Fourth Estate Goes After Independent Journalists

[paineinthearse]

http://blog.zmag.org/index.php/weblog/entry/fourth_estate_goes_after_independent_journalistsgannett_owned_c_js_non_corr/

Fourth Estate Goes After Independent Journalists: Gannett-Owned C-J's Non-Correction of Bingham Story

Posted by Lucinda Marshall at 02:16 PM

The Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal’s lengthy non-correction angst piece front and center in today’s Sunday Forum section entitled “Bingham, C-J didn’t give reporter a fair shake” by Public Editor Pam Platt explained in great detail why they were not publishing a correction to a piece that they ran last week, “Home from Iraq: What it’s like to be afraid of your own country” by award-winning photojournalist Molly Bingham. In contention is a conversation that Bingham reports she had with also award-winning New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins. The gist of the story is that Filkins, under pressure from the U.S. military, backed down from a story that was not on-message with the Pentagon story line. Filkins disputes that he told this to Bingham, who unfortunately did not have notes to back the story up.

It is regrettable that Bingham could not provide verification and that the Courier-Journal did not look into this until the story ran. But despite their own mea culpas and lengthy explanation that they are not retracting or correcting the story because there is no way to prove it one way or another, it is the sheer length of the story that belies the fair and balanced angle. For the most part, when the Fourth Estate retracts a story, it is on page A-infinity plus ten, just a small blurb at the bottom. The two notable exceptions to that of late are the CBS retraction of the story about Bush’s military record and the recent Newsweek retraction of the Koran flushing story despite reams of evidence immediately becoming available from other sources that backed the story up.

While devoting much effort to documenting the qualifications of both journalists in question, in running the story, the Courier-Journal is still delivering a very over-blown critique of Bingham’s work. In doing so, they fail to address the real question, namely the role of corporate, embedded journalism in covering up the real story of what is happening in Iraq. Filkins after all works for the same paper that thinks Judith Miller knows what she is talking about. Working as an unembedded journalist in Iraq, as Ms. Bingham is doing, is a very risky business and too many of these brave and independent reporters have lost their lives. Yet notably, when journalists like Giuliana Sgrena are attacked, newspapers like the Courier and the NYT have not chosen to print the Italian version of the report about the shooting or to question why the U.S. wouldn’t let the Italians see her car.

And one especially wonders just when we are going to see a retraction of the Weapons of Mass Destruction story. Wouldn’t it be nice if the kind of soul-searching angst displayed in Ms. Platt’s piece were directed into explaining why they didn’t fact check that little fabrication. But as Bingham herself points out in listing the lessons she learned from covering the invasion of Iraq, “Lesson Four: The gatekeepers—by which I mean the editors, publishers and business sides of the media—don’t want their paper or their outlet to reveal that compelling narrative of why anyone would oppose the presence of American troops on their soil.” The Courier-Journal’s non-correction clearly validates Ms. Bingham’s point.

[leveymg]

1. As bad as the NYT and WaPo are, at least they ran mea culpas re: Iraq WMDs

Seems that outfits such as Gannett really are just third-stringer hacks who live off of wire copy and rewrites of the major metro dailies. They've proven themselves never to be trusted, and I wouldn't buy USA Today even to train my dog.

In the Internet age, I can't imagine why anyone would continue to subscribe to "The Nation's Newspaper" and those awful small-city papers that are owned by national chains.

:bounce: :spray: