Thread by @jonworth

In reaction to my earlier tweets about poor quality journalism (and the absence of consequence for writing what's obviously wrong), some people have said "well I better get the news from the source"

I'm not sure

A lot of my friends are journalists. And some of what they have to do is nightmarish - they have to make sense of things that are next to impossible to understand, to churn out stories on topics that drop onto their plate, and do it immediately and with next to no budget

It's hence inevitable that things are going to go wrong

The question then comes: well what happens when things go wrong?

A good journalist will then realise what happened, and seek to fix it. A bad one will ignore reasoned critique and repeat the error

And the legitimate question then of course is: what critique is correct and legitimate to listen to? And who are those people whose critique is worth listening to in each case? And on what topics?

I'm lucky in that I can blog and tweet and commentate alongside my regular consultancy and training work in EU politics - and EU politics and especially Brexit are my area of credibility. It is *my job* to understand them.

If a journalist or politician makes a well intentioned error on a Brexit issue, I will point it out - and if the other person acknowledges the point they will gain in credibility in my eyes.

If instead they ignore the point (as the BXL correspondent of one left leaning UK paper *always* does) and then keep on repeating the error I am going to put them down as arrogant or stupid or both.

But that's Brexit.

What about something that half interests me, or I have little time for? Like city planning. Or Berlin's rent control law. Or the latest developments in computer technology?

Here I do not have the time to do the sifting. To do all the research myself. To find the primary sources.

I instead need someone to have done that for me, and tell me why something matters, or what's important.

A journalist in other words.

And in a complex and confusing world we need people to do that work for us - and most importantly do that work for us in the sectors that interest us, but are not our everyday prime concern.

And we might well not be as good researching things as we think anyway.

So sure, have a rant at bad journalism. And given I write about Brexit I am going to have a lifetime of that ahead of me.

But journalism and journalists are not the problem. Bad ones are.

We do not, even now, have a substitute for good journalism.

/ends