Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Taking Advantage of "Breaking News"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jUq_HBtydA] by NickieWild Who determines what “news” is? Can we define news as “that which gets talked about,” as Katz and Lazarsfeld wrote about in Personal Influence in 1955? Or are there more strict criteria that are (or should be) observed in the modern media environment? Last year, I wrote about “Martin Eisenstadt,” a fake member of a fake think tank who managed to convince the mainstream media that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent, and...