Friday, January 05, 2007

Chesterton the Journalist

The last couple days of posts centered around a poorly done news story, and the insertion of questionable history and unnecessary agendas into an article. Media bias and professionalism is a subject of great interest to me.

If you scan the Collected Works of Chesterton's essays and news columns, as is my job to do regularly, there soon appears a chasm between the standards of journalism in Chesterton's day and our own. Ironically, it was during GKCs era that "yellow journalism" came into our cultural lexicon.

Its not just a matter of bias, but professionalism. Even if I were an avowed-athiest-leftist-socialist-revolutionary, I would still take it as a matter of personal pride and attention to detail to accurately represent the opposing side, using correct terminology and not setting up straw man arguements.

Reporting of military stories particularly stirs my venom. ESPECIALLY if you are anti-war-anarchist-pacifist it would benefit you to understand the subject in at least a superficial way. At least that way if someone tells you a certain convoy is leaving for a specific purpose, you know enough about equipment and operations to know if they are lying. "They say they are going to do route security, but they wouldnt be taking XYZ if that were true. They have too many vehicles, something else is up........." Its amazing where you can get when you quit taking pride in ignorance and slovenliness all the while calling it unbiased.

1 comment:

Billiam said...

Kyro, when someone becomes a "true believer", for lack of a better term, their end goal justifies the means. If that means mis-representing the other side to make you look better, so be it. We see this in politics all the time. It also exists in the Global Warming debate, etc. For many, it's about winning, and nothing else.