Foolish news stories are increasing

Today, stories reporting simply that the mayor praised the police at the Garden Club luncheon seems inadequate – even foolish – if the police are in fact entangled in a corruption scandal; the mayor’s comments are clearly political rhetoric, and they come in response to some recent attack by his critics. - The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel

Although this form of journalism is unacceptable, where the reporter merely and incomprehensively reports on the surface without digging into the real story, this form of journalism has become more common than one would like to think. Kovach and Rosenstiel made a wrong assumption here, because, if one looks at the more than a thousand Patch websites, it is exactly this abridged and ill-researched form of journalism that a reader finds.

Good journalism avoids this sort of articles because a good reporter knows there is more to the story than the mayor simply praising the police because he feels like it or is in the mood of doing so. If there is a controversy involving the police department, clearly the mayor is staking out a position: whatever the sore spot I’m behind the cops, is the message the mayor is sending. This bit of praise by the chief executive of the city ought to be enmeshed into an article about the controversy, so as to put the event in context for readers.

If the reporter is not sure of how the meaning of the mayor’s praise ought to be interpreted as him backing the police, he should walk up to the mayor or make a phone call to him, to find out whether that’s what he meant by it. If he says, he didn’t mean that by his luncheon comments, then the writer can print and paste that as a quote.

The scanty stories have become an issue in journalism today, where there are hundreds of local sites that are launching to cover their hometown; most of these sites do a poor job at covering their town, and even poorer job at following ethical rules and standards. The authors are wrong in thinking this sort of reporting doesn’t exist, as is implied by their text – it does exist and it is alive and well and it does not seems likely to cease anytime in the future.