"Ignorance, bias, sloppiness, a reluctance to correct false reporting in as aggressive a fashion as it's first reported - is media malpractice."

If professional cooks adhered to the same standards of excellence as the professional journalists who comprise Canada's news media do, all of our customers would be dead from food poisoning inside of a week.

Here is the lie.....reporters wish to be thought of as professional but there is no accreditation. Anyone can be a reporter if you can get yourself hired.

Doctors and lawyers are professionals. Plumbers require more oversight than reporters do and you cant lose your license, just your job and that depends on the politics of the boss.

How do you lose your job as a novelist? You can't.

There is no accountability, partially in some peoples minds because there is no truth. If there is no truth or facts, only interpretations then you can never be wrong.

How is it that reporters and editors can fail so profoundly so routinely, so unaccountably, and not lose their accreditation to issue a newspaper or news broadcast?

They can't lose their accreditation because there's no accreditation to lose. Anyone can start up a newspaper or other media outlet, if they have the money. As long as the audience buys the paper or watches TV, they'll get the advertisers and sponsors.

And the same industry that would cry "government threatens freedom of press" if accreditation were to be considered, screams on the next page "government regulation required to protect consumers" when it comes to others.

It has been a long time coming. And the engine is just getting warm. But, I think that a sort of information revolution is gearing up.

IMHO, I think we just have to have faith that it will come out. They say that Watergate opened the eyes of people to no longer implicitly trust their government.

When the story breaks (and I must believe that it will) that our own media has been feeding us propoganda from groups that can only be described as "evil", then I think there will be a fundamental shift in people no longer implicitly trusting the MSM.

You'll know that the revolution is close when the intellectual elites and the leftist politicians start including "control of the Internet" in their "progressive" plans.

One more thing:

People talk about some sort of journalistic accreditation. I totally understand the desire to see such a thing. And maybe it could be done on an individual journalist-by-journalist bases.

But, if we go that way (or we apply standards to entire media organizations), then the cure might be worse than the disease.

Everyone knows that the Toronto Star is essentially a municipal Pravda. Everyone also knows that the National Post is conservative-friendly.

While I am all for holding journalists to account, if we introduce an accreditation process, then that means we have to move media ownership out of private hands and into the realm of the government.

In less than a week, you would see a Liberal Government revoke the National Post's right to publish because anything critical of the Liberals would be twisted to make it seem "biased" and "unbalanced."

In Russia, Putin has shut down a total of (I think) 14 private news organizations charging them with reporting lies (while really they were just reporting things that made him look bad). Is there any doubt that an accreditation process in this country would be used by the Liberals or NDP (and maybe even, someday, the Conservatives) for the same reason?

Obviously, "bases" should have been "basis" in my last post.

The future of journalism is definitely deteriorating, at least here in the states. The media simply reports on stories that boost ratings, whether it is news or not. The same applies to Iraq, war protests, etc.

There is no political diversity in the MSM, groupthink pervades as this thoughtful blogger writes:

Why? Why are we watching AP repeat the same basic mistake that CBS committed with Dan Rather's fake-but-accurate National Guard debacle?

....Where group membership is dependent upon shared belief, where skepticism of key beliefs is viewed as disloyalty to the group, and where non-believers are stigmatized, marginalized and excluded, the truth or falsehood of group beliefs is moot. Logic and evidence, so far as they might undermine belief, are unwelcome. This is how it becomes possible for groups to act upon false beliefs.

freealabamastan.blogspot.com/2006/12/msm-bias-everybody-knows.html

Having the enemy on your payroll isn't that irrational if you are both in agreement on the main corporate themes that America is imperialistic, Bush is evil, Islam is benevolent at its core just like other religions, Democrats are the party of the compassionate and smart, all of those lefty themes that must never be challenged. These are the same burqa clad newsrooms that denigrated free speech en masse during the cartoon controversy. Out of bounds stepping editors aren't welcome, let alone journalists that don't fit the mold, so they all muzzle themselves. They are sheep.

