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For those of you who don't know, I've had a very unusual background in that I was an overseas teacher for nearly a decade, including 3 years in Kabul, Afghanistan. What I saw in the area of journalism there confirmed my worst suspicions that had been planted at an early age. Here's what's true of journalists, in general:
  1. They're often not very knowledgeable about the subject(s) that they're covering;
  2. The bigger the name, the less likely that they do any of the hard work involved in researching, cross-checking, interviewing, etc.;
  3. It is a rarity to ever find a single story where the reporter went in with an open mind and THEN reported what they found.
When I was about 10-11 years old my small hometown had some serious flooding following some torrential rains. Reporters showed up to show images--much like what we saw this spring--but they needed some people on camera to talk about what happened to cover the human interest angle, and so they picked a couple of people who happened to be on Main Street at the same time, fished the no-brainer quote from them--"Yeah, it's really tough to deal with times like this, so it's good that our community pulls together," blah, blah, blah--and the reporter is back in the vehicle and off to the next story. All together, they were in town for probably 30 minutes, learned nothing new, got the same shots of the same swamped houses and buildings and streets under water that every other station got, and got the stock quotes from whatever random people were near to hand and willing to be on camera.

Fast forward a few years and there's another tragedy in the same town as a couple people died in a ditch cave-in. Same reporters showed up, same routine, same stock "interviews" on camera with the same sort of stock responses,... except this time I saw some people tell them off. One guy said, point blank, "You people only show up when there's a tragedy, and you don't really care about any of the people involved, and you've already written the story before you ever arrived, so why do I want to be on camera, being the dumb@$$ saying, 'Yeah, it's a tragedy,' so that you can have something to show on the news tonight?" It turned out he wasn't the only one that said some version of more or less the same thing. When the reporters got defensive about it, saying that they were there because they cared, others cared, etc., some of the locals turned the tables and beyond grilling them: "Oh, so what is something new that you learned? How will it help the families who lost husbands and fathers to see you on TV tonight, pretending to look sad and serious?" There was something close to a boycott as people refused to talk to them, but eventually they came across a local pastor and some guy in town to put on camera because neither had heard what the others had said. The reporter had the gall to interview both within about 10' of each other (on Main Street, again, of course) while changing the direction of the camera to make it appear that it was two different parts of town to anyone who wasn't already familiar with it.

Fast forward about a decade and a half, and I'm living in Kabul, Afghanistan, and after every suicide bombing, attack on some western business, etc., I'm seeing the exact same B.S. being played out on the world's stage of Kabul. Christiane Amoupoure had won almost every international reporting award known, yet she struck me as an ignorant and self-absorbed diva who 1) knew next to nothing about the subject; 2) did nothing to prepare for her story; and 3) repeated the same talking points that she would have cited if she were having hors d'oeuvres and sipping champagne while discussing politics at a D.C. or Manhattan cocktail party. Because I was in Kabul for three years, and because it's relatively speaking a small community as far as where western people could go to eat, etc., we always knew where she was filming from and why. She wasn't the only one, fwiw; they all did the same. If you turn on the news tonight and see a panoramic city shot of Kabul or some other frequently war-torn place, you're seeing a camera crew and a celebrity "journalist" being paid a lot of money to stand on top of a very nice hotel in close to perfect comfort and security while pretending that they're roughing it out in the wilds of a bloodthirsty place. If you pay attention, you'll see the same landmarks filmed from the same angles on all of the networks. Their "interviews" of people were hand-picked--the same as in my hometown, decades ago--to be a) convenient (usually people who worked at the hotel/restaurant where they were), b) willing to be on camera, and c) saying exactly what they were expected to say. An Afghan friend of mine happened to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, and his English was perfect, so they lined him up to be on TV. He gave a brilliant, direct synopsis of what had happened and why,... and so they cut him and left him out of the story, choosing instead to show more or less the same guy saying the same thing as always. They were no more interested in finding out the truth of what happened and why than the Sioux Falls reporters cared about my community when I was growing up.

