MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Slippery Blogger has No Rules” Ellis Henican Column, amNewYork, July 16, 2010
Here in the Believable Media, we don’t have very many rules.
No sleeping with the sources.
No taking money from the politicians and flacks.
And no twisting peoples’ words around when you edit their quotes.
I can’t comment on Andrew Breitbart’s funding practices or his sex life. But I do know this much: The bully-boy blogger sure did mangle what Shirley Sherrod said.
By the time he got done flip-flopping her meaning, the obscure Department of Agriculture official sounded like some vicious, anti-white racist – instead of the decent, religious, Southern woman she so obviously is. Then holy hell broke right out in the media and in Washington.
Breitbart’s “Big Government” posting was gullibly swallowed on talk radio and cable news. And in a matter of minutes, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack got busy firing his innocent employee – without taking a moment to confirm her words, their context or the underlying facts.
Vilsack has now apologized. Which he had to. He has offered the woman a new job. Which is only right.
But what about the slippery Breitbart, who’d employed similarly misleading tactics in his recent hit-jobs on ACORN and Sen. Mary Landrieu? This can be a simple oversight or accident. What kind of contrition is he showing?
And what about the big media outlets that have been feeding so voraciously off Breitbart and his ilk? This is also no accident.
Some website posts an item. True? Half-true? Not true at all? That hardly matters so long as the attack is easily repeated and it advances the website’s precooked ideological cause.
Lately, it’s been conservatives like Breitbart who’ve been most effective at this cynical sleight of hand. But the techniques can be just as effective from any direction.
Those of us who still believe in truth and accuracy have to speak out now. We don’t have many rules around here, but we really ought to follow the ones we have.
We need to break the connection between these hit-job websites and the media you can believe.
We need to ask the Believable Media this question in the New Media Age: “Yes, but is the story true?”
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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My faded memories suggest credibility in any medium is earned each day. There’s nothing inherently less reliable about a blog or a youtube post than a dead-tree story. The rules you cite are intended to help protect reporters from squandering their credibility but they’re just barely the beginning. For example, Judith Miller’s drum-beats for that famous fraud, the Iraq war, were — in my view — much much worse and yet she may have obeyed the rules.
But, who ARE the ‘believable’ media… there’s taint all over the place, and sussing out accuracy and believability is a full time job. I tend to gravitate towards ‘lefty’ blogs/media, but also MediaMatters, TruthOut, On The Media (podcast), I’m sure there are others, but critical thinking, and research are ‘arts’ rarely taught anymore. I had a great prof at UNO who taught me this stuff (but sadly can’t remember his name).