Complex Numbers

Speaking of journalism...

Speaking of journalism, as I might have mentioned before, my friend Pat works for the local newspaper. By "local newspaper," I mean the traditional daily paper with sections and legal notices and available for $0.50 in vending machines across the city.

The other newspapers in town are weeklies, and they're free, so those are the ones I actually read. Sometimes.

Thing is, like I said in yesterday's entry, I'm pretty sure journalism is dying, even as its domain is largely being transferred from print to online media. I threw out the "I blame bloggers" line as a self-deprecating joke, but I may be more serious than I thought.

See, there's an old saying to the effect of "Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one, and most of them stink." Back in the old days, if you wanted to express an opinion publicly, you had to send it to the aforementioned newspaper (or one of its ilk in a different town) along with your name and address and other identifying information, and they'd verify that it was you before they printed it - so you don't go impersonating someone you don't like, I guess.

Now, of course, we're pretty much all anonymous and we all have our own opinion pages where we can shout out any old thing. No one checks the facts, and if someone has an objection it's likely they'll just quit reading, and stick to sources they agree with - or, at worst, send a comment like "U SUCK!!!1!"

Anyway, Pat's paper just laid off its entire printing press staff. Seems rather than pay to fix the press, they're just going to send the pages over to the next town, and have it printed there. They'll cart the papers back here for distribution.

I don't know if subscription rates are dropping; I know I dropped mine as soon as I got an internet connection.

There's more to the death of news than just the impending death of print media, though. For starters, there's no longer any need to polish a story before it goes to print; you can just print what you have and post an update later. If something turns out to be offensive, you can delete it. And it pays to post a first draft; after all, they still want to scoop the other guys.

So we're left with three different, but interacting trends:

1) Everyone's a journalist, and there are fewer and fewer editors or ombudsmen.
2) Print media is dying, and
3) Internet sources are questionable.

Journalists have every reason to be lazy.

And as orangefiire commented on my last entry, I'd rather hear the raw truth on the news than a bunch of government entwined crap that's on there. I suppose for the individual journalist without any sense of morals, being aligned with the gov't makes their life easier - and makes us all more ignorant. Well, whether aligned with the government or not, everyone has an agenda. Hopefully that agenda is, "I will present the facts." But usually even that is affected by some bias. Conservatives are always whining that the media has a liberal bias, so they purposely lean right in their own spaces (like Faux News). It's hard to write objectively when all the facts run contrary to your predetermined point of view.

Well, I think reality has a liberal bias, but what does my opinion matter?

I have an agenda, too - it's to make myself utterly irresistible to all women and eventually take over the world. I think I'm succeeding.

Since my other agenda is also to be funny (actually, that works toward my main agenda), I'll link this relevant quote, found for me by my friend elleetwombly:

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/000211.html

20-something Intellectual: Facts are such a distraction from the essence of what's really happening.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

By the way, hit "Random Quote" from that page - it's hours of funny.