A spokesperson for the US mainstream media (MSM) has confirmed that all journalists are to be offered a new training course in how to fact-check information following some recent shocking lapses that have further damaged the media's credibility.
Recently a MSM journalist failed to recognize a quotation from Shakespeare's Macbeth used by Senator Ted Cruz by claiming it was from US novelist William Faulkner.
This set off a social media frenzy whereby others gleefully joined in the jeering at Senator Cruz's ignorant "mistake". After all, he's just an Okie from Muskogee and couldn't possibly have read any Shakespeare or Shaka-a-spear as some prefer to call him.
In fact the quotation in question, as virtually any schoolboy/girl knows, and William Faulkner certainly knew, was from Shakespeare's play Macbeth.
So FNN proposes a basic training course for MSM journalists comprising the following lessons:
- There is a thing called the Internet.
- On the Internet is a thing called a search engine.
- The search engine allows you to enter some text and find "hits" to content that closely match it from data stored on the Internet.
- In the case of a direct quotation, the hits will most likely lead you straight to the source of the quotation.
- If you want to truly confirm the source of a quotation then go directly to the primary source itself e.g. the book or film and check it.
Apparently this kind of basic "fact-checking" is beyond the capabilities of today's MSM "journalists" who are far too busy pursuing their own personal agendas to check if what they are "reporting" is, in fact, real.
And this is handy for them since it allows bona-fide "journalists" to assert any old BS in a tweet to trigger a social media feeding frenzy, safe in the knowledge that their ignorant smear has already done the damage it was intended to do.