The second thing (although I had thought to make it my third thing) I have to contribute is an incident that I had with my college paper. Unflattering (but realistic) picture of me aside, they managed to spell my name wrong, despite repeating it 4 times and watching the reporter scribble it correctly on his pad. Additionally, the event was a video conference with a certain tech personality who used to have a wonderful TV show on a wonderful channel, and so I was describing how I saw different pieces of legislation (DMCA, NET Act, etc) doing an end-run around fair use and that it was “…all about control” by the media companies over our personal technology. The reporter (or editor) saw fit to turn the quote into ‘[governmental] control’ in the print version. I went to the offices and stated that if I had meant to say governmental control, I would have. They issued a correction for my name.

The fourth thing (are you keeping up?) was another wonderful interaction with the college paper. A Linux student group that I belonged to had arranged to have a speaker from EFF or FSF (I don’t remember, and he may have been both) give a talk about software freedoms, licenses, and open development. The reporter got one quote from a member of the LUG saying something like “I don’t agree with everything he said in all cases, but I appreciated being able to have him speak.” Then the reporter (if I can use the term loosely) got another quote from someone basically saying “I like getting software for free because I am a college student with limited funds”, which made it look like our student group had gotten organization funds to host a pro-piracy presentation. Awesome. No correction was issued, even after we (the LUG, faculty advisor, and other students) filed a formal open letter to the paper. The best part: the reporter sat in the front row.

The third thing, is just a trope about reporting leading up to the Iraq war. Everyone has pretty much said it all already. Lies, lies, pundits, and lies. Bias towards sensationalism and simplicity. I would say that these stories don’t write themselves, but it seems that in a large number of cases, they do actually write themselves, with little or no input from reality.

…And that’s really all I have to say about that.

Having done the radio thing in a previous life, I can attest to the conscious slanting of any given “report” towards my personal biases.

Let it be noted that I am specifically not a journalist. I studied broadcasting for a couple of years, but have no formal journalism training.

Nevertheless, I was frequenty tasked with the creation of news reports and various infotainment productions.

The technicalities of “nonbiased reporting” are laid out of course, but when it comes down to it, it’s up to the low-level employee to assemble an entertaining and informative segment, with few criteria other than duration.

Personally, I always made a conscious effort to abide by my intrinsic sense of ethics when choosing subject matter and reporting the details of a given story. That still leaves a great deal of leeway, and most people will naturally tend to emphasise points that support their personal worldview.

Reporters and other media-producing folk are human. The final content is always biased, usually well-intentioned and sometimes inaccurate.

The real trick is to keep this in mind when consuming news media.

…followed by

As a Rainbow 6 player I know that all about stealth, guile, and strategy…so that gives me major street creed.

http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/portland/Blog?blog=41935&oid=868821

“Court Of Appeals Upholds Cyclist’s Right To Carry Concealed Ninja Sword “

The furious interviewee called the paper insisting she’d said “sink and stove”. My friend says he wishes he’d fudged it intentionally instead of just mishearing it, since it managed to spice up the otherwise dry article.

I hate those stupid “staged” and “Photoshopped” morons. God I hate them so much.

NFPs are the best source, but again have their own priorities and interests, beyond just reporting event.

I am incredibly cynical about 99.9% of what we know as “News”.

–Knoll, Erwin

I can’t speak to what happens with the TV folks, but every reporter I worked with got furious and upset with himself over even trivial errors.

And I can also talk first-hand about the people who claimed to have been misquoted but weren’t — people I spoke with, in some cases people I recorded. It was a newsroom joke that “misquoted” simply means “Gosh, I wish I hadn’t said that.”

Not that reporters don’t make mistakes, and plenty of them. But realize that you have one perspective on a story that’s pretty clear. A reporter has to talk to several (if not lots) and ends up with a host of different views that he has to try to reconcile into a coherent narrative. It ain’t always easy.

And then, of course, there are the times when someone tells you something but is mistaken. He won’t get the blame, you will. They’ll say ‘It’s your job to check the facts’ as if it’s possible to verify every statement of every story.

So yeah, it’s easy to pick on reporters, and they certainly screw up. But not nearly as often as you’d believe.

That being one of the major points of his post:

I thought since it’s copyrighted material they could only release it with my consent (and my contact info was written in VERY LARGE letters on the disk containing the file) but I was certainly wrong. Since everybody and his brother in the media was running this thing and making money from it…

:D

What’s scary is although I remind myself that based on that I know those stories are almost always wrong, I should consider that for every story I read, that thought vaporizes in no time, and I go right playing jump to conclusions. *sigh*

“Heywood Jablome” is always a good choice, particularly if the reporter is stupid enough to buy it.

Back when I was in the music biz, I was misquoted on a LOT of things. Each and every time, I’d read back and it was instantly understood why they did it…makes it a little more interesting. Heck, I found an hour long interview I did with Time Mag from 10 years back where they condensed it to 3 lines and changed my title from whatever I use to claim I did, to Programmer At Major University…which actually happened a few weeks after the interview as I decided to go back to school and get out of lalaland. Turns out, they wanted to have a different perspective than a music insider and found that changing the title did just that.

Any more, I just lie to reporters. Or online. Or to my friends. Everyone gets a different story. Life is soooo much more interesting if you edit reality. Why should reporters have the only fun…

The best reply to your post is “Radioguy”, and “Arkizzle”. Journalists have a slant and do get things wrong, some of it intentional, some of it accidental. A journalists job is to get you to read the article, not to tell you what’s going on; if a journalist is really doing their job they get you mad enough to keep reading. It’s all about clicks and eyeballs to bring in that sweet sweet cash.

I’ve been misquoted pretty poorly in the past, and it was done in the “Arkizzle” format above; ask a leading question, remove all the qualifying statements, there’s the money shot.

Having been in attendance at the speech John Kerry made at the University of Florida last year (the speech where the University Police Department, after allowing a particular student to grandstand and throw a tantrum for far too long, finally tasered the idiot), I was absolutely incredulous at the spin this event received in the media, even after full videos of the event began to appear on youtube, and accounts of the student’s prior attention-seeking escapades began to surface. I suppose I ought to have known better.