Strangely the links to the articles, and the comments I make about Massachusetts public figure Michele McPhee are deleted from her Facebook page.
I have spoken with both ABC affiliate channel 5 WCVB-TV, as well as with representatives from 96.9 FM Boston Talks. Those are two of Michele's former employers. However, all attempts to contact Ms. McPhee or her management team have gone unanswered.
With so much going on in the world today it may seem petty to be writing an article about Michele McPhee, however, in the current world we live in old school journalism is what is needed in order to address other issues. Things like sources, and research, and using quotes, actual facts, clearly identifying hyperbole and sarcasm, and responding to questions about your articles, are all critical.
We live in a world where anyone can upload footage from their cell phone to YouTube and claim they are in the action, and anyone can stage, and fake footage. So when we live in a world where World War 3 may start due to a video of a war crime going viral it would benefit us all if the person who ran with the article cited, and sourced their information.
We are currently living in a revolutionary time, in the midst of a paradigm shift regarding how society gets, reacts, and shares information.
The group of people who get their information, or "news", through strictly television is dwindling drastically. The same holds true for newspapers. Gone are the days of "Extra, Extra, Read All About It", to be replaced by a society that has amassed almost the entire known human history. That is coupled with the fact that people can access, assess, and address that information at increasingly faster speeds, often in real time.
Now a well written blog article can easily carry as much, or in many cases more credibility than an article published in The New York Times, or any one of a number of failing newspapers which together with television are colloquially known as the dinosaur media - extinction imminent,
A blogger known as Johnathan Corbett is known not only for suing the T,S,A, over the "naked body scanners" but also for combining the use of blogging, amateur video shot with an smartphone, that some credit to a massive spark in outrage against the T.S.A. so much so that C.B.S. News has an article stating "Rogers chastised Pistole for not being willing to reduce the size of the TSA workforce."
It's natural for there to be two groups of people who recently or currently work for the dinosaur media and their subsidiaries. The first will be those who adapt successfully. Almost every show, personality, T.V. channel all have Facebook, and Twitter accounts. There will be some who figure out how to use it successfully.
The other group will attempt at social networking, etc and fail, and be combined with those who are not willing to make the change. Retirement, old age, death, stubbornness, like minded individuals who believed that T.V. was a passing fad, all will not embrace the change.
Michele McPhee has attempted to make the change from the dinosaur media to internet media, creating accounts such as Facebook, and posting quite frequently. I believe that Ms. McPhee has broken several ethics of journalism. This does a larger disservice because she does have a following, and there are some who will think that her style of journalism is in any way appropriate,
If any issues want to be solved, or even addressed, the type of tactics Ms. McPhee is engaging in are sending us in the wrong direction. What is even worse is that after pointing out mistakes to Ms. McPhee she has corrected them without any notice of revision, and deleted authors comments who mentioned it, she has consistently deleted requests for interviews, or responses to issues, and neither herself nor management will respond to any inquiries about her ethics.
Of course this isn't the first time Ms. McPhee has faced controversy. In case my post mysteriously disappears I will leave my latest response to McPhee's race baiting below. In response to this:
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