Originally Posted by
Eclan
Is that what you were doing? I had to read it a few times to understand it.
No, but if you point out flaws in someone else's paint job while standing beside a crap paint job of your own, expect some people to pick you up on it. Since you claim you write for a living and proof-read your work until it's correct I'd have thought that same "rigour" and discipline would naturally filter through to your posts here, thus my amusement at the irony of your dig at others.
What, by the way, do you write? Do you have anything published we might peruse?
Because posting here is an amusement occasionally, I don't have hours of time to compose and correct and review everything I post, it's often, like others, a quick response.
Now, this thread was about the media largely and its failure. I say again, I'm not paid to post here so I'm not going to waste time making sure everything would pass a writing test at Oxford.
What I DON'T do when I write is add 'event' on the end of everything or replace the perfectly acceptable 'close' when a business is shut down with 'shuttered', the latest favourite media word that emanated from the United States it seems. That's my main problem with the media, aside from accuracy, is that every story starts with 'massive', includes the word 'event', talks about a business being 'shuttered', observes that the populace is 'bracing' or 'reeling', uses 'slam' for any attack by one politician on another, includes the phrase 'it comes after'. Media reporting is nothing more these days than a mindless collection of inaccuracies bound together by weasel words.
As for your pickiness, you're just being obtuse.
I wouldn't criticise someone else's paint job if mine wasn't that good. Of course, I wouldn't have been paid would I whereas the other painter (as with journalists) are paid. Your twisting of my analogy suggests that if you have your car repaired and you pay good money for it that you should just stand by and accept a crap job and pay up. We pay for newspapers and in one way or another, for TV content. It is not unreasonable to expect those people to at least make an attempt at accuracy. Once upon a time, one could read the paper and learn something about grammar and spelling because the better news outlets were paragons of grammatical accuracy. Not anymore.
As Don Watson said: "I don't know how the human race survived for the first 100,000 to 200,000 years. We must have just milled around and bumped into each other endlessly. Thank goodness we are now all 'going forward'". Watson provides some pretty good illustrations of the dire state of communication.