The trouble's not 'truth.' (media docudrama and news reporting) (Culture) (Column)
The Progressive › Vol. 58 Nbr. 1, January 1994
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Summary
Book critics, media news commentators, and editorialists have no right to condemn docudrama such as Oliver Stone's film 'JFK' on the basis of its 'truthfulness.' Serious challenges to the political order like 'JFK' should not be boiled down to 'factuality' by the conservative media establishment.
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The trouble's not 'truth.' (media docudrama and news reporting) (Culture) (Column)
The media have a way of manufacturing their own ethical "issues of the day," setting the terms by which they judge themselves and arriving at answers that suit their own agendas. Violence has topped their list for quite some time now - "Let's beat our breasts, moan and groan publicly a bit, and get back to business as usual."
Their highly visible mea culpas on this score have become regular, predictable media events. But these mea culpas serve mostly to obscure the issue, distracting attention from the larger, more serious causes of social violence, while making everyone feel better, momentarily, about having "addressed the issue." So it is with the latest big occasion for media breast-beating and self-flagellation: the demise of "truth" in mass media versions of history. Whether it's a big-screen historic drama like JFK, a small-screen docu...See the full content of this document
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