The Tricks of Art and the Art of Tricks

If “news” is a report of an event ( this is roughly how it is defined in dictionaries) then newspapers do not contain news.  I say this for a number of reasons.

First, any time I have ever been involved in an “event” and then read a newspaper’s report of it, there was always at least one  important error in the reporting.  For example, in the days when I was a prosecutor there were often reporters physically present in court when cases were heard.  I say “physically present” because their subsequent reporting indicated that what passed as their minds was clearly somewhere else.  If I read the paper later I had trouble recognising the cases in which I had been involved.  Names were changed (to protect the guilty?), people who were convicted were evidently acquitted, the sentences handed down had apparently been changed by the good graces of the reporter and the number and details of the offences committed had strangely altered.

Also, newspaper articles are sometimes accompanied by photos which prove the report wrong.  For example, I recently saw a report of a traffic accident in the local paper.  According to the article, a Triumph motorcycle was hit by a motor vehicle. The accompanying photo was of a wrecked Yamaha Virago motorcycle.  Now, some people may think this is nitpicking (OK, I suppose it is).  But, if the author of the article makes this kind of obvious mistake then how can the reader trust anything that is written?

My second (and last) point is that newspapers are more concerned with venting opinions about what other people say and do.  Yeah, I admit this is nothing new as television and the internet have rapidly made newspapers, as sources of news, redundant.  If you read what passes for political commentary in Australia you can choose between articles written by journalists who agree with you and those who don’t.   I mostly choose the first option.  If I feel the need to wash my breakfast down with lashings of apoplexy, then I read those journalists whom I know to be my politically opposites.

So newspapers aren’t!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.