Newsworthy Quotes

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Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.
Haruki Murakami (Dance Dance Dance)
Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.
Rutger Bregman (Humankind: A Hopeful History)
They had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.
Tom Rachman (The Imperfectionists)
Prime Minister: Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspision love actually is all around.
Richard Curtis
Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.
Bill Hicks
Most importantly, the epidemic was only news when it was not killing homosexuals. In this sense, AIDS remained a fundamentally gay disease, newsworthy only by the virtue of the fact that it sometimes hit people who weren't gay,
Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic)
Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.
Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.
Richard Curtis
...she was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. It was a most painful position for at the same time Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement;...
Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
We lived in a me-first world obsessed with morally inconsequential celebrities of dubious motivations and shallow character. How or why these people had become famous, or why they would be emulated and their every word newsworthy, no one of common sense could explain. The world had seemingly gone mad, and anyone pointing this out was reviled and mocked.
Bobby Underwood (City of Angels)
Our understanding of what is really 'newsworthy' is a misunderstanding.
Louis Yako
Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media’s treatment of news (that is, produce “flak”), to provide “experts” to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.1 In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis. These structural factors that dominate media operations are not allcontrolling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results.
Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media)
The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
The news is supposed to be a mirror held up to the world, but the world is far too vast to fit in our mirror. The fundamental thing the media does all day, every day, is decide what to cover — decide, that is, what is newsworthy. Here’s the dilemma: to decide what to cover is to become the shaper of the news rather than a mirror held up to the news. It makes journalists actors rather than observers. It annihilates our fundamental conception of ourselves. And yet it’s the most important decision we make. If we decide to give more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to her policy proposals — which is what we did — then we make her emails more important to the public’s understanding of her character and potential presidency than her policy proposals. In doing so, we shape not just the news but the election, and thus the country. While I’m critical of the specific decision my industry made in that case, this problem is inescapable. The news media isn’t just an actor in politics. It’s arguably the most powerful actor in politics. It’s the primary intermediary between what politicians do and what the public knows. The way we try to get around this is by conceptually outsourcing the decisions about what we cover to the idea of newsworthiness. If we simply cover what’s newsworthy, then we’re not the ones making those decisions — it’s the neutral, external judgment of news worthiness that bears responsibility. The problem is that no one, anywhere, has a rigorous definition of newsworthiness, much less a definition that they actually follow.
Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized)
The greatest influence over content was necessity--they had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words, provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.
Tom Rachman (The Imperfectionists)
It’s the great flaw of journalism. The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is.
Nathan Hill (The Nix)
Don’t let the politicians bought and sold in the political markets, the chosen “analysts”, the assigned “experts”, the co-opted writers on the Empire’s payroll tell you what is newsworthy. Don’t listen to all those who are more interested in fame, in standing on the podiums of arrogance and sitting to dine at the tables of triviality tell you what is newsworthy.
Louis Yako
we reporters are not all that incentivized to determine whether the underlying facts behind the leaks are truth or fiction. The fact that an important person said it is itself newsworthy.
John Gilstrap (High Treason (Johnathan Grave, #5))
The point is to obscure the fact that the decisions being made are decisions at all. It’s best if newsworthiness feels like a quality external to journalistic judgment, as if it were a weight attached to each story and measurable with proper instrumentation. Because of that, judgments of newsworthiness are often contagious; nothing obscures the fact that a decision is being made quite like everyone else making it, too.
Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized)
Our media, which are like a planetary nervous system, are far more sensitive to breakdowns than to breakthroughs. They filter out our creativity and successes, considering them less newsworthy than violence, war, and dissent. When we read newspapers and watch television news, we feel closer to a death in the social body than to an awakening. Yes, something is dying; however, the media do not recognize that something is also being born.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Only two or three months ago, one of the Tokyo newspapers (I can’t remember which) admirably reported that a two hundred inch astronomical telescope in America was halfway toward completion. I should like to praise the editor of that newspaper. Articles about war, foreign affairs, and the stock market are not the only things that should be considered newsworthy. A two hundred inch lens can magnify our view of the cosmos considerably. The scope of human vision will expand tremendously. It will become possible to see what was once impossible to behold. It will be a momentous occasion, as though the whole human race, once blind, is granted the gift of sight. Its importance is unrivalled by any war.
