This article, from Washington, DC's WUSA about a 'flash mob' robbery, is truly a bad exercise in journalism. Aside from the subject, which plays up the all female nature of the act as if women never commit crimes, the article rests solely on interviewing random unnamed people. No experts, no spokesman, just "one man in a parking lot"and "a woman who declined to give her name." Do these people offer any insight into the crime? No, just "Wow, that's crazy."
I dislike these man-on-the-street interviews on general principle (the principle being that the average man on the street doesn't know what the hell he's talking about), but to take it to this extreme borders on satire. The anonymous interviewees, the goal of the anonymity missing from the article, offer nothing to the article. If the reader believes that this crime is crazy, they are capable of forming that opinion themselves without being told that some completely random stranger thinks it's crazy as well.
It could be worse though. I remember a bit on DC's local NBC station, who in a report after the meltdown at the Fukushima plant, alternated between interviewing experts who said that DC was at no risk whatsoever and people on the street who were afraid of the radiation. The two were giving equal airtime, as if they were competing political viewpoints that merited that equal time.
This is why I just watch the local news for the weather.
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