You can watch it here. I think John Carroll deserves a lot of credit for his acknowledgement of error and personal apology. He didn’t acknowledge taking David’s comments out of context, nor did host Emily Rooney discuss the fundamental contradiction that was at the heart of much of the outrage: a show on credibility built around on an incredible premise. I guess they don’t agree that these were problems. The program did, however, give a full airing to David’s concern. The rest is more or less a matter of opinion. Greater Boston could have done more, but that was their call. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Cue kumbayah, per Charley.
The most interesting part of the discussion, for me, was when Dan Kennedy advanced the position that the Beat the Press panel has only a very limited obligation to check the veracity of the media reports on which they comment. Here are his exact words, per a transcript obligingly provided by alert reader sco: “There’s this notion that you were supposed to fact check every single aspect of that New York Times piece before saying anything about it, which I think is absurd. You’d never get a show together if you did that. We comment on things in the media here. That was in the media; we commented on it.” Here is his elaboration of his position in a comment he wrote here yesterday, “All I was trying to say is that with a media-crit show like “Beat the Press,” you don’t take/don’t have the time to fact-check and essentially re-report every piece of journalism that you comment on. I think my meaning comes through pretty clearly in my exact words.”
The lawyer in me wonders where one draws the line. Is any media story worthy of comment on BtP, just like that, without any further examination? Surely not, and I don’t think that is what Prof. K is saying. Does it have to come from the NYT. Would the Herald do? How about Blue Mass Group? (“The blogosphere is credible, we’re credible,” is what Greater Boston said yesterday — a much broader statement than I would have advised, considering that the blogosphere includes everything from FactCheck.org to Discouraged Bush Begins Seeking Approval Of Other Nations at TheOnion.com). Personally, I’m more inclined to favor the position advanced by inclusiveheart on dKos and quoted below: “Personally, if I was going to go on TV and make any claims and I was a journalist, I’d be fact checking everything including the New York Times.”
Dan Kennedy’s comment about fact-checking the times is a strawman, and a very lame one at that, considering that he’s used it a few times already and several of us have responded to it. Here’s one place where I left a detailed comment responding to that point, on one of his blog posts (search for “Cos said”).
<
p>
I agree with him that they don’t have the obligation to fully-fact check what they read in the New York Times before they critique it. He’s trying to distract people by pretending that is the issue.
<
p>
Fine, we’re agreed, they don’t have an obligation to full fact-check what they read in the NY Times. That doesn’t change the fact that the basic premise of their entire discussion turned out to be false; that both they and the Times conflated bloggers getting paid roles on compaigns with bloggers hiding, masquerading, and deceiving their readers; that they had no actual evidence for what they were trying to claim on that front (this is clear even without fact-checking the NY Times piece); and that the whole thing was ironic given what they said about blogs and what turned out to be the truth about the blogs they were talking about vs. the traditional press they were talking about.
“Fine, we’re agreed, they don’t have an obligation to full fact-check what they read in the NY Times.”
<
p>
I’m not so sure I agree. GB can do whatever they want, but I think they’ll lose even more credibility if they really adopt the position that they don’t need to fact check the articles they comment on — even NYT Op Ed pieces. Doesn’t that leave them open to making exactly the same kind of mistake again?
<
p>
Second, even if NYT Op Ed pieces are inherently worthy, where is the line? Are Boston Globe Op Ed pieces equally worthy. What about comments three levels down on dailyKos?
<
p>
Now, as to the rest of your comments, I basically agree, but I’m starting to feel bad for the corpse of the horse. Poor, poor horse.
The strawman he’s trying to set up is, I think, a different matter. Say, for example, that one of the bloggers in the NY Times piece received a different sum of money than what the piece says (s)he did. In order to critique the article, would Beat the Press need to ferret that sort of thing out first? Because that’s what full fact-checking is.
<
p>
Here, they based their entire story on the general premise of the NY Times piece, which happened to be wrong, and added only one more piece of evidence, which was a blog post they misunderstood by not exploring it at all. Yes, very sloppy and irresponsible. But it doesn’t require fact-checking to avoid that kind of nuttiness. All they’d have had to do is talk to someone, anyone, familiar with the subject at hand, and ask their opinion of the premise of the piece. Or, they could’ve just thought about it enough to realize the NY Times piece was conflating payment with deception.
<
p>
Don’t let Kennedy bait you into arguing whether full fact-checking is necessary, and whether you really have to spend the amount of time that requires before you can do media criticism. He’s on reasonable ground in that argument, but it’s just not very relevant.
Ultimately I think it cuts to the issue of the whole program’s credibility and reliability. They have taken a real pasting on that score. I can’t imagine how it could possibly be in their interest to risk another similar fiasco by commenting on articles that they don’t subject to any kind of scrutiny. As to fact-checking, there are degrees: minimal, complete, exhaustive, and then of course, the Ahab/Starr standard: obsessive.