Comments on: Why Good Journalism Should Not Be Free

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 13:47:29 +0000

In reply to Alan.

Hahaha, “drivel’s advocate”.

I think that Wikipedia is a different animal to journalism as a whole. It’s not really ‘news’, it’s more an encyclopedia, and giving out knowledge for free to the world is an amazing resource and an amazing dream. Wikipedia has fantastic rules and ways of keeping Wikipedia articles without bias, with enough citations, and clean from error – things that editors and journalists have often thrown out in the name of just getting a story out.

Thanks Al, great points!

By: Alan

Alan — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 19:48:52 +0000

Hmmm, playing the drivel’s advocate here (if you’ll pardon my little joke).
What about group reporting, like Wikipedia. They’re always begging for donations to keep the platform alive, but the content is group written and edited. And for that reason it makes a good foil for other sources.
I also wonder about science journals. So much of our worldview is based around peer-reviewed, double blind trials I find people read journalistic opinion on studies rather than studies themselves. Maybe it’s because studies usually cost something.
But even those studies are biased, they are funded by some group wanting some result. And many studies that desperately need doing will never be funded.
To your point I read a quote recently: “The news used to tell you that something happened then you had to decide what you thought about it. Now the news tells you how to think about something and you have to decide if it even happened.”
Big pharma in the US is by far the biggest advertiser on TV news, and more than double the lobbying size of Energy and IT industries combined in Washington.
Maybe what that tells me is to believe the inverse of medical news.

By: Olagunju Success Taiwo

Olagunju Success Taiwo — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 08:32:13 +0000

This is what I’m talking about. I love this!