wexter wrote: ↑Mon Aug 14, 2023 1:01 pm
Journalism (and especially facts-based reporting on the ground) no longer exists.
You're not wrong. Print media is being slowly strangled by the Web and journalism is going for the ride. Journalists are helping to accelerate the death of their own employment, by using and freely quoting from Wikipedia, as if it were "accurate history". Sometimes it is and sometimes not and not enough people care.
But then "real journalism" was always more of a specialty product. Reporting generally had to sell dead trees or it was useless. If you wanted "actual complicated facts", you went to independent "non-newspaper" sources like
The Nation, private newsletters or magazines that did not actually specialize in news reporting, the
New Yorker or
Esquire (or even
Playboy) being obvious examples. It's truly disgusting that a girly magazine was also an unusually neutral news outlet. America, you so funny.
An example; Some jerk at Associated Press being flown out to a major story days later and long after the news event took place
There's a term for this: "parachute journalism". And if they show up in mobs, it's "pack journalism".
The big story is that Wikipedia is not "shiny new" technology-thingy social-network anymore.... not only is it a half baked idea and a cult; it is done over kaput.. it is being replaced..
You wanna see something very perversely Wikipedian? I.F. Stone was famous in the mid-20th century as a truly independent journalist who ran his own newsletter. He had a long and distinguished career. Won many awards despite not being affiliated with a major publication.
Have a look at his Wikipedia bio; it talks about his distinguished journalism career, but it also blubbers on and on that he "might have been a Soviet spy". This subject was beaten into the ground before I was born, and they're still beating on it, 34 years after Stone's death. Remember that he was a hardcore leftist and a pro-Israel Jew, both of which should make him a hero to Wikipedia insiders--and yet Wikipedia STILL wants to shit on Stone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone
The largest contributor to that article was permablocked as a sockpuppet of Mhazard9, a notorious figure in the "Race and Intelligence" war and often accused of being Otto Placik, a plastic surgeon who tried to glorify himself on WP. Epic fuckhead Mathsci didn't like Mhazard9; thus, WP nitwits chased him obsessively. What's REALLY going on here? You tell me. THIS is what makes Wikipedia an unreliable source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Chas._Caltrop