The first time I realized that journalists and reporters can be lazy was when I was a semi-expert on a topic. In my case, I was basically a systems engineer dealing with the Mac OS. I was reading an article on a major news site about the Mac, and it was really obvious the reporter didn’t do their homework. They got several concepts wrong. They weren’t lying… they were just lazy. They took something someone told them at face value and didn’t dig any deeper.
I recently unsubscribed from a well-known YouTube channel after watching the channel host do a hatchet job on Apple and the “green and blue bubble” issue. The problem does exist, but the host totally botched the details as to why, and drew incorrect conclusions. They read one article in the Wall Street Journal and treated it as fact, despite the fact that the article had been debunked. I’m not telling you Apple is full of angels – like every company, they do some things that are terrible for consumers. But if you’re going to use your platform to bash a company, get your facts right. I can bash them from here to Nashville and back, but I know my stuff and I wouldn’t be parroting other people who didn’t do their research.
I also unsubbed from another big headed YouTuber after watching a live stream. This particular YouTuber makes really good informative videos that are very well scripted. But in the live stream, he came off like a know it all self important jerk. The kind of guy you’d meet at a party and instantly dislike. It was shocking, because his videos are so good. But knowing how big of a jerk he is… well, it kind of ruined things for me. Don’t get me started on how many Americans think it’s OK to be an ass. It isn’t OK.
In my first video for the budgetguitarist.com YouTube channel, I was slamming the Epiphone ProBucker pickups. A year later I realized I’d been wrong – it was a different type of pickup that I didn’t like. I didn’t take the video down, but I pinned my own comment about how I’d been wrong, and then made a video about how I’d been wrong. I screwed up, but I admitted it.
Lord knows I’m flawed. I can give you a list of the top 50 things I don’t like about myself. And since I do this for fun and not for a living, I’ll never have over 100,000 subs on either of my channels. I guess I’m just venting. There’s an arrogance in both of these two dudes that I find extremely annoying. In the anti-Apple video, there were 1200 comments where people went along. There were 2 where someone said “Actually, you got the facts wrong.”
The moral of the story is that you can believe whatever you want – no one has time to fact-check everything they hear. But if you have a large audience, you really owe it to them to not be lazy. Do the actual homework. Admit when you’re wrong. Then again, almost no one who watches that video will ever know the host was wrong. Also, if you’re an ass, it’s apparently OK, because there are plenty of people who won’t care that you’re an ass. But you’re still an ass.
I guess I’m annoyed that some people aren’t willing to do the right thing. That’s pretty silly, isn’t it? I’m going to go find a cool brass patch now and play.