The newspaper’s juxtaposition of unrelated events is an imagined linkage, not a natural one.

Evidence

If we were to look at a sample front page of, say, The New York Times, we might find there stories about Soviet dissidents, famine in Mali, a gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the discovery of a rare fossil in Zimbabwe, and a speech by Mitterrand. Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition (a later edition will substitute a baseball triumph for Mitterrand) shows that the linkage between them is imagined. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 109

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘profound fictiveness’ of the newspaper as cultural form — the juxtaposition is the imagined linkage.
• XREF: connects to: Events lacking significance can be magnified by the media. — Cohen, Stanley, Folk devils and moral panics: the…, 221

Related

• The newspaper’s dateline grounds its disparate stories in shared homogeneous time (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Events lacking significance can be magnified by the media. #corroborates (0.80) — Cohen, Stanley, Folk devils and moral panics, 221