Posted on 12/28/2005 6:54:46 PM PST by moneyrunner
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently ran a Molly Ivins column that repeated the hoax about the U Mass Student who claimed to have been visited by Federal agents for wishing to check Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” out of the library. The story was fishy from the start, but the Left – ever ready to believe that Bush is a Nazi – bit on it and it became a story in the outermost fringes of the kook Left including Molly Ivins and Ted Kennedy.
This became a discussion topic on FreeRepublic.com and I subsequently e-mailed the editorial page editor, Paul Harral, to get his response. I reprint it in full below.
Thanks for your comments about the UMass student which have been passedon to Molly Ivins.
You do understand, don't you, that she does not work for this newspaper?She's a syndicated columnist in the same way that Cal Thomas, whom wealso print, is a syndicated columnist.
That does not lessen our responsibility, but it is to say that hermaterial is not the property of the Star-Telegram. She writed forCreators Syndicate: http://www.creators.com
I have forwarded your messages along to her.
Paul K. Harral Editorial Page Editor Fort Worth Star-Telegram PO Box 1870Fort Worth, TX 76101 817 390-7836
The formulation: “You do understand, don’t you…” is obviously meant to be translated as: “You dunce...”
(click on the link to read the rest)
(Excerpt) Read more at moneyrunner.blogspot.com ...
Liberals think that by finding 1 person out of 300 million in this country that was supposedly "wronged" by the government, that they have the moral high ground on any issue. These peope are losers.
You do understand, don't you, Mr. Harral, that you newspaper is supposed to have an editor who actually reads the stuff from the syndicators and decides if it should be printed in your paper. Does your newspaper have any competent people like that?
I would have responded to the Cal Thomas remark by asking, "can you name any similar mistake Cal Thomas has ever made?"
The answer, of course, is no.
So its okay for my newspaper to print that "Paul Harral has sex with dead goats" as long as its from a syndictated colummnist, no need to fact check or anything. Thanks.
And these morons wonder why their product is treated like manure...
If the MSM had any credibility, they would dump people like Ivans for mistakes of this magnitude. The public might as well be reading fiction.
I have a certain amount of sympathy for poor Mr. Harrall. His newspaper has to be filled with articles and ads each day and – as we all know – the quality of that writing and reporting is shockingly low. Ask anyone who has ever read a newspaper article about an event to which they were a party.
I suppose that when they buy an op-ed from a long time syndicated opinion writer they assume a degree of veracity. That has now been proven to be false.
What is irritating is that some of these stories, like the flushed Koran story or the current one about the “Men in Black” visiting a U Mass Student who wants to read Mao’s Little Red Book, are either physically impossible or so improbably that they should send up flares/red flags/lightbulbs/sound-of-sirens in the mind of anyone who is not off-the-charts ideological. This is tinfoil hat stuff. Yet once the hoax is brought to their attention, the Fort Worth Star Telegram waits and deploys its “reader representative” to fact check a story that has been denied by its original source – in print.
A final point. This is not only an issue of ideological pre-disposition to believe virtually anything that casts Republicans in a bad light. This is an issue of quality control (QC). QC has become a major initiative in industry via a program pioneered in a big way by GE called “6 Sigma.” The newspaper industry has not yet gone beyond shoving the entire role of quality control for the contents of the publication to a few poor souls known as “editors.” It is glaringly obvious that this system is broken beyond repair. The consumers of the poor product that newspapers produce are now learning how poor that quality really is. Think of Americans discovering the quality of Japanese cars when Detroit was still producing its dinosaurs. Newspapers are feeling the competition from the Internet and the Pajamas Media. They don’t like it, but that’s life. They will either have to improve or perish.
Agreed. I gone from believing it was the bias of "shared values" - to believing its mere incompetence - to now believing its corruption. There are just too many "mistakes" happening for me to not think its deliberate.
The latest response from Mr. Harral:
FYI ... Molly Ivins takes note that she fell for the hoax in her latest
column and we are publishing both that and an official correction.
Correction runs Friday am. Column runs Sunday.
Ya know, thats simply not good enough anymore. 20 column inches indicting this administration, top of the news cycle all week, and then a blurb p16a left insert "correcting" the story? NO. I want to see 20 column inches of apology and explanation as to how she got hoaxed. I want a mea culpa to offset the damage done. If Drudge broke a story that Molly Ivan's was caught in a compromising position with barnyard animals, would she be satisfied with a "correction" a week later in the lower left hand corner?
I'm sorry, I know I'm being an ass, but this is the same old-same old. Fire her and print an apology above the fold, headlined in large bold print. THAT would restore my faith in AP and in his paper.
Anyways, thanks for the update. I'll be floating MY storiesd about Harral and Ivans next week. I have a memo from an unimpeachable source...
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