We no longer need these alleged, guild protected, professionals. Dismantling their financial monopoly we must do. Here's hoping in time that ad revenues gravitate to alternative journalism, the best bloggers.

Here's a piece related to yours I did a while back.
http://canadianbluelemons.blogspot.com/2006/05/cnn-reporter-admits-to-not-seeing-what.html#links

bryceman, it's already happening. The UN is already floating trial balloons regarding "regulating the internet" as in taxing it. Now there's a bunch we all can feel comfortable with ,regulating intellectual freedom .Awesome job this weekend btw Kate .

I must disagree with you Kate that this is simply "media malpractice". I do truly believe that this is a deliberate attempt by aged socialists to undermine capitalism ... any way they can; and that includes treasonous propaganda to assist the country's enemies.

They lost the cold war, maybe now the islamists can win ... And they don't realise that they will be the first to the beheading ground. Irresponsible idiots!

Political Critic,

You are wrong. Journalism is alive and well with the likes of Roggio and Fumento. The independents. They may also blog and be payed by their audience via the tip jar. The political pedants, however, who work within major poltiical and financial hierarchies, have deteriorated.

"media malpractice" "food poisoning" etc.

oh my sean you are being harsh with the MSM boys.

incidentally, if the UN succeeds in regulating the 'internet', rest assured another UNREGULATED one will pop up by either piggybacking on the official one or by duplicating the essential elements and running parallel. theres LOTS and lots of neo-geeks out there perfectly willing and capable of pulling it off.

including me in my own small(deadanimals) kind of way.

is there like, a phone number for AP one can call and leave a few terse comments on ?

I blame weather forecasters.

That's where the MSM take their cue. What works for 'Stan the Weatherman' can work for the rest.

Problem is people are starting to realize the difference between forecasting and actual reporting. Woe is them.

I think, Kate, that the reason "that an industry that produces mere words and facts, that is stacked with university graduates, political celebrities and academics [...] does not hold their members to the standard of performance expected of a nameless welder in an auto repair shop" is that it is an industry that produces mere words and facts, and that is stacked with university graduates, political celebrities and academics.

Sorry if that sounds a bit pedantic, but there's an aphorism by someone to the effect that: "The reason that politics in academia are so vicious is that they are so irrelevant". I think that what we are seeing with the big media is somehow similar.

The mere words and "facts" are relatively easy to finagle and relatively difficult to effectively disprove, especially when the market is so fickle. On the other hand, if, say, an engineer's bridge falls down, or their refinery blows up, it's pretty obvious to all that they have failed, and it's pretty interesting even to those who aren't students of the field.

So, it would seem to me, the problem would largely be solved if, when the so-called professional media make a major blunder, their offices were to (naturally) fall down and/or blow up. That would have a way of focusing their attention.

Now that's not going to happen, and in almost all ways that's a good thing (I don't want to see anyone get physically hurt). However, if one knows that a certain type of bridge, or refinery, is of unsafe design, then one doesn't trust it enough to use it. I do think that we are beginning to see cracks in the armour of the big media: we are realizing that we can't trust them -- to the degree that we shouldn't be using them at all.

These sorts of changes take time, typically on the order of a generation, and we don't know what the end result will be (for example, what will be the effective replacements of the missing "bridges and refineries"). But I do think that the situation has gotten to the point, and the truth is starting to leak out enough, that changes in this area are very likely.

After all, if we have gotten to the point where we now wonder whether or not even the legacy of Walter Cronkite has been cast into doubt by these media fraud artists, then the status quo cannot hold.

It's probably more effective to call your local network affiliate with complaints, and a question as to why you should bother with their local newscasts, when the national reporting they bring down the pipe is so poorly done.

The mainstream media is becoming more and more irrlevant. And the more irrelevant they become, the more blatant their bias seems to be. If CBS, CTV, whoever, wants to be propagandists for the Taliban that is their perogative. Already I think more of the national enquirer than I do of these stations. At least the enquirer delivers its "news" with a nod and a wink.

