Reporters do decide what is news, but they don't invent it, even if they sometimes become part of the story by risking their lives in a danger zone, as in the case of ABC's Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt.
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What we call 'the news' always has tried to tell a story, and it's always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling.
If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
A basic rule of life for reporters is that you should spend your time talking with and learning about people who are not sending you press releases, rather than those who are.
Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them.
We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.
News is something that happens that matters to you, which is not most of what we watch on television.
Most reporters who come to me get their stories directly from press releases. Very few do what one would consider to be their professional duty.
Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles 'stories,' and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don't know all the background can understand them.
By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.
Political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you're news.