It just happened again. I read all the way to the end of a news story and realized I had not read one thing I hadn’t read before. Since college I have absorbed several different news sources a day, to get different perspectives. You can't do that anymore. It's like every reporter in the world is working from the same set of press releases, just finding different ways to say it, using their publication's style. I imagine these writers sitting in a home office, never even talking to a human let alone getting out and "working a beat" for a story, just sending emails, texts, Tweets. And copy and pasting quotes and paragraphs from the work of other writers copy and pasting in their home offices. I don't think Americans realize what we're giving up by letting our media turn into one big staged press conference. My first newspaper job in 1977, someone used a press release for a quote and got laughed at and taunted about it all over the newsroom for weeks. You don’t get the real story from a press release, they shouted, all you get is what the corporate guys want you to see. Now in 2021 it seems press releases are all journalists use, from the New York Times or Vanity Fair all the way to the Reno Gazette, which tells me no one is getting the whole story anywhere.
We might as well be in Soviet Russia. Hmm.
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