[LINK] Why the Net fades your Media as well as your curtains

[Bruce Arnold]

..not to mention your cows. Since the invention of the steam press and the linotype (and new fangled nasties like radio and television) 'serious journalists'  have lamented  -- esp as they head for retirement/the lecture circuit/curmudgeondom -- that technology is: 
+ lowering editorial and news collecting standards 
+ encouraging sensationalism
+ fostering the growth of 'big' (ie bad) media
+ otherwise resulting in the end of Civilisation as we know it
There are other reasons for the supposed decline in media credibility and --looking at some of the studies of how working class and elite readers deconstructed the news in the 1890s and 1940s -- the 'decline' is neither real nor perhaps matters 

btw - I trust that any 12 year olds rushing copy to Australian anchor desks are on the premises for work experience.   


>>> <richard@auscoms.com.au> 02/14/00 05:08pm >>>
Or, as The Register puts it in an entirely unrelated article:
"have journalists become so used to the great pace of technology that the fear
of looking foolish has overriden the need to investigate astonishing claims?"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/000214-000002.html 

Richard Chirgwin
____________________Reply Separator____________________
Subject:    [LINK] Media and the Net
Author: "Bill D'Arcy" <billd@lisp.com.au>
Date:       14/02/00 16:10

Linkers
http://www.it.fairfax.com.au/breaking/20000214/A17414-2000Feb14.html 
Information age too fast for ethical standards
9:00 Monday 14 February 2000
AAP
THE increasing speed of information delivery has caused some news
organisations to relax editing standards - cutting into public confidence
in the media, a veteran reporter has told a US National Press Club audience.
"I think the fast part of it is the really damaging thing to ... our
credibility,'' Washington Post political reporter David Broder said
yesterday at a media ethics panel he shared with 11 other journalists and
media experts.
Broder said many errors that had resulted in a loss of public confidence
were attributable to the absence of a thorough editing process. He said
stories at the Post were often posted on its website unedited, and
television ran into similar problems.
"I have been on the set ... when some 12-year-old rushes a piece of copy
(to the anchor people), they read it, and at the next commercial break,
having some sense of judgment and perspective, one or the other will say,
'Where the hell did that come from?' But by now it's out there in the
ether,'' he said.
The annual National Roundtable was sponsored by the Scripps Howard
Foundation. It was carried live by C-SPAN and moderated by C-SPAN founder
Brian Lamb.
Associated Press president and CEO, Louis Boccardi, said the sort of
instantaneous reporting Broder spoke about could not be reversed, but the
media still were "obliged to bring the same standards'' as before.
Boccardi noted that the voluminous Starr Report of Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr's 1998 investigation of United States President Bill Clinton
reached AP members through The Wire, the agency's multimedia World Wide Web
site, in six seconds.
The Watergate Report, with technology available two decades ago, would have
required 33 hours.
Boccardi said journalists could not be swept up by the speed but must rely
on the same traditional editing processes that had protected against errors
in the past.

Bill D'Arcy