Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

While there may be some debate over whether Russia's or Canada's version of “Naked News” came first, for many social observers the beginning of serious news delivered by naked women or women in the act of stripping indicates a crisis in the practice of journalism. To say that the boundary between →  Journalism and entertainment has been breached, if not swept away, is for many not a debate at all. It is a simple observation of the dramatic transformations in the practice of journalism that have taken place in the so-called “modern” western industrial democracies (→  Infotainment ; Quality of the News ). More interesting is the debate over whether there ever existed a wall between journalism and entertainment, journalism and →  Popular Culture , or journalism and ideology, for that matter. Conservative commentators, particularly in the United States, bemoan the loss of objectivity and →  balance to a rise of a press dominated by liberal ideology (→  Objectivity in Reporting ). Liberals challenge the idea of a liberal press as a myth propagated by conservative ideologues, counterclaiming that journalism in the United States and increasingly other countries that have come to embrace the ideology of free market capitalism (increasingly known as neo-liberalism), applied to more and more aspects of social, political, and economic life, has curtailed the democratic functions of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text