Actually. As someone who worked in a small radio station news department for a pretty long time, I’m actually not accusing them of malfeasance as much as I’m accusing them of “over-eagerness” if that makes sense.
There’s just too much information floating around thanks to every Tom, Dick and Harry having a blog, or a tik tok, or a twitter account, all claiming to be “insiders” in one way or another. Far too much for the media to be able to properly vet every single piece of information that they get thoroughly. And it leads to mistakes.
But as an ex-media person, I aver that it’s not the media “making shit up” as the narrative nowadays seems to be. It’s more that they are reporting everything faster than ever in the hopes of beating the competition and as a result getting a lot of things wrong.
Does it make them complicit…absolutely. They need to do better. But it make them the “evil” ones. No. Not at all. The boots on the ground, so-to-speak, the everyday journalist’s job, passion, raison d’etre has always been to report the news and bring it to the people. To speak truth to power and all that rigamarole. The problem is that there’s too much information floating around to do that properly anymore.
That’s a delightful response to my snarky comment, thank you.
I agree, the incentive structure is such that it undermines the goals of journalism. Compounded with a firehose of misinformation, even full-time journalists must be overwhelmed.
I’m unwilling to give them a pass, however. Their job is to report accurately, they understand the risk of reporting things that are not fully vetted, and choose to anyway. As you say, they’re complicit.
Actually. As someone who worked in a small radio station news department for a pretty long time, I’m actually not accusing them of malfeasance as much as I’m accusing them of “over-eagerness” if that makes sense.
There’s just too much information floating around thanks to every Tom, Dick and Harry having a blog, or a tik tok, or a twitter account, all claiming to be “insiders” in one way or another. Far too much for the media to be able to properly vet every single piece of information that they get thoroughly. And it leads to mistakes.
But as an ex-media person, I aver that it’s not the media “making shit up” as the narrative nowadays seems to be. It’s more that they are reporting everything faster than ever in the hopes of beating the competition and as a result getting a lot of things wrong.
Does it make them complicit…absolutely. They need to do better. But it make them the “evil” ones. No. Not at all. The boots on the ground, so-to-speak, the everyday journalist’s job, passion, raison d’etre has always been to report the news and bring it to the people. To speak truth to power and all that rigamarole. The problem is that there’s too much information floating around to do that properly anymore.
That’s a delightful response to my snarky comment, thank you.
I agree, the incentive structure is such that it undermines the goals of journalism. Compounded with a firehose of misinformation, even full-time journalists must be overwhelmed.
I’m unwilling to give them a pass, however. Their job is to report accurately, they understand the risk of reporting things that are not fully vetted, and choose to anyway. As you say, they’re complicit.
You’ve gotta stop calling them Shirley, though.