Whatever Happened to Reporting the News?

The link associated with the title for this post is to a story on the website for NBC 4 in Columbus, Ohio. The headline screams "Teen Arrested For Allegedly Selling Self As Sex Slave"! (exclamation point added). Anyone bothering to read the story, or more accurately sucked in to doing so based on the headline, discovers this is nothing more than a run of the mill prostitution tale involving an entrepreneurial 16 year old girl getting a jump on the summer job market.

The story prompted the following email to the station. Not that it will change practices in Columbus, Ohio, or anywhere else, but wouldn't it be nice . . .?

Is there any remote possibility that journalistic ethics will ever again rear its head in this country?

I read your story online entitled "Teen Arrested For Allegedly Selling Self As Sex Slave". What followed was a garden-variety prostitution tale. The fact that a 16 year old was the prostitute is slightly unusual, but in today's world hardly constitutes "news", unfortunately.

It is the extensive use of hyperbole and the agenda driven selective presentation of facts that have made the majority of media outlets in the United States unreliable sources of information at best. It would be refreshing to find a news source, somewhere, someday, that simply reported the facts regarding a story and left it up to the consumer to draw their own conclusions concerning the implications of those facts.

The Five W's - anyone remember them from journalism school? Or were they purged from the curriculum immediately after integrity?