Re: <nettime> Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism".

[Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com>]

What occurs to me in this affair, is the New Yorker's presumption of its own cutting edge originality. The editors assumed they were going to the source, or at least the best informed and most highly pedigreed (read: fashionable) journalist when they went to Morozov.

The New Yorker has never been terribly strong on footnotes but their fact checkers were clearly out of their depth: they had no idea how even to research Morozov's claims, let alone to realize he was lifting the major arguments of his piece from elsewhere without suitable attribution. Or were just too lazy or poorly trained to do so. 

M simulated journalistic authenticity well enough to their poorly trained or indifferent eyes, they didn't go back to the sources to check the quotes.

Wd they even have known what questions to ask? Or if they did, wd they bother to make certain the words quoted were uttered directly to M and not to the author he quotes without attribution. Or did they care? Was it enough to satisfy their low standards, that the quotes were correct and not that they were not direct?

The bottom line: this is lazy failed journalism as it is widely practiced on-line by people who've simply handed over editorial discretion to those who have no idea what it is?or worse the print people have abdicated their own role as editors because they are fooled by the form and know nothing about the content.

The BBC news writing on the website is a model of sloppy journalism down to sentence structure and grammar; it seems at best only to go through a spell check before going live. And sometimes not even that. But then journalism has very infrequently possessed anything like what might be called "integrity."

Keith Sanborn

> On Oct 20, 2014, at 10:32 AM, "t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com> wrote:
>
> John (H), I'm not sure how it helps anyone to say that the declining
> editorial quality of a posh magazine is inexorably linked in some
> thermodynamicky way with the ultimate fate of the universe.
 <...>

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