Editorial decisions include more than just opinion pieces and editorials. It’s common for “hard news pieces” to try to add context or to put news in perspective. But the extra context or perspective is an editorial decision.
This wouldn’t bother me if journalists were experts on their domains, but there is plenty of reason to think that’s not the case.
There was once a time I considered becoming a journalist. I bought a copy of the then-latest AP Style Guide, which had a chapter on how to handle unfulfilling assignments such as business news. The fact that a media company covers news for a particular topic doesn’t mean they actually have any experts on that topic.
I remember a computer journalist who bought a Linux CD, couldn’t get it to install on PowerPC, and claimed that was proof Linux wasn’t actually portable, and didn’t understand why people asked what architecture the CD was for. I remember when a buffer overflow was reported for Apache, and before Apache had a fix, somebody released a build that doubled the size of that buffer. Several media outlets thought this was an impressive fix for the original problem, and failed to ask what would happen if an attacker doubled the size of the input.
With that kind of track record, I’m very cautious about where I get my computer news, and I fact check every story I can. But what about topics I’m not an expert in? I’ve seen incredibly dumb legal stories even though it would be easy for a news station to find a competent lawyer to review things before they’re published. When I read anything about the military or foreign affairs, I assume that the assigned journalists aren’t any better at their jobs than the people covering technology, lawsuits, local politics, etc.
This wouldn’t bother me if journalists were experts on their domains, but there is plenty of reason to think that’s not the case.
There was once a time I considered becoming a journalist. I bought a copy of the then-latest AP Style Guide, which had a chapter on how to handle unfulfilling assignments such as business news. The fact that a media company covers news for a particular topic doesn’t mean they actually have any experts on that topic.
I remember a computer journalist who bought a Linux CD, couldn’t get it to install on PowerPC, and claimed that was proof Linux wasn’t actually portable, and didn’t understand why people asked what architecture the CD was for. I remember when a buffer overflow was reported for Apache, and before Apache had a fix, somebody released a build that doubled the size of that buffer. Several media outlets thought this was an impressive fix for the original problem, and failed to ask what would happen if an attacker doubled the size of the input.
With that kind of track record, I’m very cautious about where I get my computer news, and I fact check every story I can. But what about topics I’m not an expert in? I’ve seen incredibly dumb legal stories even though it would be easy for a news station to find a competent lawyer to review things before they’re published. When I read anything about the military or foreign affairs, I assume that the assigned journalists aren’t any better at their jobs than the people covering technology, lawsuits, local politics, etc.