{"id":11620,"date":"2022-04-27T14:01:45","date_gmt":"2022-04-27T04:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=11620"},"modified":"2022-07-15T22:39:52","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T12:39:52","slug":"the-death-of-traditional-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2022\/04\/27\/the-death-of-traditional-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The death of traditional journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Journalism is a humble activity, or at least it should be. To be a reporter in a newsroom is to be continually confronted with severe obstacles to uncovering the truth.\nIn the past, the way to deal with that was to practise disinterest: avoid personally interfering with the story. But, because of the rise of advocacy journalism, that approach has changed, leaving the trade in a greatly diminished state.\nJournalists spend most of their working lives in a state of unavoidable ignorance. If, for instance, a reporter interviews an expert, that person will typically have spent decades developing their knowledge. The journalist will, at best, have spent only a few hours on the matter. The way to address that inevitable imbalance is to represent, as fairly as possible, only what the interviewee is saying and no more. No personal opinions allowed.\nMore experienced journalists do develop some depth of general knowledge if they specialise in a subject area. But even then they should be careful about thinking they know more than the people to whom they are talking.\nThe second obstacle facing journalists, especially those who have worked in business and finance sections (as this writer has), is being constantly confronted with tactics to conceal the truth. The techniques are legion: outright lying, red herrings, misleading but true facts, half truths, quarter truths, lack of context, deceptive jargon, false or misleading statistics, lobbying by astro-turf organisations, threats of legal ...<\/p>\n <\/div>\n

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