

The Worst Journalism of 2014 - samclemens
http://www.cjr.org/darts_and_laurels/the_worst_journalism_of_2014.php?page=all

======
harry8
Fox should not be present in this list. In no way is what Fox & Friends doing
journalism. It's not even worthy of being described as an impersonation of
journalism a la Wolf Blitzer and co. on CNN or the cavalcade of idiots on
CNBC. Giving fox & friends an award for bad journalism, even the worst
journalism, is actually giving it credibility that it has earned the right not
to have. It is literally beneath this sort of contempt. If it were written in
a satirical novel the critics would call the reality of fox and friends an
unrealistically drawn hyperbole.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_If it were written in a satirical novel the critics would call the reality of
fox and friends an unrealistically drawn hyperbole_

I've yet to read a more apt description of the network than thus.

------
jsnk
My pick: The Face Behind Bitcoin by Leah McGrath Goodman [Newsweek:
[http://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-
bitcoin-24795...](http://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-
bitcoin-247957.html)]

~~~
mtgentry
Mine too. Here was a case where they repeatedly looked the other way when the
evidence didn't serve their narrative.

To me it's the first example of link-bait style reporting in print journalism.

~~~
dllthomas
_" To me it's the first example of link-bait style reporting in print
journalism."_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism)

------
Spooky23
The worst journalism are the stories that aren't printed.

In my city, the local rag is tightly affiliated with the city administration.
So when stories appear that don't jive with the desired narrative (like two
armed robberies in busy pedestrian neighborhoods in the span of a week), they
just don't get reported.

The decline of old-school publications undermines the profession... One
newspaper and a couple of lousy TV stations provide no incentive to be
aggressive, especially with government officials. It's easier to print
softballs and be friends.

------
lpsz
It's okay, because with decreasing attention spans, journalism will eventually
be swallowed by click-bait BuzzFeeds of this world.

If you disagree, it's because on HN you're among peers that can actually read
an entire NYT article or a think tank report. In one sitting. Without a
Snapchat break. And HN is not representative of the general population.

~~~
Blackthorn
I really don't understand why people bash on BuzzFeed, _especially_ when
talking about an article like this. It's a place where real journalism gets
done. One of the few that are left, really.

~~~
sp332
My only exposure to BuzzFeed was the flood of listicles that swamped my
Facebook feed until I blocked the website. I didn't even know they tried to do
journalism until the Uber scandal.

~~~
notahacker
Until reading that article I'd have said the only thing that could be said in
favour of Buzzfeed is that their listicles had fewer pretensions towards
journalism (and better pictures) than most blogspam.

------
hawkice
This is an incredibly hard list to crack, and I don't think the author took
their task seriously. I think, instead, they went with things that might be
interesting to get angry about. Misphrasing or being rude during an interview
is bad, for instance, but how did it leap above all the lies produced by
laziness? For example:

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16641](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16641)

It's not sexy -- which is precisely why journalists simply lie to you about
it. You don't care, they don't care, no one really cares except experts and
the PR company that gives them the story. And it happens in almost every field
of expertise (I notice it a lot more in sciences, but that probably only
reflects my relative expertise in that cluster of ideas).

~~~
d23
> You don't care, they don't care, no one really cares

Well, why should they be in this list then? I _really_ don't care if some
local rag told their city of 2000 the intricacies of cow speech, even if
completely fabricated. I think most of us have learned to collectively skip
the nonsense anyway. What I _do_ care about are large institutions that are
manipulating the thinking of entire voting blocks, swaying the public
discourse, and affecting the outcome of elections.

------
danso
I'm glad to see the Rolling Stone debacle at the top of this list...to me,
it's one of the appalling examples of journalistic dysfunction that I can
recall off-hand. Yes, I know that the media's overall screwup up of the Iraq
War was "worse" in many regards...but on the other hand, it was a much more
diffuse and broad situation...not only the scope of the topic, but the
coverage (within the same publication, different articles had different levels
of critique).

