Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Truth in journalism

Lately I've had the sort of rough time I didn't quite anticipate. At Mint, when a story had to be written by the end of the day, I presented everyone's view - in cable operator versus broadcaster stories the views were diametrically opposite - and moved on to the conflicts between the two. Partly why I left the paper was because publishing everyone's views in a story doesn't qualify as the truth. And the satisfaction at having handed in a story is offset by the usefulness of the piece. In fact, as I'm finding out these days while I do my own research, a whole bunch of views are just lies told to journalists who should have found the time to do more.

The problem is, I now have the time, and it still isn't getting any better. The lying has reached new dimensions, because the stakes are higher due to the fact that a journalist has more time on his hands. As a result, I'm going to go mad by the time 2009 comes along.

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