The first thing I found interesting in this chapter is the idea of Attribution in journalistic writing. It is crucial in order to be credible that you include who what and where in your writing. I found it interesting that it didn’t go more into the rise of the internet and how we’ve almost lost this concept. I think of something like the spread of news about Covid and rise of misinformation. Most people now are getting their news from things like Twitter and Instagram; and when you look at news only has a “check for validity” button under the post. This means that yes Instagram is flagging a portion of possible misinformation, but it is still out there to the public. We have to look more into the attributions behind our news today due to this. I find this to be one of the downfalls with multimedia news today because there is a higher changer of misinformation or “fake” news.
Later in the chapter it talks about wording of attribution and the rule of only using “said”. This is something that kind of made me think when I first read it. My first thought was they try to have any elimination of opinion or bias by the author by using adjectives to describe given quotes. It also pertains to my earlier thoughts of credibility. In the given example, using the word according to can be a statement that slightly seems misleading to the reader. It makes them wonder if something else had been said and the words were changed. This causes a problem with broadcast news because not being credible causes problems throughout the newspaper. It also ultimately ruins whatever story is being covered.
