Missing Quality

I feel like I'm picking on a retard every time I write about YLE. It seems their feed really doesn't allow you to look at all the news with a straight face. I understand the point of having a cute animal at the end of a news broadcast, but on the Internet and especially in the feed form I don't get it.

Specifically? I'm looking at a piece where they've opened an Elf Academy in Italy to support the Santa School in Rovaniemi. Everyone should stop reading the article right at the title, but since I already started I've now learned how the school is in Noventa di Piave near Venice and ...

I'm not going to go there. The article is utterly worthless. It is not funny, it is not informative, interesting or in any way valuable. It comes with a video attachment, which is not narrated or subtitled, it doesn't have a description and it might well be Christmas stock footage from anywhere in southern Europe.

Here is the video, no Finnish language skill necessary.
http://www.yle.fi/java/areena/dispatcher/2623467.asx?bitrate=1000000

The second quality point I want to bring up is I've read of an incident where several Finnish newspapers just took an article from our largest, and when it turned out false they either didn't publish a correction or it wasn't enough to undo the damage. It's not all good in our printed media either.

Helsingin Sanomat (#1 newspaper) said The Social Insurance Institution of Finland (KELA) was found guilty in the European Human Rights Court - in reality they linked the wrong judgment to the wrong case. The turd of a report then made the rounds and ended up in 4 more papers.

Helsingin Sanomat made a mistake and the other papers just copy pasted the story without checking the background.

Both of these cases are similar in that they reveal a lack of professionalism. In the case of YLE it feels like they are whipping monkeys tied to typewriters to fill a quota, while the newspaper reporters hit "Copy" when the coffee break ends. This is what passes for news around here, but it's not much better elsewhere and I'll get to that too.