

It's Hard To Get The News From The News - lwc123
http://larrycheng.com/2009/08/12/its-hard-to-get-the-news-from-the-news/

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eli
Am I missing something?

They all seem about the same to me: It was a friendly crowd. At one point the
President specifically sought tough questions. What's the beef?

What is it about the Huff Post that makes it seem the "most accurate"
portrayal? Especially since neither of us were there.

If I were writing a story, I definitely would have included that people
chanted "Yes we can!". Sure, it's a bit anecdotal and may not be
representative of everyone or the rest of the event, but it's such a stark
contrast to recent Congressional town halls and such a vivid image. That's
what struck me watching it on TV.

~~~
jrwoodruff
Read closer man. They're not all the same. The descriptions range from the
meeting including "skeptics from whom he sought questions..." of which
"...plenty responded" to a crowd that "soft-balled him opportunities to knock
down criticism."

The NYT's description sounds like a good, thoughtful debate, the Fox News
description sounds like a staged PR event. The others fall somewhere in
between.

It's about the image you draw in your head of the meeting while reading each
passage, and while they report basically the same facts, each article
emphasizes said facts differently, creating quite different pictures of how
the meeting went down.

~~~
eli
_shrug_

They're not all the same, but they're all basically true.

If you were to assign five writers to cover a totally non-political event, you
are still going to get five different characterizations of people at the
event. I don't think this is evidence of anything evil.

It's a bit like complaining about different movie reviewers with conflicting
accounts of the same movie.

I'm not denying that news outlets have institutional biases that sometimes
comes out in the writing, but this seems like an especially mild case.

~~~
danek
this made me think of a 2 things

1, the event doesn't even seem like it should be newsworthy. isn't there more
important stuff happening?

2, even for the most unimportant of events, it seems the different outlets'
bias shows. As usual, Fox portrays Obama in a negative light and the Times
makes him seem heroic.

At least that's what i took away from it. I mean, it's nothing Earth-
shattering and we all knew this already.

------
miked
Here's another perspective on the mother of the little girl who was "randomly
selected" because Obama didn't want anyone thinking he was "just taking
questions from a plant".

"I have been honored to work with Kathleen Manning Hall on the New England
Finance and Steering Committee for Barack Obama for over a year. She has
raised money, slogged through the snow in New Hampshire and has devoted every
minute of her time toward electing Barack Obama President of the United
States. She has not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. Please elect
her as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention to vote for Barack
Obama.” Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick)"

<http://www.bluemassgroup.com/diary/11161/>

David Axelrod was one of the world's great masters of corporate astroturfing
before he joined Obama's campaign. Most of his work was for companies who
wanted blogs to mention there products in a "spontaneous" groundswell of
support.

AFAIK, he is the first president to demand that the media submit all of its
questions to his press secretary the day before the press conferences so he
can select only the ones he wants.

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mseebach
In order to move past this, we have to accept a basic lemma of reporting:
There can be no objective reporting.

------
kingkawn
Each report on an event has always been this divergent, either because of the
normal differences between two people describing the same thing, or for
political motivations. The only thing new now is that we can easily compare
them all in an instant.

------
icey
It'd sure be nice to start moving away from all the politics submissions.

~~~
bwhite
If politics were less important (more or less == "if government were smaller
and less intrusive") it would be less interesting and submissions about it
would crater.

It's the same reason why SCOTUS nominations are so contentious now. Previously
the Supremes had both less power relative to the other two branches and far,
far less power to actually impact the lives of regular folks.

~~~
icey
The problem is that political submissions are by nature very contentious. Just
because they get upvotes doesn't mean they belong here. Half the population
will agree, and the other half can't downvote. I don't think may people flag
them because of all of the other political submissions that have ended up on
the front page lately.

------
edw519
Three blind men were put next to an elephant and asked what it was.

One touched its leg and said that it was a tree.

One touched its side and said that it was a wall.

One touched its trunk and said that is was a snake.

We need journalists with "vision" now more than ever.

~~~
biohacker42
The analogy is a bit flawed, it's more like:

An underpaid and overworked journalists is sent to report on this new
"Elephant" animal that's been the discovered.

Being overworked and underpaid all the journalist can muster is a quick look
at the back side of the animal over the shoulders of the crowd. Then the
journalist quickly has to get back to writing his story, because he gets paid
by the word and the deadline is looming.

Having glanced the elephant's back side, the reporter knows it's sort of like
a giant gray pig. But he also knows that's not interesting enough and he
thinks his readers are a lot stupider then him. So he writes the story about a
giant gray man eating pig.

And that's Journalism!

~~~
eli
It's pretty hard to write about an event in which not much really happened.
Especially when people really, really want to hear about what happened. I
don't think this is a personal failing on the part of the journalists.

