Friday, August 25, 2006
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Do I Want to Talk About the Fact that My Dad Sent a Tip-Off on the Big Story in the Blogosphere Right Now to Another Blogger?
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Posted by:
Mary Katharine Ham at
4:13 PM
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No, I don't really wanna talk about it. (Just givin' you a hard time, Dad.)
Turns out Mr. Greg Mitchell, who has so vocally defended the folks making up news in the Middle East lately, confessed to making up news himself, when he was but a young'un.
Of course, "confessed" isn't really the right word since he didn't seem too repentant about it.
Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?
I never found out. Oh, I went down to the falls, all right, but when I got there, I discovered that I just could not wander up to strangers (even dorky ones wearing funny hats and knee socks) and ask them for their personal opinions, however innocuous. It was a puffball assignment, but that wasn't why I rebelled. I just could not bring myself to do it.
So I sat on a park bench and scribbled out a few fake notes and then went back to the office and wrote my fake story, no doubt quoting someone like Jane Smith from Seattle, honeymooning with her husband Oscar, saying something like, "Gosh, I never knew there was so much rock under there!"
Of course, I got away with it.
He goes on to make excuses about being only 19 when it happened. When the column was published, my dad put Mitchell right in his place with this letter to the media trade website, Poynter: (emphasis mine)
Greg Mitchell implies that being just 19 and new to the job is an excuse for a journalistic travesty (and that's just what it was). Where did he ever get the idea that lying was journalism? Who taught him that? I don't know what journalism school he went to, but mine (Grady, UGa) instilled in me that even fathoming such a hoax would be an abomination. But he actually did it, mainly, it seems, out of journalistic cowardice. One wonders how he ever got a quote from the parents of a kid killed in a traffic accident. Or did he make those up too? His ethical lapse is akin to a cop who skims from money found in a drug bust and then tries to rationalize it later because he was a rookie at the time. It's not just a mistake. It's a character flaw.
It's true, and as evidence, Mitchell has not grown out of it yet. If this guy was willing to fake a story about tourists at Niagara Falls, imagine how easy it'd be for him to do it for, I don't know, political reasons. Certainly not much of an ethical hurdle for him to jump.
In the short time I was a reporter, I covered something like 20 local deaths-- some in car accidents, some of disease, about half of them children. It was my first job out of college. Would it have been easier to make up a quote than to call a family that had just lost four children in one car accident? Yes, a lot easier. And, I was only 22, so I would have had an excuse, right? Wrong.
I wasn't a perfect reporter, but it's pretty easy to avoid making stuff up out of whole cloth.
My dad and I both know that. Mr. Mitchell does not.
My dad and I are both conservative bloggers. Mr. Mitchell is editor of Editor and Publisher. Telling, isn't it?
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This shines a small light into the mindset of news producers in the media today. Like so many washed up actors who just want to direct, they can't resist their ego calling them to become the news they're producing. |
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So, fake news > copied words.
Gotcha. |
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Mac, I don't know what you are smoking ... but whatever it is, I don't want any.
Your post is incoherent and meaningless as is.
If you think you have anything useful to say, please be clear and coherent. |
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Greg Mitchell may have been only 19-years old when committing the act of journalistic dishonesty he described. However, it’s likely that he possessed some journalism experience and training – perhaps in high school or as a college freshman (assuming he was heading into his sophomore year).
Assuming that's the case, Mitchell should have understood that he was betraying the trust of his employer and readers. To be sure, he would have had more room to excuse himself he if had zero journalism experience. But I suspect this was not the case; otherwise, his editor probably would not have trusted him with this story after one month on the job.
So why did Mitchell do it? I suspect it went beyond what he suggested was his painful shyness. In Mitchell’s account, I sensed an attitude of superiority to those around him -- including his employer who, it seems, he may have felt had insulted him with a "puffball assignment."
