One dead and one Missing at Buford Springs (FL, USA)

[KevinNM]

I suppose I've gotten used to the idea that most of the media is somewhat useless for the goal of being informed.

For us to get any info, it would likely have to come from the police, or a scuba-org working with the police. I wouldn't expect your average journalist to know much about SCUBA, from what I've seen, articles mostly just copy+pasted public statements by the police. I suppose if someone is feeling ambitious, they could try doing journalist's work and try contacting the local police department for more info.

Remember, this is probably the case for everything else the news covers too. You just notice it when they are covering something you understand. Wet streets don’t cause rain, even though that’s what the press tells you happened.

 

[SlugLife]

Remember, this is probably the case for everything else the news covers too. You just notice it when they are covering something you understand. Wet streets don’t cause rain, even though that’s what the press tells you happened.

That's not even getting into when the media has an incentive to lie.

 

[boulderjohn]

We live in a world where anyone can be a "journalist" for some media outlet somewhere. When someone posts some fact that doesn't ring true, I do a Google search and find the information in some news outlet I have never heard of. Then I see the same information has been posted in about 20 other outlets I have never heard of, and if I dig deeper, I often see many of the reports are word-for-word the same, meaning someone posted a story and 20 others plagiarized it without confirming the accuracy. What I won't see is the story in any of the established news sources (Reuters, AP, BBC, etc.)

In the meantime, the major university in my town (University of Colorado) dropped its journalism major because of a lack of interest. Many other schools across the nation have done the same.

 

[Gene]

That's extremely sad Boulderjohn regarding UC dropping its journalism program. I assume it was a BSJ, like we have here at UF in Gainesville. (Where my brother and I graduated in 1989 in photojournalism.) We grew up in an almost 100-year-old family business of journalism and newspapers in the South. Mostly Georgia and Florida. As our founding fathers knew, a truly free press was and is extremely important to help maintain a free country. As much as I sometimes get irritated by a seemingly too liberal press, I never forget the importance of the fourth estate and our United States.
Like you, I also see these would be journalist, usually writing for "publications" I've never heard of. I don't usually even open and read it unless it's from a news source I know.
My father used to tell us that after Watergate, kids couldn't wait to get into j-schools across the country to be the next Woodward and Bernsteins. Now I guess they'd be on Twitter and Tik Tok.... I wonder if Pulitzers will be awarded for that category some day.

 

[boulderjohn]

My father used to tell us that after Watergate, kids couldn't wait to get into j-schools across the country to be the next Woodward and Bernsteins. Now I guess they'd be on Twitter and Tik Tok.... I wonder if Pulitzers will be awarded for that category some day.

I watched a PBS special on the history of Alex Jones of Infowars. They interviewed former employees. The gist of the show was that he learned over the years that the more outrageous the content of his shows, the more his viewership grew and the more money he made through advertising. He was eventually making up stuff completely, with not even the trace of a basis in fact, and it made him a multimillionaire.

In what we have long called the legitimate press, a reporter who falsified a story would be fired, the outlet would apologize, and it would be big news. In those other outlets, false reporting is encouraged, for it increases the audience and the ad revenues.

 

[Gene]

Yes, it is a sad and unfortunate by-product with today's news-from-anywhere (and anyone) online shtick.
But, I also never forgot the stories from the yellow journalism days in the 1890s with Pulitzer, Hearst and others getting all tabloidy to help start the Spanish-American War and sell papers!
Remember the Maine...

 

[boulderjohn]

Yes, it is a sad and unfortunate by-product with today's news-from-anywhere (and anyone) online shtick.
But, I also never forgot the stories from the yellow journalism days in the 1890s with Pulitzer, Hearst and others getting all tabloidy to help start the Spanish-American War and sell papers!
Remember the Maine...

That certainly happened back then, and a news outlet's reputation rose and fell as a result of it. Remember that S.J. Perelman once wrote that he asked a train porter to bring him a newspaper. “Unfortunately,” Perelman said, “the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times." The Los Angeles Times is now held in higher repute than it was then, but it took a while.

It still happens today. When I was in education, we got the education reporter from the very hostile Rocky Mountain News to do an in-depth study of an education program we were introducing. The reporter spent 6 weeks in the classroom watching how students learned, and he wrote a glowing review of the program and the obvious benefits to the students. As he told me later, he was called into the main editor and called a traitor. The paper's goal was to get the public to hate public education so that they would support vouchers for private education, and the reporter had betrayed that goal. He was transferred to the gardening section of the paper. That paper is now out of business.

What is different now is that multiple independent sources rate news outlets on their objectivity. You can see charts that tell you where the biases of your favorite outlets lie.