RQ224

“On April Fools’ Day, journalists from every media take advantage of the occasion to pass off fabricated stories as news. While entertaining, these media hoaxes flout journalistic ethics and disappoint the public’s expectation that the media are reliable arbiters of truth. This play arises from and dramatises the incongruities of the journalistic obligation to entertain as well as inform. Further, hoaxes uncover the media’s role in the social construction of reality. They challenge commonsense epistemology by proving that fiction can be indistinguishable from fact, even when it is news.”

–Moira Smith. Abstract of “Arbiters of Truth at Play: Media April Fools’ Day Hoaxes.” Folklore 120.3 (2009): 274-290. Quote on page 274.  Web.

The Guild Is Cool

This is definitely cool stuff.

RQ180

“The only solution is for us, as individuals, to think carefully and analytically about our entertainment, our news and media, without resting in the moral vindication that identifying these systems and decrying them can provide. It is not enough to simply swallow the highest level of entertainment, to sternly force ourselves to listen to NPR and watch PBS, and think that in so doing we can somehow change the world. That’s just another kind of spectacle in which we’re invited to take part. It’s not the media that need changing, it’s not the entertainment that has the power to change things; it’s the viewers.”

–Jacob Clifton. “Signal to Noise: Media and Subversion in Serenity.” Serenity Found. Ed. Jane Espenson. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2007. Quote on page 214.