In today's new media world of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and every other social networking outlet, fast has taken over accuracy as the top attribute when reporting the news. During the discussion of "what's wrong with the media today," this often is presented as one of, if not the top issue and bloggers and "citizen journalists" are often the culprits. While this is a big issue, I find that it is not the biggest issue in what is bringing down great journalism. To me, the biggest problem is following the lessons of our earlier grade school teachers from years past. Do not plagiarize, cite your sources and do original work.
For some, this is very hard. To them, everyone's work is their work. When it comes to media, especially with print magazine and journalism sources like The New York Times, not only is plagiarism harmful to the real journalists that actually uncovered the story, it's even more harmful to the financing of the newspaper. If people are getting New York Times reporting from another site, people will go to that virtually sucking away advertising dollars because readership is lost even though it technically isn't.
The New York Times now charges readers a fee for viewing content in order to recoup some of those losses because sponsorship wasn't filling the void. Bloggers aren't legitimate journalists. Legitimacy is earned though the publication and not the person. I am not for an all out war against blogging and social media, I have my own blog and this post I'm writing is on a blog. What I hope is that people who use information from other sources actually cite their sources. Just like my fourth grade teacher used to say, "give credit to others who deserve it." Right now, journalism should receive a lot of credit.
By the way, doesn't anyone else find this video of Andrew Breitbart receiving The Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award at the 2010 CPAC dripping with irony?
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