Washington Post reporter Janet Cook fabricated a story of an 8-year old heroin addict that won her a Pulitzer, which was ultimately withdrawn after the story was found to be fraudulent.
New York Times reporter Jason Blair was found to have plagarized and fabricated news stories.
Now,CBS News has used forged government documents (a criminal offense) in an attempt to influence the the electoral process of America. (And CBS wants to protect it’s source. What a joke.) Comparatively, The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth are starting to look pretty credible.
Oftentimes, when goring liberal sacred cows, the attacker is confronted with the “can I get a cite for that” defense. And if one produces a “cite” that is not from an approved mainstream source, the “defenders of the faith” will belittle and dismiss the information as being from a source with an agenda.
But, do the so-called mainstream media really exhibit any more credibility than sources labeled “right-wing extremist”?
A liberal’s worst nightmare: A redneck that graduated from high school prior to 1977.
Oh, and I almost forgot, NBC news magazine, Dateline, rigged a pick-up truck to explode on impact to malign an American corporation and CNN produced a fraudulent documentary, claiming that the United States military used poison gas on deserters, in an effort to equate the American military complex with the Iraqi military of Saddam Hussein.
Yes. Mainsteam news outlets get criticized when they do something wrong. Supporters of right-wing liars like the Swiftboaters leap through hoops to try to salvage reasons why the lies are not actually so bad.
No, Razorback is arguing that a self-correcting mechanism to retract errors and lies, if used by a group of disparate publications that he deems too “Leftist” is inferior to deliberate liars who refuse to retract their stories after they have been proven false if the liars are a group that he perceives to be sufficiently “Right.”
(You see the same logic among people who claim that Evolutionary theory is inferior to Creationist dogma because the Evolutionary scientists actually correct their mistakes while the Creationists’ story does not change.)
Oh? And does your story change when I point out to you that Hillary Clinton has both MicroSoft Word and a laser printer! What does your liberal media have to say about that?!
OK, I"ll play that game. Razorback, are you really trying to argue that the outright deceptions of a few journalists automatically improves the credibility of the Swifties?
Instead of playing semantic games, answer the question posed to you.
(I’ve spent more than my share of time around journalists, mostly electronic. Most of them, most of the time, have neither the smarts, the motivation, or the time to be deliberately deceptive.)
In the case of CBS, that “mechanism” wasn’t “self-correcting.” And that was the problem there. I suspect that left to its own internal inspections there would have been no “self-correction” at all on the part of CBS. CBS had to almost be beat into submission from the outside.
So, best to praise the Bloggers and that ‘other-correcting mechanism’ in the CBS case.
I think tomndebb was referring to a correcting mechanism in society/media at large not internal to CBS. In fact only deliberate misreading of his post would say otherwise:
Hmmm, on reflection perhaps it wasn’t so obvious- especially when seeing everything from the perch you guys seem to inhabit. Still I believe tomndebb’s point refers to a wider “self correcting mechanism”
Yeah I remember being trapped in the bottom of a latrine. After the fifth guy crapped on me I thought to myself, you know that first guy wasn’t so bad…
That’s what luci was sayin’.
Something that you may decide to include in you conclusion is the percentage of right to wrong in the histories of the compared groups. Obviously the news sources you’ve mentioned have put out tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of stories. Pesumably the vast majority of them were reliable. However the SBV have just a few. So I’d expect that the ration of right to wrong stories heavily favors the aforementioned sources who have admitted that they published falsehoods as opposed to the single source you cite who (to the best of my knowledge) has not acknowledged publishing falsehoods.
But, you may not decide to consider this reliability ration when you make you case. If you do noty, I can certainly understand why.