All the time I see articles that are nothing more than a compilation of tweets from random people . example here
Is the media so lazy now that all they do is fire up a browser to get “news?”
Yeah, I hate “news” articles where they find 3 random tweets and craft a narrative around them. Something like “Bigots up-in-arms over new Wonder Woman trailer!” and then when you check twitter yourself the three tweets in the article at pretty much the only tweets opposing the movie and they only have 3 retweets each.
if you google the phrase “twitter erupts” you get 13,000,000 hits
Apparently so, and it absolutely infuriates me!
I’ve rewatched All the President’s Men several times recently, and for reporters to have to go through the amount of documentation and verification that Woodward and Bernstein had to is unheard of today. Probably even at the Washington Post. In that account of breaking the Watergate story, Ben Bradlee was waaaay skeptical of what “Woodstein” were coming up with long into the investigation and demanded all kinds of backup. And that’s the way it should be.
But with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle (which really started when CNN covered the first Gulf War around the clock in 1999), scooping the other news media becomes every outlet’s main goal. And with social media, especially Twitter, and ESPECIALLY the constant use of Twitter by thump, verification is out the window.
Now anyone can make headlines. And anyone does. And it plays right into the dumbing down of the consumers of social media. (Sadly, most of them don’t know who they are.)
Quoting tweets, including the President’s, should be illegal.
I see my circle of friends on social media drifting away. I do still check it a couple of times a week but haven’t put anything on SM for several months.
The whole politics thing is shrill and stupid, not even from friends but organisatins like the NYT and The New Yorker. So infantile and partisan, there’s no point.