Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on drive supplied by cops

Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by rpo3po on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @12:11AM (#9378835)

This, too, begins with a false premise: that journalists are equally likely to seek out positive and negative stories, and to give both of them equal importance. That is a naive assumption, unfortunately, and the facts of reporting - bad events make for good copy - prove it entirely false.

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Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by sp332 on Thursday April 16, 2015 @01:04PM (#9389245)

It's not false, just oversimplified. I swept all that complexity under the word "newsworthy".

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Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by megablast on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @01:44AM (#9379082)

This is incredibly easy to prove. Count all the good stories that have happened, and all the bad. Compare the ratios to different publications.

Of course, it is a lot harder to prove if you are saying something different than the truth.

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Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by wtbob on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @07:03AM (#9380083)

> This is incredibly easy to prove. Count all the good stories that have happened, and all the bad. Compare the ratios to different publications.

I think that's likely to be a lot more difficult than you think: how does an independent observer know what the count of good and bad events is, rather than the count of good & bad published events? The trouble is that if an event isn't published, it's practically invisible to an observer.

This is a related issue to the fact that many sensational crimes are less common today, but perceived to be more common due to over-coverage in the media.

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