.. to step up and stop all this slander against the newspaper professionals, the gatekeepers, guardians and editors who hold the fortress walls up against the relentless storming of the barricades by those pesky and uncouth amateurs you love to diss ?
Oh, and I noticed you’re using Twitter … tsk, tsk … contributing to all the muck in the swamp, are you ?
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Many people have gotten disgusted and given up on the effectiveness of a majority of (especially American) journalists over the past several years.
Here (below) is an excerpt and link to a story about a flagrant disregard for facts and truth concerning global warning in a piece published in the Washington Post by George Will.
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George Will resurrected a zombie lie yesterday. In fact, he literally resurrected it – Brad Johnson compared and contrasted his misinformation yesterday with a column from April 2006.
[Snip … ]
True, that was the result of a scientific study and not what old Newsweeks were printing to sell copies through counter-intuition 30 years ago. But you know, it’s a perspective.
Predictably yet somewhat hilariously, Will and his editor Fred Hiatt are ducking accountability on this tripe.
Mum’s the word for George Will and the Washington Post when it comes to explaining how misinformation on global warming got into Will’s most recent column.
Yesterday morning we called Will to ask him about the misrepresentations in his Sunday column. We also called Fred Hiatt, the editor of the paper’s editorial page, to ask about the editing process that the Post’s editorial page employs. Neither chose to answer our questions […]
Will’s assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he’d try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday’s post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.
But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will’s column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.
I get the impression that opinion columns in Big Media papers aren’t rigorously fact-checked, with the excuse being that they are, well, "opinion." In practice, this becomes a license for Villagers to use the credibility they’ve assumed for themselves to lie.
And if they make a mistake that actually filters through the roadblocks and reaches their editors, they face no consequence. In fact, they frequently fail upward. So they reprint the same nonsense the next week or the next month or the next year. And they are feted at cocktail parties through the next millennium.
Somebody convene a blogger ethics panel.
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