Posted 3:24 PM by Gene

Stories like these prove why press releases are more truthful than equivalent news stories. The press release has no pretensions of factuality, no yearning for the truth; its bias comes straight from the presenter; it's an honest bias. The news story, on the other hand, is supposed to be better than a press release -- at the very least it should be more truthful, more skeptical, more disinterested -- and it's written by hacks whose salaries allegedly indicate they're better. With these three stories, as with so much of the junk expectorated by scribblers, there is no discerning any difference from a press release, and that's what makes them so mightily offensive: news hacks are pulling the just-relax-and-enjoy-it-while-we-rape-you routine on their readers, and they're spreading the intellectual equivalent of venereal disease.