What irks me is that we (Canadian taxpayers) are being raped to the tune of 1 BILLION dollars a year to be fed this tripe. I tried listening to CBC radio yesterday for news on elections. They were busying themselves prattling on about some eclectic no-name musician that nobody has ever heard of. When Harper gets a majority I pray that one of his first moves is to immediately reduce my taxes by 80% (I'm allowed to dream) and then entirely, and irreversibly scrap the whole of CBC.

re The New York Times article about cheating in a journalism ethics course (ooooh, the irony! At prestigious Columbia Univ., no less) :

'The essay, of up to 500 words, is due on Thursday.'

BWAAHAHAHAHA !!!

500 words ? ! That's not an 'essay,' that's a long Letter to the Editor. And they get 90 minutes to write it? High standards of journalism, indeed!

Dig out Pat Buchanan's autobiography 'Right from the Beginning,' and read the chapters about his time at Columbia Journalism School. Nothing has changed in 35 years.

I think that any sort of licensing misses the point. Professionalism's essence isn't licensing; for example, very few lawyers ever get disbarred, and many very sleazy lawyers (one of whom ran for Vice-President of the United States two years ago on a major party's ticket) get quite rich. Professionalism's essence is a commitment to quality. In the case of journalism, that would be a commitment to truth - to the whole truth, to providing evidence for your statements (evidence that can be checked!), to an effort towards recognizing the reporter's own biases and combatting them (the best discussion of this that I've ever seen is found in a speech by, of all people, the great physicist Richard Feynman), a commitment to getting the best evidence, the evidence closest to the event, the evidence least reliant on the testimony of those who have an axe to grind.

There is a regrettable (IMHO) opinion tendency among many, including many whom I otherwise respect, to think that there's no problem with repertorial bias as long as it's disclosed. I disagree with that. Bias may be unavoidable, just as some food contamination by insect parts, etc., is unavoidable, but that doesn't mean that reporters shouldn't work their hardest to avoid it.

is there like, a phone number for AP one can call and leave a few terse comments on ?

As far as I can find, digging around AP's site, info@ap.org is as good as it gets regarding complaints. I've come to the conclusion over time with these MSM morons, the worst of them especially, provide no meaningful mechanism for feedback. In their universe, contact with the Little People is like the flu virus, something to be insulated from.

Maybe our generation is at a standoff with the MSM as we can't leverage a fairer press with their financial monopoly, but, how is the MSM going to survive the cynical, copyright infringing, and 24/7 immediate feedback of the younger crowd coming of age? Not well, I hope.

Use Craig's List, sfbay.craigslist.org/, it's free and in almost every city, if you want to hurt the MSM in their wallets. It's a classifieds revenue killer to them. When we force ad revenues to the internet, the MSM looses. It is a zero sum game concerning ad revenues.

I agree Jim.

Another thing, folks: in the case of classic professionalism as a commitment to quality, it tends to work best when the professionals' power increases in proportion to increases in the quality of their work.

However, when it comes to the media, it is often the case (in realpolitik) that their power increases when they lie, if -- and this is a big if -- people believe them.

On the one hand, as I wrote above, I think the benefits that they have being accruing from lieing in the name of power are now, perhaps fatally, threatened. On the other hand: "There's one born every minute".

Accredation?

How bout good old fashioned market forces. With new media, we now have choices. If "A" proves to be unreliable, I stop going to "A" for info and move onto "B" ect.

It's already happening. Take a look at the NYT's and a few other major papers circulation numbers and stock prices.

Right now they're in denial.

Bias, particularily endemic bias, has a funny way of making introspection impossible.

So the downward spiral continues.

