Social Media Is Crap Journalism

What's wrong with social media as a news source? It's wrong two-thirds of the time, it can be manipulated by a homeless guy using a free computer in the public library, it's dripping with agendas, it passes rumors around like an STD in a bathhouse and, quite frankly, because social media is so "user friendly," it's used by a giant number of dumbasses who are thrilled they can now play reporter.

The Boston Marathon bombing took place 40 miles from where I toil in darkness, a 55-year-old reporter on a midsized daily. Because one of the bombers went to college 12 miles from where I work, it was a local story for us.

We sent reporters to the dorms. We harried university officials for more information. We pushed everyone we knew for information and called in every favor.

And, when we weren't doing that, we spent our "spare" moments chasing down idiotic rumors presented as fact on Facebook and Twitter. Almost all the rumors were false.

Oh, sure, social media gets it right every now and then, but there's so much out-and-out lying on Facebook that no one can possibly sift through all of it in any kind of timely manner.

Look at it this way. When I had my knee operated on last year, the hospital gave me morphine. It was professionally produced morphine, administered by professionals in the proper dose. It knocked me sideways, too, and it killed the pain, as advertised.

Junkies buy their drugs on the street, unregulated, not controlled by "hospital elites," free of corporate manipulation and regulation. Fifteen years ago, in the town where I work as a reporter, some clown sold Fentanyl to people who thought they were buying heroin. They died.

That's social media. It's one thing packaged as another, rumors packaged as news, misinterpretation sold as insight, and most of it's wrong and, shot into the arm of the population, it's deadly as hell.

And, when the average, heartburn-plagued reporter isn't writing news stories based on boring old numbers, facts and quotes, he's reading "blogs" whose only source of information is his work.

There are people in this country who think Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert have something to do with news. They don't. Neither one of these blue-suited, sneering clowns has ever done a second's worth of reporter work. Neither one of them has ever covered a shooting or a house fire. You know where they get their news? They read the papers. Rush Limbaugh? Glenn Beck? Neither one of these guys has the credentials you need to get hired on a weekly out in stump country.

And there are people at the top of various internet "news organizations" who have never covered a single piece of actual By-God news in their lives. They went straight to the top of the "new media," leaving the learning process to people who like boring old facts. They look good in their clothes, but they'd be lost trying to get information out of a balky district attorney.

The thing I don't understand is that, if study after study shows people hate reporters and don't trust reporters, then why is the world full of people pretending to be reporters?

In my little part of America, some years ago, we had a radio talk show host who called herself an "opinion journalist." Know what that means? It meant she read the newspaper stories on the air and then commented on what we'd written. I got the "opinion" part of her title but couldn't figure out where she got the "journalist" part.

If you've never stood in the street, with the water from the fire hoses squishing into your shoes and a firefighter telling you to "get back," then you're not a reporter and you're not gonna be.

Twenty years ago, I covered a motorcycle vs. car accident. Guy laid his bike down in front of an oncoming Crown Victoria, and the expected thing happened.

I stood in the street talking to the cops until I had several pages of notes, and then I started back to my truck.

"You might want to wipe your shoes off," a cop said to me.

I looked down and saw I was leaving bloody footprints.

I'm a reporter. For real.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read more features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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