The Miami Herald: "Cowardice in the newsrooms"

[billbuckhead]

Cowardice in the newsrooms

BY EDWARD WASSERMAN

[e-mail]

News is a messy and elusive form of information. Reporters don't just stroll through a meadow of stories in bloom and pluck a bouquet. What gets reported first depends on what journalists hear about. Then the story must seem interesting, significant or both. It has to be something that the journalists have the brains, will and resources to pursue. And they'll want to know what rival organizations make of it, what sources they routinely rely on say about it, and a multitude of other things.

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An angry, fearful time

The performance of this country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003 will be remembered as a disgrace. To be sure, it was an angry, fearful time, and independent-minded reporting might not have been heard above the drumbeats of patriotism and war. But it's hard to read the hand-wringing confessionals from news organizations that now realize that they got the prewar story wrong without concluding that the real problem was they were afraid to tell the truth.

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<http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/edward_wasserman/9592078.htm?1c>

Ain't this the truth!

[Dookus]

1. sorry

no level of media mea culpas will absolve them of their failure to do their jobs.

I expect we'll see a lot of this kind of stuff, but we have to remember the people writing this now are the same exact people who fell down on the job.

[tkulesa]

4. I don't see any signs of correction.

Apologizing after the fact is well and good, but what about changing their practices and attitudes so it doesn't happen again, and again, and again?

We still have the same damned whore media kissing corporate and neo-conservative asses.

[merh]

2. So they woke up from a coma!

Please let the rest of the media realize their mistakes and start REPORTING THE FACTS!

Thanks for the link

[SoCalDem]

3. It's a "Two-fer"

They get to be "patriotic" and cover all the "cool" war stuff for months on end.......and then when the tide changes, they get to "re-hash" it all again and just tweak it a bit into a mea culpa..

It's CYA in its most classic form..and it's vulgar.


If there are doubts TODAY, there were doubts THEN, but they were too afraid/greedy/jealous-of-ratings/hungry-for-attention back then to follow their gut feelings. They embarked on the lemming adventure because it suited them THEN.. They have had a "change of heart" because it suits them NOW..

bastards.. Lots of dead people, because they did not do their jobs when it would have mattered..

[denverbill]

5. They think the war is the end of their problems?

What about election 2000 when they simply reprinted verbatim Republican accusations about Al Gore's 'misteps'? Do they still think Al claimed to have invented the internet?

What about their failure to even bother researching Bush's war history until 4 years later?

What about their reprinting of the SwiftLiars accusations, without doing the least bit of critical analysis?

Reporters are supposed to dig for and report the truth, as best they know it. If I claimed to have given Bush a BJ in the Oval Office, would they simply treat give my claims equal weighting to Shrub's denial, or would they at least have the common sense to check some basic facts before printing the accusation? And if it turned out there was very strong evidence against my claims, would they later publish a front-page retraction?

[kodi]

6. most folks doing their jobs so poorly would get fired, but not journalists

they just move to faux or the washington times

[ProfessorPlum]

7. Or stay right where they are

and continue to reap their fat paychecks.

You've got to be a special kind of stupid and lazy and whorish to make it in today's fast paced media world.

[Jacobin]

8. "Disgrace?"

Treason is more like it.

Warmongering pricks. Sell outs. Helping to lead this country off a fucking cliff for the neo-cons and military industrial complex. Tens of thousands on both sides being maimed and killed for NOTHING. BILLIONS squandered. The U. S. now considered a rogue nation by the rest of the world.

Fucking disaster.

Dingbats, scumbags, sycophants, cowards, useless tools and whores.