Newspapers are unaccountable and innacurate.

I'm supposed to be covering research for trailers however a quick glance at my feeds shows that Matty's the only one who's written anything yet. Jonny started a new blog but I don't know the url. I could find out quite easily, but that's for another time, what I want to write about here is how the newspaper model is unaccountable and inaccurate. I rediscovered Angry Mob's new site today and was reading this story.
In my last post I said one of the disadvantages of the modern newspaper news distribution model was that:

innacuracies can spread like a virus and their source becomes ever more hidden with every word printed.

The story of Cinders the pig is a perfect example of how the system is systematically broken, and it's a current example to back up that statement. A lie was able to work it's way through almost every level of the press in this country (except, you'll note, Social Media) without being checked once. All it took to check the story was to visit the site of the public relations agency which reported it. Each news source copied and re-wrote the story and there was no financial incentive to do any actual journalism. The only stage in the process which put the story through any scrutiny was a blog. The author of the post is not a self-proclaimed professional, and yet they trumped every other professional "journalist" in the country who covered the story.

Interestingly enough I was forced to go back on my my earlier disdain for local newspapers when I had to admit that they are the only ones to engage in any real journalism. They're forced to because they are unable to rely on any press agency, they're forced to check facts and cannot copy the competition.

The 'free press', or at least the for-profit press would want you to believe that the news is a conversation and that they know best, if journalists can't hold the facts to account it's up to you, as a citizen, to call them out.

Next post is movie trailer research.