Slim20
You misunderstand, and your words may mislead.
Ignorance is in no one’s interest, obviously. Rather I am saying the necessity for brevity does not allow a fully detailed and therefore more explanatory story to be told. And please don’t misquote me. I never said, nor intimated, that anything is too complicated for the reader to understand. I said the reader doesn’t care or have time enough to wade through sufficient explanation to distinguish between, for example, a maintenance fault that leads to a crash, and a maintenance blunder compounded by crew error that leads to the same thing, and to do it to a level that would satisfy some here.
In short, the problem lies with the reader and circumstance, not the news provider. It should be obvious that any media would like nothing more than to fully explain everything to everyone. If there were a market for that I’d have a job for life, wouldn’t I?
And no, I’m not saying it's all right for a journalist to write a story he knows to be wrong or inaccurate, as well you know. You are misinterpreting my message. And your line associating costly journalism with cheap sensationalism is a nice little play on words, but that’s all. Those two issues are so unrelated as to be poles apart. Ever considered a career as a headline writer?
Guys, wake up. Just what do you expect?
The news reporting media is an imperfect device, yes, and for all the reasons I have tried to share with you. But you cannot demand that it and the public take as much interest in a complex issue as your training, experience and insight allows you to, just because you think they should. Remember, those that want the full detail can also read the AAIB report if there’s any doubt.
OK, for those still grappling with my argument, tTry looking at this another way…the big picture. This was a national news story of relatively minor interest to the 44million or so people who live in Britain. Indeed, arguably the biggest issues for them were who might have been hurt on the ground, and the fears raised earlier over the DU aboard.
Would you have been happier if the publication of the AAIB’s report had been ignored, or had been taken over by some larger news event that day? But then you or certainly someone else here would be complaining the media never publishes anything about the accident investigation that exonerated the crew. Of course, whatever is reported should be accurate, but, at national news level, it does not have to be so accurate as to the level you demand. The reader just wants to know enough that he may comfortably forget about it all and turn the page. Hence all the references to maintenance.
I’ve tried to explain as well as complain, but if you can’t get your head around what the media is, how it works, what the public wants (and is prepared to pay for) and the slant one’s own knowledge puts on everything we read, I’m afraid you’re doomed to be unhappy with most of what you see, read and listen to. I can’t help you further in that case.