Some will see
this week’s blog as the ravings of a curmudgeonly old fool and maybe they are.
However I suspect many will share my feelings of disquiet over how we are
served by our media.
The standards of
professionalism in print media have all but vanished. I could and have filled
an entire blog with examples of grammatical incompetence and such errors occur
daily in almost every newspaper or online news service. My wife recently asked
me what they teach at journalism school these days. I was the wrong person to ask;
because I have never been there, but it is abundantly evident correct spelling
and grammar are not on the menu.
To be fair, many
of the errors we see should rightly be blamed upon the sub-editors. They are
the ones paid exclusively for the purpose of picking up such errors and
correcting them along with ensuring the story is appropriately titled and reads
as if it was written by somebody who actually completed their schooling.
It is
conceivable our journalists were always this bad and that it is only the
sub-editors who have let their standards slide down the gurgler. I always felt
outsourcing their role to ‘subbing hubs’ rather than having the work done
onsite where the journos who wrote the stories are based was bound to cause
problems.
Bad grammar and
poor spelling are not the only shortcomings of the print media however. For
example where has investigative journalism gone? And worse still, how many
times do you get to the end of a story and find the writer has left out one of
the key ‘Ws’?
I am probably a
real thorn in the arse of some of the newspapers because I notice shit, but I
don’t think I’m alone. Far too often I get to the end of a story and have an
obvious question about it that was clearly never asked by the reporter.
A minor example
is a story that appeared this week in SunDead about a spate of burglaries in Mount
Maunganui. We heard how the burglars had been brazen enough to enter properties
while the residents were sleeping and nick off with their stuff. One
interviewee said, “...they come in while
people are home, if the back doors open they will walk in while people are in
the house.” When somebody says something like that, you would expect the
interviewer to follow up and ask if the doors were left open or unlocked in
each of, or most of these burglaries. In which case the solution is pretty
bloody self evident and it is not a big heart-wrenching story about poor burglary
victims so much as one about a bunch of careless nitwits. It might be the former but thanks to sloppy
reporting we will never know.
We also
encounter factual carelessness where sometimes only half the story is given
rather like a quote taken out of context and on other occasions the information
is just plain wrong and ill-informed.
A recent story
in SunDead told us how “Four men accused of murdering Tauranga man
Gary Kimura elected trial at their arraignment in the High Court in Rotorua
today.” Not like they had
any choice! I think the reporter’s crayon must have broken before he or she
could get out the words ‘by jury’ or ‘by judge’, but it might be simply that
they didn’t understand what was going on in court and are completely ignorant
of court proceedings.
A recent headline that breathlessly told us how a bloke had escaped jail
on his 10th driving while disqualified conviction turned out to be
nothing of the sort. The judge had simply delayed sentencing to get some more
reports in.
The Sun isn’t the only culprit whose reporters seem to lack what it takes
to be a journalist. Their arch-rival the Waste of Times is not much better. The
rest of the APN stable aren’t much better and you won’t see any better
performance from Fairfax either.
The malaise that has infected our print media is able to jump species and
has also infected broadcast media (or was that the other way around?). In any
event it is now par for the course to see spelling mistakes in on-screen
captions and you simply cannot rely upon a single fact you are not well versed
in through your own experiences.
A recent example was when the Broadcasting Standards Authority fined Don
McDonald for bringing a complaint against One News. You might recall Don complained
over an item about a young Canadian girl who had discovered a supernova. The
item said it was 240 light years from earth, but in fact it was 240,000,000
light years from earth, which I am sure anyone would agree was an inaccurate
report. However the BSA seemed to think the facts didn’t matter because it was
a feel good story and really about the kid finding the supernova rather than
the supernova itself. On that basis I could broadcast an item saying I had
built a 4000 metre replica of SkyTower out of Lego when in fact I had only
built one 4mm high. But hey what the heck it’s a feel good story and it’s
actually about me building the thing. Never mind it is a million times smaller
than we told you.
What inspired this piece today was the recent descent of National Radio which
usually delivers good programming. Two recent ‘news’ items have got up
my nose on this station and one has even prompted me to lay a complaint about
breached broadcasting standards.
The first item
was on the news during checkpoint where they told us KFC’s Double Down Burger
is coming back. Hello? I thought National Radio was a commercial free zone. The
return of a disgusting chemical and fat laden excuse for a burger is not news.
It is advertising. There are no redeeming social features to the Double Down –
not that I’ve ever eaten or seen one, or even wanted to. It is not crucial to
the economy; it does not even have a human interest angle. It is just free
advertising for a foreign company who should be paying for a slot on commercial
radio instead.
However the
absolute nadir was reached this morning when Morning Report ran an interview
with the parents of the triplets that dies in a fire in the Doha shopping mall.
The poor bastards couldn’t get more than two words at a time out between sobs
and the whole performance was absolutely awful. I deem that sort of shit ‘churnalism’
with no mitigating aspects at all. I can’t for the life of me imagine what
useful purpose it served. It was tacky, tabloid audio voyeurism or auteurism or
whatever the audio equivalent is. I don’t know whether the family sought this
interview or not, but I don’t believe it makes any difference if they did. Any
decent programme producer would have said ‘we ain’t running that’. But then I
guess decency is another standard that has gone by the wayside for many. Anyway
I logged my complaint, but after Don McDonald’s experience I’m not holding my
breath.
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