Betrayal of newsroom fundamentals is creating a free flow of misinformation
Failure to follow the basics causes a report from a misrepresented organization to go global. Plus! Journos battling journalism, Libs getting tight with the hard right is OK and more!
There’s an old saying that used to be drummed into journalists.
Like most legends, it has a couple of versions, but the original appears to have been stated by a crusty old editor, Arnold A. Dornfeld, who, upon his retirement from the legendary City News Bureau of Chicago, was referenced in the Chicago Tribune:
“After 44 years with City News, Dornfeld has boiled down his advice on journalism to a single sentence:
“Chum, if your mother says she loves you, check on it.”
Dornfeld later wrote that the originator of the phrase was a colleague and equally disciplined editor, Edward H. Eulenberg.
Both are long gone, along with the Chicago City desk, which was closed in 2005 after serving the news industry and setting journalism standards for 115 years.
So, apparently, is their advice on how to get a news story right.
Headlines such as this one on the BBC website - “Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s leading experts say” - and this one - “Israel's actions in Gaza meet 'legal definition of genocide,' scholars' association says” - by ABC were everywhere, including across Canada where CBC and CTV picked up a Thomson-Reuters report on the resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS).
The bona fides of what ABC called “the world's largest association of academic scholars studying genocide” were clearly not “checked out” because if they had been it’s unlikely the story would have been spread as widely and enthusiastically as it was.
Once people did begin to “check on it,” IAGS’s credentials looked a little less impressive than at first glance. As it turns out, anyone who wants to pay a $125 annual membership fee can join the group and call themselves a genocide scholar, its ranks spiked after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, the percentage of members who voted on the resolution was only 28 per cent, other scholars were accusing it of political bias, and by the end of the week the organization conceded that its membership included “activists and artists.” Note: IAGS has now “temporarily suspended new membership joins and renewals, and disabled the member directory (both public and private). These steps were taken out of an abundance of caution to protect our members.” So you may have to wait a bit to sign up.
All this came out after the fact thanks to a number of sources including Adam Zivo in the National Post and The Free Press. Also, to its credit, Associated Press appears to have only included the IAGS accusation as a subordinate item - at least in the report I read in the Globe and Mail.
Overall, a global failure by journalism and a propaganda victory for Hamas.
This is possibly due to one of the biases Naomi Goldsmith writes about on the Media Helping Media website. But I can’t decide which one - confirmation bias, anchor bias, affinity bias or bandwagon bias - best applies. Maybe all four.
Speaking of The Free Press, it had news organizations such as CNN and the Washington Post scurrying to ensure stories were “updated to reflect new information” after The Free Press had “checked out” some of the images used to illustrate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and discovered that several of the poor children photographed were misrepresented symbols of starvation.
The Free Press was careful not to deny the existence of a humanitarian crisis or the genuine nature of other photos. But while no one argued the facts it presented, it encountered some pretty substantial backlash to which it responded in an editorial entitled “Journalists against Journalism.” The editors wrote:
“To Krystal Ball, host of Breaking Points, our journalism was “just so disgusting.” Ball’s co-host, Saagar Enjeti, chimed in to compare our reporters to Holocaust deniers, saying that a “key tenet of holocaust denial is trying to claim that many of the initial victims or purported victims had other preconditions and that’s part of the reason why they died.”
“Those who care about the truth will note that these children were not presented as the initial victims of anything; they were deceptively promoted to reflect the average Gazan. To suggest otherwise betrays a fleeting relationship with reality.
“Ball and Enjeti are not alone. Glenn Greenwald, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” argued not just for our censorship, but for our “trial at the Hague.”
“Barack Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes (whose nickname, incidentally, in that administration was “Hamas”), says we are “sociopathic.” Ryan Grim, co-founder of Drop Site News, predicts reporter Olivia Reingold’s “name will become notorious for a generation.”
On the upside, The Free Press, founded on Substack, is, according to reports, about to be sold to CBS for upwards of $100 million US and one of its owners, Bari Weiss, appointed head of CBS News.
Turns out you actually can make money in journalism with the right platform and the right attitude. But you have to be good at it, which will be disappointing news for many.
Readers will recall how when Alberta Premier Danielle Smith attended an event hosted by American conservative Ben Shapiro earlier this year, media reached out to find folks willing to characterize Smith’s actions as bordering on treasonous. Smith tried to explain that she was trying to connect with people with influence over the US President in the hope they could convince Donald Trump that his planned tariffs were mutually destructive. But that, for the most part, failed - at least in terms of media coverage.
Yet other than one comment from a distressed former Trudeau Liberal, Supriya Dwivedi, there was little concern expressed in legacy media when Prime Minister Mark Carney invited Kevin Roberts, head of what CTV News termed the “hard right” Heritage Foundation, (a US think tank) to address cabinet last week.
“This is the problem with Canadian media,” Tweeted Postmedia columnist Brian Lilley. “How stories are treated is all about which party is doing something. If a Conservative leader did any of this, minds would explode, CBC would be apoplectic. Instead, it's all calm because Carney is a Liberal.”
Is he wrong?
This week’s bouquet goes to Vassy Kapelos of CTV Question Period for noting the double standard that occurs in journalist’s treatment of politicians from one party - Liberals - when they talk about austerity budgets versus when another party does. You can find the link here, courtesy of Twitter’s @CBCwatcher, who is a friend of The Rewrite. Kapelos, BTW, is doing pretty good since she launched her career in Swift Current. Corus just signed her up for a weekend radio talk show.
(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)
You are mistaken if you think the CBC, CNN, etc., are practicing journalism. They are activists and the purest purveyors of the misinformation and disinformation that they are always warning us about. Saying these wretches are journalists is like saying the Yo-Yo Ma and the kid down the street murdering his saxophone are both musicians. Yes, they are both producing sounds from instruments, but only 1 sounds like music.
When the left gets called out for supporting this nonsense like the austerity budget, their standard reply is Pierre would have been worse. From their standpoint, he actually would not have been. He never would have got away with it. Carney and his austerity cuts is his Nixon goes to China moment.