The sad scenario in West Virginia seems damn near like a replay of New Orleans, and Rather's 'Fake but Accurate' ANG memo. I understand their urge to get the scoop - but the folks doing the reporting aren't exactly falling all over themselves to get information that's accurate and correct, much less complete.
And it's a bit disheartening that after HOW many episodes of shoddy reporting and inaccurate journalism - indeed, outright fabrications of stuff that's seemingly designed to keep people glued to the story - we're STILL expected to swallow what they give us without any question? Actually, the question I've got right now is "Who's more stupid - the public for believing this, or the reporters for believing they can keep getting away with this indefinitely?
The Anchoress ? Emotionalism: bad fuel for the pressI'm not sure the MSM can really take much more of this...Journalism used to run on facts. It wasn’t enough to have a rumor, you had to nail it down; it wasn’t enough to suspect something - if you suspected it, you expended the shoe leather to prove it. Now, unfortunately, beginning at least with Mary Mapes’ odd idea that the standard of journalism precludes proving one’s charge (it is now enough that the charge is made, and the accused must prove a negative), but particularly since Hurricane Katrina, mainstream journalism has decided it doesn’t need to run on facts; emotionalism is the new fuel on which the press is running, and it is a bad, bad gas - it sputters and sprays and belches out errors all over the airways, all through the ink barrels, and once the errors are out there, they become either (in a best-case scenario) tough narratives to reclaim or (in the cruelest case) weapons of devastation and destruction.
J.