Sad, sorry journalism

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Today‘s Washington Post had a story headlined, “FBI shuts down ransomware gang that targeted schools and hospitals”

Three people whom the Post seems to want us to believe are technical reporting powerhouses covered this story.

It appeared to be basically a handout from the government about taking down the Hive cyber-ransom gang.

The reporting is pathetic.

Nobody was arrested and no equipment was confiscated. The legal work seemed well done in stopping, probably only temporarily, the ransom gang. But nobody asked what was being done to stop the criminals from popping back up again. If they asked, they didn’t report it.

The reporting was embarrassingly poor. Nobody asked where the money went. Who has the $100 million that was wrested from those whose computer systems were so unprotected that they had to pay to get their data back. A hundred million.

Why would journalists not even ask about where the money is? If they did ask, why would they not report it? The story underhandedly points to Russia being involved. But nobody reported whether the reporters even asked about possible Russian involvement.

Even worse, I’ll bet that at least two editors read this story, and they didn’t ask, either.

As a former journalist, I think this kind of shoddy reporting is distressing. It is rampant from what is left of the local papers to the alleged top of the pile, the Post and the New York Times.

I am so sad to see it. The papers talk about how their circulation has eroded. I think to a large extent they gave it away. Don’t report real news, cover the easy stuff, write about Washington handouts, and mostly handouts and pretty soon readers don’t see a reason to keep up their subscriptions.

We all suffer the loss caused largely by lazy, bad journalism.

2

Washington Post has been going downhill for a while. Bezos may have turned it around financially, but it seems to have been at the expense of the quality of the writing.

3

The Post did some very good science writing about the pandemic. Much better than the NYT, which published an embarrassing number of misleading graphs and other materials.

4

Sounds like all they did was rewrite the DOJ press release.

“Reporting” is becoming more and more rare these days. Reporting takes time, effort, getting one’s hands dirty. It also requires critical thought and analysis. Many “reporters” lack many of these skills, probably because they don’t have basic educational training in journalism, research, grammar, etc. Add to it their editors many share the same lack of credibility and always push for instant deadlines just to beat competitors. Time is money!

5

I read a headline online today that said used the word “flea” to mean they ran from police. Pitiful.

6

This X 1,000.

Let’s not even talk about editing and grammatical errors.

Every now and then I re-watch All the President’s Men and weep…

7

Here is Reuters’ article on the same subject. I wonder if it’s any better.

8

Same hand-out, apparently. I can’t tell whether it is naivety, ignorance or incompetence.

None were curious enough to ask where the money went.

9

This story has been making the rounds lately:

The Earth’s core did not stop spinning.

The core was thought to be spinning slightly faster than the mantle/crust, and now it is spinning at the roughly same speed. It may slow slightly more in the future, meaning that relative to the mantle it will be going “backwards”. But in no sense does this mean the core has stopped turning and may go into reverse.

It doesn’t help Michio Kaku went on the talk show circuit repeating this nonsense.

10

Oh, this !

And it’s not just in the US. I have stopped counting the number of spelling mistakes in what are supposed to be the highest-standard French language newspapers where I live.

A couple of months ago, I paused after reading the very first sentence of an article when I realized that I didn’t understand it. Bear in mind that it was an ordinary topic, nothing specialized or obscure. So, I re-read it and found out that there was a connective that was used incorrectly. As a result, not only was the sentence meaningless, but it was also impossible to guess what it could have meant.

11

Too many reporters, not enough news. Too many pundits, not enough topics.

Barely-rewritten press releases are not uncommon and never have been. My bete noir example of bad reporting is Twitter reporting - Elon Musk gets into tiff with Stephen King kind of stuff, which is nothing more than a series of tweets connected by algorithmically-designed sentences written at the 5th-grade level. That shit appears everywhere.

12

His Wikipedia page describes him as a theoretical physicist and a “popularizer of science”. He’s failing on both counts.

13

I think there should be a law that reporters cannot ask “How do you feel…” of anyone under any circumstances apart from a health query. To me, that’s a lazy question.

“How do you feel about the latest mass shooting?” - how the interviewee feels isn’t news or newsworthy.

“Gee, I feel really bad for their families.” Big fat hairy deal.

Sorry - this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

14

A lot of “science journalism” comprises nothing more than press release retreads. Drives me batty. Especially when the press release is looser with conclusions and impact than the actual academic paper. And on multiple occasions I’ve had writers concoct a quote and ask if they could stick my or a client’s name on it.

15

Yeah, that’s absolutely lazy “journalism,” what I expect from smaller market papers as a last-minute space filler, not metros. Even in college, we would have been crucified by our editors were we not to take a press release and make some calls, get some additional quotes, do some fact-checking, add original content to it. But those were the idealistic days of youth, I guess, at a strong journalism school.

And, yes, copy editing and proofreading does seem to have gotten a lot worse. There were always the occasional error but, man, it almost feels like every other article these days, especially online. I don’t expect journalists to be impeccable spellers and grammarians – many are not. Their main role is getting the story, calling people, knocking on doors, research, keeping relationships with sources, etc. But get some competent editors in there!

16

To me, this is all an example of the “hollowing out” of an entire industry.

In my opinion, this was done deliberately by those with the money and power to do it. They bought up papers and magazines and TV networks in order to squash unsympathetic coverage and analysis.

The result being that a lot of seasoned talent got pushed out of the industry. What’s left is the B and C teams who don’t get a chance to hone their craft through mentorship. And leadership who serve their masters.

But, that’s just my opinion.

17

Um … “do seem” … Whoops. (My excuse is that I only had “copy editing” there first and later added “proofreading” without changing the verb. And Gaudere. More of a “curse” than a “law.”)

18

Modern “journalism” is just the “circuses” component of “bread and circuses”.

19

No, that’s creative writing! A flea is hard to see and even harder to catch, so it’s effective imagery! :wink:

Science journalism as practiced in the general media is an especially pitiful sub-genre of bad journalism. Bad journalism generally combines elements of mangled facts, sensationalism, and bad writing. Bad science journalism contains all those same elements, except that mangled facts become “facts that the writer doesn’t even understand, at a basic level” combined with a comical attempt to “explain” said facts to the audience, who are presumed to all be pin-headed morons.

Michio Kaku is the scientific community’s answer to generic bad journalism. Kaku’s particular schtick is unsubstantiated wild speculation on areas of physics that tend to capture the popular imagination – multiple universes, FTL travel, that sort of thing. Gotta give the guy credit – when those wild speculations are published as books, allegedly by a well-known theoretical physicist, they pull in serious money. But they typically have no more scientific basis than any other science fiction.

20

I don’t have access to the Post article since I didn’t sign up for the website.

It seems fairly obvious that it’s hard to arrest ransomware perpetrators if they’re operating from Russia, which is apparently the case in at least some instances. And government hacking operations have had some success in clawing back money from these sleazebags. From the BBC:

“The Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed the FBI gained deep access to the Hive ransomware group in late July 2022.”

“Officers were able to warn victims of impending attacks.”

“They also gave more than 300 decryption keys to those hacked, saving them, they estimate, more than $130m (£105m).”

That follows other operations which successfully got a percentage of ransom money back from the extorters.

I can’t tell if the WaPo article is significantly less informative. But the implication that the Justice Department has barely done anything at all against these people needs more…facts.