This past Sunday now-VP, Joe Biden, squared off on juxtaposing political talk shows against former-VP, Dick Cheney. Both sides vehemently argued why the Obama administration was/wasn’t handling terrorism correctly.
That is the background.
Here is the topic
Monday morning two journalist from Bloomberg News published an article on the war of words (1). Throughout the article the two journalist report on the fighting and list a half dozen quotes from each person. Then it ends.
Recently, Brent and I have been asking ourselves whether some information needs to be limited to the public. This is a prime example of information I would argue should be limited. What these two journalist did was report that two people got in an argument and that they have authority, so we the public should listen. However, they did not fact check either person or give any information regarding the subject on which the two people were arguing. Is this real journalism? Did it really take both of them to read through the quotes from a 15 minute segment and write them down? Wouldn’t real journalist dug up information one what the two members were saying. For instance, Cheney argued that “Christmas day bomber” should not have been read his Miranda rights Well, journalist, tell me what the Bush administration did under a similar circumstance with the “shoe bomber” back in 2003? Was that suspect read his Miranda rights?
It is my conclusion, then that these two journalist have done nothing but complicate the matter for public. This article could have been replaced telling me that Brad Pitt and Angelina were in an argument, because as far as disseminating information that will help me, a voting citizen, make a decision, this article did nothing.
Source:
1) http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a6phLM6zkt8k
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
What are your thoughts on the article or on journalism of this nature? Do you mind just being told two people argued and here are some quotes?
ReplyDeleteIt's the entertainment of journalism. It sounds like something substantive could have been said about the topics which were being broached by Cheney et al, but what we get instead is the same redundant tripe we usually receive from the tabloids.
ReplyDeleteI think the authors of this article was kind of trapped, though. The point of the article is the war of words between the two, so they're reporting on that. Whether or not that's a worthy story is a different issue.
ReplyDeleteIt'd be tough to say that reporters should fact check every quote they put in an article because that would also take some of the 'reporting' out of it. Though I do agree, many of these points where they disagreed or had contrasting points, the journalists could have filled in the blanks for readers.