From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 11:53:11 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Style gettting in the way of clear reporting
Message-ID: <199607080050.RAA05944@dns2.noc.best.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Believe it or not, this has some very slight cypherpunk relevance.  (Gasp)

At 10:06 PM 7/7/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
> Sadly, simple expository prose must be considered to be too boring, too banal.
>
> (Actually, were only a few writers doing this, it might be mildy tolerable.
> Speaking for myself, that is. But so _many_ "cyberspace journalists" are
> doing bad pastiches of famous stylists that the reportage is being lost in
> the noise.

When news media were concentrated into fewer and fewer hands during 
the twentieth century, the appearance of neutrality, objectivity, 
and authoritativeness became a major selling point, and so media 
adopted a tone and manner of neutrality, with an accompanying 
"just-the-facts" style, though in reality they became far less neutral

Now that everyone can grab the megaphone, people are not so worried
about objectivity.  If something is unfair to Nazis or blacks or evil
polluting capitalists, they know they will hear about it from the 
Nazis, the blacks or the evil polluting capitalists.

As a result, people no longer value the superficial appearance of 
neutrality and objectivity.  Suddenly colorful and openly biased 
reporting has become popular.  

This has led to some people engaging in florid excesses of colorful 
style and concocting totally phony attitudes., just as when word 
processing programs first gained the capability to handle a wide 
variety of fonts, some people produced memos that looked like 
ransom notes.

Soon enough they will settle down.  English prose was at its greatest 
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when many voices could be 
heard, and some of them were on the florid side.
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