Reporting and punditry that escaped infamy by Michael J. Socolow.
Does this remind you of reporting during 2016:
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As the day wore on, real reporting receded, giving way to more speculation. Right-wing commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. told an audience five hours after the attack that he shared the doubts of many American authorities that the Japanese were truly responsible. He “reported” that US military officials weren’t convinced Japanese pilots had the skills to carry out such an impressive raid. The War Department, he said, is “concerned to find out who the pilots of these planes are—whether they are Japanese pilots. There is some doubt as to that, some skepticism whether they may be pilots of some other nationality, perhaps Germans, perhaps Italians,” he explained. The rumor that Germans bombed Pearl Harbor lingered on the airwaves, with NBC reporting, on December 8, that eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Nazi swastikas painted on some of the bombers.
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More recent media failures include 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
Even more recently, the media has seized upon flights of fancy by “experts” to blame North Korea, Russia, the Islamic State and others for a variety of ills and disasters.
Thoughts on what leads to such media failures time and time again? I can’t think of a single major news event in the last fifty (50) years that wasn’t accompanied by:
…terrible punditry, inaccurate reporting, and ridiculous commentary
to steal Socolow’s closing line.
The failure of the news media reminds me of a discussion with a Hebrew Bible professor over the translation of a verse into English. He conceded that we don’t know the meaning of a particular term but said a translator cannot simply pass over an unknown term, but must translate it. The verse in question is well-known so the committee took refuge in giving the term an incorrect but “traditional” translation.
To what degree does the news media offer “terrible punditry, inaccurate reporting, and ridiculous commentary” because of a requirement that events, people, causes, “make sense?”
That is it is unsatisfying to report a plane crash, stock failure, bombing, without some attempt to outfit the event with an explanation.
I’m not sure if unsatisfying applies to the reporters, the news consuming public, or both.
For my part, I’m incurious about the motives of people who harm other people, assuming that even the “alleged perpetrator” has some insight into their motives. Motive is a complex and difficult subject under the best of circumstances and a sound bite of less than 30 seconds is a long way from being sufficient.
But it leaves the viewer with the false impression they have learned something about an event, people, etc.
One way to avoid “…terrible punditry, inaccurate reporting, and ridiculous commentary…,” unless you are required to respond to a particular event, is to simply ignore reporting for several days or weeks after an event. The more major the event, the longer you should delay.
For example, when 9/11 occurred, I was in San Jose, California at a Unicode conference. In fact, I was working on email waiting for the conference to start.
After the news had spread, the conference organizers asked the attendees what we wanted to do. Given the choice of watching loops of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and uninformed commentary or continuing with the conference, we chose the latter.
Delayed consumption of news of major events won’t improve the quality of the immediate reporting but it may give time for more reasonable voices to emerge. Still waiting on that to happen for 9/11.