Avoid suggestive, biased, unclear and oh yes, false descriptions of events, dressed as neutral reporting.
The failures, sometimes just a lack of discipline but too often reflecting a mindset, — and worse — the intentional abrogation of any dedication to honesty in reporting including from so-called news analysts associated with news agencies who have an obligation to truth not just opinion — is a large part of what is driving dwindling loyalty to legacy media – print and broadcast.
Here is a an item that caught our eye which appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. It validates our opinion about “mainstream” journalism across the board, or at least the discipline of editors of so-called straight news.
The photo caption’s purpose might be to confuse who hit who. Did Richard Spencer “punch the man”? What is so hard about saying the apparent white nationalist attendee was punched? Why imply the violence was and is not one-sided, or hard to discern? It looks to us that arguably someone from what appears to be a line protesting the speech, dressed in typical “antifa” garb, struck an individual dressed in arguably some sort of white nationalist garb. Draw your own implications about the purpose of the main text but sloppiness or “nuanced” purposefulness from layers of editors in a major publication on the visual grabber part of the story does not serve the news profession well. Leave sloppiness to us 🙂
David Harsanyi writing at The Federalist has more dead to rights commentary about CNN’s fake news proclivities:
10 Times CNN Told Us An Apple Was A Banana
Considering the numerous mistakes and misleading stories CNN has produced over the past several years, you’d think that they’d be a tad less sanctimonious.
The irony of the photo that is part of Harsanyi’s commentary is not lost — fake news proponent Dan Rather, appearing on a CNN program “Reliable Sources”
DLH with R Mall
