News Organizations Screwing Up

CBS News, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal have all made blunders recently that call into question their editorial command-and-control systems.

CBS News, which aired falsified documents on their 60 Minutes program, is again being accused of a similar situation, this time involving a woman who is “petrified” that her sons may be drafted. CBS omitted the fact that the woman in question is the head of a liberal group called the “Parents Against the Draft”, that the Selective Service debunked any talk of a draft, and that a mass e-mail that was sent out a few weeks ago concerning the possible reinstatement of a draft was totally false. Here’s what FactCheck says.

Fox News had to apologize because of a story (that was supposed to be humorous and kept in the office) ended up being posted on their web site. In it, they made up a whole bunch of false Kerry statements; kind of like some of Jay Leno’s skits on the first Presidential Debate. But they posted it as news and then hurriedly took it down after the mistake was discovered. Dumb! Who was the genius who approved that article?

The Wall Street Journal is defending one of its reporters who wrote a nasty e-mail about Iraq that ended up on the Internet. She had just returned from Iraq, and wrote that “Despite President Bush's rosy assessment, Iraq remains a disaster. ... [the] Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities. ... The situation, basically, [is] a raging barbaric guerilla war.” This has led the Wall Street Journal to defend her journalistic neutrality on her reporting from the war zones.

Journalistic integrity seems to be in trouble these days. When reporters break rules, or take shortcuts to get a story out, or do whatever they do to call their integrity into question, it is bad news for the free press. It takes people a long time to forget that an incident happened. And government oversight is NOT the answer. That would lead to government judging whether news content is “good” or “bad” or “approved”, which is a violation of the First Amendment.

News organizations need to be doing their jobs better, and their stories need to be verified before the story sees the light of day.