Destimulating the Journalism Laser: The laser metaphor has much more explanatory power. An echo chamber echos everything. A laser only significantly amplifies photons that are going in the correct direction. The news media only amplifies certain stories.
The reason I believe this metaphor is superior is that it gives us the opportunity to discuss the "excitation level" of Big Journalism. If you take a laser and just lightly stimulate it, it won't actually form a coherent beam because the light is escaping too quickly to become involved in a standing wave inside the resonance chamber. As you stimulate it more, eventually you cross the point where the coherent beam develops, and then more stimulation only brightens the beam until it eventually melts the components themselves.
As I hope is obvious, the "photons" are stories, and the "atoms" are people or companies participating in the journalistic process. Just like photons in the laser, atoms are randomly emitting photons all the time, little stories that attract little or no attention and die without ever being echoed or amplified, because they aren't in line with what can be sustained.
Of course the metaphor isn't perfect.
