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What A Weekend for Media Accuracy
On Friday, the news exploded with the news of what would have been the end of the Trump presidency, a BuzzFeed story about how Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen was instructed to lie to Congress. For the individuals giddy at the prospect, the news spread like wildfire. For the rest of us, alarm bells went off immediately.
And then, came this equally large bomb:
UPDATE: A spokesperson for the special counsel is disputing BuzzFeed News’ report. https://t.co/BEoMKiDypn pic.twitter.com/GWWfGtyhaE
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 19, 2019
Later reporting further sunk BuzzFeed’s boat:
After BuzzFeed published its story “the special counsel’s office reviewed evidence to determine if there were any documents or witness interviews like those described, reaching out to those they thought might have a stake in the case. They found none.” https://t.co/GZFdzHwPVK
— Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) January 20, 2019
One would think media consumers would’ve learned their lesson about immediately believing narratives involving Trump. You would be wrong.
Later in the weekend, we saw this:
Video shows a crowd of teenagers wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats taunting a Native American elder after Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March at the Lincoln Memorial https://t.co/Llu2d3bn3g pic.twitter.com/UZg4Qraqt8
— CNN (@CNN) January 20, 2019
For journalists who spent just a few minutes doing some research before trying to destroy the lives of high school kids and their school, the story fell apart.
https://twitter.com/robbysoave/status/1087088839447977984
Nobody burst Oliver Darcy’s bubble.
This is itself a false statement. News organizations don’t “invent” the news, like you claim. That said, when they get things wrong, they correct the mistakes. Sometimes, people even get fired and lose their jobs. The idea there isn’t any accountability is preposterous. https://t.co/eowzuygaUS
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 20, 2019
Published in Journalism
It was on Twitter. I didn’t clip it, so can’t say exactly what the wording was.
This kid looks like he is a teenager who is slightly embarrassed, and is being polite and waiting for the strange man to finish his odd street performance, which is evidently something that happens here in the big city.
Have I ever seen a more punchable face? I don’t generally think that way, but every picture I’ve ever seen of David Hogg has made me wish he would please just go away.
What a disheartening weekend. No wonder kids today are leery of “free speech”.
Where sunlight was disinfectant, the internet has created a array of mirrors focusing moments and reactions to them. Like the solar panel array, sometimes an unwitting bird flies by and is incinerated.
Who among us has not been in an awkward situation? Who handles every situation “perfectly” or “ideally” – especially when one realizes the cell phones are recording everything? “Everyone commits three felonies a day” is now replaced by “everyone now could be demonized three times a day” just because some short interaction is useful fodder.
A clip of video provides context for a national hatefest by the ideologically driven and their journalist enablers. The lie races around the world a million times before the truth gets out of bed. Based on the lie, you are attacked, your parents and their employers are attacked, your school is attacked.
Some institutions, thinking the narrative is real, immediately throw you under the bus because hate filled mobs are roaming the virtual planet and we on the right have all processed that there is virtually no defense against the mob. Heck, even the left is leery of the mob. Some semblance of balance MAY be restored, but the odds are low as evidenced by the lingering issues from the Duke Lacrosse case.
So they think free speech equals hate speech, but they don’t realize that the mob will be still be here after free speech is gone.
Disheartening.
I think this is it. No apology, though.
Edit: Where’s Otto when we need him?
That’s no defense unless Frankovich is similarly put down the memory hole.
Frankovich’s post may have technically been in The Corner, but it was splashed and linked on NRO’s home page (and “above the fold”). The retraction should have have had the same prominence.
Yes, and this is what Trump actually said.
Freedom of the press is essential for or liberty by holding government accountable for its actions. But when the MSM becomes a defacto part of government itself by providing fake news, or polls to drive public opinion instead of reflect it, it does come close to being an enemy of the people in toto . . .
The media’s lack of self awareness is actually pretty staggering. They constantly decry the fact that people don’t trust them then constantly give people reasons not to trust them. Oh well, it’s all in service of the #Resist movement I suppose.
Back now to the “CHAOS NATIONWIDE!!!” of the basically unnoticeable government shutdown.
And the incendiary words that he used … “spitting on the cross” … demand his termination.
Why private? The action being apologized for wasn’t.
Retraction is what is owed to readers, that was public.
Apology should be personal.
