Dude

[forsyth]

Why are journalists so bad at their jobs these days? Why are they so tied in circles trying to look "unbiased' by not telling the truth? Why do they use bullshit words to describe something extremely simple? What happened to the whole idea of journalism? Was it lost to media consolidation? Right-wing scare tactics and threats? Laziness? What happened to make journalists unable to do their flipping jobs?

Comments

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

I don't watch much TV news, as a side effect of not watching much TV, period. But most TV news can't give more tha a paragraph's worth of time to anything, whihc really limits how deeply they can get into things, even if they wanted to.

So I'm mostly referring to newspaper articles and online news, and specifically the farcial coverage of Congress's "detainee" bill. When they accept the politican's bullshit wording of stuff like "agressive interrogation" for tactics like waterboarding, beating people with broom handles, suspending them by their wrists in small metal rooms in the sun, and the rest, instead of what they are, which is torture. And how they don't mention the facts we've been spiriting people off to secret prisons to have this done to them, or that a lot of the people we're holding in Guantanamo are innocent people who were turned over to us for rewards, and not actually "the most dangerous terrorists in the world", and they haven't been tried because there's nothing to try them for. This is the context this is all happening in, and when the press just repeats the political lies about "agressive interrogation" and leaves all the rest of the context of this debate out, they're not doing their job. They're carrying the spin for evil people who are trying to justify torturing people, and they're putting this in the FIRST PARAGRAPH of their articles, like it was true. They aren't taking things and putting them in terms for people to understand. Terms like "The President today encouraged Congress to pass a bill allowing him to designate anyone he chooses as enemy combatants and send them to Gitmo without any kind of review." "The Attorney General today defended his view that torture is legal under the Geneva conventions, and there's no problem with using evidence obtained through torture to arrest people."

The press is supposed to make things clearer, not help make things worse.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Okay, where to begin. Just because you can see somebody doesn't mean they're telling you the truth. Especially when a lot of people are good at lying face to face. Especially when all they tell us about something is a maybe two minute blurb, followed by a whitened smile, with sprayed in place hair. And boy oh boy can TV news be opinionated. And writers have more time and space to get into the details of what's going on, even if lots of people won't read it.

"Detainee" and "Agressive interrogation" are direct lines from the political front, yes. But that doesn't make them true or unbiased. Especially when the "political front" that's using those terms is the side interested in white-washing things. The purpose of the press isn't to quote the government, the purpose of the press is to investigate and report and tell people what's actually going on, which is not always (or even often) what the government says it is. And so when the press uses the terms given to them by one side, that's not being unbiased. That's favoring the side that wants to pretend that waterboarding someone in freezing water isn't torture.

As for there not being facts, and everything being a matter of opinion from somebody's biased point of view, that's bullshit. Oh, it's true in a sense, people can only tell you what they've seen from their own limited point of view, but that doesn't mean there's no real facts about what happened, or is happening, or whatever. That's why journalists are supposed to use more than one source, and to research and fact-check everything they're told. Which should be easier than ever in this day and age. If two sides say something, the truth isn't always somewhere in between. It could be off to one side, and both be completely wrong. One could be telling the truth and the other lying. They could both be wrong, but one could be a lot less wrong than the other. And that's what journalists are supposed to be trained to do, find things and put them together and put the facts out, as best they can determine, so people can understand them. There are objective truths out there, and one of those truths is that our government has tortured people to death. In our names. And they want to make it legal.