OPINION:
This is an ongoing situation in the Washington Times: sloppy reporting, often by wire services, followed up by bad writing, with no editorial oversight. Artificial intelligence could/will do better.
In “Virginia AG Jay Jones says DHS may have violated state election law” (Web, Sept. 17), the AP reporter writes: “President Donald Trump’s administration has alleged that noncitizen voting could be a significant source of fraud in the November midterm elections, even as research shows voting by people who are not citizens is extremely rare.”
This is just one example of the daily dribble. It makes a New York Times-style jump with no facts; it is extremely lazy reporting, quoting “research” as though it were a person.
The Times’ editorial of just a few days later suggest the opposite of the AP article: “The Justice Department’s Fraud Division under the Trump administration has now charged 50 noncitizens with illegal voting in what is likely the tip of a much larger iceberg” (“Yes, illegal aliens do vote in U.S. elections,” Web, Sept. 21).
What research is the AP reporter referencing? Why would he or she even put that unsupported comment in the article? It is not needed and the piece would read better without it. The writer already uses “alleged.”
I did my own research, and the AP can’t tell me that California does not have millions of illegal aliens voting!
The future is clear and it doesn’t include lazy writing in newspapers. To write better than AI requires human elements of compassion and thought. It is frustrating to see this decline.
TOM KENNEDY
St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
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