Unreliable Reporting

Nothing earthshaking here like the discovery of faked photos in the news. Just a complaint about press coverage in general and how false stories keep making the headlines.

First there is the circus around the JonBenet murder. Yes, John Mark Karr is a creepy guy but by the second day it was obvious that he had made up the confession. That didn't stop the press from covering his every move for the eleven days afterwards. Even if he was guilty, why did we need to know the details of his flight to America?

Then there was the fuss over the Plame leak. As it turns out, the leak came from a non-political source and was not an attempt to silence Bush critics by revealing their secrets. It was just a slip by a state department official who liked to gossip and didn't realize that Plame was still classified "undercover".

This one got so much coverage because the left was sure that there was something to the allegations. As recently as Easter they were insisting that the source was Karl Rove and that he was about to be arrested and frog-marched to jail.

The supposedly neutral press should have seen how thin this reasoning was and given the story a lot less coverage.

Then there is Katrina. On the first anniversary of the disaster I have yet to see someone point out how stupid it is to build a city in a hole located between a major river and a huge lake. It is even more stupid to talk about rebuilding the lowest parts of the city without raising them twenty feet or more but here we are. All of the coverage seems to be on how long it is taking people to rebuild, not on the likelihood of their new houses being washed away again.

Then there are the doctored pictures of Katie Couric. When the story is about a news division doctoring pictures of itself you know things are out of control.