Check My Facts Please

What ever happened to proofreading, editing, and fact checking? They don’t seem to exist in any way, shape, or form in today’s media. These days, the mainstream media simply prints or announces whatever garbage their writers submit. I use the term “writers” very loosely when referring to those who report for the newspapers.

On any given day, you can skim through a half dozen articles from the AP and find grammatical errors, repeated sentences, and even spelling mistakes. Do AP writers computers not come with spellchecker? I really don’t understand. Half of the time you can’t even make sense of what the article is about. Didn’t these people have to write essays in High School? Don’t they even remember the basic structure of an essay? You know, the introductory paragraph, the body of the essay, which contains multiple paragraphs, and finally, the concluding paragraph. That’s pretty basic and simple. The simple choice is often the best choice.

Poor spelling and poor grammar prove to me that there are no more actual editors in the industry. After all, that much garbage couldn’t get out to the public if they still existed could they? The repeated sentences and words, which occur far more frequently than you would think possible, make it quite obvious that the writers themselves don’t even proofread their work. Didn’t they have any English classes in High School? Isn’t that the first thing they teach you about writing? Proofread what you wrote.

All of that is bad enough, but what really gets to me is the lack of fact checking. I can accept poor spelling and bad grammar. It just makes the author appear ridiculous or ignorant. What I can’t stand is misinformation and negligence. The media is often unwittingly feeding us garbage and we don’t even know about it. I know this to be true because of how often I discover incorrect information. How often do they tell me lies about things I don’t know about? They lead us to believe that we are learning things, but in reality we aren’t learning anything. Last week I was reading a local newspaper serving an area with a population of about 250,000 people. In the outdoors section there was a large color picture of a turtle sunning itself on a log in a body of water. It was a common Painted Turtle, which is perhaps the most prevalent type of water dwelling reptile in the Midwest. Painted Turtles can be found in just about every spot of water within 200 miles of the area this newspaper serves. The caption under the picture identified it as a Box Turtle. That’s when I threw the newspaper away.

They’re telling us lies and we don’t know it. We know they’re doing it, but we just don’t know when. Responsible, reliable, articulate journalism is long gone. Now we have to suffer through whatever garbage they want to print. We don’t have to like it, though.

Date Added: 26-09-2006