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Macomb Daily: You have got to be kidding me

Unlike many of my comrades, I usually take it easy on the mainstream media. After all, they’re just people trying to do their jobs, usually. Particularly, I’ve shied away from making comments about news outlets that gave me positive press during the past school board elections.

However the other day, I finally hit my breaking point The Macomb Daily is not news. It is fluff, bullshit, and the most half-assed reporting I have ever seen in my life. It’s amazing the things that this paper considers to be the most important news items of the day.

For example, take a look at the coverage from the other day. This was the front page of their website. :

Seriously? How in the hell is it that the single most important story to be featured on the front page is something about a movie theater at the zoo? A zoo which isn’t even in Macomb County. While important stuff like the status of a missing girl, a local murder conviction and budget discussions regarding COUNTY finances are barely noticeable.

Why do the editors think that this is acceptable? At what point do you l look at all the news stories available for that day and decide that the most important one is the one that starts off “A leopard hisses onscreen and movie viewers feel its breath…“. That’s not news. That’s not even journalism. That’s the kind of thing that maybe belongs in an arts & entertainment section.

If you’ll notice, above the Zoo article are numbers 1, 2, and 3. The papers scrolls through these featured articles. So what were the 3 most important articles of that day?

1. The Zoo Article
2. The Red Wings win 5-2
3. A feature on a local piece of community theater and whatever is playing at Macomb Community College

None of which are what any rational, sane, or otherwise literate human being would not consider this the most important stuff going on. Even the usually ignorant, short-sighted, bored, insulting, ignorant, arrogant, and usually racist people who regularly comment on the Macomb Daily articles (seriously, if you’re in need of how far humanity still has to go, just click around the site. If the articles don’t do it for you, the comments most certainly will) can tell that.

But what’s that at the top? A breaking news bulletin! Looks like someone over there is actually doing their jobs…lets just not mention that they were the last ones to cover it. Let’s see what kind of information they have dug up on the missing girl.

…well ok then. Short, sweet, and to the point. This article must have taken dozens of seconds to write and involves absolutely no actual “journalism” on anybody’s part. This is the summary of a 30 second radio blurb.

Newsflash, Daily. Someone gets it right.This is what a real article looks like:

As you can see, the Detroit Free Press actually wrote an article on the event that is informative, original, and more or less answers any questions a person may have regarding the incident. As did most other media outlets.

This may not be as bad, except there is quite literally no excuse to not have the best news coverage for a story that takes place in your own back yard. You are the closest source to the story, you should be first on the scene and with the damn best coverage out there.

The girl was found just on the other side of town from Daily HQ. 2.1 miles away.

There is no excuse as to why people from the tri-county area got the scoop over you when you are this close. No excuse whatsoever.

Sadly, it would appear that real news at The Daily resides in finding out what kind of entertainment we will have, and apparently a lost black girl is just not entertaining enough. And neither is anything else real, that actually affects our daily lives.

Thank God there are people like Sarah Cormier over at the C&G Paper The Journal, otherwise we would have not a single decent news outlet. It’s well past time that the Macomb Daily went the way of the Ann Arbor News.

And it’ll be good riddance when it happens.

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