The Oregon Daily Emerald yesterday had an article "
Esteemed journalist lectures on ethics" concerning a speech by John S. Carroll of the LA Times, where he complained that many journalists today lacked ethics, as they strayed from objective reporting into spinning the news.
John S. Carroll uses a finding that a larger percentage of Fox News watchers believe three fallacies than do those listening to NPR or watching PBS. The problem is that one of the so-called fallacies is actually a truth, only believed by those getting their news from public broadcasting because such is never covered by them. If you listen to NPR , as I often do in the car, you will find that their reporting is just as biased, just from the other side. In the guise of objective journalism, a large percentage of their stories are seriously slanted against the current administration and in particular, against the war in Iraq. Good news is rarely reported, while bad news is over reported.
Numerous ties between Al Quida and Sadaam Hussain have been found. The semantic game played is that it is also true that no link has been found between Sadaam Hussain and 9/11, or with Al Quida concerning 9/11. But they have been shown to have had financial ties, as well as probably having been working together on WMDs. Indeed, last week Ben Laden apparently put a bounty on the head of our head Iraqi administrator.
As to WMDs, I would suggest from my listening to NPR, that their average listener still believes that President Bush's reference to them was due to his close mindedness, despite the quote from Woodward's new book to the contrary (unreported in most of the general media) that the President was skeptical, and the CIA was adamant on Iraqi WMDs.
On the other hand, barely a mention has been made concerning the Oil-For-Food scandal, at least until very recently, and its ramification as to intentional support for our invasion of Iraq. I would hazard to guess that the average NPR listener still believes that if we had just tried a little harder we could have gotten the French and Russians on board, despite having numerous influential people in both countries apparently bribed by Sadaam Hussain through that program. Mr. Carroll uses Fox as his example but then makes the apparent mistake that since his paper and the papers he reads and the news he watches did not report stories, then they didn't happen. But his point is even more relevant concerning the leftward reporting of the news than Fox on the right, and his paper is one of the worst offenders, just behind the New York Times. I would suggest that his speech is mostly just sour grapes that he and his paper can no longer spin the news with impunity, as they have done for so long.
p.s. Today, the WSJ in
Best of the Web Today pointed out its previous post on the subject from October
OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today that "this study, by the University of Maryland, was itself a piece of propaganda, since it asked only about pro-war misconceptions, not antiwar ones".
p.p.s.
Anne Coulter was even more caustic on this subject in her caustic on Mr. Carroll's speech.
