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The Washington Post is accustomed to criticism of its coverage from the right and left blogospheres, but a Nov. 29 front page story about Barack Obama’s rumored Muslim ties came with a twist: Many voices within its own newsroom joined in the firestorm…The Columbia Journalism Review folks jumped in as well:
Since Thursday, there have been angry e-mails, Hamilton said, and allegations that the Post is swift-boating the Illinois senator by discussing rumors at length, without mentioning whether they’ve been thoroughly discredited by other media.
In the front-page piece, [author Perry] Bacon muses over how the chances of Barack Obama getting elected president might be affected by the fact that he’s not Muslim. Seriously. To build his case, Bacon stumbles artlessly through all manner of rumor, innuendo, and xenophobic smear—never bothering to refute any of it, even though there is plenty of well-documented evidence to knock down much of this stuff.
As a former copy editor, I know it's tough work, especially on a tight deadline and in a tight count. As Vince Rinehart, Editorial copy desk chief, said: "Perhaps the greatest challenge in copy editing is reading 1,000 sophisticated words on a complex topic and finding six words to tell the story and convey its nuance and tone, often with less than five minutes to do so."And House describes it this way:
Headline content often relies on connect-the-dots skills in which editors and readers assume shared knowledge and anticipate exchanges of information. As Lutz noted, "Often a headline writer is asked to convey one or more themes in a story in 3, 4, or 5 words."
That can be a mind-bending task, particularly when a copy editor is bearing in mind the Star-Telegram's mission ("Earning the people's trust daily") while dealing with supersensitive topics such as illegal immigration -- a complex, emotionally charged issue that permeates our nation's mind and pulls high readership, increasing the need for accuracy.
In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.
The purpose of this website, and an accompanying column in the Post, is to "truth squad" the national political debate in the period leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Our goal is to shed as much light as possible on controversial claims and counter-claims involving important national issues, such as the war in Iraq, immigration, health care, social issues, the economy, and the records of the various presidential candidates. When we come across a statement or claim that is at variance with the facts, as best we can establish them, we will point that out.While it's clear they're taking their job very seriously, they still keep it readable with features like "The Pinocchio Test" where they score misstatements or exaggerations on a scale of one to four Pinocchios. (And reward fully truthful statements with the mark of "Geppetto.")
The purpose of this website, and an accompanying column in the Post, is to "truth squad" the national political debate in the period leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Our goal is to shed as much light as possible on controversial claims and counter-claims involving important national issues, such as the war in Iraq, immigration, health care, social issues, the economy, and the records of the various presidential candidates. When we come across a statement or claim that is at variance with the facts, as best we can establish them, we will point that out.While it's clear they're taking their job very seriously, they still keep it readable with features like "The Pinocchio Test" where they score misstatements or exaggerations on a scale of one to four Pinocchios. (And reward fully truthful statements with the mark of "Geppetto.")
Bob Garfield: Americans may or may not be as sleep-deprived as drug makers claim, but if it were a myth you could try to quash it with the truth. That's what the Centers for Disease Control Prevention recently did. They sent out a flyer listing various facts and myths about the flu vaccine and labeled them "true or false." But a study at the University of Michigan found that the CDC flyer actually did nothing to change people's minds and may have even spread vaccine myths to more people.
Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for The Washington Post, explains that right after reading the flyer, people mostly remembered the false statements as false.
Shankar Vedantam: But about 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true.
The true statements did not suffer the same kind of deterioration with time. In other words, over time we tend to remember false things as true but not true things as false.
Bob Garfield: Americans may or may not be as sleep-deprived as drug makers claim, but if it were a myth you could try to quash it with the truth. That's what the Centers for Disease Control Prevention recently did. They sent out a flyer listing various facts and myths about the flu vaccine and labeled them "true or false." But a study at the University of Michigan found that the CDC flyer actually did nothing to change people's minds and may have even spread vaccine myths to more people.
Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for The Washington Post, explains that right after reading the flyer, people mostly remembered the false statements as false.
Shankar Vedantam: But about 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true.
The true statements did not suffer the same kind of deterioration with time. In other words, over time we tend to remember false things as true but not true things as false.
Washington Post Radio, which brought the newspaper's journalists to the local airwaves, will go off the air next month after failing to attract enough listeners and losing money during its 17-month existence.Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher weighed in early this morning on the “difficult marriage of two very different news cultures,” offering why he thought the station never fulfilled its potential:
"What democracy requires," Lasch wrote in "The Lost Art of Argument," "is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can only be generated by debate. We do not know what we need until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy.”So what Skube is trying to say is that bloggers are cheapening public debate – in the Laschian sense – because they are too opinionated, unrestrained and self-righteous. Now, it’s not as if I’m Will Hunting and Lasch is Vickers’ “Work in Essex County,” but Skube is guilty of a little bit of selective quoting when it comes to Mr. Lasch.
There was something appealing about this argument -- one that no blogger would reject -- when Lasch advanced it almost two decades ago. But now we have the opportunity to witness it in practice, thanks to the blogosphere, and the results are less than satisfying. One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.
But they are, more often than not, trademarks of the kind of journalism that makes a difference.
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