Wednesday, August 28, 2019

The death of reportage …

… All the News That's Fit to Slant. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The digital upheaval removed experienced professionals from newsrooms and replaced them with novice activists working for paltry wages. It was former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes who best summarized the new reality. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2016. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
An example: The Inquirer, the newspaper I used to work, is transparently supportive of undocumented aliens. To the best of my knowledge it has never published a piece about how legal immigrants feel about the undocumented. I take a lot of cabs. A lot of cab drivers are immigrants — from Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Haiti, Morocco, to name just a few. I have yet to meet one who didn’t agree with the Indian cab driver who said to me, “They should all have to go through the same crap I went through.” Whether you agree or not, good reporting would let you know about this. But journalism these days is about advocacy, not reporting. And advocacy has a tendency to be dishonest.

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