Say Anything Blog

Randall Hoven at The American Thinker has put together a comprehensive list of media blunders both serious and minor.  He prefaces his list with this:

Scott Beauchamp was the last straw. I realized that I need a scorecard to keep track of all the fallen journalists, journalistic mistakes and major and minor screw-ups in the media.  I couldn’t find one already made, although Wikipedia came close, so I started my own.  I apologize if there is a good list already out there, but I looked and could not find.

Offenses include lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias.  Some are hilarious, such as an action figure doll being mistaken for a real soldier.  Some are silly, such as reporting on a baseball game watched on TV.  Some are more serious.

I leave it to you to judge whether the internet damaged “journalism’s ability to do its job professionally”, as Marvin Kalb accuses, or if the internet has in fact helped expose an already damaged “profession”.

From his conclusion:

These offenses have been going on for years, long before the internet.  But there does seems to be a rise in the number of reported offenses in recent years.  Did the number of offenses go up, or did the fraction of discovered offenses go up?

The thing to remember these days is that the valiant, truth-telling crusader reporters from the days of yore are long gone...if they ever existed in the first place.  Today’s reporters are often every bit as agenda-driven as the VIP’s they cover.  Meaning that you should trust the guy you see talking on CNN, or the person with the by-line in the paper, about as much as you trust the average politician.