re: #207 Nyet

The US media is certainly better than in a whole lotta countries.

Well, that’s damning with faint praise.

I have a huge problem with the laziness, both is going after stories and in sloppy writing. Words matter, and many of our current crop of journalists don’t seem to care. They want to be first, and they want to be clever and in my mind, it’s become a race to the bottom.

Example, the tweet from the NYT reporter earlier today wherein he asked Kellyanne Conway if Trump was doing anything illegal with his businesses. His big reveal was that she told him he was being negative. That was his big scoop.

Why would a reporter ask his campaign manager that question in the first place? Her answer would serve no purpose of advancing any fact—it would just let him quote someone who would either have no idea what the answer was and whose opinion does not have any bearing on the issue.

Maybe, instead of chatting with Conway and tweeting, a real reporter would have been doing some investigation on the issue and finding documentation.

The soundbite circus that has replaced actual reporting in many cases does nothing to inform the electorate or serve any purpose other than to increase the corporate coffers.

I have always joked about putting my journalism education to work in the more honorable profession of advertising. I’m still saying it, but I’m no longer joking. You can’t get away in advertising with some of the serious bullshit that the news media get away with. Many of the former journalism schools were merged with communications platforms, with communications as the umbrella (happened to the one I attended) and courses like “Ethics in Journalism” were totally deleted from the curriculum. We are the worse for those changes.