“You don’t think” being the operative phrase, Bob.

1. I have heard conservatives criticize FoxNews many times, just not for the ideological things you are probably concerned with.

2. Unless you have an example or two, it’s difficult to offer a criticism or defense. Your opinion that FoxNews is an “egregious example of deliberately distorted news” holds no more weight than if I said the Guardian is a puerile liberal rag. Name calling doesn’t mean anything, which is why you’ll find the “wingnuts” attacking specific journalistic incidents (like the fact that journalists didn’t question Jimmy Massey’s tales) while the left speaks in large, sweeping generalities about what they do and don’t like about FoxNews (FauxNews! Media whores! Lying liars! Bill O’Reilly! Squee!).

I’m sure you can find something specific; I’m not saying that FoxNews is a bastion of perfect, responsible journalism. They are not a conservative brain trust, but a sensationalistic cable channel who use fiery pundits to fit a neglected niche. That goes back to the first point. But you’ll have to say what exactly bugs you. My experience has been that leftist complaints about FoxNews are never about procedure or truth, but ideological disagreement (trying to redefine leftist opinion as incontrovertible fact).

Jill: AND, I think this is Jarvis’s point – does anyone think that, because this story was misreported (it was definitely a story, at the least, against the horrendous actions of the nursing home), this meant the overall incompetence charge against FEMA was untrue?

That is a fallacy to justify mythtelling.

Get a grip… I can’t keep track of whether Jeff Jarvis has backed away from this or not, but the “Big Picture” argument stripped away of emotion is: lie to prove what you believe because what you believe is true. Even if you have to lie to make it appear true.

FEMA’s incompetence should be borne out by *true* stories about their incompetence, not stories we made up that we wish were true because we want sooo bad to believe them. Simlarly, if the press wants to prove an MIA story about Bush is true, then they shouldn’t offer up lies in the form of forged memos and then claim that evidence doesn’t really matter because what they believe is true even though they apparently felt they had to lie to prove what they believe is true.

The “Swifties” succeeded against John Kerry, not because they were lying (a key self-deception among Democrats) but because many of their charges turned out to be demonstrably *true*, and their detractors (including Jeff Jarvis) didn’t offer much to counter them except to scream “liar liar liar” at them.

Back to Jimmy Massey… it’s bad enough the press gave a free pass to this proven liar (“proven” is key, as opposed to just yelling it generically at people you disagree with)… but apart from the one brave reporter (Ron Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) who dared to expose the fraud, how many reporters do you think are going to follow up? Have you seen Massey’s debunking featured prominently on any TV news broadcast, despite weeks and weeks of trying to — falsely — build his pal Cindy Sheehan up as a national movement? Any reporters who happily passed along his sick propaganda going to report that they were wrong in believing him and wrong for not checking the facts like they always CLAIM that they do when they make big speeches about how great they are?

The response of Harris’s colleagues who were duped by Massey? Mostly, a collective shrug. I e-mailed a reporter from The Washington Post asking if he would follow up. No response. A USA Today reporter told me he had no plans to do so. And I spoke with David Holwerk, editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, which ran a lengthy freelance interview of Massey by an anti-war activist. “I don’t know what we’re planning to do,” Holwerk said.

Harris noted in a television interview that Massey continues to sell books and DVDs that smear our troops. “[I]t’s been profitable for Jimmy Massey to keep telling this lie,” he said.

Apparently, despite the newspaper industry’s plunging circulation figures and credibility, Massey’s media enablers believe the same thing.

There you have it. We the press lied, but we don’t care. We like our lies, so even though our lies turned out to be lies, we stand firmly behind our lies. And Judy Miller sucks!

Lying has become a bad habit for far too many among the press and the left, justified, apparently, by a fervent belief in What They Know and a maniacal fear that the Right Is Winning, and it doesn’t take a particularly right-wing ideological stance to see this. Average citizens see it in the press, which is why polling shows such a distinct lack of trust by the public in the press. We’re used to being lied to in order to preserve some “big picture” or other. And it was not encouraging to see a trusted blogger like Jeff Jarvis defend the preservation of lies with his own “big picture” argument.

