Subj : Re: Links 'R' Us
To   : alt.tv.farscape
From : Jim Larson
Date : Tue Sep 06 2005 02:29:12

From Newsgroup: alt.tv.farscape

Trouble wrote:

> John Iwaniszek wrote:
> 
>> Nick wrote:
>>> John Iwaniszek wrote:
>>>> Jim Larson wrote:
>  
>>>>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4214516.stm
> 
>>>> We can only hope.  I am not optimistic.  People still tell that
>>>> old knee- slapper about Gore claiming to invent the internet and
>>>> that Kerry looks French.
> 
>>> How does people telling jokes have any possible relevance to tough 
>>> journalism?  
>  
>> Those were repeated by "tough journalists" as though they were facts or 
>> even newsworthy.
> 
> So you're saying that just reporting what they see (dying people) and not 
> immediately buying the party line (everything is fine) that's given to 
> them won't fix what's wrong with the news today, if they don't also 
> develop the research skills necessary to write a high school term paper?
> 
> I'm being serious here
> 
> Tough Journalism implies investigative journalism, people looking for 
> stories, what happened in NO is that people parroted what they saw, and 
> didn't parrot what they were told.
> 
> I think John is saying they'll still need an influx of fact checking 
> skills, and to find stories in places other than press junkets, and the 
> nuggets dropped by schills from the administration.
> 
> 
> Hey John, the reporters work for the networks, the networks are owned by 
> companies, therefore the safe journalism was a detante of sorts, none of 
> the networks could really break with the party line for the reasons you 
> have mentioned like no access to the president for bad press.
> 
> However, this only works so long as no one steps out of line, when one of 
> them breaks with a 'true' story, they all have to run it, or risk losing 
> ratings.
> 
> So though they have institutional reasons why the rules shifted to safe, 
> maybe they'll shift back to honest.
> 
> Again fact checking and curiosity don't hurt
> 

But, but...fact checking is hard. 

-- 
Jim

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