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Have News Gathering Agencies Lost Their Integrity?

B

bturner

I'm talking the Associated Press and many other news reporting agencies. Credibility equals integrity. If you can't be credible, you have no use being in journalism.

Can anyone tell me why a mentally unstable man shooting people when being served an eviction notice becomes a nationwide event because it happened NEAR a college campus? The AP had the gall to run the story with SHOOTING ON TEXAS A&M CAMPUS for a time. Let's see, something very much like this happened in the city where I live. The difference is it was not close to a college campus. So, the event just barely warranted more than a mention on the news. The intentional twisting of the story is an attempt to create hysteria. I wonder of the agenda here. You know, real news gathering agencies don't have an agenda. They have credibility.. I admit, that's pie in the sky but there were some checks and balances.

Today, Reuters, dateline San Antonio: Texas Mall Shooting Results in One Dead and Two Injured. Truthful? Well, technically yes, but intentionally written to appear as what it IS NOT! First, the shooting happened in ODESSA not San Antonio. For fun, if you are not familiar with the distance between San Antonio and Odessa, pull up Yahoo driving directions and type in both San Antonio and Odessa to see how many hours the drive time is! Second, the shooting happened at a BAR located on the mall's property and happened at closing time: 2 in the morning. What the heck? Funny thing, this happens almost daily in a big city but it barely gets mentioned. So, since it happened as a bar fight turned deadly at closing time and the bar is on mall property it is now A SHOOTING AT A MALL and datelined on the other side of the state? Again, a blatant attempt to make a mountain out of a mole hill. A credible news reporting agency presents facts. Do you really expect to be believed from here on?

These are but two examples of what are supposedly credible news reporting agencies that have seemingly hired a bunch of folks who got their journalism degree from the back of a magazine. What's going on here?

My comments are not LIBERAL/CONSERVATIVE. Politics never enters the picture here. This is the question of why this is happening. This isn't FOX or CNN or Network. These are the news gathering agencies where their customers are folks like FOX, CNN, the Networks, BBC, major publications and media around the world. We are talking Associated Press and Reuters here.
 
bturner, don't you think you might be overreacting just a little bit? A police officer was killed and another was shot in the Texas incident a week ago. The shooter fired off several dozen rounds. A memorial service was held, prolonging the story's life. As for Odessa vs. San Antonio, I think you might be flipping out over nothing. We as journalists should never take ourselves or our jobs too seriously or we risk losing the perspective we need when being called upon to be a voice of calm when communicating to the masses. Was anyone hurt or killed as a result of things to which you take exception? My guess is, probably not. Maybe it's time to rent a movie or visit a cartoon website or simply go walk the dog and get some air. If I was your boss, that's what I'd be recommending to you right about now.
 
I think you are missing my point.

When networks and stations place this twist on the news, I figure there are several outlets for the story and I have much less of a problem. When it is the source like AP and Reuters that have subscribers such as CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, et.al., I have a problem. In the news food chain, AP and Reuters feed the world's broadcasters and print media the news and generally the networks, newspapers and stations take the story and run with it, sometimes adding a local take if time and budgets allow. These are the two major news sources. Those of you in radio for years might recall rip and read from the AP ticker. As a jock, we'd pull the text from the teletype and read the newscast. There was no fact checking. You were reading the source of the story and there was nothing to check it against.

The Associated Press said the College Station event happened on the Texas A&M Campus. It did not but in a residntial neighborhood about 1/4th of a mile away according to the KBTX reporter that was as close to the scene as College Station police would allow. A very similar event happpened here last week but it was not national news, barely a blip on local news radar because it didn't happen near a college campus, I suppose.

My point is why sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism?

The 'Mall' shooting, due to the way it is written implies someone walked into a mall and began shooting. The story was about a bar fight where somebody pulled out a gun and started firing at closing time (2 am) at a sports bar located at a mall, long after the shopping area of the mall was closed to customers.

My point on integrity is why are these 'events' being 'played' as they are? Granted, people died...a tragedy. This is not a local station or somebody like Fox or CNN doing this. These are the sources of news. The AP or Reuters subscriber, be it the London Times, New York Times, CNN, WABC or anybody else, is getting this in their newsroom.

How's this? WEST NILE VIRUS THREATENS PRESIDENT - The first case of West Nile Virus was confirmed in Washington yesterday in a 68 year old man who resided a quarter mile from the White House. The man, currently hospitalized, is expected to recover. The President was not in Washington at the time.
This is only an example, not a real story. This is the sort of stuff I'm talking about.
 
bturner said:
How's this? WEST NILE VIRUS THREATENS PRESIDENT - The first case of West Nile Virus was confirmed in Washington yesterday in a 68 year old man who resided a quarter mile from the White House. The man, currently hospitalized, is expected to recover. The President was not in Washington at the time.
This is only an example, not a real story. This is the sort of stuff I'm talking about.
Click to expand...

Your example is ridiculous. While the AP and Reuters have been lacking in the past ten years, they have never done something like that.

Like many other outfits, the wire services have had problems keeping up the standards. Often, the AP is not visiting the scene but, like the rest of us, making calls and putting out what they know at that time. Later versions move with the updated, clarified or corrected information.

