Much merriment is in the making over the Boston Globe’s recent story on a Canadian harp seal hunt - written in advance of the facts, the story was run without double-checking, and proved a major embarrassment (and, for freelance reporter Barbara Stewart, a likely career-ending one) when the hunt was postponed due to bad weather.

The story datelined Halifax, Nova Scotia described in graphic detail how the seal hunt began on Tuesday, with water turning red as hunters on some 300 boats shot harp seal cubs “by the hundreds.”

The problem, however, was that the hunt did not begin on Tuesday; it was delayed by bad weather and was scheduled to start on Friday, weather permitting, the Globe said in an editor’s note. . . .

“Details included the number of hunters, a description of the scene, and the approximate age of the cubs. The author’s failure to accurately report the status of the hunt and her fabrication of details at the scene are clear violations of the Globe’s journalistic standards,” it added.

Oops. Particularly galling in view of Mitch “The Five People You Make Shit Up About In Heaven” Ablom’s widely-publicized, and almost identical, falsification of details in a column, written in advance of the facts, about a sports event two weeks ago. The right-wing blogosphere’s ongoing assault on professional journalism got a shot in the arm with those two incidents, especially coming back to back as they did.

Michelle Malkin, in particular, has taken the opportunity to trumpet this supposed tendency toward fabulism on the part of mainstream media (a rather ironic stance for her to take, given her almost pathological disabilities in the way of facts and logic, but nevermind). She includes a list of “more recent fake news from the professionals”. She does not say it is an exhaustive list, but we can assume she made it as extensive as she could (especially in view of how far afield she went to get some of it). What, then, is the worst that can be said about “the professionals,” when one of their harshest critics does all she can to say it? This:

Sy Hersh’s fudge
AP: The hearings that hadn’t started yet
AP and the crowd that didn’t boo
Mitch Albom wasn’t there
CBS: Rathergate, Obitgate
New Republic: Stephen Glass made it up
USA Today: Jack Kelley made it up
Boston Globe: Fake GI rape photos
Boston Globe again: Patricia Smith made it up; Mike Barnicle made it up
NYT: Jayson Blair wasn’t there
WaPo: Janet Cooke wasn’t there

And more:

LATimes: The Local Liberty blog points to another possible Jayson Blair in Los Angeles.

LATimes again: Robert Scheer made it up

[links given in the original post]

A damning list. I guess.

What exactly is in it?

Well, among these 14 incidents and one “possible,” there are:

  • 2 accidental releases of stories that had been blocked out ahead of time (the “[Bolton] hearings that hadn’t started” and “Obitgate” [Schiavo obituary])
  • 2 cases of credulous failure to uncover deliberate hoaxes played on them by others (”Rathergate,” “GI rape photos”)
  • 8 cases of outright fabrication by reporters who hadn’t actually witnessed the events in question (Ablom, Glass, Kelley, Smith, Barnicle, Blair, Cooke, Scheer), plus one “possible”
  • 1 “recent news” incident that wasn’t news, or an incident, but merely a reporter admitting that he distorts his sources’ identities in speeches to protect them until he is ready to publish the full story in print (Sy Hersh)
  • 1 actual case of apparent false reporting (crowd booing when Bush mentioned Clinton)

Another little point about these stories that Malkin doesn’t bother to mention? Here are the dates (in order) of the incidents she lists:

  • no date (no incident)
  • 2005
  • 2004
  • 2005
  • 2004
  • 2005
  • 1995 - 1998
  • 2000
  • 2004
  • 1986 - 1998
  • 1990
  • 2003
  • 1980
  • 2005
  • 2005

Hmmm . . . as many as 15 incidents in a period of almost 25 years - which hardly seems like a tidal wave of mendacity to me.

What is as revealing as anything, though, is the lameness of most of these examples. Only one item in this entire list is of a story that appeared to be slanted for ideological reasons (the AP put out a story that a Republican crowd booed when Bush offered words of comfort over Clinton’s heart surgery - the audiotape records loud cheering, instead). About half the list is incidents of egregious fabrication - the repeated incidents of fake news reporting - that were clearly the result of reporters’ being unable, or psychologically unwilling, to report stories as they should have, and so making up facts in order to produce copy. This is a very serious issue, and one that was dealth with harshly (though often slowly) in each case she lists - and in most of those cases, dealt with by the institutions the reporters worked for, who investigated and reported their own errors.

