News falsifies

News in news media falsifies. It falsifies even when it tries for the highest standards of truth merely by its inherent limitation that it cannot cover all the news. It falsifies by exclusion. A paper may claim to print “all the news that’s fit to print,” but leaves out all the news that it deems unfit to print or not quite fit to print by limitation of space or else according to the presumed interest of the readership. The individual new item, similarly, tells the story edited down suitably, that is to say, to make it manageable. Even in a small community paper there are events that are never reported; in the wide international world there are more events that are never brought to our attention; and stories are never fully told except those of high sensational value (or actually even those). Every piece of writing is edited, and editing reduces, abridges, clarifies, and thus falsifies. As Jean-Luc Godard said of film: “Every edit is a lie.” A film that is called a documentary documents only those facts and events it chooses to document and fictionalizes them despite itself. A documentary documents only to the extent a fiction film is a documentary in that it documents the event enacted by the actors performing against a set, real or painted, in front of the camera. In fact, the filmmaker’s individual point of view, achieved by her selectivity, is absolutely inevitable. Even a scene shot with a stationary camera, no less than a picture in still photography, selects by leaving out what exists outside the frame. The public at large, nurtured by televised images, is hard put to question their reality and realize their falsity. News in news media, print or graphic, never tells the whole story and feeds us a false notion of the world we live in. This is the nature of the media; but it is important to be constantly and fully aware of it, or else we live a life duped.