Yeah, I’d say CNN is in bed with the wingnuts and the neocons in a major way. Whatever the White House or the Israelis tell them to say, CNN says it. Nary a peep out of Jarvis, who slams the NYT and sucks up to Murdock, and too cowardly to answer a simple question about the standard of “proof” needed for the media to report a sex scandal.

Look for Jarvis to be a Fox News regular soon enough. Or, who knows, maybe CNN, which isn’t a whole lot different.

The accusation of the affair, which is ultimately no more than media candy, is the vector on which the bulk of the story hopes to piggyback and prompt future media investigations of his unethical behavior via a via lobbyists. Media candy is now the freight journalists must pay to deliver otherwise dry payloads of important stuff to a brain-dead media.

Nope, he won’t say anything about that, because none of it fits his right-wing agenda. Nor will he bother to specify the “proof” required to report the McCain story. Jeff Jarvis is above questions. Yeah, I’m sure we’ll be seeing him on Murdoch TV any day now.

To follow up on my last post about the woes of the New York Times, I want to take a closer look at what I think is happening there, particularly in terms of the huge negative reaction to their article…

And, if proof were needed that the editors are incapable of learning from experience, they went right along with Bush’s “Iran is about to nuke us” in spite of their being burned, to put it mildly, on Iraq.

I fear that the NYT, like CNN, believes its own publicity.

You are so off the reservation you have no idea what you are talking about. I hope to God you are not a journalist. What the Times did is not acceptable journalism.

Jeff — and every other sane American — would have at least liked the Times to use sources on the record. Anyone can imply anything off the record. The sources for this story weren’t willing to even go on the record about something rather minor. It’s not like they were leaking the Pentagon Papers.

So, we have no evidence other then some disgruntled former McCain staffers saying they “feared” his relationship might have turned romantic.

That’s not journalism. That’s why the super market tabloids do.

And if you knew Jeff better, you’d know he is a big Hillary Clinton supporter. But I guess everyone who has problems with the Times must be a republican. Right?

Of course even The New York Times public editor finds the article troubling: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24pubed.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

If you’re going to criticize someone, “Charley” at least leave your e-mail like a real man or woman would.

The intro to a story is always spelled “lede” in journalism. A “lead” is a lead story, as in “what are we leading with?” A good example of why my father, who just retired as an editor after five decades in the business, never used a spell-checker. There is no substitute for knowledge.

The Times’ reporters decided arbitrarily to believe people who had nothing to corroborate a juicy, game-changing story. Your point seems to be if there’s smoke, there must be fire. Not always true, especially in an adversarial situation like a presidential race. Reporters are fools if they don’t assume anyone who drops a dime on a candidate has a relevant motive.

I’m cool with that, because that means that the people responsible for it should be fired for embarrassing the Times with an incompetently-produced article.

You might like this piece by Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/times-back-making-up-the-news/2008/02/24/1203788142795.html

Regards,

Simon

Don’t be retarded. Firstly, I said I agreed the Times should not have run an unsourced story based on innuendo.

Secondly, I didn’t say he was guilty, I said if someone could be bothered to smear him off the record, they could just as easily decide to smear him *on* the record with corroborating witnesses, phone bills, credit card receipts, snapshots, etc etc. And then all your oh-so-certain righteous indignation will make you look the fool you could very well be.

Or maybe it won’t happen. That’s the point. You don’t know, so don’t act like you do.

John,
I think there’s an opening at the New York Times for you! You think just like they do. Ethically, it’s okay to publish a weakly-sourced story full of innuendo and sensationalism because they just, like, _know_ if this didn’t happen, something just like it must have happened. Therefore, the reporters are convinced they didn’t do anything wrong.

Let’s see if they apply the same logic to the other candidates. Barack Obama? Pretty liberal. One of his supporters has a Che Guevera banner. “Does anyone actually believe he hasn’t sold secrets to the Chinese Communists?” Hillary Clinton? Ruthlessly ambitious. “Does anyone actually believe she’s not capable of murdering Vince Foster?” In both scenarios, the evidence is equally strong as the evidence of McCain’s affair.