Faced with doing a silly story and confident in his superiority -- Mitchell thus felt no compunction to overcome his shyness and do what was required of him. Reporters and people in many jobs, incidentally, do this all the time in order to fulfill their responsibilities. Their character and sense of responsibility enables them to do this.
Interestingly, Mitchell felt confident that he could get away with being dishonest because he was “quoting" out-of-staters; therefore, nobody was going to complain about the bogus quotes and names. Coincidentally, this lack of accountability goes hand in hand with foreign reporting and photojournalism: Both rely heavily on stringers and freelancers (perhaps with not much more experience than Mitchell). They can easily make stuff up. Nobody will complain.
Finally, the “puffball” story Mitchell derides actually could have turned out to be quite interesting in the hands of an able reporter. But as a 19-year-old, Mitchell apparently felt he was headed for bigger and better things -- far beyond interviewing "dorky" tourists.
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Greg Mitchell may have been only 19-years old when committing the act of journalistic dishonesty he described. However, it’s likely that he possessed some journalism experience and training – perhaps in high school or as a college freshman (assuming he was heading into his sophomore year).
Assuming that's the case, Mitchell should have understood that he was betraying the trust of his employer and readers. To be sure, he would have had more room to excuse himself he if had zero journalism experience. But I suspect this was not the case; otherwise, his editor probably would not have trusted him with this story after one month on the job.
So why did Mitchell do it? I suspect it went beyond what he suggested was his painful shyness. In Mitchell’s account, I sensed an attitude of superiority to those around him -- including his employer who, it seems, he may have felt had insulted him with a "puffball assignment."
Faced with doing a silly story and confident in his superiority -- Mitchell thus felt no compunction to overcome his shyness and do what was required of him. Reporters and people in many jobs, incidentally, do this all the time in order to fulfill their responsibilities. Their character and sense of responsibility enables them to do this.
Interestingly, Mitchell felt confident that he could get away with being dishonest because he was “quoting" out-of-staters; therefore, nobody was going to complain about the bogus quotes and names. Coincidentally, this lack of accountability goes hand in hand with foreign reporting and photojournalism: Both rely heavily on stringers and freelancers (perhaps with not much more experience than Mitchell). They can easily make stuff up. Nobody will complain.
Finally, the “puffball” story Mitchell derides actually could have turned out to be quite interesting in the hands of an able reporter. But as a 19-year-old, Mitchell apparently felt he was headed for bigger and better things -- far beyond interviewing "dorky" tourists.
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"I wasn't a perfect reporter, but it's pretty easy to avoid making stuff up out of whole cloth. My dad and I both know that. Mr. Mitchell does not. My dad and I are both conservative bloggers. Mr. Mitchell is editor of Editor and Publisher. Telling, isn't it?"
You guys can't be serious. Please, do yourselves a favor and get out of the right-wing echo-chamber. Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention should know by now just how egregious a journalistic track record conservatives have; it's been thoroughy documented by the likes of The Daily Howler, Joe Conason, Al Franken, Media Matters, etc. One of the main conservative "news" sources out there is Fox News...Fox News has Hannity, O'Reilly, etc. With that in mind, re-read the excerpt above. It's literally like reading a joke.
Here are just a few examples of conservatives in the media playing loose with the facts, the first of which is on par with what Mitchell has confessed to doing:
#1. SHATTERED BROOKS: As you may recall, David Brooks wrote a foolish-but-famous piece for the December 2001 Atlantic. “ARE WE REALLY ONE COUNTRY?” the cover asked. “A report from ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ America.” Brooks, like a modern-day Thoreau, had gone out to limn the big questions:
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DAVID BROOKS (2001): I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is, to see how people there live, and to gauge how different their lives are from those in my part of America.
