Clueless Conservative is Clueless

[essentialsaltes]

So some head honcho at Fox News told his minions to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."

I don't want to talk about that, really.

I'm more incensed by this defense of the honcho. The whole thing is pretty bad, but I save my greatest rage for this:

In other words, we journalists are paid to BE SKEPTICAL.
...
Now I am from out of town and all, but Sammon’s injuction sounds to me exactly like what editors are supposed to tell their charges – report what A claims and what B says about what A claims, but keep your personal views about both A and B out of it.

Now I agree that journalists should probably strive to keep personal views out of the matter, but somehow I think journalism involves more than sandwiching quotes from A and B, and calling it a day. Though I see all too much of that style of journalism, I don't think too much of it, and it hardly qualifies as a paragon of skeptical journalism.

Buzz Aldrin says he walked on the moon; Bart Sibrel says that Aldrin is a "thief, liar and coward". You decide!

Comments

ok maybe I'll talk about it a little

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

Raw, Unadjusted Temperature Data still Indicates a Warming Planet.

[aaronjv.livejournal.com]

Mark Tapscott is full of shit.

Journalists are paid to be nosy, curious, persistent, dedicated, and most importantly, truthful.

You're correct; there's much more than just quoting person A and person B. Good journalists have a detective's insatiable need to know what really happened. That's different than being skeptical of everything, which, taken to the extreme, means journalists can only write about what they themselves have witnessed, and then their personal views are involved.

Fuck, between this and WikiLeaks, why not just close the fourth estate entirely and leave it to citizen bloggers to gossip about life?