John Denker wrote:
>> 1) Reporters are trained to find two sides of everything.
> You mean like these guys did? ---
Thanks for this list -- there is surely a large amount of misleading
reporting these days, and, as with the war, it's often infuriating.
But many of these people -- Christopher Hitchens, Bill O'Reilly, Chris
Matthews, etc. -- are entertainers, not journalists. Our society
desperately needs more media literacy so people can tell them apart. And
our time has unfortunately given rise to the "opinion journalist" (like
Hitchens, and almost every "pundit" you see on television, and most
bloggers) who do little-to-no original reporting, i.e. the gathering of
facts, and who instead feel that their opinions, and the opinions of
others, can be discussed journalistically, weighed and measured as if
they were facts. They aren't. But hey, it's a lot easier than real
journalism. This trend is now unfortunately entering even science
journalism. It is a bad thing -- it does not provide any fundamental
information, or give people the necessary information with which to form
opinions, and it doesn't convince anyone of anything -- it's just
arguing back and forth. But it does sell blogs and magazines and books.