Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for November 22, 2018

Twitter, almost as reliable as Facebook.

I don’t do Twitter in order to keep up with the news; that’s what either Yahoo! News or Wikipedia is for (specially the latter when it comes to international obituaries)

Newspaper reporters stopped researching and reporting facts many years ago.

The solution is to move to a city you don’t care about and then you won’t care about the local news.

Twitter and Facebook are a vast wasteland of frivolities.

Malarkey, Pig.

I prefer newspaper instead. Social media is always filled with toxic fumes.

While Twitter CEO himself supports fake news peddling propagandists and selective hate mongering against particular communities, what else can you expect from that pathetic platform?

Local newspapers copy from theInternet. Mostly including typos.

The biggest problem with Twitter is all the twits…

In my area if you want local news you must listen to a police/ems scanner for the paper picks and chooses what to report on. Happy Thanksgiving everyone !

You can tell his Twitter folk is fast and reliable – they type in ALL CAPS!

thanks for addressing this. our biggest problem is lack of quality journalism, especially investigative journalism, because we can’t solve the other problems if people don’t have good information and those doing wrong can get away with it. Twitter and Facebook are helpful vehicles for getting information out but it is an issue of “garbage in, garbage out.”

You don’t need to see our papers.

I just cancelled. There is little in the way of local news that interests me and the little local news that is written is done by the people involved not a reporter. I don’t see a birthday party as news of interest to me. Most of the news is stuff they copy from the internet. I can get the comics here. So why do I need the paper?

Welp, happy thanksgiving PBS readers!

What pass for journalists where I live fail spelling and grammar, much less factual reporting.

I cancelled my newspaper subscription when it became obvious that the editors considered sports “news” to be important. Seeing headlines about coach changes above the fold on page one really got old.

The main characters in this article were ones I found obnoxious, but the subject matter was thoroughly fascinating:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nothing-on-this-page-is-real-how-lies-become-truth-in-online-america/2018/11/17/edd44cc8-e85a-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html?utm_term=.13edc405efd8&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

On how too many are swayed by repetition even when the statement is quite simply a lie:

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-believe-lies-just-people-repeat/

I have also met those who figure that truth can be determined by popularity contests rather than research and carefully and logically derived results.

Twitter is the land of trolls.

I’ll just leave this here for Goat and all like minded folks: https://inn.org/members/

The primary value of reporters is that their existence makes the people on whom they are reporting think twice about what they are doing. They may go ahead and do it, but they have to cover it up, and there is some possibility that they may decide that the threat of being reported on will stop the more reprehensible activities in which they would otherwise engage.

In most cases, the “facts” are muddied and blurred by the newscaster’s spin on the subject. “The News” is now more about a network’s opinion than about facts.

Perhaps instead of blaming ill-qualified social media sites and writers for their decline, newspapers might want to look in a mirror and ask themselves how they lost the trust of their readership in the first place? It may be as illuminating as it would be uncomfortable.

After reading all these comments I’m more than thankful I don’t have family coming for Thanksgiving.

All the news that fits – our corporate owners’ guidelines that is.

I get my news from the kid that sits next to me in school.

Many newspapers have been dumping reporters for years, by the hundreds. A few computers, a few editors, a few columnists, and access to wire services constitute a neo-newspaper of the digital age. Social media are not reliable.

Was not Twitter the playground of reporters?

“But these people do research and report facts…” LOL! Good one, Stephan! Most news reported from ANY outlet is mostly opinion, just like Twitter. Newspapers, TV News haven’t reported “just facts” in a looooong time.

We’re the Main Stream Media, and we report what should have happened.

Yep

Interesting comments. Too bad that robinharwood troll never came back to learn the truth.