I try to remember that one reason the news seems so bad so often is due to the "Man Bites Dog" principle. The breakdown of command and the subsequent mess at Abu Ghraib was newsworthy because it is not the way our military normally operates and not an example of the behavior of 99 and 44/100% of our soldiers.
It is the aberrant misbehavior of the misfit that is newsworthy, the man biting the dog. Newsweek's Koran-flushing brief falls into the same category. Almost...
When did the principle change to "Man May Have Bitten Dog" or "Man Threatens to Bite Dog" or, worse, become limited to "Bad Man Bites Good Dog"?
Since the heydey of the Edinburgh Review, it's no secret that bias makes information memorable. I don't have a problem with a biased approach to news, as long as it's news. I do have a problem with gossip and rumor presented as news... as fact. UPDATE: Via Sisu, that non-secret has now been verified by Harvard economists.
Tell me the truth, tell me what you think about it and we'll get along fine whether I agree with your opinion, or not. But you have to tell me the whole truth, even stories about good men biting bad dogs.
That's the issue that Blackfive has with Newsweek: their failure to print a story about a very good man biting a bad dog, and it's why he hasn't read Newsweek in two years. When the bias is presented in this way, it's not making information more memorable, it's suppressing it, keeping it from being remembered at all.
As so often happens, Baldilocks gets to the point in far fewer words.
