3 ms·
ProPublica writers fall for these types of pitches all the time. They never do their homework - if something sounds bad to laymen, they’ll write a story strippe
by xadhominemx 6y ago
ProPublica writers fall for these types of pitches all the time. They never do their homework - if something sounds bad to laymen, they’ll write a story stripped of context. It’s incredible.
- AmericanChopper 6y agoI see it as a broader problem of how scandalizing a problem plays out. Whenever a scandalous problem occurs, everybody is going to be interested in exploiting it to suit their own agenda. People are going to be heaping accountability onto their adversaries, which is how you end up with the bureaucratic tyranny of accountability avoidance taking priority over problem solving. You're also going to have everybody shouting about how the occurrence of the scandal necessitates the prioritization of their agenda items, how the urgency of the problem means reasonable analysis is not necessary, and how other priorities that may conflict with their agenda items can now simply be ignored. You can see this happen at all levels of society. I'm sure most of us would have seen a pattern like this unfold at work. But the media especially loves it wrt public interest scandals, because they're such solid revenue generators for them.