Not much time to take this one apart properly, but New York Times' Adam Cohen today holds bloggers up to ethical standards which, he argues, ought to equal the high...
Not much time to take this one apart properly, but New York Times' Adam Cohen today holds bloggers up to ethical standards which, he argues, ought to equal the high standards of those in the MSM.
While we agree with much of his thesis in general, one wonders if he ought to be throwing such stones from inside the Times' own fragile glass house.
This finger-wagging quote -- "Information should be verified before it is printed" -- amongst others, strikes one as more than just a tad ironic coming from the paper who allowed buckets of front page ink for Judith Miller to post un-verified information which helped march the world directly into a (so far) endless war.
Ms. Miller still works at -- and presumably collects a handsome salary from -- New York Times in the bargain. As she doesn't seem to have been held up to any particular set of ethics in the bargain, wouldn't Cohen's criticism be better directed homeward right about now?
Blogs, it seems, in Cohen's article are all tossed into the same ethically-challenged, non-journalistic barrel. All of us, apparently, require an "ethical upgrade" in Cohen's condescending opinion. True, we suppose, in as much as it would be appropriate for us to criticize the Times themselves for "reporting" done by super-market tabloids such as Weekly World News.
By way of example, here's just one graf from Cohen's piece:
The left, whether blogging or MSM, peddles nothing but defeatism and anti-americanism. They are losing, they know it, and they are getting hysterical. Quite a spectacle, I might add.