Without wading back into the exceptionally complicated details of that long controversy, I learned two things from the experience that have never left me.
First, as I traveled to Boston to go to court, and as I wracked up PACER charges downloading legal briefs and judicial orders, I would have email exchanges with newspaper reporters who wanted me to tell them what had happened. I would shoot back an email message that said, “Judge’s ruling attached,” and they would reply, “Yeah, saw the attachment, what does it say?”
Over two years, through events in a trial court and in an appellate court, with multiple parties pursuing complicated and divergent courses, reporters would not read. They wouldn’t read the 40-page legal briefs filed by the lawyers for all the competing sides, but they also wouldn’t read a three-page order from a judge. They would not read, period. They wanted the tl;dr, in a sentence or two. “Yeah, what’s it say?”
In our own moment, I remain extremely confident that the flood of bullshit like this […] is being slopped out by people who DRS — who Don’t Read Shit — about the topic they cover. Somebody in a government agency shot this dude an email message that said COVID VACCINES ARE MIRACLE DRUGS EVERYONE SHOULD GET THEM, and he said to himself, “Miracle drugs, got it!” We’re plagued by an army of people who pour “information” into the world based on two Twitter posts and a text message, after a full three to five seconds of deep thought …
Chris Bray, “Chris Bray is Stupid and Evil”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2022-04-07.
September 30, 2022
QotD: Many media people are folks “who Don’t Read Shit” about the stories they “report” on
Comments Off on QotD: Many media people are folks “who Don’t Read Shit” about the stories they “report” on
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