Thanks to Steven for this link to Notes From A Writing Coach.
It was interesting to read the author’s critique of a lazy reporter’s error-ridden article about guns. Yesterday, my husband mentioned an article from last week’s Washington Post about the government’s budget for a particular project. The reporter had apparently talked to a liberal lobby group’s PAC and had dutifully written down their numbers (which, of course, showed how wicked and tight-fisted the Bush Administration is.) Apparently, she couldn’t be bothered to give the goverment agency a call to check those numbers (or look them up on the Web); if she had, she would have found out that she either completely misunderstood what the group had told her, or that the group had played her for a fool. (My husband’s department handles this group’s funding.) The story was just plain wrong.
Remember when the Jayson Blair story broke? I remember seeing an interview with someone close to one of the events that he’d spun stories about (I think it was someone involved with the sniper investigation.) He was asked, didn’t you suspect something when you saw this bizarre story in the Times? He replied, no, we’re used to seeing stories in the paper that have nothing to do with what we saw with our own eyes.
Tom of Disputations wrote about the same thing in his old “Praying the Post” blog.
I don’t trust newspapers, particularly the “leading” papers. Do you?
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Nope, for the most part. I figure I should expect as much accuracy in other areas as when they talk about subjects I care/know a bit more about — Catholicism and certain birth issues, say. Which is to say, don’t believe everything you read in the papers.
The New York Daily News is such a rag, and I grew up with that as my favorite paper. I read it online now and am appalled. They recently reported the death of a 4-year-old boy from a “freak accident” of a rotten tree falling on him. I read a story framed in the fact that his family had just moved from a “working-class” to an “upscale” neighborhood where the houses cost in the upper six figures. It was just so distasteful to me to talk so much about how they had increased their “status” (yes that word was used) only to lose their 4-year-old son. I can’t even figure out the point of including that info. If someone I know loses a 4-year-old, I’m not going to take the toniness of their homeowners’ association, or whether Dad had just gotten a plum promotion, into account when calculating the level of sadness, or whatever.
I said: It was just so distasteful to me to talk so much about how they had increased their “status” (yes that word was used) only to lose their 4-year-old son.
I mean, I’m not sure they ever explicitly said “how said that they were ‘moving on up’ and now their 4-year-old is dead.” But I can’t figure out what the point was in talking about the family’s “status” and the cost of homes in their new neighborhood.