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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.
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 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.