Portraying as human the people you hear about on the news doing bad things is dangerous. But it's also necessary and important.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Making 'bad people' seem human is the key to making them really scary.
Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just don't understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.
The bad news for journalists today is that the media, however seriously people who are in the public eye take it, is not taken as seriously as it once was - by the public.
Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.
People are dangerous when they have nothing to lose.
It's very dangerous for a storyteller to walk into a situation with a political agenda because you end up telling a story about issues instead of telling a story about people.
It's really important to remember that most people in the public eye are human for a start and a lot of things that you read in the media get slightly misconstrued and manipulated.
I don't think it's in any way harmful, this marriage of media and politicians. I think it enhances the communications process considerably and makes it possible for the public to be far more aware, far more up-to-date on issues and the opposite sides of the issues.