The RS article, in contrast, involved a pretty simple reporting obstacle: _did
the main character accurately describe events?_ Even if she wouldn't allow
herself to be identified, nor (inexplicably) identify her attackers, there
were many ways to circumstantially confirm her story...and RS did none of
them. It's come out that the RS reporter may have lied about even contacting
"Jackie's" friends.

One reporter's lies and incompetence is bad enough...but the fact that her
work just passed through RS's reportedly legendary fact-checking process, its
editors, and its lawyers...is just devastating. The best thing that could come
out of this is that Rolling Stone as a journalistic institution falls on its
sword and cleans house. At any of the other news outlets I've worked for, even
my college paper, I can't imagine being able to publish a story like this
doing as little verification as the RS reporter did.

One of the worst collateral damages from this (aside from the obvious harm to
rape victims who now have even more reason to fear publicity) is seeing how
easy it is to co-opt the journalistic institution. Few people questioned the
RS reporter's ethics because _Hey, she 's written several well-regarded
stories about rape for Rolling Stone...there's no way she'd have the standards
of an intern for this story, right?_ Even worse were the people (including the
reporter herself) who said: _" Well, the gang rape victim wasn't the story,
the story was how U.Va ignored it"_...Um yeah, how exactly does U.Va ignore an
egregious incident that we don't know if the victim actually reported it to
U.Va?

For my part, when I first read the story, I immediately tweeted/shared it as
one of the most compelling stories I read all year. I didn't even think to
notice the unsaid implication that the reporter never located the accused, nor
talked to anyone besides the victim herself...that was my professional bias
(i.e. _Of course the reporter talked to them and got no comment...that 's what
every reporter is supposed to at least do_). But my bias about college
fraternities and the problems of rape reporting, and my previous respect for
Rolling Stone as a news source, made me accept with little hesitation a story
that, in retrospect, was too awful (and perfect in its details) to be true.

So the RS U.Va story may not have been the worst journalistic fuckup when it
comes to consequences...but it's definitely was the worst in terms of showing
the flaws in the reporting process, and in how poorly we are able to evaluate
the truth behind a story.

~~~
bhaumik
That story absolutely rattled the entire UVa community (I'm an alum). There
were bricks thrown into the alleged fraternity forcing the members to move
out. President Sullivan also shutdown all fraternity activities pending an
internal investigation.

~~~
nailer
This in 2014, the same year the Duke Lacrosse team finally cleared their names
after having them dragged trough the mud for nearly a decade.

------
pollinaise
You can do your part to fix this by not watching TV news and not reacting to
clickbait in any medium, on sheer principle. If you can't manage that, at
least don't spread the disease to others by bringing up the latest hypes and
scares.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_You can do your part to fix this by not watching TV news and not reacting to
clickbait in any medium_

Funny, I don't do any of those things, yet this stuff seem to continue
unabated. How many people need to (not) do it for a critical mass?

------
joyrider
I'm surprised Forbes didn't make the list. It has to be the worst of the major
business publications in terms of low quality content and high ratio of ads.

------
vrao423
None of the morning or prime time shows should be considered journalism. This
article has no credibility in my eyes as the author cannot differentiate
between 60 minutes and Fox & Friends.

Also, not sure how mentioning that he can smell marijuana is bad journalism.
He is suppose to report what he sees, smells or hears. Is a journalist suppose
to edit himself to push a particular view?

~~~
notahacker
You honestly can't see how the remark " _obviously_ there's marijuana in the
air" might be considered bad journalism?

Observing that there's the smell of marijuana in the air is journalism, though
you'd have to balance that against the relative importance of other
observations he could have made within the same time frame. It's a entirely
different thing to express the view that "obviously" the protests involve a
lot of marijuana and push - intentionally or otherwise - the particular view
that one should expect protests against alleged police brutality to be under
the influence of drugs [especially with all those poor black people around?].
As the original article strongly hinted, that was probably a slip rather than
an attempt to push a particular agenda... maybe he even actually meant the
smell was _readily detectable_ rather than _inevitable at that sort of
protest_. He's far from likely to have wanted to imply anything about the
inevitability of a certain demographic behaving a certain way. It's bad
journalism to make those kind of insinuations for intentional effect, rank bad
journalism to do it without an agenda to push or even awareness of what might
be implied.

------
itg
The Uber controversy showed me what journalism is all about. It's ok for them
to dig as much dirt on you as possible and present half-facts, but they go
into a rage the moment you question their motives and try to find any info on
them.

