Is it just me or do people jump to conclusions more and more often?
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I received a very angry email recently that one of our publications hadn't covered off a social issue - one we weren't aware of and certainly didn't have any factual information that could be published.
Despite what many people think about the media, we're not allowed to just publish hearsay or conjecture.
However, instead of just raising this issue and asking us to look into it, this person was very accusatory and ended their email with some thinly veiled threats about contacting the press association and union as to why we hadn't reported on it.
'We didn't know' was my simple response and yes, I'll concede part of our job is to learn about important things going on, but you might recall my editorial from the start of the year that more and more journalism is a discussion and how much we value people alerting us to the issues and topics they care about.
This was no isolated thing though, much earlier in my career I wrote sport on the Far South Coast and occasionally I would get sent some results too late for inclusion in print - papers are normally finalised for publishing just after lunch time the day before they're on the newsagent shelves - or the email would go into the spam folder.
Inevitably I'd get an angry phone call that following morning about how I had vindictively chosen to leave their results out.
The summary is that people seem to jump to the most negative reason for something, it was clearly a targeted slight against them, but that's so often not true.
I'm curious, does this happen to anyone else in their particular field too? Ever have a delay or complication at work, but people jump to the conclusion that you're out to get them specifically?
Are people becoming more bitter and impatient, or is it just a side effect of being in media in my case?
Jacob McMaster, Editor