In my obscure specialty area, the history of GPS, one person who writes books full of errors was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history (Annie Jacobsen). This is obviously insignificant compared to ruining kids’ lives, but the errors are rarely if ever corrected. Thus, nearly all articles and most books about GPS state that it started out as a military only system. See my review https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RYT8V9Z4ZG30N/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B072BFJB3Z
Not when the consequences were that the PC furies were unleashed on the person.
NR’s post was more than just “misreporting.” It was a personal smear-job. It declared these boys to be “evil” and their actions the equivalent of “spitting on the cross.” Such an awful public smear demands a public apology.
I don’t think Frankovich’s piece was the cause of the fury. Regardless, I believe private and personal apologies are much more meaningful to the people harmed than public apologies.
In this case, the sackcloth is appropriate. How do you do that in the electronic age? First, you don’t delete it, you amend it, preferably at the top of the page. As thousands of hyperlinks go up they should point to the apology not return a 404 error. This way any regret offered or explanation of what went wrong gets, at the minimum, the same prominence as the mistake. The author of the piece kept a Twitter link up to the article well into the night on the east coast. In short, apologies can be meaningless if the subject of them has to go looking for it.
Now, on to the act of contrition itself. The apology needs to be made to both the subject of the piece and the reader. At the former, Lowry’s statement failed miserably. There should also be promises of a fuller accounting to come, one that takes into account exactly how it happened in the first place. Did Frankovich really think he was within proper boundaries to begin with? And why? At what point in the dog pile did this man think jumping on a private citizen – and a minor no less – sound like the right and appropriate thing to do? Did he succumb, like so many others, to the “rapist’s defense?” “Hey, he wore something ‘provocative.’ The kid was asking for it!”
This was no mere reporting error. This was a malicious act. It needs to be treated as such.
That’s saying that it’s fine as long as it was part of a mob action. “Your honor, my client didn’t break the store window, and when compared to the action of others, he only stole a small television.”
Over at Instapundit, Glenn writes:
The editorial decision to acknowledge the post was published with incomplete information and to retract itwas proper. The multiple pieces now on NR compliment and reinforce the acknowledgment.
The reader was not harmed and is owed nothing more than an acknowledgement of error and retraction. The subjects of the piece were harmed and the apology for the harm should be offered to those harmed.
Nonsense, if the rationale for a public apology was causing a public fury then such causation should actually have occurred.
That story about the high school boys intimidating the Native American was particularly appalling. I smelled a fake news story the minute I saw it. Donald Trump is right. It is mostly fake news.
It is quite revealing of the worldview of some of the senior management of the National Review. Nicholas Frankovich is a deputy managing editor of the National Review. He saw boys with MAGA hats and assumed the worst. His personal loathing of the President of the United States filled in all of the narrative that he needed to convict these mere boys of the worst kind of bigotry imaginable. And then he proceeded to set the cross he planted in the middle of their front yards aflame with the words “evil” and “spitting on the cross”. These were deplorables after all and therefore did not need to be given anything remotely of the sort of innocence before being accused guilty.
These kids are guilty of SWWWMH … sitting while white wearing MAGA hats.
There was another story, or a tandem of stories, the media distorted. The March for Life had several hundred thousand people attend and hardly a word in the papers. The leftist (and anti-Semitic) Woman’s March had at best ten thousand, and yet it got glowing coverage. Through omission and particular selection the media distorts the news to their ideological leanings.
Now THAT is a lot of unsubstantiated nonsense. Other than the piece in question, what leads you to conclude any of this about Frankovich? Most of his contributions to NR are about the Catholic Church, religion, and some baseball, nothing to support your accusations.
The news media continue to supply reasons for me not to believe anything they say.
And the news media wonder why I’m not willing to pay for subscriptions?
The hat is the story.
No hat, no story.
In the age of the internet, “Retraction” doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) mean to memory-hole it. The offending post should remain up with a prominent disclaimer at the very beginning.
In the age of print media, the original story remained available, and a retraction was published in a subsequent edition. The same should be true on the web.
“We apologize to our readers” is a pretty standard formulation when reputable publications print things that aren’t accurate. National Review should try using it.
I see no benefit to the reader or the subject in that. It seems the editors at NR agree.
I disagree. Being a white Catholic boy from the South is plenty for the media to assume he fits their narrative (per the media, 4 characteristics of evil).