Edogawa Rampo (The Edogawa Rampo Reader)
With each integer on the Richter scale, there is a tenfold increase in the number of earthquakes that occur annually. On average, there is one magnitude 8 event, ten magnitude 7 events, a hundred magnitude 6 events, and so on, each year. If we consider this from an energy standpoint, the smaller earthquakes account for a significant fraction of the total seismic energy released each year. The one million magnitude 2 events (which are too small to be felt except instrumentally) collectively release as much energy as does one magnitude 6 earthquake. Although the larger events are certainly more devastating from a human perspective, they are geologically no more important than the myriad less newsworthy small ones.
Marcia Bjornerud (Reading The Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth)
Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines.18 Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is only rarely that the perpetrators of these petty acts seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in their anonymity. It is also extremely rarely that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be to admit that their policy is unpopular, and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside—neither of which the sovereign state finds in its interest.19 The nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists thus conspire to create a kind of complicitous silence that all but expunges everyday forms of resistance from the historical record.
James C. Scott (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance)
40 Million Invisible Planes In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine: “Flight BA0016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.” 2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
In American society we have perfected a remarkable form of censorship: to allow every one his political right to say what he believes, but to swamp his little boat with literally thousands of millions of newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, best-selling books, broadcasts, and public pronouncements that disregard what he says and give the official way of looking at things. Usually there is no conspiracy to do this; it is simply that what he says is not what people are talking about, it is not newsworthy.
Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society)
Looking back now, there's something that bothers me abut the newspaper article about her death: it has Celine as Knockout, as Queen Bee, as Prom Superstar. The kid the newspaper grieved for wasn't Celine. She was none of those things. Their version of her was less distinctive than the real Celine was, less an individual, devoid of any real-life individual's quirks and smudges. The paper seemed to believe Celine's death could only be fully newsworthy, only fully sad, if she were outlandishly beautiful, outlandishly popular, outlandishly everything.
Darin Strauss (Half a Life)
Harman was right: those pictures were worse. But, leaving aside the fact that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don't get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily reside in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent in large part because they have a terrible reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols. Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man being tortured to death⁠—or more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of Christ's savage death are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, with his battered flesh scabbed and bleeding and bloated and discolored beneath the pitiless Judean desert sun, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes, or to wear an icon of a man being executed around their necks as as an emblem of peace and hope and human fellowship? Photography is too frank to allow for the notion of suffering as noble and ennobling...
Philip Gourevitch (Standard Operating Procedure)
How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.
Bill Hicks
Most people don’t get (or want) to look at old news footage, but we looked at thirty years of stories relating to motherhood. In the 1970s, with the exception of various welfare reform proposals, there was almost nothing in the network news about motherhood, working mothers, or childcare. And when you go back and watch news footage from 1972, for example, all you see is John Chancellor at NBC in black and white reading the news with no illustrating graphics, or Walter Cronkite sitting in front of a map of the world that one of the Rugrats could have drawn–that’s it. But by the 1980s, the explosion in the number of working mothers, the desperate need for day care, sci-fi level reproductive technologies, the discovery of how widespread child abuse was–all this was newsworthy. At the same time, the network news shows were becoming more flashy and sensationalistic in their efforts to compete with tabloid TV offerings like A Current Affair and America’s Most Wanted. NBC, for example introduced a story about day care centers in 1984 with a beat-up Raggedy Ann doll lying limp next to a chair with the huge words Child Abuse scrawled next to her in what appeared to be Charles Manson’s handwriting. So stories that were titillating, that could be really tarted up, that were about children and sex, or children and violence–well, they just got more coverage than why Senator Rope-a-Dope refused to vote for decent day care. From the McMartin day-care scandal and missing children to Susan Smith and murdering nannies, the barrage of kids-in-jeopardy, ‘innocence corrupted’ stories made mothers feel they had to guard their kids with the same intensity as the secret service guys watching POTUS.
Susan J. Douglas (The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women)
If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And of course if Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editor’s office today and prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two thousand years ago he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into film, he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European publicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.
Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities)
people on Level 4 paying for ReliefWeb are the same people we asked about the trend in natural disasters. Ninety-one percent of them are unaware of the success they are paying for because their journalists continue to report every disaster as if it were the worst. The long, elegantly dropping trend line, a bit of fact-based hope, they think is not newsworthy.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Instead, when police go looking for drugs, they look in the ’hood. Tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even newsworthy in poor black and brown communities. So long as mass drug arrests are concentrated in impoverished urban areas, police chiefs have little reason to fear a political backlash, no matter how aggressive and warlike the efforts may
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
every day could bring the breaking of a new record, but the larger world would persist undisturbed. There was always news, even if little of it was newsworthy. Every pitch was different, every swing, and yet they all were variations on a familiar theme. The lines on the field, the fences around it, the neat geometry suggested that these, for a discrete but somehow infinite period, were the limits of the world.
Matthew Thomas (We Are Not Ourselves)
Victims are told not to say anything about the proceedings, because talking openly about your case can annoy your judge and benefit the defence. Abuses are not really known for their ability to practice this level of self-restraint, giving them control over there narrative around your case—and since court cases are frequently considered newsworthy events, this can give them a whole new platform to recruit more supporters.
Zoe Quinn (Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate)
Wilhelm Von Humboldt that presaged Chomsky: language “makes infinite use of finite media.” We know the difference between the forgettable Dog bites man and the newsworthy Man bites dog because of the order in which dog, man, and bites are combined. That is, we use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. That code, or set of rules, is called a generative grammar; as I have mentioned, it should not be confused with the pedagogical and stylistic grammars we encountered in school.
Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language)
I have learned that all these people are more newsworthy than we have been told all along. Do you know why? Because these people are us. I am all of these people. You are all of these people. But the media seldom represents our worthiness fairly in the news. The media may only decide we are newsworthy when using us as bait stories to go to wars, to put the show of a fake democracy as part of the big lie called “voting” and “electing” the next liar to commit more crimes in our names, by killing more innocent people in the next selected ‘evil’ country in the world.
Louis Yako
The first true newspapers, which conveyed information from around the world and were intended for a wide audience, started to be circulated in the early seventeenth century….By 1640, there were nine newspapers in Amsterdam alone…A few decades later there were hundreds of dailies across Europe. The news had finally become a business. Anything that might pique readers’ interest and boost sales was considered newsworthy by the publishers, regardless of whether it was actually important. This fundamental fraud - the new being sold as the relevant - has persisted to this day. It remains the dominant model in print, online, on social media, the radio and television.
Ralph Dobelli
I needed a story. Something local, but juicy. And more than just newsworthy. I was holding out for gasp-worthy. And I found it. Or rather, it found me. Yup, your humble J-school grad was pretty much handed a tale that had it all: sex and drugs (not the regular kinds), multiple deaths (untimely, natch), rich folks and rituals and loads o' lawsuits- even a celebrity cherry on top. My newbie journo peers might be settling for three inches of coyotes in the subway, some spry centenarian's weightlifting regime or a bucket of campylobacter in the church supper salad, but I was planning to debut large and with oomph. The story was mine. I just had to figure out how to tell it.
Elyse Friedman (The Answer to Everything)
For some reason newspapers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public's great benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock exchanges. If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And of course if Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editor’s office today and prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two thousand years ago he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into film, he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European publicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.
Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities)
The story of Krakatoa had a small beginning—seven newsworthy words, buried well down in the pages of a single London newspaper. As the summer of 1883 wore on, it was to become a very much greater story indeed. And when it was over, three months later, it was to have implications for society—for the laying of the foundations of McLuhan’s “global village”—that have reverberated in a far more important way, and for far, far longer, than anyone at the time could ever have supposed.
Simon Winchester (Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883)
If those who cause destruction have come to be ‘newsworthy’, and those who heal the devastation of that destruction have come to be less than ‘noteworthy’, has our thirst to be entertained become the truly destructive thing?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If Melania had come out and said, “According to my husband, I should be very pretty to get what I want in life,” that would have been news. Well, not news exactly, but candid enough to be newsworthy.
