La superficialitat de la premsa

En un correu que m’ha arribat trobo un parell de frases sobre la premsa:

“The superficiality of newspaper coverage is without excuse; public characters appear as on a child’s drawing, two-dimensional and without perspective. All that is lacking is the childish charm. That is not the fault of the reporters but of their employers, who will neither invest in thorough reporting nor even sanction it, because it might disturb their own concept of the world they live in.” — A. J. Liebling, The Wayward Pressman

Over the last 50 years or so, though, journalists have fallen on the integrity index, in part because of television (it’s pretty hard to be a journalist when you can’t write three consecutive sentences and have to condense a story into a 20-second item before cutting to Joe on sports); in part because people don’t read (newspaper circulation in the US has been steadily dropping, and reporters don’t get paid that well); and in part because getting a story, even if it’s just the regurgitated pablum offered up at a staged news conference, is more important than getting THE story, which is usually real work — the regurgitation is where the buffet is, but identification of the pablum isn’t a consideration.

Té raó l’autor quan fa la diferència entre explicar una història i explicar LA història, és a dir, explicar allò que ha passat no només referint-se als fets ocorreguts o al que dóna una agència de notícies, sino donant tota la informació que hi hagi a l’abast, des de la relació amb altres fets fins a l’origen d’allò que ha passat, passant per dades estadístiques o de situació, per poder donar una visió de conjunt de tot plegat.
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