Hang Right Politics

Posted by Kathy on August 16th, 2007 in Loony Left, Media Bias

Courtesy of Lucianne, the American Thinker lists the egregious missteps of a lying media:

Scott Beauchamp was the last straw. I realized that I need a scorecard to keep track of all the fallen journalists, journalistic mistakes and major and minor screw-ups in the media. I couldn’t find one already made, although Wikipedia came close, so I started my own. I apologize if there is a good list already out there, but I looked and could not find.

Offenses include lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias. Some are hilarious, such as an action figure doll being mistaken for a real soldier.

This list is amazing! There’s a former president, a sitting Senator, respected members of academia, famous authors, culpable major media outlets, and ludicrous methods of deceit. The dems really do think we are stupid. Here’s an excerpt (and this is just the A,B,C’s):

# Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press (2005). Lying/fabricating. In his sports column, he described alumni players at a basketball game who were not even there.
# Stephen Ambrose, historian/author (2002). Plagiarism. He was almost a book “factory”, writing eight books in five years. But that apparently came easier when parts were copied from other books, without attribution.
# Associated Press (AP) (2005). Fell for hoax and phony photo. The AP ran a story, with a photo, about a soldier held hostage in Iraq. The photo turned out to be that of an action figure doll; there was no such soldier.
# Mike Barnicle, Boston Globe (1998). Lying/fabricating and plagiarism. Totally made up stories, including one about a black kid and a white kid with cancer. Also used quotes from George Carlin as his own. Fired from the Boston Globe.
# Maria Bartiromo, CNBC (2007). Conflict of interest. She dated a Citicorp executive and received special treatment from him, and also owned stock in Citicorp while doing financial reporting for CNBC, including reporting on Citicorp.
# Scott Beauchamp, The New Republic (2007). Lying. TNR hired this U.S. Army private and husband of one of its own reporters to write first-hand accounts from Iraq. One of his accounts, supposedly demonstrating the dehumanizing effects of the Iraq war on him and fellow soldiers, occurred in Kuwait before Beauchamp even entered Iraq. Other parts of his writing are likely false, and if not, constitute military crimes on his part. In fact, his anonymous writing from a war zone is likely against military rules. This story is currently unfolding.
# Nada Behziz, The Bakersfield Californian (2005). Lying/fabricating and plagiarism. Writing mostly on health issues, she plagiarized from the New York Times and AP, made up sources, and got basic facts wrong. An investigation counted 29 fabricated or plagiarized articles. She also lied on her resume. She was fired.
# Michael Bellesiles, professor of history, author of Arming America and recipient of Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize. Lying/fabricating. He made “myth shattering” claims about the history of guns in America that were based on fabricated historical records. He resigned from Emory University.
# Joe Biden, U.S. Senator and candidate for President (1988). Plagiarism. He withdrew from the 1988 presidential race after being discovered “delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock… a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator’s boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden’s speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.” He’s still a Senator, and back in the race for 2008.
# Jayson Blair, The New York Times (2003). Lying/fabricating. He fabricated parts or all of at least 36 stories. He, along with his bosses Gerald Boyd and Howell Raines, resigned from the NYT.
# The Boston Globe (2004). Fake photos, fake story. The Boston Globe published pictures alleging U.S. troops raped Iraqi women. The pictures turned out to be commercially available pornography.
# Paul Bradley Richmond Times-Dispatch (2006). Lying/fabricating. Made up his story on reactions to President Bush’s speech on immigration. He fabricated interviews. He reported on an event in the first person, yet he was not even in the same town. He was fired.
# Rick Bragg, The New York Times (2003). “Drive-by” reporting. “Bragg’s defense — that it is common for Times correspondents to slip in and out of cities to ‘get the dateline’ while relying on the work of stringers, researchers, interns and clerks — has sparked more passionate disagreement than the clear-cut fraud and plagiarism committed by Blair. The issue, put starkly, is whether readers are being misled about how and where a story was reported.” He resigned.
# Fox Butterfield, New York Times (2000). Lying/fabricating and plagiarism. In 2003, a federal jury ruled that “the New York Times and one of its reporters libeled an Ohio Supreme Court justice” in an article published April 13, 2000. The jury found that the article was “not substantially true”. He also “had lifted material from a story in The Boston Globe while reporting, ironically, on plagiarism by a Boston University dean”.
# Thom Calandra, Marketwatch.com (2005). Conflict of interest. He profited by selling stocks shortly after giving them positive write-ups in his newsletter. The SEC brought suit against him, which was settled.
# Jimmy Carter, former U.S. President, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. Lying, plagiarism, bias. His book was so full of errors, including doctored maps, that his chief collaborator, Kenneth Stein of Emory University, resigned his position with the Carter Center. Carter’s book was condemned by Alan Dershowitz and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others.
# CBS, Dan Rather, Mary Mapes (2004). Fell for fake documents. CBS used forged documents from a non-credible source in claiming George W. Bush received favored treatment in the Air National Guard.
# Chris Cecil, Cartersville Daily News (2005). Plagiarism. “The associate managing editor of a small Georgia newspaper was fired for plagiarizing articles by a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald, including copying a passage about his mother’s battle with cancer. Chris Cecil, 28, was fired from The Daily Tribune News of Cartersville on Thursday after the Herald pointed out six to eight columns written since March that contained portions from work by Leonard Pitts Jr.”
# Philip Chien, Wired News (2006). Lying/fabricating. He made up sources and quotes in at least three articles. Wired withdrew the stories.
# Ward Churchill, Chairman of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado. Lying and plagiarism. He lied about his credentials and ethnic background to get a job in the first place. His “research” was laden with fabricated evidence, plagiarism and referencing his own previous writings under pseudonyms. He is worthy of Mary McCarthy’s quote about Lillian Hellman: “Every word (s)he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” He resigned.
# CNN, Operation Tailwind, CNN NewsStand (1998). Lying/fabricating. The televised special claimed that the U.S. military used nerve gas in a mission to kill American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War, but the story had no factual support. CNN later retracted the story.
# CNN and Eason Jordan (2003). Admitted bias, slanting the news. Eason Jordan, CNN’s news chief, admitted that CNN withheld reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities so as to continue getting favored treatment from Saddam.
# Janet Cooke, Washington Post (1980-1981), Pulitzer Prize winner. Lying/fabricating. Her series on “Jimmy’s World” about an 8-year-old heroin addict was totally made up.
# Katie Couric, “Katie Couric’s Notebook,” CBSNews.com (2007). Plagiarism. In the first place, her blog is largely written by someone else. That someone else copied material from The Wall Street Journal, without attribution.

And what happens to disgraced and lying journalists?

# Nina Totenberg, The National Observer (1972). Plagiarism. She was fired by The National Observer for plagiarism. “Totenberg had allegedly lifted several paragraphs from a Washington Post story and dropped them into a piece she was writing about former House Speaker Tip O’Neill for the now-defunct National Observer.” She is currently legal correspondent for NPR.

Read the whole thing. Links provided. And the conclusions Hoven draws from the compilation of his list – amen, and again I say amen.

There is a difference between postmodern journalism and fiction – fiction is honest about its fabrications.