Journalism today:

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JOhnH

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I found this in today's local paper:

. . . learned through a USAID sponsored course at the University of Central Arkansas. Go Razorbacks! . . .
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The University of CENTRAL Arkansas's mascot is a bear. Not a razorback. Why did the "journalist" feel the need to lie?

Probably paywalled, but here is the link:

Daytona Beach News-Journal eNewspaper

This full replica of our printed product provides you the newspaper as you know and love it from the convenience of the web.
daytonanewsjournal-fl.newsmemory.com daytonanewsjournal-fl.newsmemory.com
 
I reckon we are expected to read the entire newspaper to figure this out?
 
[Rant]
The vast majority of today’s “journalists” are glorified bloggers who have no apparent sense of ethics in terms of avoiding use of prejudicial language, completeness of reporting, and covering multiple points of view in a given piece. Even worse is the lack of fact-checking prior to publication, followed by poor grammar, lack of spell-checking and other basics.

IMO, the underlying problem is the loss of editing more than the writers themselves. 50 years ago, there was a copy editor to manage the basic stuff (spelling, grammar, formatting, et al), and a sr editor who would provide ethical and legal guidance, and act as a filter for overly biased or incomplete writing. The junior staff writer/reporter may have had clear weaknesses, but they were offset by the rest of the organization’s processes and pride in the quality of their product. Now, we seem to get the unfiltered junior-staffer writing, with all of the nonsense and errors intact. Worse, more and more content is AI-generated, worthless junk.

About 5 years ago (during Covid), I heard several truly awful - and highly-biased - “reporting” pieces on NPR that caused me to turn it off permanently. Until then, NPR had been one of my primary news sources…but the language they started using and the transparent bias makes it infuriating to listen to.

IMO (again), news outlets and media like Reuters and The Economist are about the only non-biased sources remaining. None of the major network news outlets appear to me to have any sense of ethics and/or quality anymore.
[/Rant]
 
JOhnH said:
I found this in today's local paper:



The University of CENTRAL Arkansas's mascot is a bear. Not a razorback. Why did the "journalist" feel the need to lie?

Probably paywalled, but here is the link:

Daytona Beach News-Journal eNewspaper

This full replica of our printed product provides you the newspaper as you know and love it from the convenience of the web.
daytonanewsjournal-fl.newsmemory.com daytonanewsjournal-fl.newsmemory.com
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Why assume it is a lie, not a simple mistake?
 
AvNavCom said:
This. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
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How stupid do you have to be to not know your own school's mascot? Aren't "journalists" supposed to be smarter than the rest of us?

In hindsight, I think posting this in the first place was a mistake on my part. It is such a minor thing that it is really irrelevant, but it was the third instance of bad reporting I saw in my first 5 minutes at the computer before my coffee kicked in.
 
Bell206 said:
Probably because they used AI to write it?
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I suggest styling AI as Ai.

Googling fiberglass care products, their proprietary Ai offered this bit of insight I was completely unaware of. I mean who knew that fiberglass had "issues, including nutritional deficiencies, obesity, parasitic infections, and bacterial and fungal diseases".
 
JOhnH said:
Aren't "journalists" supposed to be smarter than the rest of us?
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Not sure I've ever heard of journalists being held up as an intellectual standard of excellence. Dogged pursuit of the facts and the ability to coherently put those facts into an understandable narrative are the two most valuable traits, I suspect. Probably most of us have had the experience of reading a piece of journalism and rolling our eyes at the lack of nuance and sometimes plain errors. The simple fact is that most journalists are not experts on that which they are reporting.

In this case, the mascot thing is a head-scratcher, as you say. As others have suggested, it may be AI "journalism" with all the attendant hallucinations.
 
JOhnH said:
How stupid do you have to be to not know your own school's mascot?
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He wrote that he took a USAID-sponsored class there, not that he graduated or even matriculated. I guess I'm pretty stupid too, I've taken one-off courses at several well-known schools whose mascots are a mystery to me - it really isn't that important to me. I *am*, however, smart enough to not refer to the mascots without looking them up.

JOhnH said:
Aren't "journalists" supposed to be smarter than the rest of us?
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Seriously?!

Nauga,
who didn't call you Shirley
 
nauga said:
Seriously?!
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No, that (asking if journalists arent supposed to be smarter than the rest of us) was sarcasm.

But I do get that comment at times from people defending a position I disagree with. "Well, the reporter thinks so and they know more about it than us". A lot of people think reporters are well informed and knowledgeable about what they write.
 
JOhnH said:
But I do get that comment at times from people defending a position I disagree with. "Well, the reporter thinks so and they know more about it than us". A lot of people think reporters are well informed and knowledgeable about what they write.
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Until we, as pilots, read an article about an aircraft accident. Then you realize that the reporter is certainly not well-informed, and so you start, or should start, to view the media with plenty of skepticism when they report on just about anything.
 
The problem isn't the decline of journalism, but the decline in editorship. This is the same as the issues with "everybody can be a journalist" or even that "AI can be a journalist." It's not the generation of the content that is the problem so much as nobody is controlling how it gets published.

I just read a junk article on a supposedly reputable local newspaper's website about a new restaurant opening in "eastern Lincoln County." I might have been misinformed by the piece other than that I had recently driven by the restaurant, and it's not in any part of Lincoln county but in Catawba county (which is north of Lincoln county and this location is about smack dab halfway between the eastern and western borders of either county).

A couple of years ago we got the Eastern Loudoun County telephone books that sported a picture of the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center. We had a technical name for that part of eastern Loudoun, it's called Fairfax County.
 
It's usually about being first, accuracy is somewhere off in the distance.

Most "journalists" today seem tojust combine tweets or reddit posts with no perspective from the author whatever.

#journalisming
 
Much of the reporting on public safety events is reposting of official press releases, departmental social media posts, and scanner traffic, without attribution. Sometimes they’ll attribute “department sources”, or “Sergeant Joe Smith told The Daily Telegraph that…”, when all the “journalist” did was Copy+Paste.

It used to be that following significant incidents, there would be several calls from reporters and the watch commander or an officer that he’d designate would call back and give firsthand information. As social media developed, we’d often be reading the news the morning after an incident and see a full article on it, knowing that no one from the department spoke directly with anyone outside our own shift, let alone the press. The closest thing would have been a Facebook post with minimal details. But the article would have what purported to be details, and were actually just radio traffic.

Same thing with trials. You’d sit in a courtroom all week during a homicide trial and see the local reporter in there for an aggregate hour or so per day, split between mid-morning and late afternoon. The next morning would have a full front page article detailing the day’s proceedings. One day the judge remarked that there seemed to be a fascinating trial taking place in our coortroom, but he must be aging because he didn’t recall anything happening like the article stated.
 
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I would settle for proper spelling, grammar, and composition. Apparently it's too much to ask.
 
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