Edited highlights: A reputable source (police, someone there, multiple other media outlets) said an “automatic weapon” was involved and, since most journalists are not gun people, they don’t know this isn’t likely so they don’t know they don’t know about the subject.
To put it another way: If the emergency services member at a hypothetical bank robbery tells a journalist “One of the guys was carrying an automatic weapon”, the journalist is not going to say to that person “Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn’t a *semi-*automatic?”.
Besides the fact the journalist probably doesn’t know the difference between automatic and semi-automatic (and admittedly some of them probably don’t care), that’d be like asking the emergency services member at the same bank robbery if the getaway vehicle was a manual transmission, an automatic, or one of those new “flappy paddles” types. Ultimately for the average reader it adds nothing to the story, of which the main point is “Bank robbed in broad daylight by armed men, a million dollars taken, getaway car was expensive”.
As has been mentioned earlier, journalists are often writing about several wildly different things simultaneously. Try doing 20 different things in reasonable detail all week, every week - often dealing with people who are actively trying to interfere with or prevent you from doing your job (and not in a Dilbert-like “Pointy-Haired Boss” kind of way, either ) - and see if you manage to get 100% of everything 100% right.
And while we’re at it, I find the “journalists are stupid” remarks offensive and uncalled for. I’d like to think we’re better than that here.
What no one seems to understand is that much of this “stupidity” is deliberate.
Speaking as a former professor of journalism (and as a former journalist), I can tell you that newspapers will often remove a knowledgable reporter from a beat he/she has gotten knowledgable in because that reporter will have gotten TOO close to his/her sources. On a sports beat, a reporter will often cover one team for a few seasons and, just when he’s developed good contacts among the players, understands whom to trust and who not, etc (which are all good things of course) he gets switched off that team, or even off sports for a while, because it contaminates the process to be beholden to a source, or to have a source beholden to you. What you gain in familiarity, you lose in trading off favors for friends: if a player who has given you scoops in the past gets caught up in a scandal, the paper doesn’t want you thinking twice about breaking the story about your friend (or publishing too quickly a story that makes your enemy look bad.) Papers will rather risk a less experienced reporter who, because he/she has no past with that organization and who knows that there is no long-term point in accumulating favors, will be more objective.
Ben Goldacre rubbished news stories in Bad Science, which really impressed me at the time. However, while looking for an anecdote about how some basic misunderstandings about Einstein’s theories came about due to a sportswriter being assigned to the story, I came acrossthis article on a science fiction website.
Hope that wasn’t too long. I found it interesting, anyway.
As an aside to the remark about Bryson, I was watching some clips on YouTube called “Crash Course in History”. Pretty slick stuff, with a fast talking host and animation. As I got to subjects that I knew something about I noticed some mistakes, like the animation made it look like Julius Caesar conquered Britain. Then I noticed that most episodes had a correction that popped up (“The Nile actually flows north”). The writer was a history teacher, and this is textbook stuff you might find in a introductory university class. I wasn’t inclined to be too critical. They were cramming a great deal of information into each clip and even the best teachers wouldn’t have all those facts at their fingertips. Anyway, I know I make the occasional annoying mistake in my own work.
I’ve been in between reporters and people in a field.
IM not so humble because I have experience Opinion, print journalists are in general not stupid and generally more intelligent than average, and good at quickly picking up on new subjects. (Let’s just not talk about TV ‘reporters’, though). But it’s very difficult to learn a completely new subject in a couple hours, then write about it in a way that non-experts can use, in only a couple more hours, while you’ve got another story going on at the same time.
Particularly given the communication skills of most of the experts they have to learn from (“That reporter completely misunderstood what I was telling him. Must be completely his fault.”). As mentioned, editing is the process of checking for the reporter’s mistakes and inserting the editor’s mistakes and biases, with the benefit that the editor doesn’t know anything at all about the subject, and has even less time to work on it.
With the time pressure, it’s a wonder things are as accurate as they are. But I strongly agree with doreen that the vast majority of ‘errors’ that experts complain about are distinctions that might be important for the expert immersed in the field, but don’t make any difference to the reader. And I know that quite often the reporter is in fact aware of the technical distinction but is smart enough to know that trying to explain the distinction would only confuse the average reader.
This is entirely antithetical to my experience as a journalist. I have never heard of anyone being moved to an entirely different section by becoming “too familiar” with the topic they’ve been assigned to cover. The gulf between sports and other reporting is particularly large. At most papers I’m familiar with, sports folks are sports folks, and don’t cover news except in breaking or otherwise special situations. And vice versa.
The less experienced reporter would likely not even hear of the scandal, let alone need to make the choice whether to report it or not. Every newspaper I’m familiar with would rather have the most experienced and qualified folks in place to find out the news rather than replace them with inexperienced people who may not uncover it in the first place.
I’ve never heard of it either. I can imagine a reporter being moved off a beat if his/her editors believe the reporter has gotten too chummy with sources, but that’s not standard practice: it means the reporter is flat-out failing at his job because he can’t maintain his independence and is missing stories or not asking important questions. That’s a serious problem and it’s something I would expect to happen infrequently and only after repeated screwups and warnings. On the other hand it’s not abnormal for people to get moved or promoted from one job to another, and that can happen for any number of reasons.
I agree. It seems to me that the only journalists who can avoid the time-crunch/no expertise pitfall are the ones who write for longer deadline or no deadline publications.
I have had similar experiences to others here with mistakes in stories about which I had personal knowledge, including several in The Wall Street Journal. The results have been much better in monthly magazines.