A fellow referred to as Lord Haw Haw spread disinformation during the Second World War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw_Haw). He carried a British passport prior to working for the Nazi German info machine. Lord Haw Haw was eventually captured by the Allies during the final days of the 3rd Reich. He was executed in Britian for aiding the enemy.

That was then, this is now. We give people like him jobs and listen to them whining when things don't work "their" way. Kinda like the AP and Reuters reporters who get fed copy from terrorists and their friends. And I guess we are fighting a "kinder, gentler war"?

I agree, Mitch. Another way to look at the phenomenon is that while no single part of the status quo media has achieved monopoly status, on the whole the status quo media have certainly become an classic oligarchy, which is very nearly as bad.

With the massive reductions in the cost of the medium, which we have recently experienced, the media's oligarchy is exposed to far more proper market competition. Now, this market will serve what the customers want, so it probably will be a lot of t-and-a (pardon my language), and not much of people who write like me ;-)

Still, even mindless entertainment is less dangerous that fradulent manipulation of our democracy and its processes.

Since when is any of this new? Did any of you see the interview with Dan Rather by Larry King? It was comfirmation of what many believe, that the media are controlled by very powerful people, who slither behind the scenes. If a journalist does not report the news in the officially sanctioned slant, they can be in serious trouble. Mr Rather would know, and some think Pravda was the only government controlled media source? Yeah right.

I am not nearly as charitable as Kate. I think the media are treasoness. They hate Bush and Harper so much they will do or report anything that makes Bush and Harper look bad - even if this means defacto collaborating with the enemy (the enemy of enemy is my friend).

The Taliban has on many occasions said it is purposely targeting Canadian troops in order to weaken our morale in Canada hoping we will cut and run. The Canadian media have even reported this.

Yet all the stories out of Afghanistan are negative. If Canada is in a battle and kills 100 Taliban and 2 Canadian solders are killed guess what gets the focus. If a thousand villagers are happy because the Canadian forces are providing safety and 1 villager complains guess which information makes it to the story (even if it turns out the one villager is just trying to shake down the Canadians for compensation for a lost goat).

There are almost no stories in the MSM on the terrible cruelty, abject poverty and lack of human rights caused by the Taliban. There are almost no stories on all of the women who are now part of society and children who are learning and infrastructure projects being completed. Why?

The MSM wants us to lose in Afghanistan so that Bush and Harper look bad. Anything positive that might make it look as though we are winning or at least making progress must be ignored or even suppressed.

When Canadian soldiers come home in body bags it is largely as result of the constant negative media coverage. The actions of our reporters, editors, news readers, etc are causing our soldiers to die just as much as if they helped aim the gun. The actions of our reporters, editors, news readers are causing women, children, and infrastructure projects to be blown up just as much as if they lit the fuse for the bombs. They have this blood on their hands because they hate Bush and Harper.

The Taliban knows it cannot militarily win a battle against the Coalition forces. It can only win a propaganda war with the active assistance of our media. If our media covered the war accurately, with context, with even a little cheer leading for the good guys from Canada and the nobleness of our cause, the Taliban would fold like a tent. The Taliban’s entire strategy is based on the willing acquiescence of the MSM.

I personally think the Western Media are the lowest form of human scum right there with murderers, rapists and child molesters which is what their actions are facilitating in the Middle East. They should be thrown in jail for aiding and abetting the enemy. Instead they get fame, fortune and the applause of liberals and lefties.

A fellow referred to as Lord Haw Haw

Now, we make them Governor General.

After all, if we have gotten to the point where we now wonder whether or not even the legacy of Walter Cronkite has been cast into doubt by these media fraud artists, then the status quo cannot hold.
Posted by: Vitruvius

Great post V [excellent Kate!], but I'm afraid we are long past wondering about Uncle Walter's legacy: vis-a-vis the Vietnam war we now know beyond a shadow of a wonder, that the US won against the TET offensive (big time) which Uncle Walter declared a defeat. We also know from N Vietnam commanders that they thought they were toast but were relying on the US media and the Fonda-Kerrys!

