Extremely Lame

I was listening to one of the podcasts that I normally listen to, and the hosts were waxing nostalgic at how the media used to be objective and how they didn’t try to inject themselves into a story. They were wondering if this “new news” was different than “old news” because there isn’t that selfless, cold, and composed anchor talking about someone doing something terrible, like taking forty cakes.

It started me thinking. The idea of the news being objective and detached from the world as it happens isn’t the rule; it’s the exception. Back when there were multiple newspapers in a city and they were fighting for subscriptions and readership numbers, there wasn’t any attempt at all to be objective and detached. Hell, lots of times, they’d use their pages to take swipes at other papers. The term for these bad old days of newspapers is yellow journalism.

While the spreading of libelous and nearly libelous content is indeed bad, is news sterilized of all emotion really a good thing in all cases? I have to admit, I’m torn. One one hand, not injecting anything but the facts allows people to make their own decisions. On the other, most people are too lazy or stupid to make their own decisions with the news anyway, so they elect to have someone else do it for them and tell them when they should cheer and when they should jeer. Is this a situation where refusing to stoop to the level of others is simply shooting yourself in the foot or worse? Aren’t there appropriate times when you need to, well, go all Network and scream that you’re mad as hell and you aren’t going to take it anymore?