When there is carnage in the background, you can be assured that they will show the worst of it from the most dramatic angle possible. They're not interested in reporting "truth," so all that matters is having something dramatic. It was a common thing to see them cover something that was relatively mundane--for example, someone (Afghan) was killed at a checkpoint (by another Afghan) for not stopping--but there would be tight shots of the shattered glass and blood on the ground, etc.,... but that sort of thing would only make the news if it happened just outside their hotel as they would all but run out to film it with the dramatic background, then run back inside the hotel while a local camera guy got my dramatic up-close footage. One of my students was a stringer for the BBC in the summer of 2006 because she was very articulate, and her older sister had been proven to be good at doing the same thing for Reuters. Here's the problem: my student had just completed 8th grade; she was 14 years old. Whatever she told them, that was the story. That was also some of the better reporting coming out of Kabul at that time.

As for not knowing much about the subjects that they covered, that's in large part baked into the cake because "journalists" study "journalism" when they go to "journalism school" at universities. Whenever they're outside of their comfort zone--and this is as diverse as outdoor writers discussing local trout streams to sports writers discussing football to local reporters discussing school performance to international reporters discussing wide-ranging, complex international events--they're faking it. They're very good at faking it. There are experts hired to help guide them and direct the narrative, and they memorize a few talking points, and--ta da!--journalism. The angle of the story is dependent upon the perspective of the journalist and the person in the background (stringers, etc.) who feed the info and storyline to the journalist. If you're ever being interviewed for anything, especially if you're knowledgeable about whatever they're asking, be sure to ask them why they hold the perspective that they do. If you make them get beyond the talking points, there's often/usually nothing more there. TV "journalists" are just another flavor of celebrity, and most print journalists are people who were decent writers who were hired to write stories, whether or not they knew a lot about the topics that they covered. The most intelligent, informed people talking about complicated things end up saying cliches that don't sound good on TV: "It's complicated," "There's more than one or two issues," etc. It doesn't matter if the story being covered is why some illiterate bumpkin just blew himself up in Kabul, or why Chinander's defense failed to stop Northwestern's offense at the end of regulation. Reporters don't really care about the real answers if it won't be good in a soundbite.
 
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For those of you who don't know, I've had a very unusual background in that I was an overseas teacher for nearly a decade, including 3 years in Kabul, Afghanistan. What I saw in the area of journalism there confirmed my worst suspicions that had been planted at an early age. Here's what's true of journalists, in general:
  1. They're often not very knowledgeable about the subject(s) that they're covering;
  2. The bigger the name, the less likely that they do any of the hard work involved in researching, cross-checking, interviewing, etc.;
  3. It is a rarity to ever find a single story where the reporter went in with an open mind and THEN reported what they found.
When I was about 10-11 years old my small hometown had some serious flooding following some torrential rains. Reporters showed up to show images--much like what we saw this spring--but they needed some people on camera to talk about what happened to cover the human interest angle, and so they picked a couple of people who happened to be on Main Street at the same time, fished the no-brainer quote from them--"Yeah, it's really tough to deal with times like this, so it's good that our community pulls together," blah, blah, blah--and the reporter is back in the vehicle and off to the next story. All together, they were in town for probably 30 minutes, learned nothing new, got the same shots of the same swamped houses and buildings and streets under water that every other station got, and got the stock quotes from whatever random people were near to hand and willing to be on camera.

