News and the Culture of Lying

Reporters claim to seek and tell the truth in their news stories, but Paul Weaver maintains that news organizations regularly foster a haze of untruth that obscures the meaning of events and distorts our perception of reality. This distortion, which Weaver terms "a culture of lying", is the result of hidden structural relations, such as the media's need to serve the interests of advertising sponsors, and the "addict/codependent" relationship of reporters to their sources. Enlivening his account of how stories are assigned, reported, edited and published, Weaver shows how standard procedures that aim at revealing truth produce the opposite.