Say Anything Blog

Journalists teeing off on bloggers for being a bunch if intemperate, factually challenged posers is nothing new.  But the latest in that genre of screeds penned by Michael Skube at The Washington Post seems a bit ill-timed given this recently put-together list of media blunders put together by Randall Hoven at The American Thinker.

After all, should we bloggers be listening to finger-wagging about “patient fact-finding” from a member of the media when professional reporters are responsible for photo captions like this one?  Or falling for a terrorist video that tried to pass a GI Joe doll off as a real hostage?

Or how about Dan Rather’s fraudulent hit-piece on the President’s national guard record?  Or The National Review’s Scott Beauchamp controversy?  Or even that same publication’s Stephen Glass problem?

Jayson Blair?  Eason Jordan?  The list goes on and on (you really should go down this list at the aforementioned American Thinker article).

Now I’m not saying that bloggers are perfect.  There are a lot of bloggers out there who are totally unprofessional and get things wrong, either through accident or purposeful misrepresentation.  But the recent trend in the media is one where bloggers routinely detect and correct errors made by journalists, who are either making blunders (from minor to major) or outright working to deceive their readers/viewers.