastly: the kind of cocksure oxygen-thieves no one wants to get stuck with at a party, the people who talk that bit too loudly in restaurants to ensure the surrounding tables can appreciate our genius. 

"This faux-omniscience is of course a stage show – we are, to a degree, in the business of entertainment, of making an impact, of provocation, and therefore often take our best guess and present it as something like hard fact.” (emphasis added)

The full article can be read here.

It's worth remembering that, straight from the horse's mouth, their job is to entertain, provoke and make an impact, all the time pretending that what they are saying is gospel. The word "inform" seems sadly lacking from that job description.