BROKEN NEWS!

How much of what you're reading here on this blog are you hearing about for the first time? You have to admit what were writing about is pretty interesting, lawyers stealing from their clients, police work that's so bad that it rises to the level of criminality, constitutional rights being violated, prosecutorial misconduct (more on that later), etc, so why aren't we reading about these things in the local papers or on the evening news? We're not because the local media is broken. Let's take a look at a typical "BREAKING NEWS" headline from the Miami Herald:


HELL YES! A cop is put on office duty after he's arrested! RIGHT ON! The cop is taken off the street and put behind a desk after a domestic violence incident. It's not ground breaking news, but its certainly interesting. Let's look at the rest of the article...


WHAT!? The officer was arrested in May? WELCOME TO SEVEN MONTHS AGO! What exactly makes this "BREAKING NEWS?" So the cop is arrested last May and is now doing desk duty. What exactly did this cop do to make him "BREAKING NEWS" headline worthy? Let's read on...


WHAT?! The cops was arrested because he picked up his wife over his shoulder and put her into their SUV?! THAT'S BREAKING NEWS?! Is this sad or what? How the hell is this even news worthy? This story reflects the sad state our local media is in, besides printing this rubbish, the remaining stories are usually nothing more than rehashing press releases given to the media by the Police, State Attorneys Office or local government. What's worse is that when these stories are written, the writers rarely if ever actually investigate the story and just reprint the nonsense that they're given. Can you think of a better example than the fantastic piece of journalism by David Ovalle from the Miami Herald that we've discussed ad nauseum regarding the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case? If Mr. Ovalle would have taken a couple of seconds and done a little thinking about what he was writing, he would have seen that the numbers in his story simply didn't add up, instead he just went ahead and copied the hastly prepared story based on a even more mistaken riddled press release.

At least now we know that at best the local media is DEAD. I have to give kudos to the local alternative media and journalists like Frank Alvarado and Bob Norman (both from the New Times) for doing their best to report on news that isn't "mainstream". Without voices like theirs and the numerous blogs that report on stories that the "man" doesn't want us to know about, we would be almost entirely in the dark.

Have a great weekend!