I have no idea what this picture has to do with the post, I typed sloppy reporting into Google and this showed up. Gotta love old Pete though…and miss the Libertines

I seem to hear a lot about the death of Mainstream Media and the rise of blogging as the new news medium. I personally don’t think there’s much to choose between the two, case in point were two articles I read on BBC and Fortune recently. The one on Fortune by Eric Ellis on the “Flying Tigers” did read more like a personal blog post or even a rant rather than a legitimate article. I was under the impression there was two types of articles in such magazines, “news” articles which should be accurate and dispassionate and “opinion” pieces which should involve more analysis and will obviously have some bias as a result.

Where does Ellis’s article fit into this? It’s certainly not dispassionate, nor does it involve a lot of analysis or even thinking for that matter. In fact he trots out that tired line about “the Tigers’ Eelam is a country, with all the accoutrements of state” not mentioning how the Sri Lankan Government and Sri Lankan taxpayers foot the administrative costs. Ellis displays an embarrassing lack of context, no more so when he titles his article “Eyewitness account of Tamil attack.” But then I guess he was just lazy and more intent on getting down the pool at GFH than thinking about what he was writing.

Another article that appears to include the most amazing cop out was this one on Muhammad Yunus dropping his aspirations for a political party in Bangladesh. One of the last paragraphs gave me pause for thought: 

“But correspondents say that many people questioned whether he had over-estimated his popularity in rural areas, where his bank’s high interest rates are disliked.” 

Eh? I could have sworn this was the same man who just got the Nobel Peace Prize for being the “World banker to the poor”  whose micro-credit schemes are available “even to beggars.” Also the Grameen bank is majority owned by the “rural poor it serves” so it’s not even Yunus’ bank. It just seems like some journo wrote up a third of that article, couldn’t come up with a valid reason why the chap was pulling out of politics (maybe he’s just tired of bullshit), really wanted to head down to the pub and just made something up.

Even I don’t…oh wait…there’s that bottle of wine left over from last night…