For my article
this week, I chose “Syrian Newspapers Emerge to Fill Out War Reporting.”
In the midst of the revolution, news standards are going down. Some sources are even using Facebook updates as official sources. In the midst of this, a newspaper called Sham uses 15 reporters all over Syria, none of them activists, to promote objectivity and write good news. I actually found this while in the middle of another story and felt it better suited my interests as a journalist. I definitely wouldn’t have found out about it any other way since my computer and charger finally succumbed to old age and years of being battered around. Any electronic work I want to do is moved to the library until I get a new computer, which doesn’t exactly leave time for web-surfing and other extraneous activities: if I trek out to the library, I mean business; no way am I going there to Google every little term that catches my fancy, so I’ll have to live archaically for a bit. (I wish I had the hard drive of my dictionary and thesaurus.) Anyway, quite frankly, the lack of factual material in news reporting in Syria is anarchic in a way and pretty scary in another. The media controls our perception of events beyond the places we can see, and thus it must be pretty hairy when it’s contaminated with bias and unverified facts. One can only hope in such a case that people there would know not to believe what they read, but even then it’s a world of paranoia where one doesn’t know whom to believe. It’s a lose-lose situation.
In the midst of the revolution, news standards are going down. Some sources are even using Facebook updates as official sources. In the midst of this, a newspaper called Sham uses 15 reporters all over Syria, none of them activists, to promote objectivity and write good news. I actually found this while in the middle of another story and felt it better suited my interests as a journalist. I definitely wouldn’t have found out about it any other way since my computer and charger finally succumbed to old age and years of being battered around. Any electronic work I want to do is moved to the library until I get a new computer, which doesn’t exactly leave time for web-surfing and other extraneous activities: if I trek out to the library, I mean business; no way am I going there to Google every little term that catches my fancy, so I’ll have to live archaically for a bit. (I wish I had the hard drive of my dictionary and thesaurus.) Anyway, quite frankly, the lack of factual material in news reporting in Syria is anarchic in a way and pretty scary in another. The media controls our perception of events beyond the places we can see, and thus it must be pretty hairy when it’s contaminated with bias and unverified facts. One can only hope in such a case that people there would know not to believe what they read, but even then it’s a world of paranoia where one doesn’t know whom to believe. It’s a lose-lose situation.
I read Neil
Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death
before starting school and was highly impressed by it. I never watched
television news to begin with (Dad raised me right), but I was even more wary of it after reading
this book. (I suppose it can’t be too bad if cross-referenced, but why do that
when my sources now are perfectly sufficient? *wink) Yes, I love Sesame Street—who doesn’t?—but I see
Postman’s point there, that it makes education entertaining and, through his
eyes, superficial. I would agree that “Sesame
Street is an expensive illustration of the idea that education is indistinguishable
from entertainment,” though I’d disagree that watching it would have any
serious consequence. Children are children. They develop concepts of deeper
subjects and their serious sense as they grow.
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