Hurry! Hurry! Read all about it!

When you pick up the newspaper, tune into NPR, or watch the 6 o'clock news, you expect to hear certain things. Strife. Hunger. Pain. Disaster. Politics. Weather. Sometimes, there's a feature about someone who's done good for the community, but they're usually included because they recently died. This is (mostly) why I don't listen to the news any more.

You see, the news is almost like a five year old. If I (five year old) don't like Lucy–wait, no, that's a weird name. if I don't like Mrs. Hauffen-Pheffer, then I will probably not "report", or "tattle" in five year old speak, accurately. If the previous sentence didn't make any sense to you, lets try an example. I don't like Mrs. Hauffen-Pheffer, so when she accidentally gets some crumbs on my homework, I'm going to tell my teacher that she maniacally destroyed my homework, most likely in an attempt to take away my chance at getting an A+, and will almost certainly do it again. Inversely, if I was best friends with Buckley, and he knocked the cookie jar over and broke it, then I would probably say, in his defense, that someone, possibly Buckley (although unconfirmed), might have accidentally chipped the ceramic on the handle.

I believe that this is called "spin" or "editorializing", and is bad. It calls attention to the (vocab word) ethics of the writer.

Psh, you say, this doesn't actually happen in the news. CNN knows what they're doing. NPR is a professional organization. You're talking about tabloid stuff. Well, there you're wrong. I don't have enough time to actually put links into this post, but it happens quite a bit. Thank You, Rupert Murdoch.

Also, there's the issue of the appeal to pathos, or emotion. Emotion is something that news peoples like to play with. When we're sad or anrgy, we want to take action against something. When we're happy, we want to support something. When we feel uncomfortable, we want to change something. But there is an issue about the manipulation of people's emotions. Just in the way that some people have accused me of creating unfair arguments that loose the logic in the appeal to pathos, news services sometimes do this to make people see their "spin".