Is the media irreparably broken

Was working on a story recently, to confirm something reported elsewhere. Waiting to hear back from several calls/emails/texts and was writing while waiting.

Editor calls and wants an update. I explain situation. Editor didn't want to hear it. Response: "Look, we have to post something now."

Didn't care that I didn't have it confirmed at that point. Might have been the most frustrating day in my career.

 

The problem is those corrections go widely unnoticed and the misinformation goes down as the truth. At Newtown it was first reported the killer used an assault rifle. Then, oh wait, the assault rifle was actually left in the car. Now we've got this giant mess going on nationally. At Boston, it was reported that Martin had run out to hug his dad as he crossed the finish line, but later we find out that isn't true. Still, you've got tens of thousands of people repeating that story and organizing runs for his family.

In today's viral word, news agencies get it wrong from social media, go with it, then it goes out even more wide spread on social media. The whole deal is like an oil well on fire. It just keeps getting fueled by itself.

 

Newspapers bury corrections on the bottom of Page 2.

I would put a whole lot of money on there being fewer errors in the Boston Globe this morning than on April 20, 1950, when fact checking was much more difficult. The shift now is that accountability is so much higher. You're discussing errors you never would have known about with social media.

 

Interesting thought.

But then, there are 323,000 results for a "Brett Farve" search on Google. Sure is easy, though.

I doubt a 1950 fact check (Almanac, Encyclopedia, whatever) would turn up an incorrect spelling of a famous person's name.

 

The scholarly research done on newspaper accuracy from 1936 through 2005 found that the percentage of inaccuracies stayed pretty consistent in that time. Doing accuracy research in the current environment is a lot more difficult because of the different platforms on which news is disseminated, and the fact that online stories are often changed multiple times throughout the day.

 

Pete Williams is a bright and highly respected TV news man for NBC News. He must cringe when he knows that he needs to take questions from the dunce squad manning the booth at MSNBC

 

What search engine are you using? Google and Bing both correct it for you and tell you they're correcting it.

But yeah, the Internet is evil.

 

Booth of them? Booth of them in the both?

Dunces!

 

Then you oughta go look it up, just as you should when you see any media outlet you are not faimilar with mentioned.

 

Well, what did you do? As a good reporter, which you are I'm sure, you can't put something up unless you get it confirmed. Did you keep trying or figure a way to put it up? And where did he want it up first? The editors' beloved Twitter? Or your website?

 

I can see the print business quickly becoming right-wing dominated like radio was over the past 25 years. First the San Diego papers, and now the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune are being targeted by ultra-conservative owners:

http://www.deadline.com/2013/04/koch-brothers-tribune-newspaper-sale/

Makes perfect business sense, because fewer and fewer young and urban people are reading print papers anymore, but older, white, upper and upper middle class people seem to still turn to the morning paper for their news and information. But I don't think anyone (besides the usual contrarians) can argue right-wing radio brings strong journalism to the table, and it won't surprise me that by the time my obit is published, we'll be saying the same thing about the paper that publishes it.

 

The New York Post loses a ton of money. The Washington Times loses a ton of money. Turning all Tribune Co.'s papers into overtly ideological papers would be a nifty way to lose staggering sums of money. If, as Murdoch did with the Wall Street Journal, they just ran right wing editorials and columnists and left the newsside alone, they might make it work. But I wonder if that's what they want.