Speaking as a longtime journalist and editor: no, reporters frequently do NOT research their subjects in-depth. Depending if they request an article or are assigned it, they typically do brief background research, and submit that along with their article to the paper’s (or magazine’s) staff. Then it is assigned an editor, copy editor, proofreader and fact-checker. It’s the latter’s job to research and spot errors (though, as an editor, I always circle and sometimes research facts that look suspicious to me).
Ask any specialist in any field whatsoever and they’ll tell you that the media screws up when reporting on their field. Why should it be any different when they are reporting on the armed forces?
Sorry - I forgot to add that this is as much a reflection on the specialist as it is on the media.
When we work in a particular field, we get hung up on the details. We forget that to everybody else those details are either uninteresting or confusing or both. The news media often needs to distill a lot of details into a short news item - the result is that the edges get rounded off and the story loses a bit of accuracy.
But if 90% of the readership understand a story that is 95% accurate (and only inaccurate on the more esoteric and unimportant details), that is IMO better than 50% of the readership understanding a 99% accurate story.
So true, and the offended parties start sounding like Trekkies nitpicking an episode. “Did you hear that? He called a (fill in blank with any term from your profession or hobby) a (fill this blank with a similar, but misused, term)! What a numbnuts! They are so stupid and ALWAYS misreport EVERYTHING about (profession or hobby)!” Okay, the last sentence is particularly used by military people because so many of them are convinced that everybody hates them.
On Animaniacs they mentioned an organization for people like that: The Please, Please, PLEASE Get a Life Foundation. Like kabbes said, the important part is getting the gist of the story right. What they called the fucking aircraft is irrelevant. Getting trivial details wrong, despite the convictions of some nitpickers, does NOT make the entire report suspect.
A significant number of the media requests for information from the University come to my office. That usually means that one of us does all the careful gathering of facts and number-checking and number-crunching.
And then the story comes out in the paper and it’ll say something like “During an investigative report undertaken by the Free Press, it was uncovered that…” and I do a slow burn. Yeah, I guess the reporter did some up with the idea and asked the question, and then wrote the article, and I give them full credit for that. You gotta ask the right questions, and investigative journalism is at its best when it does. But I resent the additional implication that the reporter spent all this time poking around in hidden corners of our archives, digging up facts and figures and doing the analysis–when it was me who did that. Or one of my coworkers. Gripe gripe.
I’m used to having my work uncredited–I’m quite content about that when it’s going to my bosses and they thank me and appreciate me. I do not like when it goes to some outside agency or entity who then acts like the bulk of the work was their own.
But sometimes it gets in the way of knowing what the story is. I really did hear a story about an F-14 Eagle. The reporter mixed up two types of aircraft. So now I don’t know what branch of service was involved or even what the crew compliment is.
Okay, I’ll admit to being every bit as lifeless as any of you and will also admit to this happening to me all the time. I was stating what would be the ideal circumstance, when we can look beyond what the moron said and listen for the greater meaning. Not like I can.
[nitpick]I don’t want to be anywhere near you when you call a First Sergeant or Sergeant Major “Sergeant”. That can be downright dangerous, at least with the E-8s and E-9s I served with.[/nitpick]
I got into a pissing contest with my First Sergeant when he chided me for calling our Master Sergeant operations NCO "Sergeant’ and not “Master Sergeant”. I insisted he was wrong, respectfully, and he started screaming (yes, screaming with saliva flying from his lips and all) at me. The CO came down the hall to see what set him off. I thought he was going to have a heart attack when the CO started in on him in front of me.
To add a little more to proper address of NCOs. You can call any NCO “Sergeant” (with the aforementioned exceptions), but you should not normally address an E-6 as “Staff Sergeant”, although “Staff Sergeant Jones” is perfectly acceptable.
In my experience, it is far more common to see SP howitzers and personnel carriers called tanks. It seems that many people think that if it has tracks and a gun, it is a tank.
I take exception to that. Military people are often paranoid of civilians, with ample reason, IMO. You may not be old enough to remember the Viet Nam era first-hand, but I can remember being outraged at reports of GIs being demonized by civilians when I was a lad and we lived in a college town while Dad was on sabbatical from the military to get a law degree. I was proud that he was a soldier and it scared me that people talked about him and his kind that way.
I think that a news story with innaccuracies is suspect because if the reporter didn’t verify the easy stuff, how can we be sure that they verified the hard stuff? The military spends a great amount of time and resources to ensure that ample information is provided to the press in order that accurate information be disbursed. There is no real excuse for misreporting such a simple fact on military affairs.
I would think that the Department of Defense would put together some sort of press kit that would cover correct terms of address and correct names of equipment, etc. At least that’s what I’d do if I ran the DoD. Of course, that’s probably all I’d actually accomplish, and would thus fail to be in charge long.
No, I wouldn’t call a 1SG anything but “First Sergeant” I knew better, really. Well, we might call him “Top” if he didn’t get too bent out of shape.
The master sergeant who wanted to be called “master sergeant” just had a cob up his ass, that’s all. Technically, he’s wrong, but I’d probably humor him just to keep him from pinging off the walls. Maybe he hadn’t had is morning coffee yet.
I’m really glad I’m out of the military most of the time.
In USAFE (US Air Forces in Europe) our pet name for the F-16 Fighting Falcon was “Lawn Dart” because of its superficial resemblence to that cool, but dangerous toy. Another term for it was “Electric Jet” due to its fly-by-wire characteristics.
During my tour in PACAF (Pacific Air Forces) the common nicknames for the F-15 Eagle were “Rodan” (the Great Flying Monster) and “Flying Tennis Court”. This was due to the F-15s large radar sig. “Flying Tennis Court” was a derisive name given to Eagles by F-16 drivers.
While sometimes not impressed by the caliber of journalism displayed by reporters while covering the military in my 20 yrs of service, I can see how some reporters can get confused by the number of “unofficial” nicknames given to military hardware by servicemen.
The “official” names of aircraft are created by the manufacturer, not the military. The name isn’t official to the military in any sense. To the Navy it’s a S-3. To Lockheed it’s a ‘Viking’. To us squids it’s a ‘Hoover’. Most planes in the Nav have a nickname completely different from whatever the manufacturers name is, probably most notably the EA-6 “Queer”
Viper, huh? In some of the military fiction I’ve read in the past 3 years (and I’ll admit that some info there might be questionable) the call ‘viper’ is giving to incoming missles fired at Naval ships.
Is it possible that during Air Combat Maneuvering exercises, the ‘aggressor’ team is referred to as Vipers? And perhaps at some training bases, the aggressors fly f-16’s?
Actually it was the First Sergeant (whose last name was Cobb, and we were quite aware of the implication:D) who had a fit. MSG Kennedy was on my side. He’d already been a First Sergeant and was just waiting to retire and battalion sent him to us to be our Ops NCO. He was one of the most laid-back senior NCOs I ever met. 1SG Cobb was just an *sshole.