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Misadventures In Online Journalism
An anonymous reader writes "Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, has posted his take on some of the flaws inherent to today's fast-paced news ecosystem, where bloggers often get little or no editorial feedback and interesting headlines are passed around faster than ever. His article was inspired by a recent story on ZDNet that accused Yahoo of sharing the names and emails of 200,000 users with the Iranian government; a report that turned out to be false, yet generated a great deal of outrage before it was disproved. Carr writes, 'Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute — bloggers being what they are — the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
No wonder that this sort of article is posted on Techcrunch, those guys clearly have a lot of experience in that regard! ;-)
And no, I do not want to flame, they even use an older Techcrunch story as an example in TFA. They really speak from experience.
Wait. Think it through. In the context of commercial online journalism, is late really better than wrong?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Bloggers do not care about integrity, nor do they care about facts. They hear something about something online, then instantly form an opinion without getting any more facts, and if the facts that they do have disagree with what they want them to be, they merely change the facts to suit them. Bloggers like to call themselves journalists, but they know nothing about real-world journalism. To even associate bloggers with journalists does the world of journalism an injustice. Bloggers are nothing more than poorly edited opinion columns, except that bloggers can print whatever they want, while in a newspaper opinion column, lies cause a letter not to be printed. Fuck bloggers and the 'blogosphere.'
I disagree on just a single minor point. The fact checking is important. Modern propaganda techniques are much, much more sophisticated than blatantly lying. Usually the media pushes a political agenda by selectively omitting facts it finds inconvenient while giving high visibility to those it finds desirable. This process is at least as misleading as straight-up lying yet it never requires a single untrue statement. The critical thinking skills needed to detect this kind of framing are much more subtle, and thus more rare, than what it would take to Google a true/false type of fact. For that reason, it is often more misleading than a lie would have been because the lie could be directly falsified.
A perfect example of this would be the use of guns for self-defense and home defense. You'd think, from watching the news, that a law-abiding citizen who legally carries a gun has never stopped a crime. You'd think, from watching the news, that every time a gun is used for self-defense the result is a shootout. Dig a little and you find that in cases where a legal gun was used by a civilian to stop a crime, the news article will say something like "but the attacker was subdued and later arrested" and won't tell you how this happened. Dig some more and you'll see that they give explicit edge-of-your-seat details when an unarmed person wrestles a criminal to the ground, or calls the police and begs for help, or is victimized by a criminal. By comparison, they're strangely quiet when someone refuses to be victimized. Then consider that every dictatorship which has ever occurred in a modern, industrialized nation considered the confiscation of guns to be a very high priority.
The actual agenda isn't difficult to discern. It's your basic statism, though it's often made out to be more complex than it really is. By that I mean people talk about "liberal" and "conservative" and throw around all of these labels. However, both "sides" want to expand the power and size of government. Their only differences are the justifications; one does so for mainly social reasons, the other for economic and military reasons. Yet the result is the same, so any choice provided by the constant (and constantly encouraged) bickering between the two "sides" is illusory. We the people have so far been too dumb to understand the full implications of that, because we'd rather be fat and stupid and occupy our time with sports and entertainment and the latest shiny thing (and those things aren't so bad, just when they're all we care about) because that is the mark of a good consumer. Thus our opinions are as pre-packaged and intended for public consumption as our news stories, and we really do seem to be getting the government we deserve, unfortunately.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
A journalist is a researcher with an additional goal: to provide the general public with the results. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think the biggest problem that you (and many others) are experiencing is that you (and they) expect journalists to report to your biases, rather than the public's, or their own. For example, there are a great many people out there who want to hear about the investigations into terrorist activities, but to a smaller minority, this is perceived as fearmongering to sell papers. Yes, it is superficially to sell papers, but there fear was there first, and it's the public who want that fear addressed.
If your biases aren't mainstream enough, then journalism is just going to seem like a bunch of bullshit.
You know the biggest problem is that you make, just like Concerned Onlooker up there when he says "Everybody thinks every other profession is less valuable than their own", childish assumptions of people other than yourself. I don't want jounalists to report anything of even remote bias, I want a report to be a report and not a fairytale. Why do you assume that I want to hear what makes me smile? Is it that hard for you to imagine that some people just want to know the plain fucking truth?
If Jimmy, 5, falls down the fucking well I want the head line to say "Jimmy, 5, falls down the well" and not "WELLS SLAUGHTERING OUR CHILDREN, GOVERNMENT IGNORING". There is little room for sense, and more often people, like yourself and Onlooker, draw conclusions based on assumptions which were never justified. This leads to what? That's right -- misunderstandings. And that is what you just did -- misunderstood me.
I am the lawn!
A perfect example of this would be the use of guns for self-defense and home defense. You'd think, from watching the news, that a law-abiding citizen who legally carries a gun has never stopped a crime.
No, what you'd think - if you actually read more news than you obviously have - is the truth. That statistically, law-abiding citizens who carry guns are much more likely to be shot dead - often with their own guns or those owned by their loved ones - than law-abiding citizens who don't.
You are a perfect example of those who believe journalism is a bullshit profession because your own personal views are not reinforced by the news you read. But the problem for you is that your personal views are not supported by day to day facts and events, and this is what you're reading about. While I doubt any journalist has ever said or written that a gun-toting citizen has "never" stopped a crime, statistically it is much more likely that they will be a victim of gun violence than the opposite, and that is likely what you are reading about - because it just happens a lot more often. Journalists can only report what is happening - it's not their job to make up facts to suit some bias. That is in fact what this thread is all about.
A quick intertubes search reveals this quote is well over 150 years old and is really more of a proverb than a quote.
But yeah, the OP did abuse is pretty badly.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
How about the CNN story on proof of Bigfoot? Or Cnn's fail in the iranian election? I used to be a giant fan of CNN, today I've moved on to BBC/The Economist/Blogs. Even Slashdot is more reliable than those idiots. And no, I'm not new here: I browse at +4.