Shadow Footprints

Wanderings in Virtu and Verity.

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Professional News Reporting, Not

I'm not the only one who expects professional news reporting from the news media.

Every morning I read the newspaper and hope to find some accurate, professional news reporting.

Every evening I watch TV in the same vain hope.

More often than not however, the result is a poorly compiled digest of pseudo-facts and misinformation.

What on earth is going on with our news media these days and has the arrival of the Net made things better or worse?

TV news has turned into a tabloid-styled collection of fast-food-sized newsbytes that are packaged so as to emphasize the sizzle and almost completely ignore the meat of the story.

"Human interest" stories and stunning revelations that Rachel Hunter has posed nude for Playboy seem to be standard fare on the all-important 6 o'clock bulletin.

"In depth" reporting consists of a few current affairs programmes that tend to allocate about 15 minutes to each very-important story and again have an inordinately strong focus on titillation rather than information.