How absurd was Brooks’ piece? Because some states were “red” (had voted for Bush), and some states were “blue” (had voted for Gore), Brooks was afraid we might have become two different nations. So he went to see how differently life was being lived in these two different worlds. But as if to offer a cry for help, Brooks never got to the “red states” at all. Instead, he compared life in his home base (Montgomery County, Maryland) with life in the aforementioned Franklin County. Unfortunately, Franklin County is in Pennsylvania—and Pennsylvania is a “blue” state, just like Maryland! In short, Brooks compared life-styles in two blue states to see if we’d become separate red-and-blue countries. Little in his puzzling piece made much more sense than that.
Brooks’ piece made almost no sense—but we now learn that some of its “facts” were invented. Meanwhile, at the New Republic, Noam Scheiber thinks that’s fine and dandy. Brooks’ lying—and Scheiber’s approval—merit closer looks.
How do we know that Brooks invented some basic facts? We owe this knowledge to Sasha Issenberg, who writes for Philadelphia magazine. In the April issue, the eagle-eyed scribe conducts a review of Brooks’ visit to Franklin County. First, Issenberg lists Brooks’ generalizations about red-and-blue states—generalizations he finds to be rather shaky. But then he describes his own fiendish research. “In January,” Issenberg says, “I made my own trip to Franklin County, 175 miles southwest of Philadelphia, with a simple goal. I wanted to see where Brooks comes up with this stuff.” And alas! When Issenberg gets to Franklin County, he finds that Brooks simply makes this stuff up! In this, the most telling part of his article, he is quoting Brooks’ piece in Atlantic:
ISSENBERG: As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. “On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”
What did Issenberg find when he went to Franklin County? “[I]t became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home,” he says. According to Brooks, Franklin County was so deep in the sticks that you can’t even spend twenty bucks on a meal there! But when Issenberg went to the restaurant Brooks had named, he found that he had no such problem:
ISSENBERG (continuing directly): Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”
The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.
There’s more, but you get the picture. Brooks “could not have” done what he said, the scribe judged. According to Issenberg, he subsequently telephoned Brooks to ask about his puzzling claims. And Brooks—after laughing—made it official. He said that he’d made some “facts” up:
ISSENBERG: I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
Are we the only ones who can read? By his own words, Brooks admits that he faked the claim about how much you could pay for a meal in Franklin County. In the Atlantic, Brooks said that he had tried to spend twenty bucks at the county’s fanciest eat-place. “I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it,” he wrote. But when he later spoke with Issenberg, he broke an old habit and told him the truth. Brooks had actually ordered “mini-dinners”—not the giant spreads he’d described. And surprise! The mini-dinners Brooks wolfed down had cost less than $20.
Do you like it when writers just lie in your face? If so, it seems that Brooks is your man! Indeed, Brooks has done exactly what Stephen Glass did when he almost destroyed the New Republic; because the truth didn’t make a good tale, he invented fake facts to create a great story. As almost anyone would, we thought of Glass when we read Issenberg’s piece because the similarity with Brooks is so obvious. “[I]t became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home,” Issenberg writes. This is because Brooks made up facts, just the way Glass had done. [excerpted from DailyHowler.com -- http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh040504.shtml]
#2. When [Ann Coulter's book] "Slander" appeared, it soon became clear that the book was drenched in “mistakes.” A few observers focused on the following paragraph—a paragraph which pretends to show that the Times nastily name-called poor Thomas. According to Coulter, the passage provides an example of one of her brilliant themes—how “ad hominen attack is the liberal’s idea of political debate” (page 10). Quaking with rage at the great paper’s perfidy, Ann Coulter typed this. It’s totally false:
COULTER (Slander; page 12): After Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion contrary to the clearly expressed position of the New York Times editorial page, the Times responded with an editorial on Thomas titled “The Youngest, Cruelest Justice.” That was actually the headline on a lead editorial in the Newspaper of Record. Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called “a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,” “race traitor,” “black snake,” “chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom,” [39] “house Negro” and “handkerchief head,” “Benedict Arnold” [40] and “Judas Iscariot.” [41]
Good grief! Let’s state the obvious. This passage seems to say that the New York Times wrote an editorial about Thomas, in which Thomas “was not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy” but was instead called a string of vile names. Unfortunately, none of this is true. And yes, observers noticed some of the problems here—Charles Taylor in Salon, for example:
TAYLOR (6/27/02): The passage [from Slander] is conveniently phrased to make it look as if the quotes, as well as the headline, appear in the Times editorial. They don't (notes in the back of the book identify the sources as former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elder's interview in Playboy, and Joseph Lowery at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference quoted in the New Yorker). Coulter sets up the passage to give the impression that the Times called Thomas a "lawn jockey" and a "house Negro" and hopes that we won't notice that she's fudged it.
