...] Journalists to “check” sources? What? – Pure Poison [...

Journalism today sucks.

“Erroneously held principle”, fair enough; truth expressed with an intent to mislead, or clever choice of words to disguise the truth (equivocation/ semantics), yep; a truth used out of context so the meaning is distorted, OK; but “erroneously held truth” has beaten me. Examples?

And there should be a cost – ie, if you get it wrong, we don’t say “oh well, at least you were first”; we say YOU SHOULD HAVE CHECKED. As we should. There should be a disincentive to publishing unverified crap.

Because erroneous information is at best worthless, at worst dangerous – even if it is first.

I have a bit of sympathy for the journo’s: these days getting news published before other media groups is a major driver. The problem is, all of them seek to get ‘breaking news’ out before the others without doing a thorough checking of the sources.

I think you’re right that it’s the motivation to break news that drives the lack of fact-checking, but I also think that their focus on news-breaking is the problem.

This comes back to the argument in Hartigan’s Press Club address (and the statements of Christian Kerr and others before that), that what the media does and bloggers don’t is break news. I’d suggest that the traditional media has two things that most of the blogosphere doesn’t: (i) the connections to pick up newsworthy information, and (ii) the resources and expertise to do in-depth investigation of that information.

Even if a news outlet breaks a story, it’s going to be picked up by every aggregator and every other media outlet in no time. I don’t see how being the first to publish gives much of a competitive advantage. And if people want unconfirmed reports of news the instant it happens, they can use Twitter and skip the newspapers and traditional media sites altogether. Publishing unconfirmed information so that they can say, “First!” isn’t journalism.

Plato’s “Golden Rule” “Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you.” aka The Ethic of Reciprocity. http://www.religioustolerance.org/reciproc.htm has a long list of the same Rule in other religious/ philosophical texts.

I can’t find any note which excludes journalists; although Hanna is far from the only journalist who expects the public to cop the cr#p but be all honest & truthful in return: an Exclusive Order of Journos who Lie & Equivocate: But expect everyone else to tell them the truth, the whole truth etc in return perhaps?

...] July, 2009 · Leave a Comment Conal Hanna is terribly hurt at the discovery that what people tell journalists is sometimes – gasp – not the truth: [...

With print, there were deadlines but never instantaneous deadlines.