Читать книгу Feature Writing and Reporting - Jennifer Brannock Cox - Страница 30

News organizations compete fiercely to be the first to “break” a story. When a significant news event occurs, reporters race to the scene, making calls and reporting details, all while trying not to alert their competitors to the story. But reporters are no longer the ones who break the news, usually—it is often a citizen on the scene with a mobile phone and a social media account who posts it first. When bombers set off explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013, Twitter was flooded with immediate eyewitness accounts, while major news networks followed with the news about 20 minutes later.⁸

Twitter/@caitlingiddings

When news organizations focus only on the timely news of the day, they can wind up parroting each other, telling the same story in a similar way across multiple publications. This is especially common when publications or television stations are all owned by one corporation whose managers write scripts or articles to be shared in multiple markets. Before the internet, this convergence of resources could go unnoticed. How would someone in Seattle know that the story they just read or watched had also been broadcast in St. Louis, Baltimore and Las Vegas?

Twitter/@shananaomi

In the Digital Age, viewers are quicker to notice parroting. The Sinclair Broadcast Group got into trouble with audiences in 2018 when corporation heads forced anchors at nearly 200 television news stations across the country to read identical scripts echoing President Donald Trump’s accusations of other media outlets for producing so-called “fake news.” Viewers attacked Sinclair, producing both parody videos of the anchors for entertainment and compilations of the anchors reading the script as a warning to social media viewers against stations owned by the company. Media experts deemed the script “right-wing propaganda” and called reporters who were forced to read it “soldiers in Trump’s war on the media.”⁹

This is a series of news shots of dozens of television news anchors working for the Sinclair media corporation, who were all required to deliver identical messages from a prepared script calling other media outlets “fake news” in March 2018.¹⁰

Anchors at Sinclair TV stations across the country read the same scripted speech to their audiences, as shown in this compiled picture from the Poynter Institute.

Poynter.org