Is the media irreparably broken

I don't think so. I'm in Boston area and the local coverage has been very good from late last night through right now. No mention of the wrong names, cautious with suspects that were wrong place/wrong time caught on camera, etc.

Locals and everybody else were pretty bad with the misreported arrest/way to the court house bit on Wednesday, but from the MIT shooting forward have been very strong from what I'm watching.

 

That may well be, but I think this week has proven some of the huge shortcomings of crowdsourcing.

 

Ha. Yeah, always nice to have that going for ya.

I think I went to Reddit once, a long time ago, only to be completely confused the very second the page loaded. Seems like an upstanding place, though!!

 

I imagine one news organization, either existing or a new one, will try to brand itself on accuracy and not conjecture and poor sources.

Will it work? Who knows?

 

Word.

 

The media? Yes. And it has been for a while.

Journalism? No. There will always be a need for dependable, thoughtful reporting. I suppose there's a chance an organization could establish itself as a fair, measured and accurate source for news and information and prove itself as such time and time again. More likely, it will be individual creators who develop personal followings.

I suspect the not-too-distant future will be a little bit more like -- please excuse the 27-year-old pop culture reference -- the character of Edison Carter from the futuristic TV show, "Max Headroom." Carter was the one-man news bureau that viewers trusted and followed because he uncovered stuff that even his bosses at Network 23 didn't want reported.

Granted, that's a little too sci-fi, but the template probably applies: In an age where trust in corporate-owned media is at all-time lows and falling by the day, the future of pure journalism probably rests with independent journalists -- crusading bloggers? -- who want to uncover news, not just cover whatever the authorities say.

 

http://gawker.com/5995058#13663938928203&{"type":"iframeUpdated","height":1528}

"But the real story is not how the news got it wrong—there's been plenty of that since Monday. It's how, mere hours after telling a bullshit story, the news simply told a new story and expunged the previous one from its memory."

 

Now, though, on top of the misreporting, everyone feels the need to analyze and speculate on top of the misreported facts, so the blind are leading the blind down countless avenues that end up going nowhere. All that talk and conjecture before stuff is confirmed confuses the issues and sends people off on tangents that aren't true anyway.

The rush to be first, combined with the need to fill air time (and Internet space?) and look important, turns the big breaking stories into giant hairballs, which do not taste anything like real journalism. And, really, is there anything as idiotic and embarrassing as a bunch of clueless TV anchors sitting around speculating about news events they never learned how to report in the first place?

 

Put me in the camp of CNN won't recover from this one for awhile.

CNN will be the running punch line on a national joke for quite sometime.

 

You mean it already isn't that?

 

The part in bold is the key issue here. The race to be first on a story hasn't changed. What has is that when a reporter gets a tip or a lead, instead of having time to check it out before deadline or air time, he or she makes it public immediately simply because there is now a way to do so.

And that is the danger of Twitter, etc. Instead of being encouraged to check facts, reporters are encouraged to post information first and check it out later. And much of that "information" turns out to be completely wrong.

 

And the ownership of the information has changed too. Used to be when you got scooped, you'd go through your own process of at least confirming it to your satisfaction. Now you slap the word "Report:" in front of something and run with it. And if it's wrong, the news outlet says "hey, don't blame us, it was the other guys that got it wrong and we just told you what they were saying."