For the record, the estimable Taylor was much too kind when he said that Coulter had “fudged it.” In fact, the Times editorial included none of the terms that Coulter put inside those quotes; Coulter had simply invented a nasty claim, then sold it for 26 bucks to the rubes. Hopefully, Salon’s readers were repulsed by what Taylor revealed—by the nasty, inexcusable way Coulter put these words in the mouth of the Times, where they didn’t belong. But uh-oh! Sadly but understandably, even Taylor was taken in by the depth of Coulter’s pathology. In fact, Coulter’s faking went well beyond her bogus claims about the Times; the footnotes to which Taylor referred were thoroughly bogus too! No, those nasty phrases didn’t come from Joycelyn Elders’ Playboy interview. They came from a totally different source—an unexciting source which Coulter cut-and-pasted (i.e.: plagiarized), then failed to ID in her footnotes.
As usual, sorting out Coulter’s lying takes time. Let’s go back to that Times editorial.
Amazingly, Coulter got one thing right; the Times did write an editorial called “The Youngest, Cruelest Justice.” But in fact, the editorial was all about “the substance” of Thomas’ work; more specifically, it concerned one of Thomas’ oddest decisions, a decision concerning the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Constitution. The first three paragraphs of the Times editorial pretty well sum up the case. Please note the total lack of “ad hominem attack,” the absence of any name-calling:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (1/27/92): Only four months after taking his oath as a Justice, Clarence Thomas finds himself rebuked by a seven-member majority of the Rehnquist Court for disregarding humane standards of decency. The withering reprimand, included in the Supreme Court's majority opinion in a prison case Tuesday, is this:
“To deny, as the dissent does, the difference between punching a prisoner in the face and serving him unappetizing food is to ignore the concepts of dignity, civilized standards, humanity, and decency that animate the Eighth Amendment.”
The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishments. Only Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia refused to apply it to the case of Keith Hudson, a Louisiana prisoner who was shackled and beaten by two guards while their supervisor watched, warning them only against having "too much fun."
A shackled prisoner had been beaten and injured. Seven members of the Rehnquist court said this was “cruel and unusual punishment.” Thomas, new to the Court, did not. After praising the Rehnquist majority, the Times expressed disappointment in Thomas:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: The Thomas dissent would be alarming coming from any justice. Coming from him, it rings also with crashing disappointment.
He is, for one thing, the youngest Justice. He might well serve until the year 2030 or beyond. Although his voting record now is identical only to that of Justice Scalia, he could attract enough support from future appointees to move the Court still further to the right.
A second disappointment concerns hope. Justice Thomas rose from poverty and discrimination in Pin Point, Ga., and his nomination won support from prominent people sure he would bring to the Court the understanding bred of hardship. Indeed, he testified poignantly about watching busloads of prisoners from his window. "I say to myself almost every day, there but for the grace of God go I," he told senators eager to believe him.
As a Justice, Clarence Thomas doesn't talk that way any more.
