« The Rice Genome Sequenced - fun for historians, too! |
Main
| Charter school successes? »
August 11, 2005
Oral formulaic poetry, front page stories -- separated at birth?
Bomboy found drug coverage to be moralistic in conception, gullible in sourcing, and formulaic in execution.Well, yeah. Surprised? I'm not. Of course, I think you can substitute all kinds of words for "drug" there, like "political" and "economic" and "abortion." There's nothing more moralistic, gullible, and formulaic than journalism; reading the newspaper makes me wonder why we think that illiterate Serbian singers were somehow primitive or were somehow surprising -- oral formulaic poetry, front page stories -- separated at birth?
Still the article from which the excerpt comes is worth reading. Why is meth the next heroin? Why is oxycontin the next whatever? Read it and weep.
via Radley Balko.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 11, 2005 7:49 AM