At 12:40 AM 7/8/96, James A. Donald wrote:

When news media were concentrated into fewer and fewer hands during the twentieth century, the appearance of neutrality, objectivity, and authoritativeness became a major selling point, and so media adopted a tone and manner of neutrality, with an accompanying "just-the-facts" style, though in reality they became far less neutral

An interesting point. You are probably right that journalism is becoming more florid as "amateurs" flood the market. However, I don't quite buy the concentration argument, as things were pretty concentrated in the Hearst era, and the explosion of magazines in the past few decades has not been as concentrated. (In any case, these are hard things to quantify without more research, which I for one am unlikely to pursue.)

Now that everyone can grab the megaphone, people are not so worried about objectivity. If something is unfair to Nazis or blacks or evil polluting capitalists, they know they will hear about it from the Nazis, the blacks or the evil polluting capitalists.

As a result, people no longer value the superficial appearance of neutrality and objectivity. Suddenly colorful and openly biased reporting has become popular.

I still think of "The Wall Street Journal" and "The Economist," two of my favorites, as being _careful_ in their reporting (careful is different from unbiased). But my main focus in this thread was on the _styles_, and this I think is more explained by faddishness. And advertising. To get "mind space," as with "shelf space," the packaging must entice, fool, and trick the reader.

This has led to some people engaging in florid excesses of colorful style and concocting totally phony attitudes., just as when word processing programs first gained the capability to handle a wide variety of fonts, some people produced memos that looked like ransom notes.

Yes, and many of the newsletters we're seeing--as many are cc:ed or forwarded to our list--are the kissing cousins of "zines." Same faux style, same emphasis on "flash" over substance. (Not all of them of course.) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."