That was the end of the [New York Times] piece. None of the ugly terms inside Coulter’s quotes appear in this editorial. In fact, there’s no name-calling done here at all; there are no “ad hominem attacks.” Yes, Coulter was lying—as she constantly does—when she said that the editorial didn’t concern Thomas’ judicial philosophy, but she committed a vicious offense when she slandered the New York Times so grotesquely. Taylor was too kind—he was much too kind—when he said that Coulter had “fudged” her claims. In this paragraph, Coulter puts nasty language in the mouth of the Times—language the Times never used. She directly, blatantly misled her readers, even as she engaged in the very type of “ad hominem attack” she was pretending to criticize.
This, of course, is vintage Coulter—and yes, it’s pure pathology. To the good, Taylor had caught one part of her lying, even if he was a bit too mild in his condemnation. But uh-oh! With Coulter, the pure pathology runs so deep that there’s often a second layer of lying, and that was true in this event, although Taylor, understandably enough, completely failed to take notice.
Yes, Coulter’s basic claims were bogus—but so were those footnotes, the ones Taylor cited! When Taylor looked in the back of the book, he noticed that the footnotes didn’t cite the New York Times; they cited a Joycelyn Elders Playboy interview, and they cited statements by Lowery. As we’ve seen, Taylor reported this in Salon: “[N]otes in the back of the book identify the sources as former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elder's interview in Playboy, and Joseph Lowery at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference quoted in the New Yorker.” But uh-oh! That string of invective isn’t from Elders; Coulter was up to her old tricks again. And in this case, she also was plagiarizing.
Wow! Did the New York Times call Thomas “a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,” a “ traitor” and a “black snake?” Did the New York Times call Thomas a “chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom?” No—but neither did Elders! That first string of epithets doesn’t come from Elders’ Playboy interview, which was published in June 1995. It comes from a totally different source—a book review in the Washington Times, a book review that has nothing to do with either Elders or Lowery. The review was written by Lawrence Stratton; it concerned an obscure book on racial matters by Charles Lawrence and Mari Matsuda, a pair of obscure authors. Here’s the text which Coulter cut-and-pasted, inserting it right in her book:
STRATTON (5/14/97): The violent implications of [Lawrence and Matsuda’s] analysis are apparent from the hate-laden language criticizing "colored critics of affirmative action," such as Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Linda Chavez and Shelby Steele, but especially Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
In over 75 references to Justice Thomas, the authors use images designed to evoke hatred: "race traitor," "black snake," "chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom," "house Negro," and "handkerchief head." Not content, they psychoanalytically diagnose Mr. Thomas as suffering from "internalized racism and self-loathing" and accuse him of engaging in "Black on Black crime."
Amazing, isn’t it? The highlighted passage is from a review in the Washington Times—a review of a book by Lawrence and Matsuda. So what did Coulter do? She transferred the passage straight into Slander, where she pretended that the nasty words had been voiced by the New York Times! But her dissembling didn’t end there; if you looked up footnote 39, as Taylor did, the note seemed to say that Elders was the source of these nasty phrases. Indeed, Taylor even passed the claim on to Salon readers. But uh-oh! That claim wasn’t true, either! What did Elders say about Thomas? We’ll show you in a section below. But no, Elders (and Lowery) hadn’t said those said those nasty things about Thomas, just as the Times hadn’t done.
Do you see why we’ve told you, again and again, that Coulter’s “errors” constitute a pathology? That Coulter “misstates” as other scribes breathe, that she’s in a class by herself when it comes to misstatement, deception and slander? Readers, layers of deception are Coulter’s norm, as we see in this ludicrous episode, and as we saw in the remarkable way she “corrected” the final page of Slander (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/20/05). How does Coulter’s pathology work? When she “corrects” a blatant mistake, she “corrects” it to something else that is bogus! And when her footnotes show that her text is bogus, her footnotes turn out to be fake-phony too! And it turns out that her text has been plagiarized! And alas! Since normal people almost never encounter pathology of this high potency, it’s easy to be fooled by Coulter. In this case, Taylor caught Coulter in her first layer of “error,” but then passed on her next bogus claim, telling readers that Elders had said the nasty things about Thomas.
