You know, when I first read this Iraq Now article on some incredibly sloppy (yet oddly similar) quoting done by half a dozen different media outlets, I figured that by the time I got home it'd have all been resolved: somebody would have found the actual transcript that would have explained everything, because nineteen times out of twenty that's how these stories go.
This would be the twentieth, apparently. I looked at an available transcript (which looks like it came from here) and I've looked at the articles Jason Van Steenwyk pointed out, and every single one of his objections checks out. Quotes out of context, quotes gotten wrong, Dowding... we're talking a thorough job in getting the story wrong.
Being a nice guy, I'll still just assume gross incompetence on the part of the writers involved - but I would very much like to see the Zero Article that they decided to rip off in lieu of doing their own research. Not to mention the name of the author of same.
(Via Smash)
I'd be interested to see someone do an in-depth examination of how often this sort of thing happens -- take one day's news, go through every news article from a dozen papers, and see what percentage of them have this kind of crap. Considering the deadline pressure, the herd mentality, and the usual bell-curve distribution of ability, I bet the percentage would be disturbingly high.
If I were in charge, I'd make a law that says that every news source (paper, TV, wire, etc) had to publish one fictitious but plausible story every day, and I'd make sure that this law was well-publicized. That way, whenever anyone read, heard, or saw a given story, they'd be forced to bracket it in their mind as possibly not accurate, and before they could take it seriously, they'd have to do a bit of checking up first.
Posted by: kenB | May 26, 2004 at 05:48 PM