Spoilers DSC has partnered with The Hollywood Reporter for exclusives
- Thread starter Red Panda
- Start date
Propaganda, eh? You do realize that the article you link is a run-of-the-mill feature piece that gets produced every day by news outlets everywhere? There's nothing insidious about it. And you do realize that THR has partnered with CBS to cover the season, as has also been stated publicly? Note that they're doing it responsibly: they aren't praising the episode to the stars, but working from, yes, historical fact, and quotes from cast and crew.
Really, ask yourself if you'd be calling it propaganda if they were producing negative stories every day against the show.
Really, ask yourself if you'd be calling it propaganda if they were producing negative stories every day against the show.
I would.
No, I didn't realize that. Where was that stated?
More important, why would a supposed journalistic enterprise assert in advance that they were going to push a series with nothing but positive coverage?
Exactly what journalism should NOT be.
The Hollywood Reporter has always been collection of press releases for the studios. All the entertainment news is and always has been. That’s how Hollywood was operated since it was built.
It's Hollywood Reporter, not the Washington Post. These entertainment rags can't survive without the studios giving them access.
That's fine, but what we have here still isn't propaganda. This is a feature piece that abides by journalistic ethics. The article refrains from anything that might be construed as a review, makes no real claims about the quality of what's on screen, and patterns its content and tone from the quotes it uses. This is a common genre done commonly.
There was a story going around about it in advance of the premiere.
This is very common. Someone at THR reaches out to CBS, or someone at CBS reaches out to THR about covering the season. The goal of the writer isn't to evaluate the quality of the show or offer a review, but to contextualize the event and give people a taste of why it might be interesting. It's not uncommon for news organizations to refuse to cover what they can't in good faith cover.
And yes, this is something journalism can do and does do, and as I said, it isn't breaking any rules here. It doesn't tell us the show is glorious, or a masterpiece, or really comment at all on its quality. It isn't praising the performances or the episode itself.
Source: journalism major. Have written for news. Has a partner who's a reporter.
Midquest: It's because of the DAILY nature of HR's Discovery stories that I view this as something above and beyond what might otherwise be considered "very common." Yes, of course feature stories with no dissenting views are common in all sorts of journalism, but they're generally not this frequent on the same topic!
Edit: I see that this thread has been joined to an earlier one I wasn't aware of. But I also see that the thread begins with the following: "Showrunner and franchise captain Alex Kurtzman joins The Hollywood Reporter each week to talk through the latest episode of the CBS All Access drama." I don't interpret "each week" to mean "every single day" as it has been for the past week.
Edit: I see that this thread has been joined to an earlier one I wasn't aware of. But I also see that the thread begins with the following: "Showrunner and franchise captain Alex Kurtzman joins The Hollywood Reporter each week to talk through the latest episode of the CBS All Access drama." I don't interpret "each week" to mean "every single day" as it has been for the past week.
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I hear you, but think about if this were not coverage of a show but, let's say, a local event. A state fair. In my state, we have arguably the biggest state fair in the US, and people get really, really excited for it. When the state fair is coming, there are almost daily articles about it, and that continues for the two weeks of the event. As different attractions arrive or events within the fair occur, stories in the papers highlight them with interviews from the planners. What these articles don't do is review the event, but they do try to find human interest in it. I don't see this coverage as particularly different from that except that it's happening in a different venue. Now, if THR starts commenting in a critical register--describing the caliber of performances or the quality of the direction--I would have an issue with it because doing so would blur the line between reasonable promotion that THR's audience would likely want to hear about and the analytical evaluation of the show, which really ought to stand on its own. At least, that's my perspective.
These kinds of pieces can be a headache to write because you want to tell a good story, respect the artists involved, but also not tell people what to think about the quality of the event itself.
One big difference is that many of the participants in competitions, performances, etc., at state fairs are unpaid, whereas Discovery is a wholly commercial operation. I'm very familiar with feature stories about state fair events in newspapers, and even played piano accompaniment for 4H musicals at the MN State Fair two different years, so although I understand your analogy, it doesn't really work. In neither case would criticism enter into such feature stories, but "reasonable promotion" of a largely volunteer effort on a near-daily basis is not equivalent to what HR is doing.
I think you've answered your own question there. HR and Variety used to routinely earn respect when they were published on newsprint, decades ago, and sometimes their websites still produce actual journalism. By contrast, I never had such expectations about People.
But even then, they published daily articles about upcoming movies and what the Studios wanted to say about them.
Much like politics in the US, people tend to ignore it until it pops into their worldview & affects them one way or the other.It's called HYPE in Hollywood and it's been going on for almost as long as Hollywood has been in existence.
Why are we grumbling about it now?
What's the difference between this and what People Magazine does weekly?
(besides People being more of a RAG)
It's called HYPE in Hollywood and it's been going on for almost as long as Hollywood has been in existence.
Why are we grumbling about it now?
Because Real Star Trek(tm) and Gene's Vision(tm) and whatnot.
It's not inaccurate.
GR said MANY THIINGS of both the 23rd and 24th century eras that the actual WRITERS of the majority of episodes promptly ignored (in TOS pprobably with Gene Coon's and Herb Solo's blessings) such as "Star Fleet ISN'T military..." (mot of the episodes from the TOS era would disagree like oh: "Court Martial", "Errand of Mercy", "The Doomsday Machine", and I could go on. GR said A LOT of things about Star Trek that didn't actually pan out in the actual episodes.
It's not conventional journalism. It's a trade magazine. Entertainment trade magazines market to people who work in the entertainment industry. It's literally a big advertisement. Comparing it to conventional print journalism that needs to maintain objectivity is silly. They can occasionally do conventional reporting, like say covering the Harvey Weinstein case because it's industry related, but that's not their primary stock-in-trade.
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I remember going to the public library every week to read the new Weekly Variety for news about the second Star Trek movie. The paper was essentially what seemed like about a hundred pages of ads - page after page of display advertisements, many of them half or full-page, which had been purchased by studios, actors' agents etc to announce the beginning or wrapping of production on some project, someoen's casting, etc.
In 1986, BTW, Paramount bought two pages for the announcement of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Except for special issues, the paper was newsprint, and the studio paid extra for red ink on that one: black and white and red all over, so the joke goes.
There were short articles and interviews peppered in between the ads. Most news about Trek in 1980-82 was to be found by scanning the bottoms of the typeset columns, where minor (that is to say, unpaid) casting and production information about current films would be used to pad out extra space after some puff piece about an exec who "ankled" one studio or another to land a fat job at another.
"Kirtie Alley and Merritt Buttrick into Star Trek 2."
Who? What?
THR is like that, yeah.
In 1986, BTW, Paramount bought two pages for the announcement of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Except for special issues, the paper was newsprint, and the studio paid extra for red ink on that one: black and white and red all over, so the joke goes.
There were short articles and interviews peppered in between the ads. Most news about Trek in 1980-82 was to be found by scanning the bottoms of the typeset columns, where minor (that is to say, unpaid) casting and production information about current films would be used to pad out extra space after some puff piece about an exec who "ankled" one studio or another to land a fat job at another.
"Kirtie Alley and Merritt Buttrick into Star Trek 2."
Who? What?
THR is like that, yeah.