Everything You See And Hear In The Media is FAKE!

For many years, I was a professor of communication who taught, among other things, a course in media aesthetics and analysis. As an introduction to that course, I gave students a few handy phrases that summarized the points I was trying to make during the semester.  For this course, I had a few, but the most direct, and I feel most pithy, was "Everything you see and hear in the media is Fake!"  This disturb some students, those who were actually listening, and often someone would respond, "But what about the news?"  My response was simply that the news was the most fake of all.

Last week I wrote a piece called "Reality Television Is Anything But Real" that touched on this subject, but I want to delve a little deeper.  The most obvious issue is the use of the term "news." Often, news is described as information that is timely (happening now), topical (subject of contemporaneous public interest), proximate (some local connection or location).  These attributes are appropriate in order for the medium (newspaper, radio station, etc.) to serve its audience (and it's advertisers).  At least one other attribute identified in the journalism textbooks is conflict.  This is where the problems arise.

The reason that I maintain that news is fake is highlighted by the word we use to describe these individual news items: stories. By it very definition, a story has a predefined narrative structure.  Aristotle identified this structure 3,000 years ago and dramatic structure still dominates our communication environment.  The structure is simple:
Exposition (the starting point, the status quo)
Complication (something that disrupts the status quo)
Climax (the point where the disruption/crisis can not longer continue
Resolution (the complication is resolved and  a new status quo is established),

This simple structure is evident throughout our fictions, but it also is evident in our non-fiction "stories."  We expect these elements and are often disappointed when they are not fulfilled.  That is why the news "story" is, by definition, fake.  We (the reporters, editors, audiences) impose or demand what we expect is the natural progression of our stories.  But life is not like that for most of us, its messy, unpredictable, and often downright boring.  But news in the 21st century is the the bait on the advertisers' hooks, not an end onto itself.  Just look at Faux News and CNN some night and pay attention to the structure, not the content.

So, media practitioners force all information into the Aristotelian structure to satisfy our Western sense of order and to keep our eyes on the screen or the page.  That makes these stories understandable and inviting, but does not make them real.  Even when there is much truth in a story, it is still first and foremost a story.  Add to this the ways in which we mediate the reality that is being reported (we use words, pictures, sequences, order) and it is clear, at least to me, that everything you see and hear in the media is fake, especially the news.  If you don't believe me, apply the Aristotelian structure frame to a news story (or an advertisement for that matter) and then tell me I am wrong.  I am waiting to hear from you.