Everyone makes mistakes, even the news. However with technology consistently evolving and the Zuckerberg wall constantly moving, one would think mistakes would happen less frequently.
But they still happen all the time.
In the 1400’s one of the biggest flaws with the printing press was ensuring death. In 1431 there was at least one false Joan of Arc wanders about after the real one was executed. Could the same be said for Elvis and Tupac?
I mean with Tupac being able to perform as a hologram you know that technology truly is limitless.
But technology doesn’t stop mistakes from happening. Fast forward to 1981
There was an attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. He was shot and seriously wounded, he suffered from internal bleeding a punctured lung. ABC, CBS and NBC had the video above featured on their news station within half an hour of the shooting. Both Dan Rather on CBS and Frank Reynolds on ABC delivered obituaries for White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was paralyzed, but still alive.
Another big slip up happened earlier this year in June, when CNN and FOX slipped up by reporting that the individual mandate for the ruling of the Affordable Care Act had been struck down when in actuality that was not the case.
So are mistakes due to people trying to meet a deadline and not fact checking or is it something else? In the case of Reagan and the Affordable Health Care Act I think it’s reporters infatuation with sensationalism. As terrible as it sounds, viewers get joy out of bad things happening. As we discussed in class more people like to read about death,crime and basically anything else going wrong in the world.
My only hope that since the ability to upload news is only getting more efficient with the increasing technology that the information being delivered does not suffer in the process.
Leave a response