Sunday, November 18, 2007

The 'You've Been Framed' Approach To Reporting

I'll admit that I feared this would turn out to be this month's 'leave Britney alone' moment but writer Helen Brown makes some good points, the best being what - in retrospect anyway - is the most obvious: namely, who on earth was expecting Britain's most persistently self-destructive diva to turn up sober anyway ?

Of course, in the great scheme of things, pop culture is neither here nor there, still there's a deeper issue here. The article offers us an insight into modern journalism. Consider that the main charge HB levels is that her fellow journalists spent the minimum amount of time on site and were only interested in gotcha! incidents - no matter how isolated and unrepresentative of the general picture they were. Hmmmm.... now I put it like that, it seems somehow familiar.

I guess we're lucky the journalists actually went to the gig, rather than staying lodged in the bar of the Birmingham Holiday Inn and sending out Iraqi stringers.

There's something else too. Consider that journalists keep on yammering about how they - unlike mere bloggers - carry out original reporting. Really ? Here's a member of the MSM confirming what we always suspected: most MSM reporting consists of deciding what line to take, then turning up just long enough to cherry-pick a couple of anecdotes to support that position. Hey, at least bloggers are honest about what we do.

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