BTW – I would like to hear what Carson Fire thinks Joe Wilson’s documented deceptions are.

Gladly.

He lied about who sent him. He originally alluded to Cheney, but it was really the CIA via his wife.
He lied about his findings. Iraq had indeed been trying to acquire yellowcake.
He lied in saying that the “16 words” were debunked. They were not debunked by his actual findings, and were supported by other reports.
He lied about Robert Novak.

From the LATimes: Plamegate’s real liar

The least consequential of these fibs was his denial that it was his wife who got him sent to Niger in February 2002 to check out claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence later stated, in a bipartisan report, that evidence indicated it was Mrs. Wilson who “had suggested his name for the trip.” By leaking this fact to the news media, Libby and other White House officials were merely setting the record straight — not, as Wilson would have it, punishing his Mata Hari wife.

Much more egregious were the ways in which Wilson misrepresented his findings. In his famous New York Times Op-Ed article (July 6, 2003), Wilson gave the impression that his eight-day jaunt proved that Iraq was not trying to acquire uranium in Africa. Therefore, when administration officials nevertheless cited concerns about Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, Wilson claimed that they had “twisted” evidence “to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” The Senate Intelligence Committee was not kind to this claim either.

The panel’s report found that, far from discrediting the Iraq-Niger uranium link, Wilson actually provided fresh details about a 1999 meeting between Niger’s prime minister and an Iraqi delegation. Beyond that, he had not supplied new information. According to the panel, intelligence analysts “did not think” that his findings “clarified the story on the reported Iraq-Niger uranium deal.” In other words, Wilson had hardly exposed as fraudulent the “16 words” included in the 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” In fact, the British government, in its own post-invasion review of intelligence, found that this claim was “well founded.”

Victoria Toensing, the expert who the left is desperately trying to smear and destroy, apparently with nothing more to go on than she is very credible and says things they don’t want to hear, makes clear that even the heart of Wilson’s tale is dubious, insomuch as so many rules and procedures were broken to get Wison on a national soapbox via Niger in the first place:

Mr. Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement, a mandatory act for the rest of us who either carry out any similar CIA assignment or represent CIA clients.

When he returned from Niger, Mr. Wilson was not required to write a report, but rather merely to provide an oral briefing. That information was not sent to the White House. [contradicting another Wilson claim]…

Although Mr. Wilson did not have to write even one word for the agency that sent him on the mission at taxpayer’s expense, over a year later he was permitted to tell all about this sensitive assignment in the New York Times. For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we’d have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA’s Prepublication Review Board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published. Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of the article, which, it has been reported, did not jibe with the thrust of Mr. Wilson’s oral briefing. For starters, if the piece had been properly vetted at the CIA, someone should have known that the agency never briefed the vice president on the trip, as claimed by Mr. Wilson in his op-ed.

This is not the bold hero the left imagines, but like with Jeff’s insistence that we protect Broussard’s lie, and the inclination by the press to hype Massey then shrug when the truth comes to light, Joe Wilson’s lies are a “Big Picture” that many want so, so badly to believe, and so not only is every lie excused, every lie is promoted and defended in the face of facts and truth.

Which is why all you got for Fitzmas was one guy, who you probably never heard of before, for nothing more than not being able to keep what were probably previously insignificant details of a story straight. The whole Plamegate thing is only a scandal if you really really believe that the government was trying to “get” somebody by outing Valerie Plame; but as the truth is more likely, the government was probably just defending itself against the hyper-political agenda of a loud, lying leftist (Wilson).

What I then saw, as a viewer, was Tim trying to do some browbeating of a misinformed source of information (to show hard journalistic integrity??) against a man who had suffered through a disaster and seemed close to breaking and I don’t think that was the way to handle it. AND, I think this is Jarvis’s point – does anyone think that, because this story was misreported (it was definitely a story, at the least, against the horrendous actions of the nursing home), this meant the overall incompetence charge against FEMA was untrue? Tim could’ve done a piece on how, in the heat of the moment, there had been some unsubstantiated reporting going on, and this was one case of it — so, with a little bit of time and perspective, let’s take another look at the overall situation. I think it was improper to go after this man who was not a reporter and, as far as I could tell, was just passing on the facts as he knew them.

