Journalistic stupidity
The sad thing is, I could probably write a roundup of idiocy by journalists far and wide just about every day -- certainly every week.
First, CBS News' White House correspondent channels his inner jerk:
You have to listen carefully, but Plante's question can be made out: "If he's so smart, how come you lost Congress?" This is obviously not a question designed to elicit any sort of information. It's snark of the sort that tends to bring the journalism profession into ill repute.
Maybe I can sue Plante for defamation.
Then there is this recent column by John Leo chronicling other major journalistic lapses.
If anyone ever starts a museum of horrible explanations, the one-liner by Newsweek's Evan Thomas about his magazine's dubious reporting on the Duke non-rape case — "The narrative was right but the facts were wrong" — is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it."
What Mr. Thomas seems to mean is that the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't.
This is the sort of thing you encounter when university training and newsroom culture is all about establishing "narratives" and not about simply reporting facts.
I'm sure I've told this story before, but I remember taking a journalism class at Cal Poly where we watched a video of some "protesters" from the gay group ACT UP vandalizing a Catholic Church. The instructor then encouraged a classroom discussion on how we as journalists should report the story; balancing the "wrong" of vandalism by ACT UP against the wrong of Catholic teaching on the use of condoms -- which is what ACT UP was ostensibly "protesting."
I pointed out that the Catholic Church's teaching was not only "no condoms," but also "no sex outside of marriage." Since homosexual sex is by definition outside of marriage (except now in Massachusetts, but that wasn't the case at the time), then the "no condom" rule was really a moot point. I mean, if you're not going to follow church teaching on when and with whom you have sex, why are you protesting what is really a tertiary rule? If you're following all of the Catholic Church's rules, then the chances of you contracting AIDS is very nearly nil.
Needless to say, the discussion was short. However, this is the sort of "training" journalists everywhere get -- and I wasn't in every j-class across the nation pointing out inconvenient facts.
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[...] Plante to ask him about his comment after the announcement of the departure of Karl Rove (which I lambasted earlier, with video): “If he’s so smart, how come you lost [...]