This is not Stravinsky

V. Lind says:

This sort of thing happens all the time. Too many ill-educated people producing declaratory items, from news reports to p.r. They are under-informed due to dumbed-down “education.”

They have NO frame of reference. They do not recognise things that just a generation ago would have been common knowledge. They do not “look things up,” and they do not check, or know how to. We have recently seen instances on this very blog where people have not even checked with Wikipedia, which anyone serious knows might be a useful starting point but is NOT to be taken as definitive in any dispute.

When I was a reporter, and a critic, every single assertion I made was checked by someone hired for that very function. Most things checked out, but if there was any query as to how I had arrived at anything I had submitted to the publication for print, someone called and CHECKED. I had to have my rationale, or evidence, at the ready. I once used a Latin phrase in a sentence in a magazine; the editor himself called and proposed a different one that he thought would score my point even more decisively, to which I happily acquiesced. My choice had not been WRONG, and he would have allowed it; his was just better.

Clearly that sort of thing, and copy-editing, have long since died. What is worse, their disappearance has had endorsement, starting from a White House that denied the fact as a useful element in any dialogue, and denied the existence of truth — and mocked those who sought it.

The lack of care is dispiriting. It inevitably spills over from the way people are treated in communications to the way they are treated in real life. Not pretty.