Study Attacks Newspapers
April 19th, 2008 by Alan Korwin
The lamestream media told you:
“Newspapers faulted for errors, dramatizing”
“To regain public trust, newspapers need to do a better job of editing out misspellings and misquotes, curb the use of unnamed sources, and resist the temptation to sensationalize, a study suggests,” reports Deb Reichmann of the AP.
The American Society of Newspaper Editors released its study on why newspaper credibility is on the decline. “We’ve got to cut down on the errors,” ASNE president Ed Seaton said. The study is part of a three-year project to find out why the public has lost confidence in newspapers.
The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:
“It ain’t about spelling errors,” says one unidentifiable newsman. “And what’s a ‘misquote’? Is that where someone says something, and the paper says something different?”
The report, uncovered in a deep stack of clippings at the Uninvited Ombudsman’s office, is from Dec., 1998. Hmmm.
Alan Korwin,
Sorry if I’m repeating my previous post about Paul Weaver’s book “News and the Culture of Lying (Columbia Journalism review). I also agree with “The Uninvited Ombudsman” comments in your column.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3613/is_199411/ai_n8731174
Example from “News and the Culture of Lying”
“Weaver’s claim is that journalists and public officials combine to fabricate artificial crises of public policy that end up being “covered in the media, reacted to by the public, and dealt with by government” as if they were real. In short: officials tell lies by inflating the urgency of things, and journalists compound the fraud by passing them along in supposedly objective–but inherently uncritical–ways.
The result, he argues, is both bad government and a journalism that is “stupid and dysfunctional,” practiced by reporters who are little more than “dependent, submissive, narcissistic courtiers” to the officials they cover.”
With the advent of the internet, mainstream media is gonna have to start getting their act together, or risk obscurity.
anti armchair generals, you’re blaming “government” for newspapers lies. You’re saying they just pass on “governments” lies without checking. Only if it falls into a newspapers narrow category of “important news”. What we used to call “propaganda”.
Not to say “government never lies”, but newspapers are dying because of self-inflicted wounds. The NYT is whining about loss of circulation and yet it continues to do the same old, same old. Even as they collapse they blame others. It couldn’t be because they just make stuff up, and everyone knows it (except a few die-hard libs who don’t care - but there’s not enough of them to float anything).