I mean I know because I did journalism in junior high through college. And I've written articles here and there for church - in small church publications. And each time - I was looking for specific quotes, and often used a quote to build the piece around.
The problem with most journalism is it is opinion pieces or editorializing.
A lot of times people are interviewed and nothing gets into the finished article (or one is never run) and other times the angle is completely different from what was actually said, and then there are the just plain errors in misquoting someone or misunderstanding what was said.
That's my difficulty with this article. It's not a straight up interview. It's a lot of contextualizing. She takes statements or quotes from various folks and peppers them throughout, with a lot of editorializing between. And a lot of those quotes or statements may be completely out of context. Or spun in a direction that changes the meaning completely. It seems to me that the writer had an agenda, and spun the article to meet that agenda.
For example? There's a story that I read three times at the very beginning, because at first glance it seems that Whedon at the age of 5 was responsible for the death of his 4 year old neighbor. And a lot of people thought that was the case. But it's not. He played with the boy, with no adult supervision, neither knew how to swim. Whedon went home, the kid was found to have drowned in their lake or pond. The point Whedon is making is his parents couldn't be bothered to supervise, didn't teach him to swim, and did nothing as a result of it. And it was traumatizing. But the journalist frames it in such a way that it is almost creepy, and people think Whedon was responsible.
And I've seen journalists do that a lot in the last several years - manipulate their subjects, quotes and facts to tell a story or get across a specific theme or agenda. That's not journalism, that's editorializing, and if taken too far marketing and propaganda. Journalism should be about conveying facts and information. And I think a lot of journalists forget that.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 02:30 am (UTC)I mean I know because I did journalism in junior high through college. And I've written articles here and there for church - in small church publications. And each time - I was looking for specific quotes, and often used a quote to build the piece around.
The problem with most journalism is it is opinion pieces or editorializing.
A lot of times people are interviewed and nothing gets into the finished article (or one is never run) and other times the angle is completely different from what was actually said, and then there are the just plain errors in misquoting someone or misunderstanding what was said.
That's my difficulty with this article. It's not a straight up interview. It's a lot of contextualizing. She takes statements or quotes from various folks and peppers them throughout, with a lot of editorializing between. And a lot of those quotes or statements may be completely out of context. Or spun in a direction that changes the meaning completely. It seems to me that the writer had an agenda, and spun the article to meet that agenda.
For example? There's a story that I read three times at the very beginning, because at first glance it seems that Whedon at the age of 5 was responsible for the death of his 4 year old neighbor. And a lot of people thought that was the case. But it's not. He played with the boy, with no adult supervision, neither knew how to swim. Whedon went home, the kid was found to have drowned in their lake or pond. The point Whedon is making is his parents couldn't be bothered to supervise, didn't teach him to swim, and did nothing as a result of it. And it was traumatizing. But the journalist frames it in such a way that it is almost creepy, and people think Whedon was responsible.
And I've seen journalists do that a lot in the last several years - manipulate their subjects, quotes and facts to tell a story or get across a specific theme or agenda. That's not journalism, that's
editorializing, and if taken too far marketing and propaganda. Journalism should be about conveying facts and information. And I think a lot of journalists forget that.