Some of the incidents Malkin lists are simply laughable, or non-incidents entirely. Reporters often draft the obvious parts of stories in advance of deadlines (especially with obits for famous or clearly dying individuals), and it has sometimes happened that those stories mistakenly get released. This is nothing but an accident - it has nothing to do with falsification or even bad reporting. Malkin dredges up two such incidents to pad her thin list of reportorial crimes as if they mean something (I’m surprised she didn’t include the famous one involving Mark Twain - “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” - it would have inflated her data set by almost 7%). In the case of the Hersh “scandal,” I still can’t figure out what the “story” is supposed to be. Hersh is renowned for having done some of the most important reporting of his generation - including My Lai and Watergate. He has also gotten burned on a couple of major stories, including in one case some forged documents relating to JFK. All that was decades ago. In recent years he has done some of the hardest-hitting reporting on Iraq, especially Abu Ghraib prison. He has the infuriating habit of giving speeches in which he makes dramatic claims that can’t be confirmed until much later when he prints the full story, and he admits that he sometimes “fudges” facts that would identify sources in his speeches, in order to protect those sources. But, as far as I can tell, nothing he has printed about Iraq has ever been shown to be false. Some of the things he has described in speeches have still not emerged in print, and there are questions how good his sources for them are. His claim that he doesn’t need equally strong evidence for things he says in speeches, as opposed to in print, seems shaky to me, but he has made his own standards of evidence clear and has so far not been caught out on them where he himself claims he is fully accurate (i.e., in print). Not only can I not find where it is he has supposedly misled people, I can’t find where he has even been provably wrong.

And, finally, it is noteworthy that two of the cases Malkin cites are ones in which third parties deliberately misled the media and were not discovered in time. It is generally agreed that both these document hoaxes (”Rathergate” and the “rape” photos that turned out to come from a porn Web site) were amateurish and should have been uncovered. At the same time, reporters depend on sources, and if the sources set out to deliberately mislead the reporters, inevitably they will succeed. Bloggers demonstrated in these two cases that extensive research can uncover hoaxes, but to my mind this hardly tells against the mainstream media. Considering how much absolutely baseless crap circulates among blogs, and how far wrong so many bloggers are so often on the simplest facts without being victimized by hoaxers, the facts that hoaxes are so rare in the professional media, and simply incompetent falsehood is so common among bloggers, seem to me to demonstrate a clear advantage for the professionals. (My pet-peeve example is the Schiavo case, where blogs glommed on - without the slightest display of critical analysis - to the most bizarre and scientifically groundless claims, and repeated them at deafening volumes. The mainstream media were almost as bad, but showed a definite effort to get the facts straight, and also showed clear improvement toward the end. The blogosphere, I think, completely humiliated itself on that issue - yet nobody calls them on it. No one has ever suggested that those events demonstrated weaknesses in reporting-by-opinion on blogs, or that the obvious fact that the reliable information in the case came through the mainstream media, and was then often distorted on blogs, says something about the relative strengths of the media. Several prominent bloggers set themselves up as “experts” on the case and purveyed the most unprofessional and false information and opinions imaginable - in ways that would never have been allowed in real publications - and then were never called to account.)

I go back again to the fact that there are so few of these examples in the mainstream media. Malkin can only come up with 15 over 25 years, in part by including “possible” examples, examples of events that were not even news stories, and examples of simple publication errors, not falsifications. There are doubtless more examples to be had, but, it seems, not many more high-profile ones. In looking into the background of the examples above for this post, I read several review articles on well-known journalistic falsifications; in all of them, I found only one other example discussed that was not on Malkin’s list. If that list is not comprehensive, it’s close to the entire list of such examples that usually get mentioned. And how paltry is that list? 15 examples - a good number of which are meaningless - from 10 major newspapers, broadcast networks, and wire services, over 25 years. Sounds to me like the “biased, old-model mainstream media” are doing pretty well. Yet on this absurd fact base, bloggers - almost entirely from the right wing - who do no original reporting at all, and recognize no responsibility to cultivate and protect sources, fact-check, cross-source stories, separate fact from opinion, or serve a public need, continually proclaim the death of journalism. Worse, they proclaim - as Malkin often has, and does by implication in her absurd blog post on this topic - their feeble few examples of bad reporting are evidence of a conspiracy against conservative subjects.

In fact, their own screeds against that reporting prove how robust in general it is. If a professional press corps that is - as conservative bloggers themselves have proved - generally accurate and competent continually turns out stories that show conservatives in a bad light, maybe it’s not the press that’s a fault.