Comment on Privileging the Question

Sun, 05 May 2013 12:15:18 GMT

I have two sources, both from Slovakia.

First is a person I know and consider trustworthy, but I don't have their consent to publish their name. The newspaper was Pravda (second or third most selling newspaper in the country).

Second is more indirect, I worked for a company which provided some services for a few newspapers, so my colleagues had a lot of contact with journalists. The stories suggested that the journalists were paid poorly, overburdened with work, and usually quit burnt out after a few months.

The information I got from the first source is: The journalists have to write 3-4 articles during the day, about a topic they learn in the morning, and they mostly use phone and internet to create the texts. (Sometimes the newspaper has a policy that the journalist must sign half of articles with their real name, and half with some pen name, to not make it obvious to the readers how much articles one person writes daily.) Many people, especially scientists, refuse to communicate with journalists under these conditions. But there are some known, relatively high-status people, willing to give an opinion on almost any topic... and when the day is almost over and the journalist didn't succeed to get information from anyone else, such a person can really save the day. (This is written from my memory.)

The part about the possible strategies is: From the first source, I got the descriptions (1) and (2); the former is a typical day, and the latter is the fallback option, when the former one fails, the day is getting over, and the boss is becoming impatient.

Unrelated to my sources, (3) a few journalists in Slovakia were fired a few years ago, because they repeatedly stole and translated material from foreign newspapers (for some reasons, Guardian was a popular victim). This was discovered when web discussions below articles became mainstream in Slovakia; some people made a sport of providing hyperlinks to the original articles.

The option (4) is what happened to me as a person interviewed by journalist, on two indepenent occasions. At the interview it was obvious that the story is already written, and I am only there as a name to put under the article.

The first case: I was a small child and I won a local mathematical olympiad. The journalist came to me with an idea of writing about a gifted child and computers. Was disappointed to hear that we don't have a computer at home, and can't afford one. The journalist asked me repeatedly whether because of my success my parents are planning to buy me a computer, and I repeatedly said no. The resulting article said that my parents are considering buying me a computer; although I never said anything like that. But that's what the journalist wanted to write.

The second case happened a decade later: At some protest against some human rights abuse in Palestine, I decided to talk with a journalist about a paradox that when talking about Europe, the concept of "collective guilt" is not accepted, but when talking about people in Palestine, the same concept is used for them, and nobody discusses that. The journalist seemed interested and asked about my name. The only thing about this all in the resulting article was: "Student Viliam said that opressing Palestinians is bad." At that moment I decided to never speak with a journalist again.

And that's the information I built my model upon. Sorry, no references.

Disclaimer: I am not saying that all countries are like this, or even that all newspapers in my country are like this. But I also don't believe that this all was just a random exception. Under some conditions, this is the equilibrium the system converges to.

I can also imagine that the reality is more complex than this, for example that the newspaper has a few high-status journalists who do serious work, and a few low-status journalists to provide the text to fill the rest of the pages; so this all only describes the work of the low-status ones.

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