Now, let’s look at a different case and find out what the feeling is – Pat Tillman. Where did this information come from and is there someone to put on Russert and hold accountable?

BTW – I would like to hear what Carson Fire thinks Joe Wilson’s documented deceptions are. I have seen everything I’ve heard about be debunked by actually reading what Wilson wrote. But – maybe I’m missing a few things. Could we please hear what those are?

Our obligation to bring democracy and freedom to the people of Iraq? Now I understand why Americans were so hoodwinked. Because your premise is a fallacy and doomed to failure.

1) Russert was dealing with the details of one small story in a bigger story being wrong. The details should indeed have been corrected, but a simple statement would suffice. Aggressively challenging a man dealing with incredible stress and personal loss, just because right wingers demanded it for political reasons, was unseemly. And if the details of that one story were not quite right, it is still true that the woman died because of official negligence. And it is still true that several hundred other people, if not thousands, died because of FEMA’s incompetence.

2) Miller didn’t just get the details of one story wrong. It’s not as if she said that the biological WMDs were in Basra, but actually that particular type of WMDs was in Tikrit. There were no WMDs, chemical, biological, or nuclear, anywhere, period. The whole thing was a fabrication, and she was a key member of the ‘cabal’ (to borrow Wilkerson’s term) that enabled that fabrication, repeatedly violating all ethical rules of journalism in the process. And tens of thousands died because of it.

Sorry if you consider this ad hominem, but your fixation just sounds silly, and rather unintelligent.

We are all wrong about things from time to time, and it is human to find justifications for our beliefs. Jeff is actually far better than most writers in taking in feedback and revising and rethinking his positions… sometimes sticking by his guns, sometimes by acknowledging the arguments of others, and sometimes by admitting that he was wrong.

Most writers don’t lay so much on the line as Jeff Jarvis does. I certainly don’t lay as many of my own personal beliefs out there to be squabbled over by people I don’t know.

My critique is on journalism in general; I consider Jeff Jarvis to be one of the better front men for moving journalism in the right direction.

If reading his blog was just about agreeing or disagreeing with him all the time, I wouldn’t read it. And it is one of the few blogs that I continue to read regularly, despite being a “wingnut”.

In her first public comments since the letter scandal erupted, Anonical [the girlfriend] told The Post that going public with the private letter was one of the hardest decisions of her life.

Seeing it used by The Times to misrepresent her boyfriend’s beliefs about the war stung deeply, she said.

“The reason I chose to share that letter was the paragraph about why he was doing this, not the part about him expecting to die. It hurt, it really hurt,” she said by phone from Seattle.

I believe I have read that the editor’s defense is that the NYT was justified in excising the actual theme — the real meaning — of the letter because there was balance provided by *another* soldier’s words in the same article. But that seems to be a rather weak justification for distorting one soldier’s words to support the paper’s point of view. If ten soldiers say “A” and the NYT says “B”, pretending that 50% of the soldiers say “B” is not balance, it is purposefully deceptive propaganda.

And I’m sure we can find hundreds of other examples of journalists behaving in what would seem to most people to be just as unethical or worse than anything Judy Miller did. Yet they are not held up for especial ridicule and scorn, and, unfortunately, that seems to be because such behavior is far more the norm than the exception.

Don’t dismiss too quickly the general distrust that the public has with the press. As soon as I left your site a few minutes ago, I found a brand new sample of dubious journalism that seems relevant.

This is a great one: in brief, a gentleman named Jimmy Massey has been travelling with Cindy Sheehan, and has written a book called Kill! Kill! Kill! in which he outlines all manner of Kerryesque war atrocities committed by him and his marine buddies while in Iraq.