However, I still think it was way cool the way he took off his black glasses when he announced JFK's death.

But Uncle Walter was a fraud no less that Dan "fake-but-accurate" Rather ... just lucky to have held forth in a credulous age.

And that's the way it is!

I don't think it's so much that any of this is new, Paul, rather it's a matter of the observations many citizens are now making about how their relationship with the media is changing with the times.

There have been other cases in history where the media has been put in its place by citizen reporting and publishing. For example, think back to the two great ages of pamphleteering in the United States. The first was of the era of 1770s and 1780s, during the times of the Revolutionary War and the incubation of the Constitution. That one was fairly tame, as the cost of the medium (presses, ink, &c) still pretty much kept the exercise in the hands of the elite. And yet, my god, those pamphleteers were brilliant men.

There was a second era of pamphleteering in the second half of the 1800s (if I recall correctly). That one was rather brutal, as the cost of the medium had dropped to the point where a middle-class citizen could now pamphleteer, so there were no Marquis of Queensbury rules in place; it was pretty much no holds barred. But so in kind it put the oligarchy media in its place.

And now we have the incrimental cost of the medium at close to zero, and that's including distribution around the world. Hold on to your hats, folks.

Upon rereading my last comment, I realize that I didn't explain why the first great age of pamphleteering was antithethical to the oligarchy media, to wit, that these elite citizens (you know, the founding fathers) self-published -- the dialogue was carried on outside of any sort of oligarchy media mechanism. Sorry about that.

My first introduction to this media phenomenon Kate is exposing came when I started investigating gun control back in 1992. I started wondering why nobody in the media was concerned that the Canadian government was confiscating private property without due process.

Then I got diging and discovered it wasn't just the media, it was pretty much the whole Ivory Tower complex of medical and scientific journals, criminological journals, psych journals, history, you name it. In the 1970's and 1980's one literally could not find a journal article in almost any field that found any use for firearms in private hands.

Why? Because grants were not going to pro-gun, pro-freedom types of research. Outfits like the Joyce Foundation were paying big cake for anti-gun studies, so naturally that is what got done and printed.

Presumably that is also what got most of the trash through peer review. Reviewers who didn't go along didn't get asked again.

Same deal in the MSM. You go with the flow, or you go under. Right now the flow is Lieberals in Canada, DemocRats in the USA.

This is nothing new in the media biz, broadsheets were violently partisan in the old days, didn't even pretend to be fair. That's why we have liable laws, to address the extremes of the past.

We just aren't used to it, is all. Papers and journals were more circumspect during and after the war because they had to be. Since the 1960's the Left has been subverting that trust and using it to forward their own agenda.

What has blown the lid off them is that now car painters like Kate and physical therapists like me can look up source documents in seconds. We don't have to believe Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather any more, we can check up on them.

AP is just a little slower on the uptake than one would expect is all. They can't seem to adjust to the fact that they are going to get called on their BS every time.

Damn good thing too, eh?

If we assume that all Canadian journalists feel they have some professional requirement to report accurately and impartially, then yes, a lot of newswriters and newswire services, along with certain national news broadcast networks, are not behaving professionally. But if we assume that they are working in the field of public relations on behalf of the national ruling party and the tribe that supports them, as part of a deeply-embedded social juggernaut of unelected power who are collectively trying to ensure on behalf of their tribe that they remain, for the purpose of elecoral success, the pre-eminent creator of our national narrative, then we'd have to admit that they are competent, highly-successful professionals.

Let's show some respect here.

CBC's convention coverage, for example, was as professional as it gets. There was a deeply embedded thoroughness, and unwavering sense of courageous, albeit muted, partisan solidarity in the coverage. One got a sense of "This is us getting it together here. We can do it." When Ken Dryden blithely asserted, in a mission statement repeatedly echoed in one form or another by other Liberal candidates and luminaries, that conservatives aren't Canadian, that Conservatives don't love this country, not only did it not merit comment by the journalists covering the convention, it didn't even register as any sort of issue at all, from any angle.

