*“A trifle pompous, do you think?”
“Possibly. But I should say it anyway. It will have very little bearing on what they print.”*
Terrence Rattigan, The Winslow Boy
“shitty”
“Stupid” is an unfair term to use here but just because someone can write well it doesn’t mean they understand anything about the subjects they write about. Much like actors who feel the need to use their soapbox to talk about non-acting subjects. Granted, journalists are supposed to know something about the subjects they report on but they probably do their jobs just as well as the rest of us, which means they can do their main job (write) well enough and they may have opinions about other subjects but that’s it. All to often their main job is to attract readers or viewers and actually providing factual information is secondary or even tertiary.
I was home sick all week and watched a lot of news TV (CNN, HLN, ABC and CBS mostly). What struck me most was the limited number of topics news show covered and the wide range of details they disagreed on. The Steubenville rape case for example. The age of the victim changed between 15, 16, “teen” and “early teen”. The perps were “the football team”, “football players”, “two football players” and a number of other options, the only word in common was “football.” Are these facts so difficult to gather that they just make them up? Also, there was an awful lot of interviews of people who just happened to be standing around in Steubenville who had nothing to do with the case except for being a warm body with an opinion. Is that really journalism?
My own experience with journalists wasn’t about stupidity, but about (at best) carelessness and (at worst) utter dishonesty.
Journalist who is a friend of a friend contacts me about story she wants to write. I agree to be a source, because I believe it’s an important story. I ask for and receive assurances of confidentiality.
Story comes out. In the very first paragraph, I’m easily identifiable. Not by name, but anyone at the company that was the subject of the story could (and did) put two and two together. The consequences for me were unpleasant. The journalist refused to take my calls after the story came. Why would she? She’d gotten what she wanted.
This happened to me twice. I will never speak to another journalist again.
On things you know about, or on things you don’t know about?
Back when we were trying to sell expensive engineering software, I, as the technical expert, got interviewed by lot of editors/reporters in the specialized press. While many of them had degrees in engineering, they were doing interview after interview on a wide range of subjects even in a specialized field. In this context I and our PR guy got to see the articles ahead of time, and they did a pretty good job. It is really hard when you don’t understand the context of the subject.
I found that it paid to write sound bits for interviews ahead of time, and get them in. But lots of interview subjects are going to assume that the reporter knows what they do.
My wife edits articles for on-line scientific encyclopedias, written by free lancers, and she can tell when the writer really didn’t understand the subject material. You get very tentative. I’ve written on stuff I got and stuff I didn’t - and it is much easier to write about something you understand at a deep level.
I expect that your articles, even if factually accurate, would be nonsense to an expert in the field - assuming you were writing about something you knew little about.
Which is not to say I disagree with the larger point. My father always thought that the stories about the UN in Newsweek were bullshit, but then he had worked there for a very long time and knew everyone.
Most of those are not contradictory (and saying 15 instead of 16 could be a slip of the tongue). And in the Steubenville case, two players have been charged and some people are saying other team members were either involved or know more about what happened.
It’s a common part of it, yes.
Not really, because I have no pretensions to be a journalist. And loads of people write clearly (if not well), it can’t be that hard - I just happen to be appalling at it.
I bet I could fact check some articles decently though and I’m sure others could.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to say here. No doubt they would be of very little value to experts in the field. But I would hope that they would be correct at least.
I am not trying to imply with that statment, by the way, that I can grasp some subtle concept in a field I know nothing about with ten seconds of instruction. But if I were a journalist, if i didn’t understand it I simply wouldn’t mention the concept at all. No point in teaching grannies to suck eggs.
I wrote profiles for a business publication. I interviewed the owner for 45 minutes then I returned to the office and wrote the article in 45 minutes. There were no other possible resources to be had or time.
How much irony are you piling up when you can’t take the time or trouble to learn the first, most basic things about reporting and yet keep offering opinions on how they do their jobs without taking the time or trouble to… You get the point.
Yes, reporters often - usually, always - get details wrong. It’s an impossible job. It really is.
This kinda touches on my problem with reporting. Not so much the reporters are stupid per se but they need experts that they can run shit by before it goes to print.
Sure, they write an article on nuclear waste. Unless they also are trained in nuclear engineering the article will probably make folks from that field cringe.
So, maybe they don’t have a nuke science guy or gal in their pocket. However, they IMO SHOULD at least have some half assed science guy in their pocket.
If the article they run makes anybody who knows basic stuff about science cringe then thats pretty bad.
And, particularly in this day and age, not having some “expert” you can call on as a reporter seems pretty damn lazy/irresponsible.
Well that may be the case but that brings me to the thrust of my OP - and why I put it in the factual question forum - there are obviously serious implications for this because “the establishment” (amongst others) put great reliance upon things journalists write. And pay great heed to the opinions of journalists.
Seems to me then if they aren’t actually doing research properly, then the articles should be treated skeptically but more importantly the opinions should practically be ignored. In practice though they aren’t.
