I really am curious about this. Every profession is going to have good and bad people in it but I wonder if some of the problems we see in todays MSM is due to old fashioned laziness.

I think blogs have helped with this to some extent. No longer can columnists or journalists just sit back and write knowing no one but their internal fact checkers are going to know if they don't do their work. Now every citizen is a fact checker on them and when they get it wrong its shown on blogs for all the world to see. What is really funny is how some of the errors are so easy to find. If we as normal citizens can find the not followed leads or not researched adequately backgrounds then surely a reporter with their resources (newspapers, tv with access to things like Lexus Nexus) could find what we find at least and probably more.

Just my 2 cents.

Interesting post, Mighty, just perfect for me to refer you or anybody else who might be interested to these sections of the TVNL website:

http://tvnewslies.org/html/lapdog_press.html

And then there are those people who have no idea how to really watch the news, regardless of what station they're watching or listening to. I know I didn't know, until I came to TVNL and investigated some of what the founder and editor of the site was saying about what we should be watching and/or listening for:

http://tvnewslies.org/html/how_to_watch_the_news.html

I get most of my news from these sources: http://tvnewslies.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=4866

Catherine

Good points, interesting topic... new way of looking at journalism (or lack thereof!) Thanks Mighty

That's a really good point, because how many employees have ever slacked off on the job? Some to many, right? Now what if someone's job is in the news? And there you go. It's a job, and deadlines add time constraints, and there's corporate pressure from advertisers, etc.

The only safeguard against laziness is perhaps the back-end threat of litigation against the employer, or the threat of job loss against the employee.