News cannot picture reality but only signal that something is happening

Evidence

Lippmann’s view is that reality is “picturable,” and truth can be achieved by matching an independent, objective, picturable reality against a language that corresponds to it. News, however, cannot picture reality or provide cor- respondence to the truth. News can only give, like the blip on a sonar scope, a signal that something is happening. More often it provides degenerate photo- graphs or a pseudo-reality of stereotypes. News can approximate truth only when reality is reducible to a statistical table: sport scores, stock exchange reports, births, deaths, marriages, accidents, court decisions, elections, eco- nomic transactions such as foreign trade and balance of payments. — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 358

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Lippmann’s key claim that news, unlike science, cannot provide correspondence to truth.
• XREF: Links to Rorty’s correspondence theory of truth and the broader transmission/ritual distinction central to Carey. — connects to: Communication does not report reality but inverts the reported relation to it — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 187; Communication constitutes reality rather than merely representing it — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 382; Media convergence can constitute reality rather than merely representing it. — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 19 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 358

Broader Connections

• Communication constitutes reality rather than merely representing it #complicates (0.80) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 382
• Communication does not report reality but inverts the reported relation to it #complicates (0.70) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 187