Stop digging
USA Today columnist Andrew Kantor continues to make journalists look bad over on his blog. Kantor has posted two updates (here and here) on his blog and closed the comments on his original post after racking up 101 comments -- most of which properly take him to task for what can only be described as lacking familiarity with the truth.
Kantor continues to make the following claim:
Fabricating quotes is not the same as faking news. That doesn’t mean it’s right, or professional, or acceptable — but it’s not “faking news.†And it’s certainly not “staging news.†So yes, Mr. [Charles] Johnson, not faking news is not faking news.
This is a distinction without a difference. I encourage Mr. Kantor to demonstrate the courage of his convictions by writing about a real event -- say the recall of Sony-manufactured Apple batteries -- and then just making up quotes from Sony and Apple representatives and a half-dozen "people" who got third-degree burns when the aforementioned battery exploded in their laps.
Kantor can then try his "fabricating quotes is not faking news" defense with his bosses.
At this point, if I'm Kantor's boss -- and it's a good thing I'm not -- I would be scheduling an appointment for Monday morning to go over Journalism 101, honesty, good public relations and not making a horse's behind of oneself.
Of course, this is all peripheral to Kantor's main point.
My main argument still stands: The kinds of things bloggers like Mr. Johnson write would never stand in professional journalism. As much as they would like to, professional journalists wouldn’t write things like he did about Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell: “Mitchell sneakily went back and rewrote sections of it to make himself appear less guilty.â€
Why not? Because an editor would say, rightfully, “How do you know it was ’sneakily’? Do you know E&P’s normal practices for corrections? How was this handled differently? How can you attribute motive — do you have someone on the record who said so, or are you just making it up?
Yes, Kantor's all in a huff because Johnson used the word "sneakily." Kantor is probably correct that "sneakily" wouldn't have made it past an editor in a news story -- but it certainly would make the grade in an opinion column and that's where I'd place just about all of Johnson's blog entries (and mine as well). The timing and the way changes were made to Mitchell's 2003 piece can easily lead a commentator -- and even a straight news reporter -- to the well-founded belief that they were made "sneakily."
Which just goes to prove that Kantor's wrong -- again. This happens daily in professional journalism. A case in point that's been in the media recently is Robert Novak's column outing Valerie Plame. In follow-up columns Novak described the leaker -- now known to be then Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage -- as "no partisan gunslinger." Kantor, to stay true to form, would trash Novak for this statement "Because an editor would say, rightfully, “How do you know" he is no partisan gunslinger? "Are you just making it up?"
And honestly, if what occurred with Mitchell's story after its existence was highlighted over at Confederate Yankee is E&P's "normal practices for corrections," then that magazine has a serious problem -- no reputable outfit makes changes like that to a story without noting them.
And Kantor just keeps the hits coming:
Bloggers, though, aren’t professionals. They can make things up and don’t have to hold themselves to any kind of journalistic standard. They can pop in loaded words like “sneakily†without offering any proof. They can attribute motive based on … well, based on nothing at all.
Frankly, it'd be funny if it weren't so sad that Kantor is attacking Johnson for allegedly "making up" Mitchell's motives when in the article in question Mitchell admits to making up people out of whole cloth. But Mitchell is a professional and Johnson isn't. But Mitchell made up people and quotes ... but professionals are held to a journalistic standard ... but Mitchell wasn't held to a journalistic standard in this case ... so Mitchell isn't a journalist ... but he is ... but he can't be ...
The mind reels.
Journalism. Wound. Self-inflicted.
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I wonder what Kantor would have to say about, to pick a few at random, any column by Maureen Dowd, Robert Scheer, Mark Morford, Paul Krugman, and/or Harley Sorensen. Ha.