P.J. O'Rourke (How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016)
we the people should expect integrity from the news media and unbiased reporting of newsworthy events.
Ben Carson (America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great)
Human ‘senses’ have a hierarchy as far as loss, and taste and smell rarely made the news or a made-for-TV movie. Most people are terrified of losing sight or going deaf. Losing the ability to touch is a horrible part of paralysis. But smell and taste? Not newsworthy.
Susan Kraus (When We Lost Touch)
therein lies one of the core problems with how Silicon Valley policymakers have dealt with graphic and extremist violence. When videos of beheadings began to emerge from Syria in 2011, with nameless victims, keeping them up was deemed “newsworthy.” But when an American’s death was broadcast to the world, that calculation changed. The fact that Foley’s family had spoken out in favor of banning the video from being shared certainly matters; but what about the Syrian victims whose families had no way of reaching YouTube, let alone mainstream media?
Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
But this fascination has cost us our access to a very significant part of the true history of the church. That part passed ignored and unrecorded even as it happened, because no one deemed it to be newsworthy.
Jim Petersen (Church Without Walls)
For most of us, the vast majority of what we do in life is not sexy. Our daily grind isn’t glamorous or newsworthy, it’s just making stuff out of steel. But faithful leaders don’t need things to glitter for their work to produce gladness. Faithful leaders find meaning in the mundane knowing that their faithfulness in their daily hard work pleases the Lord. They know that behind the simple things we do is an eternal mission, a purpose, and an impact worth our faithfulness.
Brandon Michael West (It Is Not Your Business to Succeed: Your Role in Leadership When You Can't Control Your Outcomes)
to a great extent the media decide the significance of things that happen in the world for any given culture, society, or social group. The language used by the media to represent particular social and political groups, and to describe newsworthy events, tends to provide the dominant ways available for the rest of us to talk about those groups and events.”48
Mark R. Levin (The Democrat Party Hates America)
Kindness and empathy should not be newsworthy. It should be the norm.
Sara Ellie MacKenzie
Imagine the state of distrust in which I move through the world. Revealing anything shameful to anyone, I run the risk of exposure, censure, mockery. Everyone should be told this about fame before they start pursuing it: you will never trust anyone again. You will be a kind of damned person, not only because you can’t trust anyone but, still worse, you must always be considering how important you are, how newsworthy, and this divides you from yourself and poisons your soul. It sucks to be well-known, Pip. And yet everyone wants to be well-known, it’s what the whole world is made of now, this wanting to be well-known.
Jonathan Franzen (Purity)
Who’d rather read, “The godly shall never suffer persecution”? Me. But we do. So did Christians in the time of the apostles. And they are suffering now—around the world, but especially under the lash of Islamic terrorism. Who, just a few years ago, could have imagined the so-called Islamic State—or ISIS, or ISIL, or Daesh, or whatever you want to call it—appearing on the scene and literally crucifying Christians, including children; or that they would brag about beheadings; or that they would be committing mass executions of Christians? That’s evil incarnate—but the big-dog media don’t like to talk about it, and neither do liberal politicians. And that’s only one strand of Islamic terrorism. There’s al Qaeda and there are other jihadist movements, all of which are dedicated to the extermination or subjugation of Christians. There’s a global war against Christianity in the name of Islam—and a lot of us don’t even know about it, because the lamestream media don’t think it’s newsworthy. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, challenge yourself to keep informed about the Jihadist threat. Pray for courage, pray for God’s protection of our country, pray for our leaders to defeat this death cult, and pray for threatened Christians around the world.
Sarah Palin (Sweet Freedom: A Devotional)
The importance of newsworthiness can be seen in other ways. For example, even though fewer than one out of 1,000 defensive gun uses result in the attacker’s death, “newsworthiness” means the media will only cover the bloodier cases, where the attacker is virtually always shot and usually killed. Woundings might be about six times more frequent than killings, but one could never tell that from the stories the media chooses to cover.