[...]
WHAT ELDERS SAID: No, the New York Times didn’t say that Thomas was -- well, let’s reprint Coulter’s work:
COULTER (page 12): After Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion contrary to the clearly expressed position of the New York Times editorial page, the Times responded with an editorial on Thomas titled “The Youngest, Cruelest Justice.” That was actually the headline on a lead editorial in the Newspaper of Record. Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called “a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,” “race traitor,” “black snake,” “chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom,” [39] “house Negro” and “handkerchief head,” “Benedict Arnold” [40] and “Judas Iscariot.” [41]
No, the Times didn’t say any of those things; Coulter engaged in a typical vicious misstatement. But just for the record, Joycelyn Elders didn’t say those things either, although Taylor thought she had after reading Coulter’s footnotes. Footnote 39 cited Elders’ Playboy interview, but none of those phrases came from that session. Elders did say one naughty thing. Here’s her full exchange about Thomas:
PLAYBOY (6/95): Moving on: What is your opinion of Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala?
ELDERS: Umm—
PLAYBOY: She was your boss.
ELDERS: Yes.
PLAYBOY: What is she like?
ELDERS: No comment.
PLAYBOY: No comment?
ELDERS: I think Donna Shalala is— Well, she has a Ph.D. in political science. I think she used her political science.
PLAYBOY: What about Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas?
ELDERS: I think Clarence Thomas is an Uncle Tom.
Silence
PLAYBOY: No more on that for us?
Elders remains silent.
PLAYBOY: OK.
The scorecard: Elders called Thomas “an Uncle Tom.” She did not call him a “chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom;” that phrase came from the Washington Times piece which Coulter cut-and-pasted. Nor did Elders call Thomas the other names which Coulter cadged from that source. Misled by Coulter’s footnote, Taylor assumed that Elders had said these things, and mistakenly passed the claim on to his readers. Completing the rundown, Lowery did call Thomas a “Benedict Arnold” and a “Judas Iscariot,” but he didn’t use the racial terms Coulter listed. And of course, none of this had anything to do with the actual claim in Slander’s text—the claim that the New York Times had said these things. We’re deep in the weeds here, making a point. Even deep in the weeds, Coulter keeps lying.
Yes, Coulter keeps lying, even deep in the weeds. But almost no one has enough imagination to plumb the depth of her pathology. In November 2002, for example, the Columbia Journalism Review published an analysis called “How Slippery is Slander?” The piece was written by Michael Scherer and Sarah Secules. They tried to fact-check Coulter’s claims. But they got beat by the fake footnote too:
SCHERER AND SECULES (11/02):
Coulter Claim: She introduces a New York Times editorial on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas headlined THE YOUNGEST, CRUELEST JUSTICE, then writes: "Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called 'a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,' 'race traitor,' 'black snake,' 'chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom'. . . . " (p. 12)
Footnote: The passage is constructed to suggest that the Times authored these epithets, but the footnote refers readers to comments made in a Playboy article, which goes unmentioned in the book's text.
It’s understandable, but unfortunate. Scherer and Secules didn’t keep on checking when they got to Coulter’s fake footnote. As such, they didn’t see that the footnote was just as bogus as the text it sought to document, and they didn’t see that the passage they quoted had been plagiarized from the Washington Times. “How Slippery is Slander?” Perhaps understandably, Scherer and Secules weren’t quite up to the task of plumbing the depth of that story.
By the way, Scherer and Secules said they fact-checked forty claims in Slander. Result? “[N]ineteen were either accurate or could generously be considered fair comment and criticism,” they reported, but “the remaining twenty-one would not pass [a fact-check] without major debate.”
[...]