Fast forward a few years and there's another tragedy in the same town as a couple people died in a ditch cave-in. Same reporters showed up, same routine, same stock "interviews" on camera with the same sort of stock responses,... except this time I saw some people tell them off. One guy said, point blank, "You people only show up when there's a tragedy, and you don't really care about any of the people involved, and you've already written the story before you ever arrived, so why do I want to be on camera, being the dumb@$$ saying, 'Yeah, it's a tragedy,' so that you can have something to show on the news tonight?" It turned out he wasn't the only one that said some version of more or less the same thing. When the reporters got defensive about it, saying that they were there because they cared, others cared, etc., some of the locals turned the tables and beyond grilling them: "Oh, so what is something new that you learned? How will it help the families who lost husbands and fathers to see you on TV tonight, pretending to look sad and serious?" There was something close to a boycott as people refused to talk to them, but eventually they came across a local pastor and some guy on town to put on camera because neither had heard what the others had said, and they had the gall to interview both within about 10' of each other (on Main Street, again, of course) while changing the direction of the camera to make it appear that it was two different parts of town to anyone who wasn't already familiar with it.

Fast forward about a decade and a half, and I'm living in Kabul, Afghanistan, and after every suicide bombing, attack on some western business, etc., I'm seeing the exact same B.S. being played out on the world's stage of Kabul. Christiane Amoupoure had won almost every international reporting award known, yet she struck me as an ignorant and self-absorbed diva who 1) knew next to nothing about the subject; 2) did nothing to prepare for her story; and 3) repeated the same talking points that she would have cited if she were having hors d'oeuvres and sipping champagne while discussing politics at a D.C. or Manhattan cocktail party. Because I was in Kabul for three years, and because it's relatively speaking a small community as far as where western people could go to eat, etc., we always knew where she was filming from and why. She wasn't the only one, fwiw; they all did the same. If you turn on the news tonight and see a panoramic city shot of Kabul or some other frequently war-torn place, you're seeing a camera crew and a celebrity "journalist" being paid a lot of money to stand on top of a very nice hotel in close to perfect comfort and security while pretending that they're roughing it out in the wilds of a bloodthirsty place. If you pay attention, you'll see the same landmarks filmed from the same angles on all of the networks. Their "interviews" of people were hand-picked--the same as in my hometown, decades ago--to be a) convenient (usually people who worked at the hotel/restaurant where they were), b) willing to be on camera, and c) saying exactly what they were expected to say. An Afghan friend of mine happened to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, and his English was perfect, so they lined him up to be on TV. He gave a brilliant, direct synopsis of what had happened and why,... and so they cut him and left him out of the story, choosing instead to show more or less the same guy saying the same thing as always. They were no more interested in finding out the truth of what happened and why than the Sioux Falls reporters cared about my community when I was growing up.

When there is carnage in the background, you can be assured that they will show the worst of it from the most dramatic angle possible. They're not interested in reporting "truth," so all that matters is having something dramatic. It was a common thing to see them cover something that was relatively mundane--for example, someone (Afghan) was killed at a checkpoint (by another Afghan) for not stopping--but there would be tight shots of the shattered glass and blood on the ground, etc.,... but that sort of thing would only make the news if it happened just outside their hotel as they would all but run out to film it with the dramatic background, then run back inside the hotel while a local camera guy got my dramatic up-close footage. One of my students was a stringer for the BBC in the summer of 2006 because she was very articulate, and her older sister had been proven to be good at doing the same thing for Reuters. Here's the problem: my student had just completed 8th grade; she was 14 years old. Whatever she told them, that was the story. That was also some of the better reporting coming out of Kabul at that time.

