Electric Josh

All regimes are founded on opinion.
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More Get Your War On. Good Dr. Rees assures us that everything is just fine.
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Rick Santorum (of all people) wants to make the NOAA's weather data available only by paying a private company. This is much like what the Mass Turnpike Authority has done with traffic data, and it's beyond stupid. I've already paid for that data! Let me have it, dammit! Story here. Here's an AccuWeather spokesman demonstrating that he's a moron:

"The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people's lives and property," said Myers, whose company is based in State College, PA. Instead, he said, "It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of 'warm and sunny.'"

So perhaps best not to forecast anything unless the forecasts you aren't producing tell you that the weather won't be warm and sunny. Cute. (What is it with Pennsylvania and bad government these days?)
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Everyone's favorite hacker who got rich and now has tons of time on his hands to write little essays now has The Submarine, in which he describes how PR firms plant about half of the news stories that aren't about natural disasters or other obvious news.

Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.

At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times.

He makes no mention of how presidential campaigns and the like get covered, but you get the general idea. This sort of thing does make reading the news way more interesting, parsing the backstory out of the stilted words that eventually see print.
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