Of course it is. Like I said, there are bad reporters doing bad reporting. There is a lot of pressure to be first to a scoop and some guys run with stuff before they've done the proper legwork.
And absolutely that deserves to be criticized. Like I said, Sekeres is a crappy reporter. And if someone is hesitant in believing a scoop from him because his track record is spotty ... fair enough.
But again, nobody is 'making stuff up'. Reporters are reporting stuff they believe to be true. Some of them are just more thorough and accurate than others.
Oh, absolutely. No argument there.
Reporters are human beings and just as prone to biases as everyone else. And for generations, reporters in city have flip-flopped as pro/anti management when management changes happened and their reporting has been coloured by that filter. And absolutely, when something lines up with your narrative it's probably human nature to get excited and run with it quicker than you would with something that goes against it.
Again, I'm not at all saying that we aren't subjected to bad and/or biased reporting. Constantly. It just drives me nuts when, whenever someone sees a story they don't like, the default response is LOL THE MEDIA JUST MAKING STUFF UP AGAIN as though people are inventing stories out of thin air. That simply doesn't happen.
I've worked with reporters and most of them are good, often their mistakes are either honest or the result of not having enough time or resources to follow up, but definitely there is an inherent bias that they do use to frame things.
I haven't seen reporters completely make up something out of the blue, but I HAVE seen them embellish or fill in the gaps with their own speculation that they pass off as facts, and only clarify once caught out. So they'll hear a true fact that they'll report (inside source says X happened) and then they'll make up that it happened because Y reasons, and word it in a way that you'd naturally interpret Y as also having been reported by the source who said X.
X was reportedly true.
Y was made up by the reporter who thinks that's what happened.
Both will be passed off as the same level of information sourcing.
Not all reporters do it, but it does happen and is gross, so they may not completely make things up, but their evolution of facts becomes so perverted it in a sense is now made up, just with an original kernal of truth.
it doesn't help that teams brazenly lie almost constantly. no one accuses the canucks of fake news when boeser is reported as being day to day and then it's revealed well actually he had wrist surgery and will be out a month. reporters have to skirt the edges of confirming their stories because teams will pretty much never be straight up with them except when it benefits them to do so
This is very true, teams lie all the time for understandable tactical and strategic reasons, but reporters are held to a standard of truth. It does make it harder for journalists, but in the end, that's literally their job, to discover the truth.
