Mine eyes have seen the horror of the faking of the news.
I have witnessed shoddy reporting that was serious abuse…
Finally there's been a bit of a fuss (not enough really) about how much of our television news isn't really news:
Old news
We have pre-recorded news breaks that are anything but news updates—they're often recorded hours in advance, and are merely a rehash of the 6 O'clock news. It's tedious enough to keep being told the same thing, over and over, while watching a station for a few hours. But, more than that, it's extremely deceptive to promote such news breaks as being a news update. Leave the news interruptions out until you actually have some “news” to report, the “olds” are annoying wastes of time.
Hack news
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The prevelance of chequebook journalism. Where stories are paid for, and stations actively keep away the competition. They deny it, of course, but the recipients prove otherwise (e.g. not cashing their cheques, and letting others see them; people faking stories to see if the stations will fall for them, which they do, then outing them to a rival the next week)
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Where proper research goes right out the window, and whatever's sensational is reported as fact, or fact is sensationalised to the point it ceases to be fact. And stories where no real information is presented, at all—you find out nothing about something, and that's all you end up knowing.
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Journalists setting themselves up as judge, jury, and executioner on some issue (witchhunting). Which is bad enough, but they usually set out to prove a certain point of view, no matter what, rather than investigate the story. Such arrogance has destroyed quite a few legal cases, making it impossible for real justice to occur, and ruined lives. Investigative journalism and objective reporting seems to be a thing of the past.
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News crews falling over themselves to be the mouthpiece for popular issues and promotional material. Politicians don't get the grilling they so need, we see continual smarmy pat-on-the-back jobs, and no memory for the countless lies they've told. How many lies does a politician get to tell before they get branded as being a pathological lier and not get given any positive coverage? We see promotional stories for fictional programs being shown on the same channel, and so on…
Trivial fluff
- The football being ranked as more important that humanitarian disasters.
- Diet fads and other gossip-class stories presented as current affairs.