News vs Reality READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES - George P Ritter - October 1978

George P Ritter

Our concept of reality is often determined by what someone else says reality is. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of mass-media print and broadcast news journalism. The bulk of our news comes to us secondhand, neatly packaged on the pages of our morning newspapers or from TV The news that makes it into the public consciousness often does so because somebody determined it was ''fit to print. "Only when we understand the message behind the medium can we appreciate that news and reality are often two distinctly different things. In early 1977 a condensation of a book entitled Murder of a Gentle Land chronicled mind-numbing atrocities of Hitlerian proportions- the systematic elimination of over one million human beings by the Khmer Rouge in the nation of Cambodia. Murder of a Gentle Land was subsequently evaluated by a reviewer for the New York Times, Paul Grimes. - Information Supplied By: Herbert W Armstrong Library