The Fundamental Unreliability of America's Media - By Glenn Greenwald

The Fundamental Unreliability of America's Media

By Glenn Greenwald

January 12, 2010 "Salon" -- Consider the record of the American media over the last two weeks alone. Justin Elliott of TPM http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/the_flight_253_one-way_ticket_meme_a_media-propaga.php documents how an absolute falsehood about the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing -- that Abdulmuttab purchased a "one-way ticket" to the U.S., when it was actually a round-trip ticket http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/pageoneplus/corrections.html?_r=1 http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/abc_issues_correction_on_widely_cited_abdulmutalla.php -- has been repeated far and wide by U.S. media outlets as fact. Two weeks ago, Elliott similarly documented how an equally false claim from ABC News -- that two of the Al Qaeda leaders behind that airliner attack had been released from Guantanamo -- became entrenched as fact in media reports (at most, it is one of them, not two). This week, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/09/fool-me-over-and-over-and_n_417311.html Dan Froomkin chronicles how completely discredited claims about Guantanamo recidivism rates continue to be uncritically "reported" by The New York Times and then inserted into our debates as fact.

.................

Aside from falsity -- and the fact that they become irreversibly lodged in our political culture as fact -- what do all of these deceitful reports have in common? They're all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then repeating what they claim as fact, with the falsehood-disseminators protected by "journalists" from any and all accountability for their falsehoods. It's exactly the same process that caused our leading media outlets to tell Americans about Iraq's massive WMD program.........

etc. etc. etc., kp, more:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2010/01/12/media/index.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24378.htm

Who could have foreseen that?

Some people say.

I was beginning to think that unattributed quotes by anonymous sources might not be, like, totes reliable.

What pisses me off, and I swiped this outrage from Eschaton, is the granting of anonymity for no apparent reason. Sometimes someone will confirm something that's perfectly all right to confirm, but they're just not "official" enough to grant confirmation. In those cases, it's understandable that a quote will be anonymous ("high level spokesman" or "a State Department official"). But granting someone anonymity because they don't have the intestinal fortitude to own their words, aided and abetted by a conniving reporter who wants to get some dirt out is a topic that should be addressed at the highest levels of the profession. It stinks to high heaven, and doesn't advance the public's right to know one iota.

Corporate party LINE,
Distracting the Sheeple,
and impeding any real discussion or even awareness of their criminal acts.