This from the Riverside Press-Enterprise of March 11:
In reporting on Roger Ebert's visit to Rancho Mirage, the paper carried a column with the following:
Headline: "Critic: 'Crash' a better picture"
Actual quote: "It just may be that some people thought "Crash" was a better picture."
Yes. That's a nit. Is it, though, indicative of haste? Or carelessness? Or bias? Or? Or?
One thing for sure: readers must read carefully and thoroughly. Otherwise, our affinity for bumper sticker substitutes for philosophy might affect our decision making processes.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Accuracy in Media?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
As someone who has been one of the ghosts in the media machine, situations like can generally be attributed to haste. I wouldn't say carelessness, but not being careful enough can be a problem as well.
ReplyDeleteDon't jump on the media "bias" bandwagon on this one though. Oh, sure, the copy editor who wrote the headline may have a bias for one movie over another (if working nights allows them time to see first-run movies in a theater). But I don't quite understand why the bias card gets played so much. The mainstream media does a lot to beat the bias' out of their employees and try to produce news that is devoit of much life or personality at all in order to not let bias show in a anything written by a reporter or headline writer.
And why are blogs, which are obviously biased, so popular? Could it be that the bias is out there, in readers' faces? I think the people get pissed at the mainstream media for so much is they can't tell which side "they" are on and they use their own biases to read things in to the words, pictures, and presentations they find in the media.
Not that I'm biased or anything.