So has good meaningful research on the negative consequences of this been done? If not it really ought to have been!
Fact checking is only part of the job, and in most places it’s an additional responsibility for the reporter and the editor, not a separate job.
Sometimes that concept is unavoidable- or is your assignment.
At least in Peru, it is rampart ignorance mixed with a heavy dose of using fixed phrases and a big helping of not even considering checking anything at all.
The Dakar Rally just started in Lima and we had “regular” journalists reporting on it: it was apalling. The only thing they could say about quadbikes is that they have 4 wheels; trucks are big a colorful, foreigners speak other languages and have different habits, th edesert has dunes. This for an event that has been in the public eye for months, so more than enough time to prepare.
I meant no slam at you - as I said, no one can do this right all the time. And sometimes the concept you don’t get is the crucial one. But I think unless you are very lucky, you will either make some subtle mistake to be pounced on by the experts or be so high level as to be absurd.
Here is an example. We had a nice little, cheap, product that was based on something called the Chinese Postman algorithm. Our product manager decided that the technical people were incompetent to write a press release, and so gave it to a PR company. What came out was <product> works on algorithms! Factually correct, I suppose, but laughable.
I recently got asked to write a column for a special issue on digital implementations of wireless transceivers. To quote Tom Lehrer, “this I know from nothing.” Reading the introductions to the papers in the issue helped not at all. Because of the way my column is structured, I was able to riff on a vaguely related subject, but if I actually had to write about this topic the result would be junk. And I’m what passes for an expert in this general area.
So my experience tells me that you - or anyone else - couldn’t do it.
I was under the impression that immediate reports from TV news are treated with a grain of salt, daily newspaper reports are treated with two, and that longer articles in news magazines or magazines like the New Yorker will be much better reported. It would be very dangerous to treat something reported on in a daily paper as guaranteed correct.
I think we want to hear the opinions of journalists with long experience in certain places. like the White House or Wall Street. First, they have a broader knowledge of what is going on than almost anyone, and second, they probably know a lot they can’t write and which can influence their opinion. I don’t particularly want to hear the opinion of the police reporter for my local rag.
In my experience, what reporters often get wrong are fine distinctions that don’t matter 90 % of the time , but matter very much that other 10% of the time. For example, I constantly read articles that use either parole or probation to refer to any form of supervised release. Most of the time it doesn’t matter whether the mugger was on probation or parole for his last mugging.The point is that this is not his first crime and he hasn’t even finished the sentence from a previous one. But sometimes the word chosen makes a big difference. A former governor in my state made a big deal about how he was going to “eliminate parole for violent felons”. The reporters and the general public thought that violent felons would now serve their full sentences in prison and none of it on supervised release. But that’s not what happened. What happened was instead of being interviewed by a board that had the authority to grant a discretionary parole release, they would now be conditionally released by operation of law. Perhaps a very technical definition of “parole” , but had the reporters understood that, they would have known what the governor was really saying.
But who are you writing for? For general readership, something like:
BOFFINS AT P INSTITUTE SOLVE PROBLEM Y
Boffins at P institute have today launched Product X, a solution to Problem Y.
Geniuses with thick black glasses noticed that Problem Y was mathematically equivilant to the well studied Chinese Postman problem. Geeks and Weirdos say that the Chinese Postman problem can be thought of a puzzle - how can a postman visit every street on his round in the shortest possible distance? It turns out that the answers to that question involve deeply complicated mathematics that have BAFFLED nerds for years - and there are many unanswered questions.
Even so, lots is known about approaches to the Chinese Postman. And a CLEVER CLOGS named VOYAGER noticed that he knew enough about the Chinese Postman problem and its various solutions to solve Problem Y. It turned out that the streets in the Chinese Postman problem were {verticies in Problem Y} in Problem Y. And the lengths of the streets on the postman’s rounds corresponded to {vertex weights in Problem Y} in Problem Y. Using already known properties of the CP problem, VOYAGER was able to create Product X.
In VOYAGER’s own words: “I didn’t say this”.
None of this explains how writers about guns couldn’t take five minutes to use Google to find out what a semi-automatic is.
It’s not like “parole” where what most people think it is is different from what it actually is. That’s on the governor, who should be smart enough at his job to know how to phrase things for maximum understanding. Unless, of course, the governor did explain it, and the journalist just tuned out after the first word.
Or more likely, the governor meant to create exactly the impression he did and was counting on journalists not knowing enough to take ten minutes to call someone who could explain.
This reminds me of Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Nearly Everything. I was merrily reading along about subjects I know very little about and thinking I was learning something. Then I got to the chapter on IT and started seeing loads of errors. This made me mistrust everything else I read in the book. I mentioned this to my girlfriend who has a degree in Chemistry and she had the same experience after reading the chemistry chapter.
Bryson started off as a journalist, maybe they have a trait where they try to clever-up topics they don’t really understand.