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Friday, 30 October 2009 10:30 |
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I think people are being too kind to churnalists. They assume that they unquestioningly type whatever their brain farts out. I, more cynically, believe that they actually do the research, find out the facts and then deliberately say "Nah, sod it. Doesn't fit in to the picture of the world we need to paint. Instead of 'Only 2% of Brits are Muslims' let's go down the 'These fuckers are everywhere' route"
I did a few weeks work experience at my local paper a few years ago, as I misguidedly wanted to be a journalist when I was a boy. I remember getting in lots of press articles and weeding out the interesting ones, following up the story, phoning people, conducting a couple of interviews. I wrote, in my view, a pretty fair account. I then sat with an editor who read the piece and said 'hmm, good start. Now let's use some journalistic license to jazz it up a bit'
Apart from the names of those involved, the end result bared little resemblance to what actually happened. I know it's cliche, but newspapers are in the business of selling papers, not reporting the news. Shame on supposed 'leading political bloggers' such as Iain Dale and the rest of the population for believing a single word written in the press!
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