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A Critique of the Boston Bombing News Coverage (Video)
David Coursey has spent a lot of his life as a journalist, specializing in IT coverage for most of it. He's written for ZDNet and eWeek, Forbes, and other well-known publications, and has had his stories linked from Slashdot more than a few times over the years. What he is not as well known for is his expertise as an EMT, a field he has been in as both a volunteer and professional since the rocks in California (where he lives) were still soft enough that the Flintstones used them as pillows. He and I were chatting on Facebook yesterday, and I realized that David's views on media coverage of the recent Boston Marathon bombings might be worth sharing. Do you think what he's saying is valid? Do you agree or disagree with him? Or some of each?
We need a story now, quick. We need something to put on airtime because our marketing is calling around our advertising clients to see who wants to bid on the next hour of airtime. The big need to get something up quick, even if it's very low quality, such as a poorly recorded video interview without a transcript... oh, wait...
Coverage has been one completely bogus claim after another, always from unnamed sources.
Blast from second floor inside building. Oh wait, no it wasn't.
Two bombs placed in trash cans. Oh wait, no they weren't.
Authorities have found and "blown up" a number of other bombs. Oh wait, no they haven't.
A dark skinned suspect has been arrested. Oh wait, there is no such suspect.
Why not ask us again in a day or two (when the transcript is ready).
I can't seem to play the video and there's no transcript but I was impressed with Jon Stewart's drawing and quartering of CNN's coverage. He hit the nail on the head of what "journalistic integrity" has fallen to. Jon Stewart was saying CNN had an 'exclusive' story on the arrest ... exclusive because there was no arrest.
Get on Twitter, say some stuff that sounds legit. Sit back and watch it retweeted, then it'll hit the blogs and finally the 'news.' And all they have to do is try to track down the original source (you) but they seldom do. And that's what "crowdsourced" news has come to. Whenever someone heralds the amazing results from crowdsourced news, it's always post hoc cherry picked results of an actual first hand account or someone who got it right. They seldom look at the entire volume of tweets prior to what we know is true and what is conjecture/wrong.
My work here is dung.
Whatever else this story will do, it will further undermine any objection to CCTV cameras everywhere, especially if the bomber gets caught as a result of them.
If I wanted video I'd be on Youtube.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Just wondering if all you MSM types can get off your 24/7 cycle and stop going over and over and over this.
My cousin is home from the hospital and her two knee surgeries, and the FBI has the shrapnel from her leg.
K, thanks.
P.S.: Most of my family is NOT WATCHING your coverage. At all.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Where to begin...
The competition to get to the story first is too great and often over shadows the duty of the new to check facts and report an unbiased account of events.
What is missing is any sort of repercussions for reporting false facts, who do we hold accountable? Unfortunately good news simply does not pull in the desired ratings and ad revenues.
No sig here...
CNN/NBC/Fox all want to be the first to get the story out. No matter what, for some reason being first though bad info - is good.
Then, they have hours of airtime to fill. So they use unknown "fact" combined with stupid pundits to just fill airtime. It is a bunch of shit in summation.
Everyone thought dedicated news channels would mean dedicated new coverage. These for-profit news channels are trying to maximize their news coverage dollar and that usually means making the most out of the least. Late last night I watched a sheriff interviewed who was extremely careful not to give out even estimates of numbers. He was very disciplined and never speculated; at the most saying it could have been a criminal act or it could have been an industrial accident.
When a reporter was later asked to summarize his comments, she emphasis (paraphrasing) "he said it *could* have been a criminal act. That's an interesting choice of words." So even when there's no news, that gets turned into something!
Look at the Jodi Arias trial that's been featured on HLN for weeks now. An open-and-shut murder tiral about a pretty girl with some irrelevant sordid sexual details has become their primary focus and they're milking it for every last graphic sexual and violent detail.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Seriously, stop fucking watching the 24 hr news channels. If you all weren't watching, then they wouldn't be making any money. You can't complain about something that you regularly participate in willingly. No one is FORCING YOU to pay attention to this fucking shit.
