Knowing is Half the Prattle.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

The Confusion of the Press

So I was listening to a freind's podcast today about bad news reporting. Like he, I agree that news reporters get things wrong all the time. In fact, I can't think of a news story that I or anyone I know has been in that hasn't included something that was wrong. An example follows...

When I was performing in the band Tortuga, we wrote and performed the music for a modern dance performance. This performance was reviewed by both the Village Voice and Backstage magazine. According to the Village Voice's dance reviewer Deborah Jowitt the music was ...

written and played live by the band Tortuga (the songs have lines like "I want to dissect your face")

Um... well in actuality the music was all instrumental (i.e. no "lines" at all). Did she even show up to the performance?

Link to the actual Village Voice Article

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Funny. I was just reading this in "Sex, Drugs and DNA:"

"... a report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2004 tried to make the point that the press has done a good job on science stories. The .... analysis examined the accuracy of 627 newspaper articles published in the US, UK and Canada which were based on 111 peer-reviewed research papers. A close look at their numbers shows that a significant proportion of the time, journalists made significant factual errors or exaggerated the implications of the findings... They found that 82% of the newspaper articles did not contain any significant errors and that 63% did not report any claims that were exaggerated above what the researchers themselves have claimed..."


Michael Stebbins agrees that the press can't be bothered not to suck.