We need fewer stenographers in journalism and more investigators

Daniel Harrison writes on Medium about the risks of PR in the financial and political press creating instances of conflict of interests.

Harrison writes, “To conclude this brief political and economic examination of the current media landscape, while wire journalists as establishments such as Associated Press and Reuters have their role to play, by and large, these so-called reporters are at the end of the day, for the most part doing much more harm than they are good. For it is none other than these writers — whose words are syndicated on thousands of online news sites and blogs as content filler, and thus read by millions — who are unquestioningly transcribing pretty much verbatim, what they have been shoveled from the PR-happy economiplomatic platform that spews out the bits in conspicuously typical mainstream-style soundbites. This type of news, which you can find every day all over the web, it truly nothing but garbage most of the time. It is the message that someone wants you to hear about their supposed philanthropy or goal to create jobs or even innovate America’s next greatest product.

“Faced with this sort of news gaining traction every day, newsrooms hiring more and more of such writers out of grad schools to rewrite trivial public relations pap, late-teen cut-and-paste reporting by comparison seems even rather palatable.

“For if there is one thing that is killing news reporting faster than anything else, it is the waste of paper incurred by the activities of public relations departments pushing their agenda on another developing young readers mind, in spite of and even at times in the face of the constitutional right that reader was by birth afforded not to get spoon-fed a diet of propaganda like some starving kid from Pyongyang.”

Read more here.