Originally Posted by
gulliBell
The quality of journalism in Australia by-and-large is poor. I'm stunned reading on-line news every day at the volume of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and disjointed story lines. And when I see so-called aviation experts like Geoffrey Thomas (and others) being interviewed in response to events the drivel that comes out of their mouth makes me cringe. Literacy and numeracy is in decline for a whole generation, the NAPLAN data released today shows one third of all students in Year 3, 5, 7, and 9 are not meeting minimum academic standards. Journalists don't fact check their work and they write uninformed rubbish. Take for example one of Australia's highest paid journalists Lisa Wilkinson who's been paid $2M/year by Channel 10 to stay at home and do nothing for the past two years. By her own admission she didn't do any fact checking of the Higgin's allegations aired on The Project, and she didn't even seek comment from Senator Reynolds before the story was broadcast. Journalism in Australia is a joke, twin engine R44's and propellers in the pool or not.
I do a lot of technical automotive writing for my work, most of which ends up on peoples' walls on posters. The people writing the news are paid to write; I would imagine they are considered professional writers as part of their job role. Yet I also see constant spelling errors, grammar errors and plain incorrect facts every day. One of the worst I saw earlier this week was a news article about something in Vienna, Australia. Vienna is the capital of Austria! I think that auto-spelling correction and other tools are to blame for some of the errors, along with pressure to get breaking content onto the websites and feeds. But everything, and I do mean everything, should be proofread by someone else before going live.