If you want to read some journalism by a guy who doesn’t have an impossible job, try anything by John McPhee. The New Yorker pretty much publishes whatever he wants to write whenever it happens to be finished.
If you like good journalism and have a bit of time, here’s about 28,000 words McPhee wrote about the Mississippi River in 1987.
Quite a while after I became a McPhee fan, I bought a John McPhee reader that had parts of his earliest books. There was a section in it in which he wrote about some scientists who surveyed wildlife in part by inspecting roadkill. I have spent hundreds of hours doing the same thing, and McPhee got it exactly right.
Happens all the time with sports reporters covering teams in NYC. Very rarely does someone cover the same team for season after season, though the same reporters work for the same papers. If someone works for the News, he will cover the Mets and Giants for a few years, then switch over to the Yankees and Jets–obviously, it would be a new experience (and not a promotion) to cover the “other” team, and that’s the reason he switches–he’s either burned his bridges on the old team or he’s too close to his sources.
Is this all surmising on your part, or is there some other basis? Because I think Tyler Kepner was on the Yankees’ beat for the Times for about 10 years, and your explanation isn’t the only one: for starters, the reporter might have his own choice of teams he wants to cover. And Garfield226 is right that not every type of reporting works like sports reporting.
Exactly! If you write for the general public, most of them read it, have their eyes glaze over, and say, whatever. But the one or two who understand the field will say “journalists are stupid - there will be a letter to the Times about this!” and the go running off to post on the SDMB.
Amusingly, it is not the (Chinese Postman) problem but rather the Chinese (Postman problem) - originated by someone who was Chinese. That could trip someone up right there.
On one hand, it’s true that sometimes referring to someone else’s work (which is fine so long as attributed) will transmit and amplify an error. It is also true that details on the same story (some times “details” along the lines of changing “less taxes” to “no taxes”, cf. the current brouhaha over Depardieu).
But it’s not only journalists who can’t be arsed verify details which are actually very important: the difference is that they do it in public, where everybody can see. The project I’m working on right now suffers from a very common defect: rather than giving us access to the people who do the work, for most of the project (learning what the client does, writing it down, proposing how it would be done in the new system, preparing the new system, testing it, loading sample data, more testing, preparing the training) we only had access to the factory manager and the finance manager. Financial details were correct; every other department? Just one example: according to the factory manager we’d have 9 production orders per month; the finance manager would always say 3 but would admit to 9 when we mentioned the discrepancy (3x3, he only cared about 3 of them because the others have much-lower costs). The actual number turned out to be between 23 and 25, varies every month :smack:
The most quoted article in Chemistry used to be wrong. There is an important notion about proteins which was not published in an article and there were people who thought that a round-table discussion was not “quotable”, so they’d quote an article by the same author instead. An article about sugar chemistry, not a protein in sight. It’s now changed (people are finally citing the round table, after the author complained in a very public forum), but… seriously? I got graded down for checking the cited article, finding it was wrong and providing the right cite!
Yes every one. Regardless of how much I read, I read everything written about incidents I am involved in.
Reporters will also bring their own bias to the reports. When it was publicly announced that my unit was being deployed a reporter asked for an interview from a local soldier. My friend volunteered. Lets call him SGT Smith. He told the reporter that he was proud to serve and was committed to going. He said his family would miss him but they supported him in his career whatever he does.
When the article came out the first line was, “This Thanksgiving there will be little to be thankful for at the Smith house.” Even though the reporter got his quotes mostly right, that first line poisoned the article and was the opposite of what my friend said.
Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy: Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true—except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge. – Erwin Knoll, editor, “The Progressive”
Your personal belief is wrong. That’s not poor journalism. That’s journalism.
Gee, and I’ve heard journalists tout their layers of editors and fact-checkers. So it really works the other way!
Now there’s a ringing endorsement!
You really think that? Seriously?
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” --Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Norvell (June 11, 1807)
“The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies–unless one counts journalists.” --George Orwell, “Homage to Catalonia” (1938)
How “wrong” are we talking, though? In the example you follow up with (quoted below), from the information you provide the only (arguable) error appears to be in the intro, with the rest of the story accurate.
Without knowing the specifics of the story, it’s entirely possibly the intro was changed by a sub-editor or even the paper’s editor. It happens to all journos at some point - usually improving the story, but not always.
Considering the family said they would miss your friend while he was serving overseas, even though I’m not in the US I can absolutely see why whoever wrote the intro thought it would make sense to go with “Not as good a Thanksgiving” approach, especially since to the average person (ie the newspaper’s readers), having a family member posted overseas on military duty is not something considered a cause for celebration.
Would I go with that intro? No. But the fact someone did doesn’t automatically make all journalists stupid, liars, or out to further an agenda.
A big part of my job is fact-checking newspaper stories. In an ideal world, sure, I would love to be able to spend hours looking up obscure references, phoning every person quoted to go over quotes, etc etc, but in the real world I simply cannot do all that. I still pick up lots of errors - especially if the story is on an area I know a decent amount about - but I am sure occasional ones get through. Unfortunately, if people want fast and affordable (or free!) news then that is the price they have to pay.
It’s like when people jump on a typo or two that they have found in a newspaper and say: “The proofreaders are lousy - I could do that job much better!” Well, for every one typo that gets through, I have probably picked up and corrected several thousand. You may have spotted one, but you have had as long as you liked to read the paper, and haven’t had a queue of other stories that had to be read, corrected and re-read by a given time.
If you write for the general public, most of them read it, have their eyes glaze over, and say, whatever. But the one or two who understand the field will say “journalists are stupid - there will be a letter to the Times about this!” and the go running off to post on the SDMB.