As for not knowing much about the subjects that they covered, that's in large part baked into the cake because "journalists" study "journalism" when they go to "journalism school" at universities. Whenever they're outside of their comfort zone--and this is as diverse as outdoor writers discussing local trout streams to sports writers discussing football to local reporters discussing school performance to international reporters discussing wide-ranging, complex international events--they're faking it. They're very good at faking it. There are experts hired to help guide them and direct the narrative, and they memorize a few talking points, and--ta da!--journalism. The angle of the story is dependent upon the perspective of the journalist and the person in the background (stringers, etc.) who feed the info and storyline to the journalist. If you're ever being interviewed for anything, especially if you're knowledgeable about whatever they're asking, be sure to ask them why they hold the perspective that they do. If you make them get beyond the talking points, there's often/usually nothing more there. TV "journalists" are just another flavor of celebrity, and most print journalists are people who were decent writers who were hired to write stories, whether or not they knew a lot about the topics that they covered. The most intelligent, informed people talking about complicated things end up saying cliches that don't sound good on TV: "It's complicated," "There's more than one or two issues," etc. It doesn't matter if the story being covered is why some illiterate bumpkin just blew himself up in Kabul, or why Chinander's defense failed to stop Northwestern's offense at the end of regulation. Reporters don't really care about the real answers if it won't be good in a soundbite.
Could not agree more. I have said many times that if I see Scott Pelley (60 minutes) on the street I am going to punch him in the face for the way he smeared a fellow Marine. That guy has no clue what it is like to get shot at but wants to make every Marine who fired back look like a war criminal. Same with every time a supposed christian,(read as any white non-muslim) does anything it is world news that the whole world must know about. Meanwhile right now in Nigeria Christian villages are being wiped off the map by Boco Haram. Have you seen that on the news? It took then 2 weeks to really report anything of substance on the national news about the flooding in NE because some whack job shot up a mosque in New Zealand. Now I am not saying that the Mosque story should not be reported. Just how about reporting the flooding as well. Also why do we not hear about out Christians being killed in Nigeria?
 
When the Atlas storm pulverized western South Dakota and its surroundings, almost every interview from the first several days was made within about 45 minutes of the Rapid City airport, and almost every image of dead livestock was taken from the same main road and/or interstate. Also, almost every story felt that the most pressing concern for those who had just lost their livelihood was that the government was shut down, and so it couldn't help. A couple ballsy folks were being fished for a quote about that, and basically asked back in response, "How in the hell is the government going to bring my cows back to life?" It's the same pattern. Because they had flown in from D.C. or NYC where the government shutdown was all that they were talking about, it MUST be in some way connected to a story about an early winter storm on the Northern Great Plains that killed trainloads of cattle.

I was overseas at the time, so I genuinely wanted to follow what had happened, and what was happening afterwards. At least for the first two weeks afterwards, the ONLY true reporting on what happened came from some Louisiana public TV show about agriculture because they had taken the time to call up a bunch of people who had been affected across the whole region.

It was a local story that obviously didn't deserve 9-11 levels of tragic coverage, but if they could have just actually reported what happened while shutting the heck up about the government shutdown ... it would have been appreciated.

Now Nebraska went through a different flavor of the same thing with the flooding. I now wish that they'd just stay away. I'd prefer it if local people would refuse to be interviewed by them. They don't really care about what you have to say beyond getting the quotes that they want to fit the narrative of the story that they had already devised before they ever arrived.
 
The power of the "media" to choose what NOT to tell/show you is many times more important than what you ever hear or see. That should be humbling for any journalist and sobering for anyone seeking the truth. Sadly, pride and ignorance are bliss for too many folks.
 



The power of the "media" to choose what NOT to tell/show you is many times more important than what you ever hear or see. That should be humbling for any journalist and sobering for anyone seeking the truth. Sadly, pride and ignorance are bliss for too many folks.

Any time I have read a news story by local media, that I knew the details of the event personally, was written inaccurately.

In fact, I've been quoted in an article, for an interview in which I was not present.
 
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For those of you who don't know, I've had a very unusual background in that I was an overseas teacher for nearly a decade, including 3 years in Kabul, Afghanistan. What I saw in the area of journalism there confirmed my worst suspicions that had been planted at an early age. Here's what's true of journalists, in general:
  1. They're often not very knowledgeable about the subject(s) that they're covering;
  2. The bigger the name, the less likely that they do any of the hard work involved in researching, cross-checking, interviewing, etc.;
  3. It is a rarity to ever find a single story where the reporter went in with an open mind and THEN reported what they found.
When I was about 10-11 years old my small hometown had some serious flooding following some torrential rains. Reporters showed up to show images--much like what we saw this spring--but they needed some people on camera to talk about what happened to cover the human interest angle, and so they picked a couple of people who happened to be on Main Street at the same time, fished the no-brainer quote from them--"Yeah, it's really tough to deal with times like this, so it's good that our community pulls together," blah, blah, blah--and the reporter is back in the vehicle and off to the next story. All together, they were in town for probably 30 minutes, learned nothing new, got the same shots of the same swamped houses and buildings and streets under water that every other station got, and got the stock quotes from whatever random people were near to hand and willing to be on camera.

