One of the nice things about using fake but accurate as your journalistic standard is that it gives one great flexibility. The reporters who are in Iraq could avoid the dangerous realities of going to violent areas and just use past actions and report them as happening again. Abu Ghraib is a fact so it is probably still happening. The Kennedy- Johnson, Nixon administrations used the CIA to spy on political opponents so you can report that President Bush is doing it to. Why not. These guys are so predictable why wait for it to happen. Maybe by reporting in this new style you can prevent these things for happening so fudging the facts and timelines is noble. Thus a lie is good. Someone who has gone to Communist meeting will probably become a spy so McCarthy was just ahead of the curve.

We all have predictable attitudes to certain issues. I could probably predict some of your responses to certain issues.And you could do the same regarding my ideas. But if I was a reporter, or even a simple blogger, and instead of saying “this is what I think Markus will say” or “here is what Markus has said before’ I implied that I was reporting what Markus had said before you said it I would be a liar. And If the new journalism ehtic is not to report the facts as we know them at the present time and we allow speculation to be reported as fact then the line between fiction and fact will be blurred even farther then it already is. This a big deal. He is a talented writer. He knew what he was doing. He didn’t care because his intentions were, in his mind, noble. So this is what you want. Fiction is OK as long as the political positions are the correct ones. Fake but accurate. All the News that’s Fit To Print Before it Happens. We know what will happen so we can report it before it happens. Nice journalistic standard.

Are you telling us that because impartiality is possible, it is therefore true? And further, because you don’t know of the abundant evidence, that it doesn’t exist?

I think folks are well-aware that talk-radio tends conservative. Are you calling that part of the MSM? Huh. ABC and the NYT don’t think so.

I would be curious which half of the nation’s newspapers you think are conservative.

If it’s so equitable out there, I propose a trade: the conservatives can have the major networks, the NYT, LAT, WP, Time, Newsweek, and the usual suspects we accuse of unacknowledged bias. In return, the liberals can get talk radio and Fox news.

(crickets chirping)

I thought I did give you evidence. A well loved and respected member of the MSM felt free to write about an event, the Republican National Convention, in advance of the event occuring. He did not say he was writing a preview of what he expected to hear. It was written as if he was writing about an event that he was reporting on. He presented it in a major magazine. He gave the now traditional fake but accurate defense. And in aglowing story on Lapham the LAT lets Lapham present his lame defense of his fraudulent story without confronting him on it. “It was a mistake, but to my mind a minor one.” Yeah, I guess you can pre-write stories about an event that has not occured and present them as if you were writing about the event in real time. Why wait to have the event happen when you are going to write the same story anyway. It was just a short time ago that the journalistic world was in an uproar over the military paying for stories. Even though there was no evidence that there was any lies in the stories the mere fact that someone was paid by the military and the writer did not disclose this fact(By the way I agree with this accusation) there were howls about the attack on journalisms integrity. Yet Lapham fakes his story and he is still lauded by his bretheren. Why? Because he is on the same side of the political fence and they agree with him so making stuff up is OK. The Cheney photo altering.(RESIGN) The Mitt Romney photo doctoring. Read this blog. examples are given all the time. these are just a few that I can remember off the top of my head over the last few weeks.

If the ABC had penned a love letter about Bush, i suspect that would have been tagged as completely objective.

Here’s the deal: People who work in the media have no requirement, professional, ethical, or otherwise, to be objective. That goes for anyone working in any profession. No one expects their doctors, for example, to hold no opinions about the medicines they prescribing or the hospitals they use.

Why? Because a person and the work they produce are different animals. It is naive — or manipulative — to argue that the pursuit of objectivity requires an of us to be devoid of opinion. But, it is not naive to expect us to keep our opinions from influencing the products that we produce on the job.

But, like doctors and all the rest of us, people in the media do have an obligation to avoid allowing their personal opinions to influence their on-the-job behavior. That’s called impartiality, not objectivity.

One should expect a surgeon to be impartial enough to send a patient to the most appropriate hospital, even if that surgeon loathes the head of surgery there.

Likewise, one should expect a news reporter to construct an impartial story, even if he loathes — or loves — the person that’s the target of the story.

If you’re worried the media people aren’t as able or willing to compartmentalize their own opinions as the rest of us, then you need to produce some evidence. (Your own opinion is not evidence.)

Penning a rant about Bush on the company email system was stupid, but no more so than expecting people in the media to be devoid of opinion, or to seize on any such expression of opinion as proof of the great media conspiracy.

The best approach is to let the market take its course: Turn ABC off. That’s what I did to Fox years ago.

Was their any journalistic outrage from the WAPO writer Peter Carlson? Of course not! He is part of the club and since the article undoubtably dovetailed with the writers political worldview no follow up questions on this obvious fraud were pressed onto Lapham.

I caught some of the C-Span coverage of an earlier JFK School of Government multi panel talkfest about Vietnam. And of course it was a given that Vietnam and Iraq are the same so it was just obvious to compare the two wars and of course they are going to end up the same so there should be little to no effort to try to distinguish between the two. It was treated as a fact rather then subject for serious discussion. The Journalists of that era were spouting the same rhetoric they did in the sixties and you could tell that is exactly how they gear their reporting of the current conflict. The 3rd day conflict duststorm was the start of the quagmire stories and they have not stopped since. It was hard to distinguish which war they were discussing sometimes because the arguments were identical.

There have been numerous major error’s in the conduct of the war and I have no problem with Journalists discussing them and exposing them. But so many are locked into the Vietnam comparison that they are almost, as Lapham did with the convention, pre-writing their stories to fit their predetermined Iraq is Vietnam script. But since the new standard is if your ‘fairly accurate you can write the story before the action takes place and still be beloved by your fellow scribemen. If you tilt the right way.

If it is true, it is simply an indicator of insufficient professionalism, not excessive partisanship.

I agree. The fact that so many jounalists are pathetically unprofessional is disturbing. Its not surprising, though: I suspect most entered the profession to be propagandists and party workers, not reporters.

This comment email will only help propel this guy’s career.

Any conservative that slips through the msm media’s filter and accidently gets hired should do something similar and watch their career prosper. Then when they make to the top start hiring conservatives.

Bush is a politician, not a journalist. Can you come up with a quote from Kerry, Clinton, Carter, or Gore saying something positive about Bush?

Don’t strain yourself trying. Bush (R), Kerry (D), Clinton (D), Carter (D), Gore (D). Their perspectives are apparent. No one expects neutrality. Troll on.