"Churnalism" Ha! What a great word.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2008/s2348362.htm

This is pretty interesting. The video footage is on the right hand side. The short version is only 10 mins long, the extended is 20 mins.

I don't have time to watch it just give me the gist of it son.

You haven’t had 10 spare minutes over the past year?!! Sweet Christ.

Well, here’s the crux.

KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Nick Davies, you say journalism is in a bad state. What are the symptoms?

NICK DAVIES, JOURNALIST & AUTHOR: At its heart what's happened is that big corporations have taken over newspapers which used to be owned by small family firms and they've injected the logic of commercialism into newsrooms and that logic has overwhelmed the logic of journalism.

The big structural sign of that is that all across the developed world these new corporate owners of the newsrooms have cut editorial staff at the same time as they've increased the output of those staff.
[...]

If you take away time from reporters, you are taking away their most important working asset. So they can't do their jobs properly any more. So in this commercialised world, you have journalists who instead of being active gatherers of news - going out and finding stories and making contacts and doing funny old-fashioned things like checking facts, they've become instead passive processors of second-hand information, stuff that come up on the wire Reuters or AP, stuff that comes from the PR industry.

And they churn it out. I use this word "churnalism" instead of journalism. They just churn this stuff over without having the time to check it, without having the time to decide whether or not this is what they should even be covering today. And it flows into the news and a lot of it is garbage.

There was also a fairly interesting discussion he had in the last 5 minutes about “balance” and “both sides of the story”. It wasn’t in the transcript so here’s my effort at paraphrasing.

At 16:30 minutes.

“I’m not interested in telling both sides of the story; I’m interested in the truth. If two people are telling different parts of the story, I’m not going to put both of them in—I’m going to go check and find out who’s telling the truth, and if this guy over here’s lying then he can get out of the story.”

So, anyways, how've you been Trev? Sorry I didn’t see you at Tombo’s thingo, but hey, how else would I maintain my reputation of jerkness.

What’s the good word with your combat engineering? I hear you’re “shipping out” in a couple of weeks? Is that right?

Verily.
Thanks for the summary.
I be leaving on October 5th. You jerk.

Wow. So Soon. Hey, good luck with that. And have a good time.

I also forgot to mention, can you bring me back a torpedo?

No.

how about a weapon of unimaginable destructive power?