Newspaper writers and editors often defend incompetent reporting with scrofulous logic — “Both sides were angry so it must have been a good article.”
Publishing gibberish would also anger both sides of any controversial issue; and that takes no effort at all; a reporter wouldn’t even need to show up at the meeting and fall asleep.
A Richard Dawkins observation fits perfectly here —
“…when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”
As a responsible reporter he reluctantly learned that “journalism” at our national level does not always care about reporting accurately.
Having attended thousands of local governmental meetings and reviewed the news reports afterward, I am now more astonished when a Monterey Peninsula reporter gets it right than when they get it wrong.
Barrett’s article concludes –
“More broadly, if too many news organizations neglect to check their facts, how long before the Insider’s Lament becomes everyone’s? In a business whose cardinal asset is credibility, that notion should be unsettling.”
Lazy reporters and editors breach their large responsibility to our community. Genuine reporting involves listening and understanding the subject. Accurately reporting what each of two (or more) sides say is not hard, but it takes actual work.
