Joplin Tornado Exemplified Need for Peircean Journalism

Updated February 16, 2012

Joplin Tornado: Shocking Photos & Videos of Destruction in Missouri - The Daily Beast : "A tornado set down in Joplin, Missouri, on Sunday, killing 90 people. The disastrous storm took a path that was a mile wide at some points, and emergencies have been declared on both the state and local level. According to the NOAA, the Joplin twister is the deadliest single tornado since 1953."

I think news just took a u-turn. People literally make the news now. People are cameras and sound. The money used to send a zillion reporters everywhere is wasted.

The job of reporting should make a u-turn into Peirce thirds. That is a kind of thinking. Moving past binary to looking for serious solutions based on 1. what happened and 2. what challenge it illuminates. 3. therefore we will experiment by ...

With video's like these there is no need for professionals on scene.

So if one fifth of reporters questions are process why are the other eighty percent so unfruitful?

Yglesias | ThinkProgress: "Ordinary people don’t care about politics all that much. But when they do decide to pay attention to politics, it’s because they’re worried about jobs or the environment or energy prices or taxes or something. It’s never because they’re wondering how the president reacted to Steny Hoyer’s remarks about Eric Cantor’s characterization of the Treasury secretary’s statement about the debt ceiling." I think there's more to it. See Charles Sanders Peirce on "natural" triadic thinking. Journalists are trained not to hope.



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