The point about newspapers being made from trees is true but trees are a renewable natural resource. If you happen to live where trees don't grow so well, you may not know that. It is possible to use the trees faster than they can grow but we passed that point a couple of thousand years ago in some places.
There being a journalist in the family, I feel that I should speak up for the news business. It is a business, of course, and newspapers go out of business for various reasons, one of which is competition from other news sources. But much of what passes as news on television and possibly radio, is not news but either entertainment or opinion or editorials. What is printed (not necessarily what you read) is sometimes highly influenced by different things, how much so depending on the content and the newspaper. Most newspapers have always had a slant to the left or right and have generally said so in their masthead. It is true, too, that there are smaller staffs in newsrooms these days, too. Most of the income for newspapers comes from advertising and advertising money these days is swallowed up by television.
News people mostly know what they're talking about, except for irrelevant details, which critics like to jump all over. Critics have their own idea of truth of course and will not be swayed by facts, except for the ones they have created. But sometimes, especially in broadcast journalism, news people talk to one another more than they talk to "sources." So they get surprised now and then. And sometimes what they say falls on deaf ears.
The journalist in the family that I mentioned is my wife's first cousin (one of a grand total of two). He has lived in Egypt, Serbia, Thailand (paradise, he said), Borneo and Afghanistan, where he lives now. He was also imbedded with troops going into Iraq. He knows what he talks about. I recall him sitting in our living room telling us there was going to be a civil war in what was Yugoslavia and there was. So Yugoslavia was the hot spot for a while and he spent some time in Pristina, Kosovo. In fact, that's where he met his wife. But unfortunately, that didn't work out because he was footloose. He was never at home. The family worries that one day he'll come to an end somewhere overseas. He's also written a few books along the way, too. My son, who has never written a book, was also in Iraq for fifteen months and he also knows what he's talking about, at least concerning Iraq. My son-in-law, on the other hand, knows next to nothing about Iraq--he went to Afghanistan.
