Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Modern journalism: Let’s not bother to fucking check

This, then, is how modern journalism works. The TUC has a proposal to state that people shouldn't be forced to wear high heels (or foot-damaging footwear) in the workplace if they don't want to. The usual suspects at the Sun and Mail (and even the Telegraph, who really aren't a quality paper any more) decide they'll have a bit of fun and pretend that the TUC is BANNING HIGH HEELS OMG, whereas in truth they're more than entirely aware that isn't the case; it's just the same sort of drab lie that gets dredged up from time to time against trade unions, the hated bloc-voting Trotskyite Reds who WOULDN'T EVEN BURY THE DEAD BACK IN 1979 and so on, yadda yadda.

You'd hope that at that point the 'quality' papers, even the Guardian, which is traditionally seen as being a left-wing newspaper, might have a look at the facts of the situation and say, ah no, that's not it at all. Wouldn't you? You would? Well you'd be wrong. Because far from bothering to fucking check anything in the slightest, they just decided to run with a crock of steaming horseshit from Jenni Russell which assumed that everything the Mail and Sun had said was correct. Big assumption. Big, wrong assumption. But then I suppose there's no snooty little article (and £££ to be made from it) if there isn't a story, is there?

OK, so don't blame the journalist for not fucking checking in the slightest; it's not in her financial interests to check, is it? No ban on high heels = no shit article from me saying oh noes, but I like my heels innit? Fine. But didn't anyone else check? Couldn't anyone else give a shit? Didn't anyone else care that the Guardian, the liberal-left Guardian, was running an article based on a total and utter lie about trade unions? Or, to boil it down a bit further, did no-one care that a supposedly quality paper was running an article based on a total and utter lie? No, apparently not.

This comes in the wake of the fairly tawdry hatchet job the Graun did on comedians the other week, including Richard Herring, who was understandably a bit pissed off by the whole affair. Sure, he got a 'right of reply' but that doesn't excuse the misleading article.

It's pretty saddening for those of us who see the Graun as the last-chance saloon for some kind of mainstream liberal voice in the media (apart from the state-funded Bolsheviks at the Beeb, obviously, pffffft). Crap journalism makes every single article less respected. The thing about being the good guys is that you sometimes can't run the story you want, if it's not based in fact. That means you have a sliver of integrity, and it sets you apart from your rivals who couldn't care less.

Doesn't it? Or doesn't that matter any more?

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Related posts:

1. Lesson 2 of journalism: Don’t check facts
2. Why I don’t bother with Mad Mel
3. A very modern slavery
4. It would be too much effort to actually check something, obviously
5. Mad Mel: I think it’s something like this, but I can’t be sure. Shall I check? Nah, fuck it.