Make money ! This is raw, simple, minimalistic, but true. Mainstream media's objective is to make money, by three ways:

• Selling subscription (cable, paper, internet)
• Selling copies in the case of paper media
• Selling advertisment spaces

To acheive this, they relay information as good as they can, but if it sounds a bit "sensational", it won't hurt... in their view.

Specialized media usually do a better job at informing their audience, because they know what they talk about.

Quite often mass-media do say wrong things, or say things wrong, just because the reporters don't fully understand what they are talking about. This is no attack. No one has universal knowledge, and if they had to deeply study all topics they're reporting about, the news would not be exactly fresh...

I knew the theory about what I described above for a while when a very spectacular and mediatic accident hit the industry I'm working in, so I expected media to be wrong, either to make things look more spectacular or simply by mistake.

This did occur. What I did not anticipate was how wrong they were ! Some media mixed-up the company name with a product, told about places that were miles away from where the accident occured, and so on. The general idea was correct, but the details were not as good as one could naively expect.

Going through such an experience in my very own professional field was a very enriching experience.

One problem journalists have to face-up with when in rush is to find experts to inform them. It is quite frequent when major event happen to see "self-acquinted" experts appear.

How can a journalist check someone's expertise ? Not so easy... without an expert !

Another bias is that once a journalist knows an expert (be it good or not) if something happens again in the same context, he will certainly not look for a new expert. This is why we always see the same guys on the same topics.

Having said all of that, I thnik that media do their best, but are biased by some controlled and un-controlled factors. Working in a rush is never easy - get the facts, don't care about the immediate conlusions.

So if you want general views of what goes on, listen to media reports (electronic or not), but if you want detailed opinion and analysis, go for specialized media.

And don't forget, what you get is what THEY see !