alt Hacker NewsJournalism is about presenting a topic, not about presenting a person. I don’t care about Elon Musk as a person. I don’t care about his opinions on lawn care or cooking eggs. But in a story about self driving car technology I want to hear his input and the input of Ford and GM and Waymo and Uber and suppliers and academics and regulators and users. Compiling all those sources and presenting a narrative on the topic of self driving cars is journalism.
Giving one person an uncritical platform for three hours isn’t journalism. For that to resemble journalism you would have to squint so hard your eyes would be shut.
This is a great point and well made.
I would take it a step further and argue that it's not so much a topic as facts. Like objectively measurable things about the real world.
There's always going to be some limit to what we can actually measure and how much time we have to do it, but there's no reason not to try to get close to what we we're capable of doing.
I would argue that there are very few people who are actually authorities on a subject worth uncritically transcribing for 3 hours on a subject. Elon Musk is an easy target, the only thing he's an expert on is being Elon Musk, which isn't a very interesting topic.
What he has to say on any given subject does sometimes matter, because some people believe what he says, so it's useful for me to know some of it, but it's more useful to know what the actual facts are.
I don't want reporters who write an article that says "well I talked to one side and they said it's raining and I talked to the other side and they said it was hailing", I want a reporter who goes out and checks what the weather actually is.