Newspaper "scandals"

[liamstliam]

I am curious about something.

As some of you know, I was a newspaper reporter for 11 years before becoming a teacher, I have worked part-time at papers on and off since then, and I am a total Web newspaper geek.

I wonder what some of you think about the reporting scandals at the New York Times and USA Today. When you have professional interests, sometime you overreact.

I recently read Jayson Blair's book, and most of the time, I had to explain to people who he was.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I found it distasteful and very upsetting. I hold my journalists to a very high standard -- I have a few friends who went through college for journalism, and I expect "professionals" to behave like that, and "professional organizations" to string them from the highest limb when they don't. If you want to make stuff up, the Weekly World Whatever is always hiring...or nowadays you can just right your own blog.

On the flip side, no one seems to be telling the truth nowadays, so one more liar/fabricator just gets a shrug out of most people. :-/

[dsrtao]

I noted way back in elementary or middle-school days that when I went to a news-worthy event, the coverage was never quite the same as what *I* saw. That doesn't bother me much: I realize that no one has an omniscient point of view.

What does bother me: political biases masquerading as straight news; coverage of technical issues by people who don't understand the technology; coverage of foreign affairs by people who apparently don't know anything about the history of the region in question; coverage of the economy by people who know nothing about economics; coverage of any government-related issue by people who do no background fact checking.

And then I have to worry about reporters making their stories out of whole cloth? Oy. Blair should have been flogged around Times Square.