Go figure. We all know that if a Conservative leadership candidate ever asserted that the millions who have voted Liberal are not true Canadians, and that they don't love their country, his statement, and any similarly thrumming-fingered reaction as we saw from delegates at the Liberal convention, would be excoriated and denounced -- out of a sense of professional responsibility if nothing else -- by journalists covering the event as ludicrously arrogant. But when it's a prominent Liberal making the accusation, it floats gnetly coast-to-coast over the airwaves as a mere reiteration of some fundamental Canadian truth, as the pivotal axis of some not-yet-realized but important-to-all-Canadians narrative, and not as the ludicrous, brutally partisn, hegemonic, hideously time-bound attempted-ururpation of Canadian-ness that it is.

It's okay, though. That snooty comfort that disgusts so many Canadians will be their undoing. The Lib-proxy remora have fatally underestimated the number of people who by virtue of being neither credulous, nor socially ambitious, nor power/celebrity obsessed, are true throwback Canadians. Kate, Angry, Blackrod, Janke, Steyn, Darcy, Kathy Shaidle, Kevin Steele, Joan Tintor, etc etc etc are leading the charge.

(BTW, when I say "Canadians" I mean it in the more traditional, and not the recent perjorative, sense.

Robes are being yanked off. The choir has stopped lip-syncing....isn't that Kate in the front pew? I think she must have said something.....

hi kate,
just stopping in to say congrats on your placing in the blog awards. well done!!!

"why is it that an industry that produces mere words and facts . . . does not hold their members to the standard of performance expected of a nameless welder in an auto repair shop?"

Because they believe that they produce, not "mere words and facts", but THE TRVTH (carved and gilded in marble).

It always bothered me when Baghdad Bob was treated by the MSM like he was just a joke for late night TV comedians.

IMHO, he was not a joke but a glimpse at the -man behind the curtain- on many, many of the network news stories that come out of the ME.

We know the networks are manipulated, threatened, bribed and worse.

The kidnapping of the FOX news reporters in Gaza and their forced conversion to Islam along with the rumored payment of a large bribe is only one in a long list of examples of stories that are only partially covered and then buried by the MSM.

IMHO, even FOX news has not reported the facts behind that story.

When Greta Van Susternin interviewed the reporters after their release, their forced conversion to Islam was not allowed to be discussed.

I am guessing that is because if they were to recant their conversion, they would once again be marked for death by the Islamists and also that a large ransom was paid.

And that ransom will likely finance more kidnappings, suicide bombers, etc. etc. by those who are our sworn enemies.

I am not falling for the "poor-performance" , " lack-of-reporting", or even the " not-checking-the-facts-before-printing" excuses. That would imply incompetence which would in return imply they don't know what they are doing, which would imply that the MSM Journalist get a "Free Pass" for careless and stupid reporting. Not buying it.

The MSM are im-bedded with the Islamic Terrorist Savages and know damn-well what "they are doing." They have sold their souls and pocket-books for the all out Destruction of President Bush, the Christians and anything Republican.

YAY AMERICA!!

why is this board always so obsessed with america?

HUH, soon we will be obsessed by France and the joined at the hip dion/chirac. Carbques coming to an eastern city soon, as that is the policy of Chirac. You did notice the muslim terrorist supporter at the convention didn't you, supporting Dion.

That's right kids. Keep patting yourselves on the back over your courageous struggles to reveal the truth.

We'll find those WMDs any day now.

...

I just thought of something:

After being brought up to speed on how safe Iraq is from Michelle Malkin (hat-tip to sda!) I've decided to book my family's Christmas vacation there! Apparently all those reports about sectarian violence are all nonsense, spread by Al Qaeda and other nasty fellows. There are no massacres.

So wouldn't it be a hoot if me n' the kids were playing in the sand along the Tigris and we actually found those WMDs?