John R. Lott Jr. (The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You'Ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong)
My friend Bailey is looking at me with tears in her eyes and a smile of pure joy. She sees me, the real me, not the broken little bird that my mother sees, or the Ambassador of Hope that my father sees, or the girl who was stupid enough to walk off with a stranger and ruin everyone's lives that my sister sees. Bailey sees me as I want to be: a normal, non-newsworthy, non-broken, non-victimized sixteen-year-old girl.
Clara Kensie (Aftermath)
But the press, instead of reporting on these shared and often boundary-crossing views as an asset for the Democratic Party—after all, Democratic voters would have to unify around one of these candidates eventually—responded with disappointment and even condescension. They seemed to want newsworthy division. Soon frustrated reporters were creating conflict by turning any millimeter of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into a mile. Since there was almost none in content, they emphasized ones of form. Clinton was entirely summed up by sex, and Obama was entirely summed up by race. Journalists sounded like sports fans who arrived for a football game and were outraged to find all the players on the same team.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
Who has declared that murder is more newsworthy than the heartwarming story of an elderly woman who delivers Meals-on-Wheels to local AIDS sufferers?
Kristin Hannah (Summer Island)
Of the nearly one hundred reports of rape or attempted rape in twenty-one newspapers in nine American colonies between 1728 and 1776, none reported the rape of a Black woman. Rapes of Black women, by men of all races, were not considered newsworthy. Like raped prostitutes, Black women’s credibility had been stolen by racist beliefs in their hypersexuality. For Black men, the story was similar. There was not a single article in the colonial era announcing the acquittal of a suspected Black male rapist. One-third of White men mentioned in rape articles were acknowledged as being acquitted of at least one charge. Moreover, “newspaper reports of rape constructed white defendants as individual offenders and black defendants as representative of the failings of their racial group,” according to journalism historian Sharon Block.25
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Babson became a sought-after public speaker, and the newspapers reported his predictions as newsworthy events.
Walter Friedman (Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters)
PR (public relations) Leadership is the art of giving those leaders a mediaphilic (tm) and newsworthy public, social network and intelligent press platform of BENEFICIENCE, for communicating and relating their working ideas.
Dr Tracey Bond
Less than two months later, Sulzberger was at another prominent function the New York Times found newsworthy: the marriage of his daughter. The nuptials were a full blown affair, and accordingly, the Times devoted 880 words to the event—more than eight times the amount of space that it gave to the findings of the Bund report, which reported the 700,000-person massacre.
Ashley Rindsberg (The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History)
There is hardly any crime in this little village. There are drug-related crimes, like everywhere else, but not terribly newsworthy ones—crimes of petty theft, shoplifting, and of course domestic assaults, which are violent but statistically stem from addiction and poverty, America’s crimes of the broken heart and soul.
J. Reuben Appelman (While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students)
To write a good press release you have to focus. The press release is meant to hook people—it’s how you get journalists interested in what you’re making. You have to catch their attention. You have to be succinct and interesting, highlight the most important and essential things that your product can do. You can’t just list everything you want to make—you have to prioritize. When you write a press release you say, “Here. This. This is what’s newsworthy. This is what really matters.
Tony Fadell (Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making)
He [Aziz Ansari] was just another overeager guy trying to talk a woman into sex, viewing her limits as a challenge he needed to overcome in order to score. What he did was not unusual and was not, in truth, newsworthy; yet that was the very reason it was news. Because it extended the conversation beyond legality, revealing the most banal and pervasive of power dynamics: that men interpret women's behavior through the filter of their own wishes.
Peggy Orenstein (Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity)
One particular Facebook policy, which the company has dubbed the “newsworthiness exemption,” has come under fire from activists, who believe it privileges politicians’ speech above their own. The policy allows posts that otherwise violate community standards to remain on the platform if the company believes the public’s interest in seeing it outweighs the risk of harm.
Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
Practicing meditation as escape has the dimensions of hypocrisy and deluding oneself. So meditation must be for the evolution and improvement of one's mind and for its purification. There can be no spiritual practice which is motivated by the desire to escape from complexity. Abandoning what we authentically know about ourselves in order to conform to the demands of our society drags both ourselves and our societies down to the level of something functional rather than something alive. Non-violent struggle is simply note newsworthy and places no pressure on politicians to act. It can safely be ignored because its response to being ignored will remain non-violent.
