RapierFugue
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Joined: 3/16/2006
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quote:
ORIGINAL: rulemylife
It doesn't sell as well.
In fairness though, there are still reliable media sources.
But as with any job you have some who are better at what they do.
True enough, but I also think the modern 24 hour cycle is at least partially to blame for the "fast assumption, wrong judgement" issues.
Go back a few years (when I was working for a TV news provider) and you've got news programming of specific length, at specific times, and therefore deadlines, which lend themselves to the kind of editorial meetings where journalists and editors sit and discuss, item by item, what’s a) correct, b) newsworthy and c) its degree of accuracy. So a programme’s editor would have pieces taken from feeds (AP, Reuters, etc), stringer teams (indirectly employed semi-freelance) and news teams (fully employed staff teams), and the degree of faith in each source was a known and understood variable; in short, they knew the likely degree of either bullshit or inadvertent over-statement they were likely to get from a given item/statement/piece, and a deadline before which they had to make a call on it (which deadline also gave them a chance to cross-check whatever was being claimed).
And, further, a specific amount of time they could afford to dedicate to it; so the organisations valued pithy, punchy, concise writing that took its 2,3, 5, 10 minute, or however long slot (depending on its importance) and they “wrote to piece” – in other words, a good journo would be able to write to precisely the length of piece they were being asked to produce and, as they often did their own VT editing (with VT editors at their side in most cases, although some preferred to work alone), an appreciation of the tone, pace and punch-points within each piece they wanted the images to link with.
News doesn't work that way anymore; the 24 hour cycle, started by CNN, and adopted as a model pretty much across the globe now, is a constantly-changing, fast-moving and direct to transmission entity, and above all it is also highly competitive for time-to-air, not quality of product. So what matters most now is not how good a piece is, but how fast it reaches the viewer. This inevitably leads to short-cuts being taken with the editorial process, no matter how competent or professional the editor at the time (and there are good ones and bad ones, same as with any human endeavour).
In addition, the 24 hour cycle has massively increased the sheer amount of air time available; no longer is the programming focussed around half an hour of morning news (as opposed to magazine style programming with news drop ins), an hour at lunchtime, an hour in the evening, and a few bulletins in between – now it’s 24 hours of news, and even with lots of commercials that still leave acres more space to fill, so now every even slightly believable theory or opinion is blasted almost straight-to-air, without much in the way of editorial oversight.
Then there’s the change in personnel makeup and expertise – previously, newscasters were hard-core journalists whose reputation rode largely on their gravitas and ability to both write & contribute, and then deliver, the news. Now most of them are just talking heads, spewing forth whatever the teleprompter (and thus their editorial staff) direct them to, and so yet another “quality gate” fell by the wayside; I witnessed top-level newscasters, back in the day, reading their scripts before going to prompter (and yes, almost all of them checked scripting before it got anywhere near a teleprompter), and simply declaring “Sorry Frank, I don’t like X – it’s not me”, which was shorthand for “I, with my 30+ years in journalism, think this part of the report is highly suspect, so balls to me staking my reputation on stating it as fact” and, 9 times out of 10, the editor would cave and redo.
Lastly comes the rise of the “instant expert”; in days gone by the amount of time allocated to a subject expert was measure in seconds, or a few minutes at most, and with far fewer news outlets this tended to mean the market was very small, and thus for every position of expertise in a given subject area there were maybe 2-5 people in a given country, on a given topic, that the news agencies would bother to talk to, and these guys tended to be a) academic or fully accredited experts in their given field, with decades of practical experience and b) acutely aware that they were gambling with their professional reputation every time they opened their mouths, which tended to lead them to being thoughtful, taciturn, concise individuals, who incidentally weren’t being paid much other than expenses to be there; so no axe to grind, and no benefit in “sexing up” their opinions, because ridicule over just one overly exaggerated piece would be enough to see them mocked by their peers.
Now though, with so many news outlets, and so much time to be filled, just about anyone with an opinion and more than five minutes experience of the field under discussion is dragged in off the streets, often paid well for their time, and above all are in a situation where the “sexier” they can make their input, then the more likely they are to achieve recognition, and therefore higher income.
Put all those factors together, add in the largely media-derived paranoia over certain terrorist outfits, and you've got your explanation for why accuracy and concise delivery are not now the goals of most news organisations.
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RE: Media and the Oslo attacks - 
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