ObamaIsTheNewHitler writes of newspapers: “There’s nothing in it you can’t get elsewhere”

Sigh.

Do you know WHY you can “get it elsewhere”? Because the news was gathered, distilled and thrust into the public consciousness by some journalistic enterprise, most likely a newspaper. THAT’S how it ends up “elsewhere.”

I don’t understand why people have such difficulty with this concept. One of the most startling revelations from the past couple of years — illuminated time and again by discussions like this very thread — has been the public’s vast ignorance about the process behind the news. It’s as if people think that all these stories, all these things they know about current events, are just already sitting there somehow. They seem to think the news just “exists,” and happens to get printed on paper or talked about on the radio or presented on a website.

In other words, they take the whole thing for granted. They take for granted that they know what the president did yesterday, or that a plane crashed somewhere, or that so-and-so was traded by such-and-such team, or that this intrusive new tax is being implemented, or that so-and-so performer is coming in concert — all this stuff we know about the day-to-day world around us. They don’t seem to realize HOW they know all this stuff. And that’s a really weird disconnect, being so clueless about the way all this random reality gets turned into hard information and eventually winds its way into your own consciousness.

Every newsgathering outlet should simultaneously shut down for a week. Maybe people would finally start to get it.