New technologies have radically transformed relations between reporters and editors. Previously, newspaper correspondents and reporters for press agencies and TV had a relative degree of freedom and could follow their intuitions. They could hunt out news, check, edit, and format it. Nowadays, they have increasingly become pawns to be shifted to various places around the world. The editor, for his part, has news coming at him from a whole range of sources and thus has his own assessment of the facts, which may be quite different from that of the reporter covering events on the spot.
Reporters are the victims of the arrogance of their bosses and the media groups.
In one week I've had to film in five countries on three separate continents. Until recently we learned our history from the heritage of knowledge that our ancestors left us and from what archives contained and historians uncovered. Rudolf Arnheim, the German cultural theoretician, had already predicted in the 1930s that human beings would come to confuse the world perceived by their senses and the world interpreted by thought, and would believe that seeing is understanding, which is untrue. Television, in Arnheim's opinion, could have become one of the more rigorous forms of research, feeding our understanding. But it could just as easily make our minds lethargic as enrich them.