Journalisdiocy

Created this word today, to describe a generalization of “the way journalists are”, their process of creating articles, or in other words “the reasons for the abysmal quality of most newspaper articles”.

It specifically targets the journalistic tendency to add additional descriptive words into a sentence, which actually distort the information, and skew the impression of the reader into one direction (probably the journalists personal point of view).

Also the strong, escapist, trust of journalists towards government officials and other authority figures, always prioritizing their opinions, acting as if they were experts on the subject(every subject) and essentially making it look like what they say is the truth.

Knowingly using Lies and Deception, but justifiing it to themselves, while ignoring the huge implications this has, beeing done by journalists on a day to day basis. For example: using misleading titles to catch the readers attention and getting him to read their article. They know, that in most cases readers will only read the title. They justify their actions as their only chance to “push” their article. But they ignore the fact, that if only the title is read, which will still be the case for most readers, the information given to the reader, and remembered by the reader, will be false!

When conducting interviews, journalists will take anything for an answer, and not even comment on it. Maybe you could excuse this somehow in live interviews. But if it is beeing recorded or even gets into print, this behavior is just disastrous. They probably view themselves as highly professional when doing so, allowing “viewpoints to be heard”, but allowing someone to conceal information or outright lie about it, without pointing this important fact out to the reader, makes the journalist complicit. Furthermore the answers are often off-topic or unrelated. It should be the duty of the journalist to make sure his work – the information given to the reader – makes sense. Else the knowledge/thoughts of the general public become twisted. When talking about things not well understood by most, this does not become apparent. But if your newspaper would read “Are you hungry?: I try real hard to find my shoes.”, everyone would recognize it for what it is. Or do you think some people would suddenly start eating shoes when they are hungry? Well, thats exactly what happens when people are not knowledgable on their own, and not informed by the journalist. Most topics are not as “clear” as this one, peoples knowledge becomes twisted by made up relations/information/etc. like this. They assume everything the journalist is allowing to be seen, and doesnt question, is making sense/is true.

… to be continued.