Minor nitpicking here, but this is the internet... An EMT is not the same as a Paramedic
If you hadn't, I'd have. :-)
I would describe it a bit differently though. Essentially, there are four levels of EMT: EMT Basic, EMT Intermediate, EMT Advanced, and Paramedic. That is, all paramedics are EMTs but not vice versa.
A couple times I've considered geting EMT-basic certification and volunteering. I never have, but I did look into the training requirements. An EMT Basic course will usually be one semester; I think the one around here is twice a week for around 3 hours each meeting. That comes out to around 80 hours. I could be wrong, but I think the Intermediate course was another semester. The paramedic curriculum though is a couple years of more classes. The basic and intermediate courses struck me as something that it'd be reasonable for a lot of people to do while still having a day job, but the paramedic curriculum definitely seemed like a much more full-time commitment.
Most of the "news coverage" right at the start could have been replaced by a 5 second looping animated GIF.
Worse yet, a few hours later some of the stations around here were showing repeating footage clips of people running and screaming with no obvious indication it was recorded earlier to try and make it seem like it was still happening.
The most pressing point is not about Boston and may have nothing to do with Al Quiida at all. The real problem is frequency of incidents.
We are seeing more and more people or groups acting out in violent ways. The media and politicians can make remarks all day long but the public is
missing the point. Here we have several bombs made from pressure cookers. About one week back we had some nut attack 14 people with some sort of box cutter or utility knife. In the mean time we have had organized killings of people in public jobs such as prison wardens. Then we have the recurring loonies who have urges to shoot school kids or even college kids. There are so many incidents it is hard to keep track of them. I do not believe it is bad diet or lead in the drinking water. I think we simply have a population under too much pressure and people are acting out. Yet our politicians will not address the real problems. For example many in congress would like more background checks on gun purchases. They are smart enough to give lip service to claim advancing the mental health care system but that is a huge lie. America has never funded mental health and is not about to provide decent funding for mental health. And it gets even worse. The fertilizer plant explosion in Texas may well be a worse problem than the Boston incident. The company involved has already admitted that they failed to have mandatory fire and incident equipment in place. In a very real way that company may well have been far more outrageous than the nut that placed the bombs in Boston. Yet media won't jump on it at all. I can also tell you that Ft. Lauderdale had a fertilizer plant burn a few decades ago and the responding firemen came down with cancer almost universally. Apparently the gasses expelled in a fertilizer plant fire tend to be very, very lethal in the long term. Where is the media on this? Frankly American news media is really in the crapper these days.
No, seriously. Up until 60 Minutes came along News was considered a sort of loss leader for networks. It was something they felt required to have but no one expected to make money at it. They simply reported the facts and tried to guess the weather. Then 60 Minutes came along. No one expected it would make money. I mean a news show making money? No way! Surprise, it made money. It did REALLY well. Everyone had to have one and then they began to realize they could draw eyes to their news shows. Ever since then it's been downhill. We now have multiple channels dedicated to nothing but "news" and by god if there's nothing exciting going on we'll dig something up! Investigative reporting? Meh, not so much. That requires time and work and someone might scoop us! No, now they just report things as fast as they can and they make them as exciting as they can to draw eyes. The more fear the more people turn on their TV sets and gawk at the shows and yes inevitably the ads. the commercialization of "news" was one of THE worst things to happen to television and hell even print media. One need only look as far as the grocery checkout to figure out how that went too. Why we've even got news channels that skew and spin their views for specific markets. How else can you explain the Faux News channel and CNN and MSNBC all spinning the same stories in different directions? they have all targeted a demographic for their "news" and want eyeballs for their ads.
Frankly it's pretty damned disgusting and disheartening. If you're old enough at all to remember a time when we had news shows with just a scrap of integrity you realize just how far we've fallen all in the name of making a fucking dollar. Bleah!
P.S. Think I'm full of it? My citation after a 5 second Google search... http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102153/The-Transformation-of-Network-News.aspx
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News networks don't reports news. What they do is 24/7 real life drama. If they simply changed the "news" on their labels to "reality TV" all the issues would be solved.