Let’s start off with a big thank you to Â鶹ÊÓƵ for keeping it real. This platform appears to be continuing with a mandate to report actual news while allowing opinion pieces such as this and editorials to appear under a correct heading and sector.
Reporters are not pundits. Professional reporters are trained to recognize errors and correct them, not make them worse. Then file their report.
In other words, the so-called reportage we may see on hundreds of other online platforms are not, in reality, real news reports if the wanna-be reporters involved are unwilling to correct errors and unwilling to consider both sides of any story of community interest.
Unfortunately, it appears as if most of our mainstream media outlets seem to be more dedicated to entertaining rather than informing.
The tech giants rule the daily postings, not the regularly paid “both sides now” reporters who are becoming increasingly hard to find.
Online attention is what the so-called newsies (pundits) of today seem to be grasping for these past few years. Quality in reportage is not a concern as long as the entertainment value is present and in the forefront of their offering.
Spewing crazy ideas or concepts has somehow become acceptable as news, when, in reality, it’s usually not even close. It’s just harmful and slows down progress in the real world.
Who can bring the hard and soft news to the panting public, the viewers, listeners and readers? I say it’s still the trained reporter, not the pundit or commercially driven podcaster.
After all, what we sometimes refer to as the free press here in Canada, means there is a little bit of a problem for the pretenders. They are not interested in telling or absorbing the truth or accepting the credibility of the sources and actual real live news reporters.
Genuine reporters are still striving to bring the truth to the masses, whether the masses believe it or not. If they don’t, then here comes the alternative … a lot of ignorance and the insertion of online power brokers who don’t care to control what appears on their platforms and apps. Apparently, they now don’t even go through the motions of trying to sort the wheat from the chaff in the news-gathering worlds.
Let ‘er rip, they say. That’s where the money is and that’s what counts, not the truth.
The real media brings reality. That doesn’t sit well with the online influencers and a host of podcasters and platform drifters and grifters. Executive power and money rules, and that’s their only rule.
Tech platforms may take in a fraction of real news and then rewrite it to suit their audience or, sometimes simply ignore the real story and post something they think should be the real story because, well because, their version is more entertaining.
There is no denying the fact that control of the media means controlling the minds of many and when that wanna-be sector runs askew of truth, of facts, well, we’re heading for a whole lot of hurt.
As one publisher noted when it came to political debates, “we’re there to cover them, not enter them.”
Well said, Mr. Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).
Real news may be harder to find these days, but it’s still available if the public is willing to find it. It used to be easy to recognize via local newspapers, radio and television stations and, yes, a few online outlets. But there seems to be more work required in the process of digging up the truth lately. That should not be the case.
I recall a cardboard greeting we once had in a busy newspaper newsroom where I was once deployed that said, in essence, “News is something that someone, somewhere is trying to suppress.”
Or, as the old newsroom mantra went back in ancient times when it meant something to deliver facts … “news is what we do, all the rest is advertising.”
Facts, truth, reality should still mean something in the public domain and that means the media, for sure.
