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In the future where will be the expert in Mozambique when a crisis hits? Or Serbia? He/she will be in Mozambique, or Serbia, and will be able and willing to te
by CamperBob 16y ago
In the future where will be the expert in Mozambique when a crisis hits? Or Serbia?
He/she will be in Mozambique, or Serbia, and will be able and willing to tell us what's happening because he or she lives there. The value of dropping a satellite phone-wielding reporter from a helicopter and picking him up 24 hours later has always been questionable, IMO, and now it's completely pointless.
Information may or may not want to be free, but news definitely does.
- hugh3 16y agoSerbia is a good example, because whenever anything newsworthy happens in Serbia it's probably some sort of conflict between the local ethnic groups, and if you're relying on locals for information you'll find that their view of the incidents will vary greatly depending on which side they're on. And that's just natural bias -- imagine what happens when you throw in folks who are deliberately sowing misinformation, for one reason or another. It would take hours to sort through all the news reports coming in from Serbia, determine who are the more and less trustworthy sources, and put it all together into some coherent narrative, and I don't have time to do that for every controversial news story that happens in the world! I'd be happy to pay a dollar a day for a relatively trustworthy newspaper to hire journalists to do this sort of thing for me.
- CamperBob 16y agoI'd be happy to pay a dollar a day for a relatively trustworthy newspaper to hire journalists to do this sort of thing for me. At which point you're still in the business of having to trust people and seek out multiple points of view if you really want the whole story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair , anyone?
- hugh3 16y agoOh, I said a relatively trustworthy newspaper, not the New York Times.