From the St Louis Dispatch via Gateway Pundit (spot those journalistic ethics!):

News organizations worldwide published or broadcast Massey’s claims without any corroboration and in most cases without investigation. Outside of the Marines, almost no one has seriously questioned whether Massey, a 12-year veteran who was honorably discharged, was telling the truth.

He wasn’t.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated – according to his fellow Marines, Massey’s own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey’s unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

…

The details of Massey’s stories changed repeatedly.

For example, he almost always told his audiences and interviewers of an event he said he’d never forget: Marines in his unit shooting four civilian Iraqis in red Kia automobile.

In some accounts, Massey said Marines fired at the vehicle after it failed to stop at a checkpoint. In another version, he said the Marines stormed the car.

Sometimes he said three of the men were killed immediately while the fourth was wounded and covered in blood; sometimes he said the fourth man was “miraculously unscathed.”

(go to the article for EVEN MORE variations!!!)

On reporting the Sheehan beat, reporters were too busy reporting on the story that they liked to be bothered with mere facts and truth. Why would they suspect the veracity of somebody who they agree with and who says things that supports their preconceptions?

It’s not just a matter of transparency or point-of-view. There seems to be something extra that journalists suffer from. It’s a sort of denial of point-of-view. They really *do* believe that they are unbiased; the really *do* believe that the world is exactly the way they see it. This leads them to make bad choices; they give free passes to people the rest of us are suspicious of, and dig in like demons on others with the flimsiest and most irrelevant of evidence. Many of us were disappointed (but not surprised) recently when Ed Bradley “interviewed” Joe Wilson on 60 Minutes. Despite a long list of Wilson’s documented deceptions, veteran journalist Bradley mostly just “grilled” Wilson on the misdeeds of his political enemies.

But being honest about Wilson’s actual veracity shouldn’t preclude continuing to probe the government if there’s really something there. But in this instance, the press is happier to continue being propagandists for their point of view than being reporters covering a story in a fair manner from a point of view.

Like FEMA/Broussard, getting to the truth does *not* preclude holding FEMA accountable for *what they really did*. If anything creates a perception that FEMA should be let off the hook, it’s the erroneous, fact-challenged reporting in the first place, that was bound to be disproven and fall away, not the fact in itself that the record is corrected. Journalists created the mythology; if that mythology is shattered, that is not a fault to be laid at the feet of truth. Justice and propaganda are not the same thing.

Unfortunately, that is indeed the unifying fault of many journalists, and apparently the primary fault of Judy Miller in her WMD reporting. It’s what we “right wingers” complain about in liberal journalism… it’s not that they always take the liberal side of arguments, but that so often they write their stories ahead of the facts; facts are not evidence or building blocks for them, but twisty things to be made to fit pre-existing assumptions.

This sometimes can be used to support more conservative positions, if a reporter has certain conservative ideas (it’s possible to have both liberal and conservative leanings on different things), but it’s equally wrong in any case. In the case of Katrina, journalists decided that FEMA was taking too long to respond, and so then every rumor and innuendo was used to build on that agreed-upon theme. The result was not balanced reporting of the real world that told us where FEMA was at fault when it *was* their fault, what was out of their hands, and what should have been the responsibility of others, but an exaggerated fiction — the “big picture” — that portrayed FEMA as the cartoonish demon behind every single problem.

Same for WMDS. It’s not like Miller was the first reporter to cover that beat, after all. We know that many reporters before her wrote stories in a similar vein, relying on intelligence agencies, politicians, and… well, just everybody. Miller simply got the hot potato when US forces entered Bahgdad, and became an especial target of the left when they conceived the spurious tale that we went into Iraq on a false pretext of WMD alone, and so “Bush lied and people died”.

I don’t think it would be fair to say that Jeff was unethical in his Katrina whopper position; like Miller, it’s not a matter of ethics, but simply a matter of being wrong, or, at worst, stubborn.

The insistence of many that Miller is unethical because she was wrong really does seem not to be an ethical position, but a partisan opinion, and that strikes me as being fundamentally unfair.