I don't know how many of you read the Washington Post online, and then read blogs, and how many of you use blogs as portals to important articles (the emails seem to run about fifty-fifty on this right now) but I've noted an odd pattern on their web site (which you wouldn't notice if you were using blogs rather than their home page). For really big articles, important articles, the headline on the main website, washingtonpost.com, is often one that I would complain about -- but the headline attached to the article itself, once you click through, rarely is.
Today, for example, on the home page, you see, "Bush Warned of Possible Attacks Before Sept. 11." Hey, that's just incendiary, as well as being quite unfair. But click through, and you get the hyper-bland "Declassified Memo Said Al Qaeda Was in U.S."strong>
Now, what in the world is up with that?
Also amusing is to read the Al Jazeera account of the PDB release alongside the Reuters, AP, Washington Post and LA Times stories on the same subject. Almost identical spin.
I swear to God, sedition/betrayal/treason was far more nuanced during the Viet Nam War.
Posted by: Theodopoulos Pherecydes | April 11, 2004 at 08:14 AM
The Washington Post survives by selling papers; journalism professors have tenure and sell something else. Nevertheless, the ideal is what papers pretend to sell; but that's to flatter their audience (``you are interested in objective facts''), not to succeed or fail in delivering the ideal. They succeed by selling. Objective facts do not sell.
It's an audience failing more than a newspaper failing.
But then look at journalism professor audiences : young and idealistic, just what you grow out of as you age. Would a cynicism major sell? I don't think so.
So you find journalism courses that don't come anywhere near the reality of journalism, for one audience; and actual journalism that doesn't come near what it pretends to aim at, for another audience.
The aim of improving public discourse perhaps is served by ridicule here. Outrage won't go far.
The need in a democracy is to show how to respond to inevitable failures and compromises of yourself, otherwise than through cynicism, because failures are certain.
Posted by: Ron Hardin | April 11, 2004 at 08:52 AM
Keep in mind -- I'm not a journalism professor!
Posted by: dauber | April 11, 2004 at 09:23 AM
Well, as far as I know, the article writers aren't the ones writing the headlines.
Don't you think it would be a good idea to get on these guys and find out WHO they have that writes the headlines?
Posted by: Syl | April 12, 2004 at 02:33 AM
http://search.cnn.com/search?query=increase%20site%3Aru-new.com&type=web&sortBy=date&intl=false >139
http://search.cnn.com/search?query=equity%20site%3Aru-new.com&type=web&sortBy=date&intl=false >68
http://search.cnn.com/search?query=today%20site%3Aru-new.com&type=web&sortBy=date&intl=false >46
Posted by: potamuchtoo | August 11, 2007 at 08:49 PM