Sarpy Sam invites comment from Ed Kemmick and me (as the "professional journalists" of the Montana blogosphere) on Newsweek's Quran-flushing fiasco. Ed responds here; as Sarpy Sam speculates, I don't have much to add to the discussion.
I will say that I felt a bit heartsick at news of the error. When honest mistakes crop up in news reports, I nearly always feel bad for the reporter because I know how that feels, and I know how easy it is to make mistakes. I expect to make a few today. Beyond that, it's not too hard to see how the error occurred. Such allegations had been floating around for a while; the information came from a source that had been reliable in the past; and the whole thing amounted to just a single sentence.
But it does appear the sourcing was sloppy -- in exactly the same way as the CBS forged documents story was sloppy. In both cases, reporters floated the story by government officials; when officials didn't shoot the story down, reporters took that as confirmation. That ain't smart.
BONUS OBSERVATION: Before news of the error broke, Bill Maher said that the most interesting aspect of this story was the remarkable capacity of the toilet. He said he can't even get a Jehovah's Witness tract down his toilet.
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3 comments:
Thanks for the answer David. Everybody was talking about the issue but nobody was talking about the Journalistic standards involved. I felt it was poor and you as a professional confirmed this for me. Thanks again.
I always figured that anything dropped on my front door from a religious group was so much stuff that it would jam the toilet.
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