Broken News

I find the phrase "breaking news" (sometimes just "breaking") strangely farcical. Today another celebrity died. Another celeb is likely to keel over tomorrow. If I don't find out about it until next week these "news-makers" will be just as dead then as now.

Most news you see on TV is really more in the way of advertising - literally created by public relations firms in the form of PR videos.

Your local station doesn't actually go to Pfizer and interview people about the benefits of some new wonder drug that will make your cock harder for longer periods of time, Pfizer provides that material as a PR video. Then, your local news station might do some strange editing that shows one of their own interviewers asking questions with the Pfizer representative apparently answering these amazingly incisive questions. Except that the backgrounds and lighting might be different as they bounce between one subject and the other - just as if the interviewer and the interviewee were not in the same place at the same time. Just as if the whole thing had been awkwardly ultra-scripted and the two subjects had been filmed up to several months apart. Amazingly - it's an advert!

So when you watch the news - itself often one long advert of some kind or other for a whole host of things - and they break away for actual commercials, what is happening is that one bigger advert is being interrupted by a series of shorter adverts. It all just blends together.

Even the news from the government is shocking pre-prepared and sanitized. The government has been known to hire PR firms to get certain propaganda shoved down our throats. Of course, we paid for it too.

U.S. Army Commercial Slogan: Be all that you can be.

Pos-T-Vac Commercial Testimonial: "You're gonna be all that you can be, or you're not gonna be all that you can be. It helps you be all you can be."

I can't think of the last time I heard something that was so truly momentous that knowing about it "this minute" was somehow important.

It's all adverts in the main. Almost all of it aimed at the young, vain and foolish; or at the old, vain and foolish. When your a kid it's all about pimple creams and the tinsel strength of long hair. And apparently, when you're over sixty years old two of the most important things are to wear adult diapers and to have a mechanism for maintaining erections that last several hours.

I know what you're thinking: this guy is completely conflating/confusing the idea of news with the idea of advertising.

Maybe...

So, I ask you: what is the difference between 95% of what you see offered as news and an advertisement?