McFreedom

Glenn Reynolds told a brief story about media overhype in a New Orleans hurricane, this morning, which reminded me of something that happened to my mother a few years ago in the small town in North Carolina that she lives in. There had been some heavy rains for several days, and few of the lower-lying areas in the county were beginning to fill with shallow pools of water, including my mother's side yard, which always forms a wide, shallow pool when there is a lot of rain. That morning, a local television crew knocked on her door, and asked her, on camera, if she was worried about flooding. "Oh, no," she said, "it always looks like that when it rains, but it's never come anywhere near the house." That night, her side yard was on television. But the interviewee was some other woman who had expressed great distress about the potential for flooding. I have never once seen a news story where I knew the particulars as an insider (and, thanks to my work in high-profile companies in Silicon Valley the past few years, I got a lot of opportunity) and there was not at least one significant factual error, omission or distortion to make a better story. Never. Unlike a lot of people, I don't think there's any conspiricy, here. I think a lot of it is sloppiness - by definition, half of journalists are below average - and I think some of it is selectively ignoring some facts to make a better story (or to create a story, at all). But I'm a very firm believer in the maxim, "Never attribute to malice what may be explained by incompetence."