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TweetVery good article by Thomas Sowell over at RCP outlining the NY Times and the buildup of hoax after hoax that just seems to keep hitting the front page that looks “legitimate” to the average reader and the irresponsibility of such acts.
The front page of the New York Times has increasingly become the home of editorials disguised as “news” stories. Too often it has become the home of hoaxes.
Going back some years, it was the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been gang-raped by a bunch of white men. Just a couple of years ago, it was the Duke University “rape” hoax that they fell for.
In between there were the various hoaxes of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was kept on and promoted until too many people found out what he had been doing and the paper had to let him go…Last month the New York Times created its own hoax with a long front page article about how war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were killing people back in the United States because of the stress they had gone through in combat.
That hoax was shot down two days later by the New York Post, which showed that the murder rate among returning war veterans was only one-fifth the murder rate among civilians in the same age brackets.
Undaunted, the New York Times has come up with its latest front-page sensation, the claim that some anonymous people either suspected an affair between Senator John McCain and a female lobbyist or tried to forestall an affair.
But apparently no one actually claimed that they knew there was an affair.
This did not even rise to the level of “he said, she said.” Instead it was anonymous sources reporting their suspicions.
[...] Read more
The rise of alternative media — notably talk radio — has limited how much the mainstream media can get away with.
Dan Rather’s fake memo about President Bush’s National Guard service might have gone unchallenged, and affected an election, back in the old days when the media consisted largely of like-minded colleagues who would not embarrass one of their own.
Bloggers and talk radio shot that one down. But it is doubtful if we have seen the last of the journalistic hoaxes. Not in an election year.
hattip: HarryParker
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