Fast forward a few years and there's another tragedy in the same town as a couple people died in a ditch cave-in. Same reporters showed up, same routine, same stock "interviews" on camera with the same sort of stock responses,... except this time I saw some people tell them off. One guy said, point blank, "You people only show up when there's a tragedy, and you don't really care about any of the people involved, and you've already written the story before you ever arrived, so why do I want to be on camera, being the dumb@$$ saying, 'Yeah, it's a tragedy,' so that you can have something to show on the news tonight?" It turned out he wasn't the only one that said some version of more or less the same thing. When the reporters got defensive about it, saying that they were there because they cared, others cared, etc., some of the locals turned the tables and beyond grilling them: "Oh, so what is something new that you learned? How will it help the families who lost husbands and fathers to see you on TV tonight, pretending to look sad and serious?" There was something close to a boycott as people refused to talk to them, but eventually they came across a local pastor and some guy in town to put on camera because neither had heard what the others had said. The reporter had the gall to interview both within about 10' of each other (on Main Street, again, of course) while changing the direction of the camera to make it appear that it was two different parts of town to anyone who wasn't already familiar with it.

Fast forward about a decade and a half, and I'm living in Kabul, Afghanistan, and after every suicide bombing, attack on some western business, etc., I'm seeing the exact same B.S. being played out on the world's stage of Kabul. Christiane Amoupoure had won almost every international reporting award known, yet she struck me as an ignorant and self-absorbed diva who 1) knew next to nothing about the subject; 2) did nothing to prepare for her story; and 3) repeated the same talking points that she would have cited if she were having hors d'oeuvres and sipping champagne while discussing politics at a D.C. or Manhattan cocktail party. Because I was in Kabul for three years, and because it's relatively speaking a small community as far as where western people could go to eat, etc., we always knew where she was filming from and why. She wasn't the only one, fwiw; they all did the same. If you turn on the news tonight and see a panoramic city shot of Kabul or some other frequently war-torn place, you're seeing a camera crew and a celebrity "journalist" being paid a lot of money to stand on top of a very nice hotel in close to perfect comfort and security while pretending that they're roughing it out in the wilds of a bloodthirsty place. If you pay attention, you'll see the same landmarks filmed from the same angles on all of the networks. Their "interviews" of people were hand-picked--the same as in my hometown, decades ago--to be a) convenient (usually people who worked at the hotel/restaurant where they were), b) willing to be on camera, and c) saying exactly what they were expected to say. An Afghan friend of mine happened to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, and his English was perfect, so they lined him up to be on TV. He gave a brilliant, direct synopsis of what had happened and why,... and so they cut him and left him out of the story, choosing instead to show more or less the same guy saying the same thing as always. They were no more interested in finding out the truth of what happened and why than the Sioux Falls reporters cared about my community when I was growing up.

When there is carnage in the background, you can be assured that they will show the worst of it from the most dramatic angle possible. They're not interested in reporting "truth," so all that matters is having something dramatic. It was a common thing to see them cover something that was relatively mundane--for example, someone (Afghan) was killed at a checkpoint (by another Afghan) for not stopping--but there would be tight shots of the shattered glass and blood on the ground, etc.,... but that sort of thing would only make the news if it happened just outside their hotel as they would all but run out to film it with the dramatic background, then run back inside the hotel while a local camera guy got my dramatic up-close footage. One of my students was a stringer for the BBC in the summer of 2006 because she was very articulate, and her older sister had been proven to be good at doing the same thing for Reuters. Here's the problem: my student had just completed 8th grade; she was 14 years old. Whatever she told them, that was the story. That was also some of the better reporting coming out of Kabul at that time.