For the "mistakes" they make, the AP is pretty much the only way news inside the U.S. gets disseminated to broadcasters, printers and websites; Many groups have tried to copy or compete, and they fail. Nobody gets the initial story out there the way AP does.

As for the dateline, it has long been AP policy to dateline their copy from where it was filed. Shame on anchors, reporters and editors at subscribing outfits who don't know this and use the AP dateline as a story locator.
 
I have noticed repeatedly ap or abc will refer to 'tax increases' rather than 'tax increases on the wealthy'.

I had to argue with someone at AP that the Monkees were not a British group-which they reported after Davy Jones died. He was British so I guess that means they're a British group ! Idiots !
 
I think the original poster's criticisms hit the mark. I was a reporter for 10 years and served on my state's AP Broadcaster's board. I've been out of the biz for a number of years now, and the shenanigans the OP mentioned are indeed ridiculous. But they're also indicative of a general loosening of journalistic standards. In other words, everyone's getting sloopy. I'll spare you the rant that will make me sound like the guy kicking kids off his lawn, but suffice it to say the general budget climate at most news organizations, and the overall weakness in how our schools teach kids to read and write, results in poorly educated, inexperienced and apathetic reporters. The days of a crusty old editor who could (figuratively) pop a newbie reporter in the chops for a badly-written, poorly-sourced and just-generally-crappy story are long gone. Oh, and the fact that national networks (Nancy Grace, anyone?) hype tragedies that are really just salacious local stories merely exacerbates the problem. Journalistic integrity? Wow, I haven't laughed so well in a week...

Now get off my lawn!
 
The one that got me was the reports after the Colorado shooting referring to Aurora as a tiny town. It took me about 30 seconds to look it up in my atlas, which shows it with a population of about 267,000. Tiny town, NOT!
 
I think you're extrapolating the the organization has an agenda, when it's just sloppy reporting. There's a difference.

A lot of times, this comes when reporters cover stories from a distance. I think that might be the situation with the San Antonio/Odessa story. They put a dateline of where the story was written, as opposed to where it happened. Like a radio reporter doing a voicer about something in Iran from the Washington bureau. The proper SOC is where he's based, not where the story is located. There are loads of examples of this.
 
And one thing I do understand is stories evolve in the chaos as a story develops. I remember the morning on the air when Egypt's Anwar Sadat was killed. Let's just say a cat with 9 lives would not beat him. He was deceased and then alive so many times over more than an hour or so I lost count. I can easily see that happening and it has been quickly corrected.

I know I might be outside the usual thinking. After all, after the string of shootings in the media, I have not thought of gun control but rather how we might attain more accessible mental health care for the afflicted. I felt the issue was not guns but access to help on mental issues that was a more likely issue. The shooter in College Station had mental issues according to his step-dad who said he was a ticking timebomb. Had they tried to get him help? If not, did they know how to get him help or did they feel helpless. The Colorado shooter was seeking help and his doctor alerted folks but somehow, it seems, little or nothing was done. Perhaps neither tragedy could be prevented, but I wonder if better access might have bettered the chances of diverting the deadly encounters. I don't write this as an editorial content but as an example of how I see the issues.
 
We all have our own little pet-peeves on the.... carelessness.... sloppiness.... the "what the hell difference does it make" things that happen in the reporting of what passes for news" today. (Notice, I couldn't bring myself to use the word journalism to replace 11 words!)

I hate it when a story comes across on the network or even a local station which is essence says: "There was a tornado is some forsaken little village in Arkansas today." If the story is worth telling, then it is a courtesy to those of us who have lived in multiple states and have family in multiple states, to simply put in (with some accuracy) the name of the forsaken little village.

Bturner being in Texas may or may not have taken note of a news story that had a very butchered up string of locations tied to it in various sources where I tracked it down. It was somewhere in the time frame of maybe 3 to 5 months ago. Down in the South end of Texas there was a shooting out in what was called a desolate, rural location that took place at the site of a barn or pavillion where cockfights were known to happen. As the story developed, it turned out not to be a random, emotional bar-room fight type of shooting but apparently a targeted execution killing. This killing it turns out took place about 10 miles from where I lived for the first 14 years of my life. Multiple towns were listed in various stories reporting this bit of violence. By Google-ing every source I could find, and wasting time on Google Earth trying to pin-point the location of this shooting, all the complaints listed in this thread were in evidence.

It was not time wasted. I rediscovered road names and communities that had not crept out of their hiding places in the folds of my brain for decades. Engleman Gardens was always a mysterious enclave of orange tress marked by their own private water tower about a mile from the main road to town for us. But no reporter... not a single one could be so plain-spoken as to say: This shooting happend about two to three miles west northwest of Elsa, Texas. Half a dozen cities in the area much further from the site of the shooting were listed.... but NEVER the town where it actually was close to.

If you live in Pittsburgh, PA or Staunton, VA or or Las Cruces, NM you could care less where it happened. It was somewhere south of Dallas and that says it all.

All of that to bring me to the question: What ever happened to that hot chick who was the banker's daughter in Elsa, TX back when I was a high school freshman. ;D
 
I think they have.

C'mon people 2 eggs poses cancer risk? WTF :mad: I search YouTube first for news, listen to KLBJ-AM, and /or film it myself, then look at the rag we call the Austin American Statesman. In that particular order.
 
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