As a tube driver, and knowing what was what and background information to
many things (as any tube staff would), I soon came to realise that most
stuff reported about the tube / strikes / whatever was at best misleading
or inadequate or at worse, downright lies. As a consequence, I normally
treat any newspaper as a comic on the basis that most of what is printed
is irrelevant or rubbish!

Roger

*From:* Bruce
*Date:* Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:14:08 +0100

"Jack Taylor" wrote:
The standard of railway-related writing has, for some while, been
plummeting steadily lower and we often lambast the BBC for their
reporting but today's efforts in the London "Evening Standard" by
their Transport Correspondent, Dick Murray, are spectacularly
dismal.

Whilst appreciating that there's a need not to baffle the general
public with too much technobabble, there really is no excuse for
the following load of tosh, from his article about Tuesday night's
shambles on the Jubilee line:

"Instead of using traffic lights trains are linked by radio waves
which 'talk' to trackside responders. These in turn send a signal
to a computer in the train engine to speed up or stop."

"One cut was to remove the reverse facility for trains. This means
they cannot circumvent any stranded carriages as they cannot be
switched at points to travel on the opposite track."

"Last night's problem appears to be more straightforward, with a
piece of signal box falling off a carriage and on to the track,
short-circuiting the power."

Traffic lights, train engines (on the Underground!), pieces of
signal *box* falling off? What has the man been on?


I share your concern about the plummeting standards of journalism.
However, there have always been problems when non-technical
journalists - whose education and training has mostly excluded any
mention of technology - write about technical matters.

The Evening Standard article you quoted is certainly no worse than
many other articles about technology by non-technical journalists.

However, some of the worst standards of "journalism" are to be found
on this newsgroup when contributors post messages about technology
(other than rail) that they know less than nothing about.

wrote:
As a tube driver, and knowing what was what and background information to
many things (as any tube staff would), I soon came to realise that most
stuff reported about the tube / strikes / whatever was at best misleading
or inadequate or at worse, downright lies. As a consequence, I normally
treat any newspaper as a comic on the basis that most of what is printed
is irrelevant or rubbish!


I agree. Writing good articles about the railway needs a strong grasp
of a wide variety of technologies that are constantly being changed,
improved and developed.

It is asking an awful lot of a non-technical journalist for them to
possess the specialist knowledge that would be need to keep abreast of
all these changes. The days of newspapers, TV and other media
employing specialist journalists to write about specialist technical
subjects is long gone, if it ever happened at all.

In article ,
() wrote:

As a tube driver, and knowing what was what and background
information to many things (as any tube staff would), I soon came
to realise that most stuff reported about the tube / strikes /
whatever was at best misleading or inadequate or at worse,
downright lies. As a consequence, I normally treat any newspaper as
a comic on the basis that most of what is printed is irrelevant or
rubbish!

I'm afraid my experience is much the same about anything I know directly
about, sadly. To be fair to journos, this is more because they don't have
time to find out what they need to know than because they can't be arsed
to do so.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

wrote in message

In article ,
() wrote:

As a tube driver, and knowing what was what and background
information to many things (as any tube staff would), I soon came
to realise that most stuff reported about the tube / strikes /
whatever was at best misleading or inadequate or at worse,
downright lies. As a consequence, I normally treat any newspaper as
a comic on the basis that most of what is printed is irrelevant or
rubbish!

I'm afraid my experience is much the same about anything I know
directly about, sadly. To be fair to journos, this is more because
they don't have time to find out what they need to know than because
they can't be arsed to do so.

Yes, I've often been interviewed by journalists from the trade press
about my specialist subject (not railways). The UK journos tend to be
worse than their, say, French, German or US equivalents, but better than
the South Africans. More often than not, these days they're new to the
subject and often freelance with just a few hours to research and write
a story with no relevant background to draw on.

Even if they do a reasonably competent job, the sub-editors dumb it down
further, if only by using mixed-case for acronyms. It was better 10 or
20 years ago, but the press now operates on much thinner margins, with
less advertisinng to fund it, and having to compete with free Web
sources (and news groups, of course). Most UK trade magazines have a
skeleton full-time staff, with the gaps filled by freelancers and
correspondents (plus advertorial). The press in non-English speaking
countries suffers less from on-line competition, and consequently has
declined more slowly.