Real headlines:
And the media wonders why so many people get their news from blogs.
These people are killing journalism
Alex Wild on insects, science, and photography
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A personal blog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
Myrmecos- derived from the ancient greek word for "ant"- hosts Alex's musings about these and other little creatures that share our planet.
Questions? Email alwild [at] myrmecos.net; or follow @Myrmecos on Twitter.
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Bits and Pieces
Totally agree. The newspapers here in NZ are notorious for this kind of behaviour.
Also, love the ‘kill me now’ tag… says it all, really!
UGH. *head desk*
And killing science… then we wonder why the public is reluctant in funding us “just to see what we can do”.
Yeah, for real!
Best to just ignore the Daily Mail, Alex. It’s nothing more than a high profile tabloid. MSNBC is harder to immediately write off, though.
I have to agree. Since when the Daily Mail is supposed to be “journalism” ?
Its the Daily Mail UK – nuff said.
Probably squeazed that article in between some celebrity-royal gossip, a story about aliens, a story about some hyperobese person on welfare and the obligatory girl-in-a-too-tight-singletshirt-thinking-about-some-world-event shot.
I believe that the headlines of articles are chosen by editors rather than the actual journalists, and the MSNBC article content seems pretty good to me. So it’s worth noting that this is probably more a piece of editorial inanity than flawed journalism.
Which is not to say that the editors aren’t killing journalism!
I eavesdropped on one of the newer professors in the biology department complaining about his paper on Anelosimus social spider juvenile male mating behavior being called ‘spider foreplay’ in the media. I think he said that it wasn’t even a paper he was distinctly proud of. I’m sure the attention to work in academia is good, but sometimes I wish people wouldn’t read media hype…
The people aren’t killing journalism; they’re practicing it. Complaining about their hype is rather like criticizing a hooker for having sex with her clients.
Hey….Just one minute !
Are you suggesting that journalists are analogous to prostitutes or that journalist are both pimp and prostitute ?????
“Enquiring minds want to know” the National Enquirer
I’m just pointing out that Alex is making a normative point. He’d like journalists to care about conveying accurate and relevant information to the public. So would I. That’s not what journalists do for a living, however; and it never has been. They do entertainment, advertising, and propaganda.
Journalism is like evolution. What we value about it are its side effects, not its usual products, nonsense and pointless death.
Amen to paragraph I, scratch my head to paragraph II. Personally, I value the ‘usual’ products of evolution far more than journalism as usual. I think a ‘scum rises to the top’ model works better for journalism than for evolution.
Daily Mail, England = Weekly World News, America.
Kudos to whomever sent out the press releases. Also seen on BBC Nature News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/16424096
[...] of course, check out his follow up post, These People are Killing Journalism, to see the media handling the topic with their usual intelligence and [...]
So funny yet so sad.