Sloppy or Dishonest?

"Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists."

   - Norman Mailer, (1923-      ), American writer

Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit links to a sloppily researched article by Kate Zernike in the New York Times and asks, "When, oh, when, will we get a decent press corps?"

What has Glenn so frustrated is Zernike's use of an untrue story about George H. W. Bush which showed up in the Times back in 1988:

"Maybe she copped that from Juan Gonzales in the Daily News a couple of days earlier, who wrote: 'Can we ever forget the look of utter amazement on Bush, the father, the first time he found himself facing and electronic scanner at a supermarket counter 12 years ago?' "

According to Snopes.com, Bush was neither where the piece said he was nor was the author of the article present at the event.

Errors like this make you wonder if reporters are not getting the little stories right, how well they're doing on the big ones. Deadlines on major breaking news might put pressure on writers to release their work before every single detail is verified, but something like the Zernike and Gonzales pieces that are not that time-sensitive should be dead-on accurate in my opinion. That said, I'd be inclined to chalk their oversight up to plain old sloppiness, rather than dishonest reporting.

I can't be as generous in my assessment of the recent Associated Press bogus boos story, however. It was a flat-out fabrication according to Hindrocket over at PowerLine. I would agree, as Hindrocket suggests, that its author should be fired. In fact, I would go even further and say he should never be allowed to report for any major, or minor, news organization again. He's broken the trust of every reader who gets the news from outlets who use the AP as a source, and there are hundreds of these. 

This Reynolds post explores the breach of trust rather thoroughly. Read the whole thing, and when you're finished ask yourself how we've arrived at this point. When did it become acceptable to fictionalize what is supposed to be news? How much of what we read assuming it is factual is anything but? 

Your guess is as good as mine, but I do believe something good may be coming out of all this. The media's seeming reluctance to police themselves is creating an army of fact-checkers in the blogging world. These folks are refusing to allow traditional media to get away with anything less than honest reporting. Armed with their powerful search engines and connected to each other by an extensive informal network, they are verifying almost everything being published today.

To me, that's a giant step in the right direction. Anything that's happening that will help bring a higher level of honesty and integrity to our print and broadcast media is a good thing. I applaud these new detectives and urge them to continue their criticism of those who are not taking their responsibilities as journalists as seriously as they should.