In the midst of reading (a bit late) the revelations regarding the lies of Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp in The New Republic, I clicked over to tnr.com, only to be reminded the magazine is actually asking us to buy a subscription to read their publication on line. In other words, they want us to pay for their lies! Can you imagine anything more absurd and shameful? Who would be such an idiot?
Here’s the top article on their web page today: The Overhyping of David Petraeus, Army of One by Andrew J. Bacevich . The first graph hints that General Petraeus is being oversold as our savior in Iraq. But to read more, to get the “facts” backing this up, you have to pay. The cost of a digital subscription to TNR is $29.95. Considering the amount of free information about Petraeus and everything else online, let’s hope Mr. Bacevich’s facts are more reliable than Private Beauchamp’s. Or perhaps TNR will offer our money back for disinfo and propaganda.
But allow me to go further. As many reading this know, I am not a “young blogger,” alas (wish I were). I spent a lifetime working in mainstream media - book publishing, Hollywood movies, newspapers and magazines. Fact-checking, in my experience, is a big lie. It barely exists in the mainstream media.
As an example, I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times on my experiences on the jury of a film festival in Siberia. It contained many statements about the state of the Russian film industry in the post-Soviet era. My fact-checking? It consisted of a young lady calling me up and asking me “Did this happen?” I said, “Yes.” End of conversation. That was fact-checking. And with some exceptions, that is par for the course. Mainstream media cannot afford extensive fact-checking. They are already in the soup financially. Where would they find the money to do it, even if they wanted to.
Blogs, of course, are much better at fact-checking. [What? You can't be serious.-ed. Damn right, I am.] Thousands of eyes are staring at these words right now, many of them belonging to people much more qualified and capable than the fact-checkers of the MSM. An open comment section lurks below. It’s hard to get a spelling error by here for long, let alone a serious error of fact. If I were making up stories like Pvt. Beauchamp, I would be crucified - and deservedly so.
Of course, I am up against questions of fact-checking every day as an executive at Pajamas Media. It can be nerve-wracking and humbling (fortunately we have those comments to keep us honest) and for that reason I have some sympathy for Martin Peretz and Franklin Foer. But not a lot. Their way is the old way. If it’s not over now, it’s over soon. And the Beauchamp Affair put another nail in the MSM coffin. Pretty soon it will be thrown overboard.
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9 Comments
1. Robin Goodfellow:Ironically the Weekly World News is shutting down. Probably due to too much competition in the fake news arena I suspect.
Aug 6, 2007 - 11:54 pm 2. Lem:It’s not just the MSM.
The spectacle of Barry Bonds “breaking” the all time home run record when evidence exist that he has cheated is disturbing to me.
There is got to be a way to make it right.
Aug 7, 2007 - 5:48 am 3. tim maguire:I’m disappointed at how this is working out. I subscribed to TNR for several years and let it lapse not because I don’t value them but because I don’t have time to read them.
It’s hard to find a liberal publication that displays much sense or fairness, and TNR was one of the rare ones that attempted some balance and honesty on partisan issues. But worse even than publishing Beauchamp, they defended the story when they had reason to believe it was not true and, as Ace detailed, they pulled a little bait and switch in the defense. That is unforgivable.
Aug 7, 2007 - 7:27 am 4. Insufficiently Sensitive:The mendacious yarns of ‘Scott Thomas’ were plunked into the magazine without a thought of fact-checking. It is as if Franklin Foer had found a surrogate in uniform to parrot his own opinions about the beasts in the US military - why check, when the opinions are correct? Foer cut his own throat by loudly claiming that the stories were confirmed, even in the face of plenty of contrary evidence.
Maybe TNR can reinvent itself as Red Star or some such heroic bastion of progressive truth.
Aug 7, 2007 - 11:21 am 5. LarryD:As Eric S. Raymond puts it “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”
Because blogs allow feedback (the comments section), the principal functions in the blogosphere. Blogs that have a large and varied readership, not only get errors fixed quickly, but because some of the readers have subject matter expertise in the topic, the story can get additional research and leads.
Aug 7, 2007 - 11:23 am 6. jedrury:I agree with Roger. Watching the network news last night and on comes a story about the new wiretap legislation that the president - the lame duck president - “rolled” Reid and Pelosi on and to get a comment the segment reaches out for a comment from the ACLU; a young woman no more than five years out of law school. Now, there is street cred, huh?
Catch the financials from the Times and other newspapers and read how their classified ad revenues are cascading. There is no money for green eye shade fact checkers.
Thanks to Craigslist and others for their falling revs.
Aug 7, 2007 - 12:12 pm 7. Cinabar:This is mystifying to me.
Instead of fighting (and losing) with the blogs, the MSM should utilize the blogsphere as an adjunct to their reporting. They could continue to report with their usual limited fact checking then invite the blogs to comment and fact check on their behalf (for free no less). If the facts pan out then the MSM can continue with a follow-up story. If the facts cannot be confirmed the MSM can issue a retraction and thank the fact checkers for their diligence. In turn, the MSM would gain credibility by using the blog experts as their own
Aug 7, 2007 - 1:23 pm 8. Lem:Here is Andrew Sullivan’s defence of TNR as of last week.
“Read TNR’s accounting. It is as I predicted: honorable and, except for one small inaccuracy, it checks out. All the aspects aggressively challenged by the usual propaganda organs have been verified and corroborated. The military is now conducting its own investigation. Given the record of such formal investigations, I’m not as confident in the Pentagon as I am in TNR. Can we now expect apologies from the people who smeared and maligned the magazine and its soldier-reporter? I doubt it. The attackers are not the kind to acknowledge their own errors.”
Where is Sully now? on vacation of course.
This is just too good for words
Aug 7, 2007 - 2:17 pm 9. Mike K:I am reading the Cheney biography and the contrast between his life and the phony world of TNR is almost startling. I was a subscriber and sent gift subscriptions to my children for 25 years. I thought it was balanced although leaning left, as several of my children do. I think Foer decided on a new business plan to reverse the decline that had set in about the time I dropped it five years ago. He decided to pander to the nutroots, as the Beauchamp “diaries” and now the Petraeus smear, demonstrate. Look at the left wing blogs and you see the TNR theme. The trouble with that strategy is that the blogs are free and advertisers want eyeballs that are attached to people who might buy something. TNR is doomed.
Aug 8, 2007 - 7:22 am