Recently I was was thinking about the relevance of the three clips presented to us during our last class together and how they had to do with the idea of "fake" news. At first I didn't understand how the clip of Tom Cruise acting crazy on Oprah demonstrated this. After a short while of pndering I came up with an idea. Tom Cruise is a huge superstar, and people like his agents know that superstars get in the news for almost anything. It seems to me that Tom Cruise's actions were dictated by his agent or a PR group to make news. See, after this incident, Tom Cruise was in the news constantly. Whether good or bad everyone was talking about how "Craaaaaazy" he was. And of course, his new movie Mission Impossible: 3 was on its way to theatres so the huge publicity of the main actor of the movie was a generous boost towards ticket sales I'm sure.
This is fake news because there are other people creating it for the sake of the buzz. They are deciding what we should be seeing for the next two weeks by simply making a superstar do ridiculous things. Tom Cruise isn't really news, it's advertising in disguise, similar to the so called "newscasts" that we watched which simply take an ad from a company and twist it into a story that is supposed to sound important to us as viewers.
So yes, that video of Tom Cruise is fake news. I mean, he didn't even say anything intellectually stimulating, he just smiled and jumped around.
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2 comments:
interesting post, ben. you're right about pr firms working with celebrities in order to shape their public personae, and tom cruise is certainly working with someone in the pr industry. the reason i screened tom cruise jumping the couch on oprah is because it is a representative clip of another genre of news - soft news/infotainment. though the information presented is of questionable integrity/value, it still constitutes a popular form of "news." why is soft news important when thinking about other forms of news?
Well I guess when you find out what soft news it brings up the question of what is hard news? is it just news that is serious like wars and weather and politics or just anything that truly matters to the viewer?
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