Samdhong Rinpoche (Samdhong Rinpoche Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World: Tibetan Buddhism and Today's World)
Big market ripe for disruption. You have identified a large mainstream consumer purchase and process that is inconvenient or unpleasant, and it is associated with a product that has long margins that will give you plenty of funding for both reducing prices and building a brand. 2.   Unfair advantage. You have conceived of a company position and customer acquisition strategy that will take the company from 0 to 60 because you have unique insight and ability to execute on that vision, or you have direct access to deep pockets of capital, technologies, influencers, or experts who can make your product a compelling and newsworthy breakthrough. 3.   Total experience. You have thought out the entire end-to-end consumer experience and can specifically identify how your company will radically improve over the current experience. You are capable of executing that experience from Day One. 4.   Digital savvy to scale. Your founding team has deep experience in harnessing the Internet for customer acquisition, and you have a clear sense of what digital strategy and channels you will prioritize.
Jules Pieri (How We Make Stuff Now: Turn Ideas into Products That Build Successful Businesses)
Well, there is a bothersome ethical problem with a proper trial involving a control group, and blind testing. If something looks effective – say it seems to be slowing the growth of tumours – then everyone wants to abandon the trial and give the thing to the control group as well. It seems wicked to withhold it just because of a scientific quibble.’ ‘So the trial is suspended incomplete?’ ‘And then nobody knows exactly where we are. A lot of medical procedure is like that too. Never properly verified. But people love certainty – so dramatic, so newsworthy. The qualified truth, full of ifs and buts and as far as we know so far, is so relatively boring.
Jill Paton Walsh (The Bad Quarto (Imogen Quy, #4))
Because of that, judgments of newsworthiness are often contagious; nothing obscures the fact that a decision is being made quite like everyone else making it, too. Thus, a shortcut to newsworthiness has always been whether other news organizations are covering a story — if they are, then it’s newsworthy by definition. In the modern era, a shortcut to newsworthiness is social media virality; if people are already talking about a story or a tweet, that makes it newsworthy almost by definition. In both cases, the presence of other outlets and other voices serves to build a fortress of tautology: whatever everyone is covering is newsworthy because everyone is covering it.
Ezra Klein
The Trump videotape was so compelling, “the silver bullet you never find” as one GOP official put it, that there was little anyone in the party could do to counter it. That is, until WikiLeaks posted Podesta’s e-mails, which included the elusive transcript of Hillary’s paid remarks to Goldman Sachs. Unlike a targeted leak, the nature of the WikiLeaks dump—two thousand private e-mails made available to all news outlets at once—meant that editors had to divert reporters to comb through them and find anything newsworthy.
Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
Why is panic in the stock market newsworthy? That's all they ever do! It must be easy to get hired as a stockbroker: 'Show me your panic face! You're hired!!
Stewart Stafford
what to cover—decide, that is, what is newsworthy.
Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized)
Though it's somewhat depressing that political leaders just being part of a normal judicial process is seen as so abnormal and newsworthy.
Nitya Prakash
Matuszewski felt that movies could be used for education if significant events could be captured but was well aware that “history is far from being composed uniquely of planned ceremonies.” He had faith that the cinematographer of the future would risk his life to seek out newsworthy events to capture:
Michael Binder (A Light Affliction: a History of Film Preservation and Restoration)
The puzzle is why dramatic cases in which people use guns to save lives are virtually never covered. Some of the difference in treatment is understandable. Dead bodies are more newsworthy than mere brandishings that cause criminals to run away. Dead bodies of innocent victims are probably also more newsworthy than dead bodies of criminals, but it is suspicious when the media are already covering a story and leaves out how the crimes were stopped.
John R. Lott Jr. (The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You'Ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong)
It's the great flax of journalism: The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is. We have follow the same trajectory as the stock market---sustained and unstoppable growth.
Nathan Hill (The Nix)
both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
Tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even newsworthy in poor black and brown communities.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Was that at the root of her antipathy? An assumption that newsworthiness meant invulnerability?
