It should be an offence! If only print media adopted some of the standards of institutions like Wikipedia. TV and newspapers with massive readership/viewership regulary abuse that position of power to commercial or political ends. Now of course these are generaly commercial organisations, and perhaps I'm being naive in thinking people want their newspapers to tell them the news, the sales figures of The Sun show that. And I've often heard that newspapers is the one industry regulary run at a loss because owning a paper gives you so much political power (I really need to find a citation for that!)

I'm a regular reader of BBC news and often click into the Technology section. They seem to be constantly writing about computer security threats, and they rarely seem to be in proportion. As for the beebs motivation, money and politics really shouldn't come into it, I suspect it's more likely that on a slow tech news day they turn to recent security releases and alerts that steadily stream out of organisations like Symantec, Microsoft and others.

A recent example of this is the covereage over the last couple of days of the supposed harmful effects of wi-fi networks. I saw something about this on newsnight lastnight but the article that's really wound people up is from the Independent. Ian Betteridge has written a great come back.

This leads me onto my next idea. In this age of blogging and wikis, the new user generated mass media, we should be able to combat the misinformation coming out of these media giants. How about a website dedicated to either debunking, or perhaps in some cases supporting issues that are currently in the media, using citations to real research. Perhaps it would be a simple wiki, with a digg type interface to bring currently relevant articles to the front page. People could visit it to verify whatever they've just been reading in their newspapers, or at least hear another side to it.

Labels: media, panorama, wifi