As for not knowing much about the subjects that they covered, that's in large part baked into the cake because "journalists" study "journalism" when they go to "journalism school" at universities. Whenever they're outside of their comfort zone--and this is as diverse as outdoor writers discussing local trout streams to sports writers discussing football to local reporters discussing school performance to international reporters discussing wide-ranging, complex international events--they're faking it. They're very good at faking it. There are experts hired to help guide them and direct the narrative, and they memorize a few talking points, and--ta da!--journalism. The angle of the story is dependent upon the perspective of the journalist and the person in the background (stringers, etc.) who feed the info and storyline to the journalist. If you're ever being interviewed for anything, especially if you're knowledgeable about whatever they're asking, be sure to ask them why they hold the perspective that they do. If you make them get beyond the talking points, there's often/usually nothing more there. TV "journalists" are just another flavor of celebrity, and most print journalists are people who were decent writers who were hired to write stories, whether or not they knew a lot about the topics that they covered. The most intelligent, informed people talking about complicated things end up saying cliches that don't sound good on TV: "It's complicated," "There's more than one or two issues," etc. It doesn't matter if the story being covered is why some illiterate bumpkin just blew himself up in Kabul, or why Chinander's defense failed to stop Northwestern's offense at the end of regulation. Reporters don't really care about the real answers if it won't be good in a soundbite.
Good write up. I certainly agree. Your post speaks to the heart of my post on page one, which was "transparency in the news is a bitch." I have several similar examples but I suppose we all do, which is why another paper is slowly coming to a close.

IMHO, journalism as it should be died with watergate. It was at that moment in time "journalism" catapulted from information and trust into money and stardom.
 



Like everything else, journalism is all about the money. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? As long as the facts are somewhat accurate, slanting the story is legally OK. I sometimes wonder what the old news reporters (like Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, Murrow, etc.) would say about the way journalism is taught in schools and handled on the job. I am sure there are some great reporters out there trying to do a good job, but those who control the books (and get big bonuses) have the final say.

Please correct me if you feel I am wrong.
 
Y'all have touched one of my hot-buttons with the exchange above ...

... Here's what's true of journalists, in general:
  1. They're often not very knowledgeable about the subject(s) that they're covering;
  2. The bigger the name, the less likely that they do any of the hard work involved in researching, cross-checking, interviewing, etc.;
  3. It is a rarity to ever find a single story where the reporter went in with an open mind and THEN reported what they found.
... Reporters showed up to show images--... fished the no-brainer quote from them--"Yeah, it's really tough to deal with times like this, .... yes, drives me nuts to see a reporter grab the most backwards ignoramus for a sound bite on a tornado to utter the infamous 'I seen it coming.'

When there is carnage in the background, you can be assured that they will show the worst of it from the most dramatic angle possible. They're not interested in reporting "truth," ... Proverbial 'if it bleeds, it leads' ...

Reporters don't really care about the real answers if it won't be good in a soundbite. ... amen!

Could not agree more. I have said many times that if I see Scott Pelley (60 minutes) on the street I am going to punch him in the face for the way he smeared a fellow Marine..... Peter Arnett is my guy ... clearly remember his bleeding heart reporting from Somalia leading up to the insertion of our troops in Somalia and Mogadishu ... my 20th Century version of William Randolph Hearst who pushed our war with Spain.

Like everything else, journalism is all about the money. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? As long as the facts are somewhat accurate ... does it really have to be factual anymore?

Used to have three 'professions' lumped together ... used car salesmen, prostitutes and politicians ... one sold junk, another sold flesh and the third sold BS ... somehow, the journalism profession (if you can still call it a profession) has become a class of their own.
 
