Honesty and Accuracy - The Media v The Internet

I recently met two journalists who were discussing whether the Internet would cause the demise of newspapers and other media.

One of them criticised the accuracy of the Internet, and was really not very happy with my response that whenever I know the real story about anything published in the media, the published version never tallies with my information and sometimes is just plain wrong.

The basic problem is that the newspapers and the media need bad news. Without bad news they don’t have a product or service to sell.

Nicholas Montserrat wrote a book about the effect of the media on the people and the society on a small island and about the changes wrought purely by the exposure by the media. For example I am under the impression that most or all of the car bombs in Baghdad are sited within camera range of the reporters’ hotels as this ensures the media coverage the terrorists want in order to achieve their aims and it offers the media and government the opportunity to provide bad news.

The situation went wrong with the end of the Cold War, until then the media had something to frighten us with everyday, but not recently. Mind you may be we should be more worried about China and Iran than we are, though there’s probably nothing we can do about it individually or collectively.

If there’s no bad news then everything (or most of everything) can be left alone and no change is needed, but then there’s a risk that no one will buy the papers or watch the news. The general population seem to have decided that there is no really bad news so just let the politicians of whatever party get on with playing their games and there’s no real need to vote, even if their vote could affect anything.

Coming back to the accuracy of the Internet, I use it to do research about the Coeliac condition and Raynauds syndrome, to research information about Linseed, to look at weather forecasts (I use three different sites), to monitor competitors websites to look for product developments and marketing ideas, to find useful new technologies for our own company, to research legal and corporate matters, to provide marketing stimulus for our company (www.e-advantagesolutions.co.uk ), to buy spare parts for my car, to buy seeds for my allotment, to buy books, to get new recipes.

Yes, Google Earth may be a short time out of date but the map references are spot on and the altitudes shown look reasonably accurate. Absolutely stunning. And locally it shows the location of all the fixed speed cameras!

The CIA reports on Mauritius look pretty sound to me though they may be in error because they may include some government supplied statistics. The maps are astounding.

So where are the errors referred to? Are they in the unsafe(?) scientific evidence put forward to support or disprove things that are supposed to cause us fear, eg about global warming for example, about fast driving on public roads, about the low quality of our education system.