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February 01, 2005

Today's Example of the High Standards of Journalism

Remember when Tom Oliphant told us how the Swift Vets story didn't meet the high standards of journalism? But look at the things that do!

Today the press services released information on an apparent kidnapping of a U.S. soldier in Iraq. Here's the thing with news from Iraq... good news is ignored, while potentially bad news leads.

But it turns out this potentially bad news wasn't news at all. The kidnapped "soldier" was a TOY DOLL. Backcountry Conservative has a good read on things, including an obviously fake picture.

What seems to be happening here is that the MSM is becoming a conveyor of raw data... with the blogs doing all the real analysis. Unless the data reflects negatively on certain causes, in which case the data is never conveyed in the first place.

Perhaps this is the future model for the news media in general... gone will be the days when the MSM would tell you the news and then tell you what it meant. But in order for this to happen, ALL information would have to be conveyed, and that makes individual news operations useless... news would be raw, and you would no longer care whether you got your news from Peter Jennings or the Bachelorette.

Just my musings on the subject.

Update: Check this out. In fairness this seems like something one couldn't find very quickly, but I mean, the story was hardly up and it was already debunked. Crazy.

Posted by March at February 1, 2005 04:12 PM

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