The Media Circus?

[canyonwalker]

I was intrigued by several points made in the discussion on NPR's Talk of the Nation program yesterday (19 Dec), "What The Media Got Wrong In The Newtown Story" (link). The main points to me were:

1. The way the media got facts wrong in the hours after this calamity is not a symptom of modern recklessness driven by the proliferation of cable TV

Comments

[mhnicholson]

I used to work for a company that put news headlines on pagers (yeah, those who don't know what a pager is can get off my damn lawn) so we had access to a lot of the AP, Reuters and other feeds that the news institutions use to decide what stories to pursue. Each story would mutate throughout the day, often reversing major factual points of the story.

Real time news is basically taking those raw feeds and reporting them before verifying them. It's a time for trust trade -- you can't have both.

[canyonwalker]

Hey, you were at least working on the more modern pagers-- those with the ability, essentially, to send a text message. Earlier pagers were like text message tools minus the message.