Who called Thomas “a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests?” No one you ever heard of! According to the Manchester Union-Leader, the (unnamed) head of the Maryland NAACP called Thomas that in 1997. But so what! Coulter threw it on the pile and pretended that the New York Times said it. After all, it provided a brilliant example of those liberal “ad hominem attacks.” [excerpted from DailyHowler.com -- http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh042205.shtml]
#3. [regarding the related matter of that doctored Reuters photo...]
Exploiting the Reuters incident.
It is [inarguably] wrong for a media outlet to alter photographs or other information so as to falsely represent what is being reported. That is beyond dispute. Yet for three straight days now (and still going strong), the right-wing blogosphere has been wallowing in a self-celebratory swarm because two photographs taken in Lebanon and published by Reuters were found to have been altered using Photoshop by the freelance photographer who submitted them. Rush Limbaugh has now joined the party, decreeing that "Reuters ought to be investigated." (The frequency with which Bush supporters call for media organizations to be investigated because of what they report is itself notable.)
Given the intensity and duration of the blogospheric mob scene fueled by the Reuters discovery, one would think that this event demonstrates some sort of important point beyond the particular photographer's poor judgment or deliberate deceit. But it is difficult to see what the point might be, to put it mildly.
The alterations made to the original Beirut photograph appear to have increased the amount of smoke one sees in the photo, taken after a Beirut bombing raid, but the amount of smoke in the original unaltered photograph is itself quite substantial. Israel really is bombing Lebanon; buildings really are being destroyed; many Lebanese civilians really are dying; and nobody who is serious disputes any of that.
These excited bloggers seem to be using the Reuters incident to try to "prove" that the dreaded "mainstream media" -- and Reuters has long been a special target for many extremists on the right (who sometimes refer to it as "al-Reuters") -- is hopelessly biased against Israel and in favor of Islamic terrorists, including Hezbollah, and that nothing the MSM reports about this war, or anything else for that matter, can be trusted. Many of these bloggers appear to hope that this incident will call into question the reliability of all reporting on the war outside of YTNews and Fox, including what happened in Qana, Lebanon, and any reports that reflect negatively on the Israeli war effort.
But Reuters hardly has a monopoly on scandals of this sort. Quite the contrary, examples of photographic alterations and political distortions of evidence are abundant. The blogger TBogg today documents two instances of photographic manipulation -- one from the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign, which cloned members of the military in the audience while the president was speaking, and another that used Photoshop to falsely depict John Kerry at an antiwar rally next to Jane Fonda.
And then there was the complete misquoting by Fox News' Carl Cameron of John Kerry at the height of the 2004 campaign:
"Move over Dan Rather, Fox News' Carl Cameron is joining you in the hoaxer hall of shame. Fox News' Web site posted a story written by its top political reporter yesterday with made-up quotes that painted Democratic presidential contender John Kerry as a spa-going girly-man."
Ironically, one of the anti-Reuters lynch mob leaders, Little Green Footballs, defended Fox's publication of false Kerry quotes by arguing that Fox "pulled the article down and apologized for it the same day. That is, of course, how a responsible news organization handles a situation like this" (emphasis added). That, of course, is precisely what Reuters did with the altered photographs. In fact, the agency went much further by removing all of the photographs and announcing it will never use that photographer again. Fox, by contrast, refused to remove Cameron from covering the Kerry campaign and continues to employ him. Worse, Fox excused itself by claiming that publication of the fake quotes "occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice."
[…]
By all means, misleading photographs and other fabrications should be documented and exposed. But such scandals typically reflect little about anything beyond the culpable individuals involved. [That last sentence should be carefully read and re-read by you guys on the Right.] [This is an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's post on Salon: http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/08/07/bloggers/index.html]
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That was a little inside baseball reference to a pundit caught plagiarizing. A little fun I was tossing at the writer here. The "fake news > copied words" was an homage to that incident at the Red America blog at the Washington Post. Sorry I wasn't clear on that, but I had no idea I was being graded.
The greater question being wether made up news gets a person fired, like somebody copying other people's work.
Sort of like the comment right above this one. |
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