Cutting Both Ways: A Weakened Message and a Media Outlet’s Damaged Credibility
The financial struggles of the San Antonio Symphony have been in the news quite a bit recently. To this, former San Antonio Express-News senior critic Mike Greenberg adds his take. Unfortunately, he pulls the rug out from under himself, and takes his former employer with him.
He does make some good points, a few of which revolve around bringing the symphony into the “21st century” by, among other things, burning the “Fred Astaire costumes the men” have to wear. He also suggests branching out not only into different genres of music, particularly those popular in the local community, but forming “artistic partnerships” with non-musical arts, such as “gaming (and) computer animation.”
Moreover, he points out the oddity that our symphony is the “only major orchestra in Texas that has never had a Hispanic music director.” By the time he suggests that it “needs to operate like a business,” the reader has had to wade through the wreckage of some information he cites.
He lays the blame for its finances at the feet of poor fundraising efforts. To prove his point, he notes that even though San Antonio’s gross domestic product (GDP) is bigger than that of Kansas City, Columbus and Nashville, they all raised more than twice as much, on average, for their respective symphonies than the Alamo City did.
Arguably the more relevant figure here would be GDP/capita. By that measure, each of those cities solidly outpace ours. If classical music tends to attract wealthier fans, it’s no wonder those metros rake in more contributions.
On a closer look however, his case suffers from a much bigger shortcoming: he cites incorrect information. All those cities’ respective GDPs are in fact, contrary to what Mr. Greenberg writes, bigger than San Antonio’s.
Perhaps the biggest turnoff in literature is poor grammar, misspellings, etc. Those however, are fairly easy to remedy with spell-check. To get accurate information takes a bit more work, but it’s doable, and absolutely worth it when arguing for or against something.
The only thing worse than that is when such misinformation gets through multiple layers of proofing. How does a news outlet allow such a thing to happen?
It’s bad enough to be decidedly slanted in one direction or another. But when you publish erroneous data, maybe the lack of balance in your operations isn’t the biggest threat to your credibility.