Jay Rosen knows how to work his hyperlinks. I could barely get through a graph without opening up a billion (slightly hyperbolic) new tabs. That said, everything he linked to was elucidating on the state of anxious journalists who want to be “producers of innocence” and seem bipartisan at the sake of not correcting totally invalid remarks (the LA Times had no fear, but were also not objective, as James Fallows said).
Presidential nominees are practically professional spin-doctors and in an ideal world the journalists would be the board on which politicians’ “spun-truths” would be corrected. However, it seems journalists are walking on eggshells now, in fear of being cast as a complete right or lefty.
Fallows had three positive examples of journalists correcting blatant mistakes – but the key is that they were blatant and could easily be proven incorrect. I’ve linked below to a video by MSNBC on the leaked Romney footage, which is a little harder to call out as inaccurate.
Too bad this was on MSNBC. Although, the WSJ did a good job of breaking down facts as well. Is it too easy to say that fact-checking/correcting is often ignored when the material is harder and warrants at least a ten minute explanation or a lengthy article? Has fact checking been harmed by shorter attention spans?
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/now-with-alex-wagner/49074064#49074064
