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Notes -
Schooled. Journalism schools still exist, but I hesitate to say educated because at least from my conversations with the students they were not well rounded independent thinkers. They learn good technical writing of articles, but generally don’t get enough background in other subjects to allow them to understand what is actually happening.
I mean, isn’t that kinda not their job? Journalists are biased, but they’re definitionally reporters and not supposed to be running blogs.
Pushing a narrative is a problem, but they’re actually supposed to be writing articles along the lines of ‘experts say x about y’- it’s what we pay them to do.
How do they know who is a proper expert and who is a charlatan, without knowledge? They don't, so they take the safe and logical route: the 'experts' are those who follow the narrative.
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I mean the problem with sending someone to report on a topic that knows little about the topic is that they don’t have any way to vet what each set of experts is telling them.
A scientifically literate reporter is probably going to have some insights into how diseases work and how germs spread and so on. Maybe not perfect but enough to know where the expert’s story might not add up, or what questions need to be answered or even whether the research referenced says what the expert claims it says.
A political science literate person who knows the history and main actors in Israel and Gaza is not simply going to uncritically report the two competing narratives and call it good. They’re in some sense going to examine the evidence in light of what is known about the parties and give as accurate of a picture of what’s actually true.
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