The Fake Newsroom

When I hear the phrase 'fake news'
I do not think of Donald Trump,
the most famous exponent of the phrase.

I imagine a situation comedy
about a news room which doubles
as a 'big brother' style laboratory
where what the staff say in the room
is funny to television audience viewing it,
who are led to accept that it is a fake newsroom 
where for the viewer the ultimate joke
is on the newsroom characters
who think that hey are real
and what they write reflects a serious reality.

What nobody except the writer appreciates
is the double puppetry effect in the writing,
where the audience are directly manipulated
through the manipulations of the characters.

Such a complex piece of work
about the manufacturing of news
and manipulation of people's views
has yet to be written, and when it is,
it can only be written once
and has to be written well to work
before the mass audience tire
of knowingly being played with
and the press try to reclaim their superiority.

But then again it is not for nothing
that there are very few TV documentaries
about the workings of the print press news,
and with good reason, secrecy preserves their primacy.