Oct. 1st, 2012 10:30 am
On-the-ball tech reporting from the BBC
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unjapanologistAddendum to that recent whine about how politicians have a responsibility to get educated about the internet: "mainstream" media need such education at least as badly. The internet has become crucial not just to many people's personal lives, but to the functioning of whole societies. There are very many people who don't have the time or the inclination to read a slew of tech news RSS feeds, and established news outlets have a responsibility to bring their audiences comprehensive and correct information about important internet-related events.
Alas, tech reporting in mainstream news outlets is often so bad I don't know whether to laugh or cry. If there's any reporting on internet-related matters at all, it's often a near-verbatim copy of whatever press release some agency or company has sent around. Tech news in Belgian newspapers is mostly two-paragraph blurbs without any attempt at analysis or fact-checking. And it's kind of hard to take them seriously after they all jumped on that hilarious "anti-ACTA protesters wear masks because they fear reprisals" thing.
That's "just" my local newspapers, but it gets really sad and depressing when you think of how many global "quality" news outlets are often exactly as useless when it comes to reporting on the internet. BBC News just published an article on how Japan criminalized illegal downloading of music and video. This happened three months ago. The article makes an effort to present "both sides" of the issue but doesn't provide a shred of analysis to help readers understand how they should interpret the quotes from politicians on the one hand and activists on the other. For instance, the article fails to point out that the download numbers presented by politicians have been denounced as pure fantasy by Japanese activists, and that the punishments mandated under the new law are grotesquely out of proportion with the offense.
It's not that this sort of tech reporting is so wrong it's offensive (although sometimes it is), or that it's deliberately misleading (it often is misleading, but I don't think journalists do it on purpose). It's just useless. Giving vast swathes of "mainstream" audiences nothing but useless reporting on such a critical topic is irresponsible.
ETA: I belatedly realized why the story must have somehow floated across the BBC's field of vision at precisely this time: now is when the law passed three months ago actually goes into effect. Now that BBC has noticed it, others like CNN are jumping on the bandwagon. The BBC article was unimpressive, but the CNN one is downright atrocious; it parrots industry figures without the least context, provides no analysis at all, and repeats debunked claims on things like the effectiveness of HADOPI in France.
Alas, tech reporting in mainstream news outlets is often so bad I don't know whether to laugh or cry. If there's any reporting on internet-related matters at all, it's often a near-verbatim copy of whatever press release some agency or company has sent around. Tech news in Belgian newspapers is mostly two-paragraph blurbs without any attempt at analysis or fact-checking. And it's kind of hard to take them seriously after they all jumped on that hilarious "anti-ACTA protesters wear masks because they fear reprisals" thing.
That's "just" my local newspapers, but it gets really sad and depressing when you think of how many global "quality" news outlets are often exactly as useless when it comes to reporting on the internet. BBC News just published an article on how Japan criminalized illegal downloading of music and video. This happened three months ago. The article makes an effort to present "both sides" of the issue but doesn't provide a shred of analysis to help readers understand how they should interpret the quotes from politicians on the one hand and activists on the other. For instance, the article fails to point out that the download numbers presented by politicians have been denounced as pure fantasy by Japanese activists, and that the punishments mandated under the new law are grotesquely out of proportion with the offense.
It's not that this sort of tech reporting is so wrong it's offensive (although sometimes it is), or that it's deliberately misleading (it often is misleading, but I don't think journalists do it on purpose). It's just useless. Giving vast swathes of "mainstream" audiences nothing but useless reporting on such a critical topic is irresponsible.
ETA: I belatedly realized why the story must have somehow floated across the BBC's field of vision at precisely this time: now is when the law passed three months ago actually goes into effect. Now that BBC has noticed it, others like CNN are jumping on the bandwagon. The BBC article was unimpressive, but the CNN one is downright atrocious; it parrots industry figures without the least context, provides no analysis at all, and repeats debunked claims on things like the effectiveness of HADOPI in France.
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