Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Why JIll? Why? A Case Study for Remedial Journalistic Ethics Class
Keven McCullough notes
The question now becomes why didn't the New York Times run a clarification explaining their badly incomplete story from yesterday. One other fact left out of the original story was that to date the U.S. and Coalition forces have destroyed or prepared for destruction roughly 400,000 tons of weaponized material.
Which brings us to this important observation from FOX NEWS last night. If large trucks were loaded to the gills with the materials described it would take 38 trucks to make off with the full stockpile. Coalition forces have destroyed nearly 40,000 trucks worth of materials. In other words the amount missing is LESS THAN one percent of what has already been or is presently being destroyed.
Jill Abramson could have done comparative research to discover the truth about not only when the weapons had actually gone missing. Her reporters could have chosen to put it in its proper context in terms of the scope of what coalition forces have accomplished.
She instead chose to run a story that was deliberately incomplete, contextually false, and purposefully drove to mislead the readership of her paper - all for the sake of allowing John Kerry a bloviating moment to try to pump up his failing bid for the White House.
Is this how to run a respectable newspaper?
The question now becomes why didn't the New York Times run a clarification explaining their badly incomplete story from yesterday. One other fact left out of the original story was that to date the U.S. and Coalition forces have destroyed or prepared for destruction roughly 400,000 tons of weaponized material.
Which brings us to this important observation from FOX NEWS last night. If large trucks were loaded to the gills with the materials described it would take 38 trucks to make off with the full stockpile. Coalition forces have destroyed nearly 40,000 trucks worth of materials. In other words the amount missing is LESS THAN one percent of what has already been or is presently being destroyed.
Jill Abramson could have done comparative research to discover the truth about not only when the weapons had actually gone missing. Her reporters could have chosen to put it in its proper context in terms of the scope of what coalition forces have accomplished.
She instead chose to run a story that was deliberately incomplete, contextually false, and purposefully drove to mislead the readership of her paper - all for the sake of allowing John Kerry a bloviating moment to try to pump up his failing bid for the White House.
Is this how to run a respectable newspaper?
# posted by Knitting a Conundrum @ 8:32 AM 