Robert Galbraith (Troubled Blood (Cormoran Strike, #5))
When most of my friends broke up with someone, it was the end of the world. The last time Izzy broke up with her girlfriend, the girl cried for weeks. When Jackson broke up with someone or started seeing someone knew, it was about as newsworthy as Izzy getting busted for texting in class again.
Erin Fletcher (Tied Up In You (All Laced Up, #2))
The posts were selected not for their newsworthiness or any higher purpose but for their entertainment value and shareability.
Jill Abramson (Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts)
Patience is not a hallmark of the press, especially in the Internet age of rapid fire news reports. The media hungrily gobble content as long as they can make the case that it is new and interesting to the public. Unpublished reports, speculations, preliminary review process sometimes become as newsworthy as meticulously verified conclusions.
Paul Halpern (Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics)
I didn’t have to worry about being the girl until I made the JV team freshman year and suddenly, a girl playing on the boys’ team was newsworthy. I’ve done everything I can to stay out of the spotlight. I write the articles. I don’t star in them.
Sara Biren (Cold Day in the Sun)
I PALE HORSE 1 THE VIRUS NOW known as Hendra wasn’t the first of the scary new bugs. It wasn’t the worst. Compared to some others, it seems relatively minor. Its mortal impact, in numerical terms, was small at the start and has remained small; its geographical scope was narrowly local and later episodes haven’t carried it much more widely. It made its debut near Brisbane, Australia, in 1994. Initially there were two cases, only one of them fatal. No, wait, correction: There were two human cases, one human fatality. Other victims suffered and died too, more than a dozen—equine victims—and their story is part of this story. The subject of animal disease and the subject of human disease are, as we’ll see, strands of one braided cord. The original emergence of Hendra virus didn’t seem very dire or newsworthy unless you happened to live in eastern Australia. It couldn’t match an earthquake, a war, a schoolboy gun massacre, a tsunami. But it was peculiar. It was spooky. Slightly better known now, at least among disease scientists and Australians, and therefore slightly less spooky, Hendra virus still seems peculiar. It’s a paradoxical thing: marginal, sporadic, but in some larger sense representative. For exactly that reason, it marks a good point from which to begin toward understanding the emergence of certain virulent new realities on this planet—realities that include the death of more than 30 million people since 1981. Those realities involve a phenomenon called zoonosis. A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health. Pondering them individually—for starters, this relatively obscure case from Australia—provides a salubrious reminder that everything, including pestilence, comes from somewhere.
David Quammen (Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.)
But it wasn’t just Fox. On March 23, just after we’d gone to war in Libya, he surfaced on ABC’s The View, saying, “I want him to show his birth certificate. There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” On NBC, the same network that aired Trump’s reality show The Celebrity Apprentice in prime time and that clearly didn’t mind the extra publicity its star was generating, Trump told a Today show host that he’d sent investigators to Hawaii to look into my birth certificate. “I have people that have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” Later, he’d tell CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “I’ve been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing. I’ve been told that it’s not there and it doesn’t exist.” Outside the Fox universe, I couldn’t say that any mainstream journalists explicitly gave credence to these bizarre charges. They all made a point of expressing polite incredulity, asking Trump, for example, why he thought George Bush and Bill Clinton had never been asked to produce their birth certificates. (He’d usually reply with something along the lines of “Well, we know they were born in this country.” ) But at no point did they simply and forthrightly call Trump out for lying or state that the conspiracy theory he was promoting was racist. Certainly, they made little to no effort to categorize his theories as beyond the pale—like alien abduction or the anti-Semitic conspiracies in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And the more oxygen the media gave them, the more newsworthy they appeared.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
In any declining culture much of the declension comes about by leaders and preachers who are self-serving or even rapacious, corrupt, and perhaps vicious, people who are far more interested in retaining power than in serving, people who devote more attention to the “spin” they will give to public answers than to the truthfulness of their answers. Pretty soon the entire fabric of the culture unravels. Corruption is soon tolerated, then expected. Cynicism becomes the order of the day. More and more people do more and more of what they think they can get away with. Integrity becomes so rare it is newsworthy.
D.A. Carson (For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God's Word)
There are many positive things occurring that are not considered newsworthy, but are in fact of much greater significance than any of those daily acts of unconsciousness.
Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)