Quote:
Originally Posted by Saul Goode
It amazes me how reporters, who make a living ostensibly "informing" others, and who live here, can be so stunningly unaware of things going on around them in plain sight every day. It's as if they have no general knowledge base at all - and worse, no interest in developing one...as if everything's just brand-new to them.
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Having had a period of time in my work career where I had to deal with the news media, both local and to a lesser degree, national, this was my experience as well. I was rather mind-boggled to discover it. It was one thing to get a series of rather clueless questions from someone working for the Coast or wherever, but when you got similar questions from the CBC, CTV or CP you quickly realized that reporters really had zero knowledge of the subject in question. In retrospect that shouldn't be a surprise because why should they, since they are not reporting on it every day? But when you tried to fill them in on the subject before they started going thru their list of questions in order to make your answers more understandable to them, they usually were not interested and behaved like you were trying to misinform them just to make your answers sound better. Most of the time they had reached their conclusions on the story of the day long before they talked to you. I discovered that most reporters who were not calling in response to a news release we had issued were calling because someone they liked to use as a source had set them up with their version of the facts first, and everything they did subsequently was based upon that version being correct when in fact it was often far from it.
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