Thursday, April 08, 2010

Baby, yeah you're moving way too fast

Scanning Memeorandum this morning and here's a perfect example of what's wrong with the news outlets these days. Everybody rushes to be first to break the news. The *scoop* lasts all of 30 minutes at best and most of the time, the initial reports turn out to be wrong. Then they all spend the day updating the story for accuracy.

This story started yesterday reporting a terrorist was trying to light a shoe bomb on an airplane. At this point, 24 hours later they say it was a Middle East diplomat who was smoking a cigarette in the bathroom and talked trash to the flight attendant. By the end of today we may have the accurate details.

This is actually the downside of Twitter. The rumors break there first usually, spread instantly around the world and within hours, three different versions are circulating and not everybody sees the final corrections. This is no way to inform the public.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

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2 Comments:

Blogger ed waldo (Hart Williams) said...

This is so dead on it's almost not worth saying -- except that nobody's saying it. The grand rush to bloviate on whatever the tissue-thin and sketchy story du jour is, and then the festival of crickets on actual retractions/corrections.

Why? Because they're chasing that next ambulance of a story like junkyard dogs suddenly unleashed.

I thought it really came to a head when Ed Morrissey and some other rightie douches were breathlessly reporting on the MexiCali quake, with UPDATES! as though they actually knew a goddamned thing about it, or were giving anybody meaningful information not available from government and traditional news sources. Absurdist theater.

11:51:00 AM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

Blogtopia has changed a lot since the old days hasn't it? I remember when we used to mock the MSM. Now it seems the bloggers who figured out how to make money from it, all do the same thing and those aspiring to chase the hit counts for the trivial, even as they complain that the tradmed doesn't inform.

On the bright side there are still some who do in depth context like yourself. Sadly, there's no money in it, even though it's worth so much more.

7:26:00 PM  

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