n terms of the news of today you will see that. If a person is watching the news and there is a lot of violence and bad things happening they will almost always ask the questions, why can't the news say something good? Well what if there is nothing good to say. News nowadays has had to cater around this however, creating "Local Heros" segments, "Health Checks," etc.In the film Howard had the advantage of television, thus he was able to get away with a little more than he would have been able to in regular news writing. The best evidence for this comes from the reading where Gitlin quotes Ben Bagdikian's three stage selection of news. The editor first doles out the assignment. The writer covers it, but then the editor gets it back to look over. If the editor feels that something may offend of upset the advertisers, or his bosses, etc. he has the freedom to "edit" the article and make it "suitable for print."Basically, in the film Diana is the quintessential reporter for today's corporate world. For her it did not matter what the real news was, all that mattered was what would sell and what news would garner the highest ratings, etc. This is how the network wanted Howard to feel, however instead he chose to tell the public how everything works. In essence Howard almost became his own program director and told the stories how he wanted them to be told.Things like this do happen in the real world often. Many times you will read a column that seems to be a little off beat and seemingly against the grain. This is because sometimes things do get by the editors. Also, these things usually only happen when the column is written by a reknown columnist and not a reporter. The main reason for this is that the paper and the head honchos there can always lay the blame on the columnist and forward all the criticisms to him/her.I had seen this movie while in high school and I liked it then as well. However I did not have the knowledge of the news indus...
