From This is what is killing newspapers. The post is short, even this short quote is a large part of the text, but it’s well worth your while to go read the rest and the comment thread.
I agree with the original commenter that sparked Ian’s post, not because I don’t think news isn’t worth it, but because most news isn’t. It’s fiction and lightweight gossip for the most part.
If there’s one thing I learnt over the last three years and the tremendous news coverage that Iceland has been getting it’s that mainstream media is incapable of writing even one news item without getting something substantially wrong.1
Blogs are even worse; discussions based on ignorance and arrogance, free of frills such as facts or research.
It’s not just finance and politics news that gets handled this incompetently, recent coverage of Iceland’s ban of strip clubs is also devoid of salient, relevant bites of info such as the fact that strip clubs have only been legal there since 1995 and for the last few years only legal in a small township just outside of Reykjavík while being banned in the capital proper. Or that the production of pornography is illegal as well (consumption is in somewhat a grey area, technically illegal but isn’t really policed).
Mainstream news isn’t worth £2 a week or a year because it doesn’t have enough facts to qualify as news and is too boring to qualify as fiction.
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I’ve known for a long time that media (and blogs that don’t specialise in science and health) are incapable of getting science and health stories right and often blatantly misrepresent research, but the magnitude of their incompetence was a surprise, especially in what should be media’s core competence: major current events. ↩
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theirdarkaddress reblogged this from kvasir
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kvasir posted this
