glass houses, etc. etc.
I don't make monkeys, I just train 'em to write opinion for the RMN!
Rrrromenesko:
Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple wrote this week that Editor & Publisher has become increasingly irrelevant under editor Greg Mitchell. Not so, says the E&P chief. "Since I became editor of E&P four years ago, the publication has won more top awards than virtually any other trade magazine, our Web traffic has increased 500% ... and our business fortunes have turned around completely."
If there's one murder of newspaper editors who could recognize the fearsome shadow of irrelevant reporting...
A story titled "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert" was based on a source she never met or even interviewed. For that story, [Judith] Miller watched a man in a baseball cap from a distance, who pointed at the desert floor, and used that as a basis for filing a piece that confirmed the U.S. had discovered "precursors to weapons of mass destruction." According to her sources in the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha of the U.S. Army, this unnamed scientist from Hussein's WMD program had told them the "building blocks" of WMD were buried in that spot. Miller explained to me several months later that she had seen a letter from the man, written in Arabic and translated for her, that gave his claims credence.
[snip]
The next day she was on national television, including PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," proclaiming that what had been discovered was "more than a smoking gun" and was a "silver bullet in the form of an Iraqi scientist." In an interview with Ray Suarez, Miller began using the plural "scientists" and implied there was more than one source. She gave the Bush administration credit for creating a "political atmosphere where these scientists can come forward." The story was trumpeted by conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and, once it was zapped off to regional newspapers via the [New York] Times wire service, it acquired even more dramatic purchase. "Illegal Material Spotted," the Rocky Mountain News blared with a subhead that distorted even more: "Iraqi Scientist Leads U.S. Team to Illicit Weapons Location." "Outlawed Material Destroyed by the Iraqis Before the War" was the headline of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Unfortunately, none of it was true.
In its editors note, the Times admitted Miller's "informant also claimed that Iraq had sent unconventional weapons to Syria and had been cooperating with Al Qaeda -- two claims that were then, and remain, highly controversial. But the tone of the article suggested that this Iraqi 'scientist' -- who in a later article described himself as an official of military intelligence -- had provided the justification the Americans had been seeking for the invasion. The Times never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims."
...they'd be writing for the RMN (here for more fun-with-irrelevancy-and-biggest-stories-of-our-collective-lifetimes).
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