~~~
knowtheory
You're letting a single Buzzfeed article define what journalism is to you, and
then complain about others presenting half-facts?

c'mon.

------
Pxtl
Start suing them.

~~~
protomyth
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan)
makes it very, very hard

------
iconjack
Last year's winner should have been NPR's

    
    
       U.S. Worries NSA Leaker's Files Could Be Hacked  (Tom Gjelten)
    

[0]
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2035315...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=203531584)

This story came out when Snowden was still at the Moscow airport. At issue is
whether Snowden's files can fall into the hands of the Russians or Chinese.
This is a fair question. But the piece focuses on physical access to the files
on Snowden's laptops, which is simply comical. Of course they can take his
files. A listener would get the impression that Snowden's protection of the
data consists of holding tight to his computers while the Russians attempt to
wrest them from his arms, or his ability to sleep with one eye open and his
laptops at his bedside. My favorite gem was when security expert Lee explained
that you can get at a laptop's hard drive using nothing more than an ordinary
screwdriver. Will the Russians be able to locate a screwdriver? Only time will
tell.

Gjelten tells us: "For Snowden to have kept his files secure, he would have
had to keep his laptops powered off and disconnected from the Internet. Plus,
he'd need physical control of the machines at all times." This statement is
irresponsibly misleading. A trusting listener would have no choice but to
conclude that Snowden's secrets are unprotectable after hearing this. But the
truth, access to the files themselves are unimportant, because they are surely
encrypted.

Eventually they did get around to talking about encryption. Their experts on
the matter were the likes of Mark Weatherford, ex-DHS undersecretary who now
works at the Chertoff Group (as in Michael Chertoff), who told us that
"Encryption really only buys you time. You can eventually decrypt it. It just
takes time to do that, and it's really dependent on the algorithm and the
keys." Again, it's being emphasized that it's only a matter of time before the
Russians have the goods. What is not mentioned is that a modest-sized
encryption key buys billions of billions of billions of years [1]. It would be
an earth-shattering breakthrough if the Russians or the Chinese or the
Americans had an algorithm that could beat this.

At one point, Michael Sutton of Zscaler admits: "If Snowden were using the
best possible encryption and he was using a strong key, it would be virtually
impossible for NSA, China, Russia - anyone - to access that data." But Gjelten
immediately smothers this thought: "At least in the short run. There are ways
to break a code, if only by what cyber technologists call brute force -
essentially having a computer try every possible key combination until the
correct one is found. Mark Weatherford, now at the Chertoff Group, points out
that no encryption lasts forever." Not forever, but much longer than the age
of the universe. At no time in this story is it revealed the kinds of time
frames we are talking about. By the way, "the best possible encryption" is
available for free and runs on any computer, and a strong key takes an
insignificant amount of effort to generate.

Finally, the piece ends with "In all, cyber security experts agree, the
likelihood is good that the Chinese or the Russians or both, will sooner or
later have whatever documents Snowden has taken with him, whether he intended
to share them, or not." This is false. Not only is it untrue that the Russians
are likely to get the data, it is also untrue that cyber experts agree that
they will, which Tom Gjelten would have known had he asked any non-government-
affiliated encryption expert.

In short, Gjelten spent the first half of the piece addressing physical access
to the files, which is ludicrous, and the second half convincing us that
encryption is futile, which is the opposite of the truth.

[0]
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2035315...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=203531584)
[1]
[http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619)

