I just came back to post about two stories that were on the news this evening.
The first was that police had seized a kennel where 74 dogs had been kept in inhumane conditions, with many starving. Cut to an interview with a Humane Society official (where the dogs were being kept) who said, “if you have 20, 30, 40 dogs together, they’re going to fight over food, and some of the smaller or weaker ones will starve.”
So, which number will viewers take away from the story. The official number of 74, or the figurative “20, 30, 40” that the interviewee used to make a point?
The second was a sports story where the reporter said that a player had broken a team record that had stood “since the team was founded in 1977.” Only problem was, the team was founded in 1967.
Obviously it was a typo, but what happened? Did the reporter have the right date, but simply said it wrong on the air? Did the source of his information get the date wrong, or did the reporter scribble it down incorrectly. Should the reporter (who hadn’t even been born in 1977, much less 1967) automatically have known when the team was founded?
Here’s a question that should have a single, factual answer. How many people died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center? Was it 2,752, 2,726, 2,792 or 3,478? Depends on which cite shows up first on Google.
I have had my picture in the paper twice. Once when I was in Naples, Florida a reporter asked me to stand next to the Naples Pier. Then he asked a girl to stand with me and a caption appeared “Naples, home to the all-American boy and girl next door.”
Yeah right I was a 28 year old gay male
Another time I was in Chicago and a Sun-Times asked me to point to a polling place sign and then told me to look for my picture. Then I saw my picture in the paper with a sign saying “Mark XXXX, helps direct Chicago voters to their proper polling places.” As if I actually DID this?
Ok both the captions are technically accurate as in 1) they did not state that you had a preference that you did nit and 2) well you were pointing to the polling place.
I used to be the print media, working for a weekly newspaper, and quite frankly, at events where I was present and the dailies also reported on said event, the dailies never got everything right, frequently got quite a bit wrong, including quotes, and the TV people were even worse. Oddly, the radio stations that do news did quite a bit better. Or maybe that isn’t odd.
Also, when events I have been involved with have been covered, again, the dailies get it wrong. They get the names wrong. They get the neighborhoods wrong. They get the facts wrong. This has been the case since 1962, when my cat was written up as a Sunday feature in a very small-town newspaper. They called her a three-year-old tomcat (she was two, and not a tomcat), added 10 pounds to her weight, and spelled my mother’s name wrong. Nice picture, though.
A few years ago one of my neighbors got attacked by three dogs while jogging. They were reported as a pack of pit bulls. In fact they were two Jack Russell terriers and a Shih-Tzu, with the little dog inflicting most of the damage. (The Jack Russells mainly tripped her; the Shih-Tzu tried to eat her. And I should probably add that they were pretty much all little dogs.)
I will say that daily news reporters have deadlines that I can’t even imagine. As a writer for weeklies, I had time to check quotes, call people numerous times, wait for them to call me back, etc.
In the perhaps ten times I’ve had inside knowledge about the facts of a news story, there has NEVER been an instance of no inaccuracies in the story. Usually minor inaccuracies, but not always minor. But always something.
The red-shirt rallies and rioting in Bangkok last year. Western coverage was poor, especially by the BBC. The red shirts are just a bunch of thugs. Granted, some of their grievances are valid, but they’ve been valid for decades and are not specific to any post-coup government. But what really irked many was the Beeb’s seemingly total acceptance of the calm, mannered English-language press releases from the red shirts designed for Western consumption and which meekly claimed to be the poor and oppressed while completely ignoring the Thai-language rallies endlessly calling for the most horrific violence you could possibly imagine to be delivered unto any and all non-red shirts. The BBC took so much heat for their poor coverage that it’s suspected that was one of the main reasons for changing out their main reporter here, although that’s never been confirmed.
I had some personal experience in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas in the 1980s. They were not universally seen as the saviors that the left-wing press tried to portray them in the US, nor were they the devils of the right-wing press. Overall, I think they were certainly better than Somoza, but definitely more flawed than their supporters wanted to see them as.
My family was surprised to see an article in the paper about the “mysterious” disappearance of my great-grandfather from the admittedly somewhat bizarre tract of land (a sort of mini-ranch in the middle of an urban ghetto) he owned. They article quoted a number of squatters and ne’er do wells that inhabited the far corners of his land, but failed to realize the simple truth- he was old and it became time for his family to put him in a nursing home.
I will also say that pretty much everything you read about China is wrong, or at least amazingly short-sighted.
My younger brothers were out drinking while visiting Phoenix a few years ago and took a cab back to the hotel. While still on the sidewalk, my youngest brother was hit by a drunk driver and was injured severely enough that he was in a coma for a week and wound up losing his leg. When he recovered, he was on the hook for $2 million in medical bills.
A reporter interviewed him and my stepmother while he was waiting on his prosthetic leg. The newspaper article mentioned that my brother had been drinking and led the reader to believe that he was drunkenly walking in the street. They never mentioned that he was still standing on the sidewalk when he was hit and that the driver was the one who was driving under the influence. They also failed to mention that the driver was an illegal immigrant and never paid a dime towards his medical costs.
I complained to the editor via email, but never received any response.
