The Last Sentence

[pynchonoid]

--- Keith McMullen <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
>
http://speakout.com/cgi-bin/udt/im.display.printable?client.id=speakout&stor
> y.id=4171
> 


"Now more than ever, we need professional journalists
to help distinguish the wheat of reliable news and
credible opinion from the chaff of information, rumor
and propaganda that clogs the Internet, and to help
create the next-generation vehicles for online
journalism."

I wrote that three years ago, and I stand by that
statement. 

I'm not sure what your beef is.  Go back through my
P-list posts, as far as you'd care to, and you'll see
that I include urls for everything I pass along to
this forum -- that's a way for anybody to see for
themselves the original article.  If I don't make it
clear what's "news" and what's "opinion", the original
articles and their publishers do.  There's no
deception there. If you don't care to make the effort
to know what you're reading, that's your problem.

Perhaps you've noted that Pynchon-L is a discussion
forum, not a news medium; all kinds of opinions get
flung around as "facts" , and that's a common practice
in conversation. At least I  attribute the quotes I
include in my posts, and make it easy to find and read
the original article, and decide for yourself what to
believe.  

What is deceptive in journalism, whether online or in
the traditional media, is the deliberate blurring of
boundaries between news and opinion (as on Fox News on
the Tube), presenting opinion in the guise of news,
slanting news stories by choosing to build the story
around certain facts, quotes, and leaving out others,
resulting in a story that presents a very different
picture than would be presented by a story that
included more of the available facts and witness
reports, or which reflected a different set of the
available facts and quotes.  

If anybody's interested in my take on online
journalism, feel free to read the FAQ at
http://www.online-journalist.com/faq.html.  For what
it's worth, that FAQ has been reprinted in two recent
books about using the Internet as a publishing medium
in general and for writers in particular.  

Here's one distinction that I consider relevant,
quoting from http://www.online-journalist.com/faq.html
(cleaning up a couple of typos in the process):

"Q. What influences do online journalists have on
their audiences, in comparison to mass media
journalists? 

While audiences for online journalism remain smaller
than the audiences for mass media journalism, online
journalists have the same influence on their audiences
that mass media journalists have -- by choosing which
stories to report; by choosing which facts, quotes,
and other story elements to include and which to
exclude; by choosing to tell the story from a
particular point of view. A crime story told from the
point of view of the victim will elicit a different
reaction compared to the same story told from the
point of view of the criminal, for example, whether
that story is presented in the morning newspaper, on
the 6 o'clock TV news, or on the Web. The Web's
interactivity and hyperlinking give the journalist
more opportunities to examine multiple points of view
in a particular piece than traditional, analog media.
The lack of serious space limitations permits online
journalists to develop a story more fully and to
publish source documents and background material. "



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