When the Atlas storm pulverized western South Dakota and its surroundings, almost every interview from the first several days was made within about 45 minutes of the Rapid City airport, and almost every image of dead livestock was taken from the same main road and/or interstate. Also, almost every story felt that the most pressing concern for those who had just lost their livelihood was that the government was shut down, and so it couldn't help. A couple ballsy folks were being fished for a quote about that, and basically asked back in response, "How in the hell is the government going to bring my cows back to life?" It's the same pattern. Because they had flown in from D.C. or NYC where the government shutdown was all that they were talking about, it MUST be in some way connected to a story about an early winter storm on the Northern Great Plains that killed trainloads of cattle.

I was overseas at the time, so I genuinely wanted to follow what had happened, and what was happening afterwards. At least for the first two weeks afterwards, the ONLY true reporting on what happened came from some Louisiana public TV show about agriculture because they had taken the time to call up a bunch of people who had been affected across the whole region.

It was a local story that obviously didn't deserve 9-11 levels of tragic coverage, but if they could have just actually reported what happened while shutting the heck up about the government shutdown ... it would have been appreciated.

Now Nebraska went through a different flavor of the same thing with the flooding. I now wish that they'd just stay away. I'd prefer it if local people would refuse to be interviewed by them. They don't really care about what you have to say beyond getting the quotes that they want to fit the narrative of the story that they had already devised before they ever arrived.
It’s sad to say to but there is too much competition in news these days. Cable channels, social media, blogs and so on. It’s like they just barely scratch the surface of the story before they quickly move on. Sadly the Cronkite days are long gone
 
Side note since this thread has gone way off topic... But once a small tornado hit my neighborhood in Millard around 2007. We had minor damage, just a down fence and some loss property, but a couple houses nearby had to be leveled. A local reporter (John Knicely) got out of his vehicle and walked straight through my front and backyard for an interview. I intercepted him and asked what he was doing in my yard. He had the attitude that it was his right to trespass because he was doing a story. I was respectful and instructed him that he should have simply rung the doorbell and asked to access my property. His smug ass gave me a smile like he was some sort of celebrity. It really peeved me and to this day I refuse to watch channel 6 news. BTW he must have makeup applied with a putty knife cuz that dude's face is wrecked lol, my bitterness expressed.
 



And the world is a much better place now that all the newspapers are going under, mom and pop grocery stores are going under, little gas stations are going under, mom and pop everythings are going under:Sarcastic:. Little towns are dying, schools closing all in the name of Walmart or Amazon. I am just kind of sad to think about what this world will look like in another 50 years, I kind of hope I have crapped out by then.
Well said....and with the local tax dollars drying up and charter schools and cyber schools cutting into the pie our public schools are in rough shape.
 
I'm glad you are aware of it - I am too. I resolved to stop buying anything but food at the grocery store, don't go to big box stores, try to get fuel from locally owned franchises, etc. Getting labor from local businesses is easier - trying to source a lot of modern conveniences locally is impossible (vehicle, phone, computer, etc).

I hope that someone comes up with a way to get money out of people for creating content. Curating content is nice, but that isn't the same thing as creating it. Micro-transactions are one idea, but hard to compete with "free". Newspapers provide useful information, but not in a modern form. And since the consumer doesn't seem to know the difference between some jerkwad on Twitter and a journalist that's spent 20 years reporting, we probably are getting what we deserve.
Perhaps a tax on Twitter and Facebook may cut down on some of the Twitter journalists.
 

I sometimes wonder what the old news reporters (like Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, Murrow, etc.) would say about the way journalism is taught in schools and handled on the job.
Sadly the Cronkite days are long gone
I haven't looked into all of the above, but I think that we'd all be disappointed to know how much the criticisms that I had above were true for the legendary people, too. It's been the norm for quite some time for the prima donnas to do none of the work and to know little of the background before putting themselves in front of a camera to talk about it like some sort of expert. The WW2 correspondents that are so often praised admitted freely afterwards to self-censoring bad news so as to keep the public's morale up while supporting the war back home.

I don't know what the proper balance is, but I at least want the person who's taking credit for the reporting to be able to intelligently discuss what they're reporting, and that has rarely ever been the case.
 

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