THE MARKUP
From Bad to Worse [Stephen Spruiell]
After E&P editor Greg Mitchell attacked bloggers for exposing staged and altered photographs of Israel's offensive against Hezbollah, Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee found an embarrassing story that Mitchell had written about his own experience faking a news story for a small paper in Niagara Falls.
Embarrassing, yes. Funny. But not really that bad. After all, it happened a long time ago, and Mitchell copped to it.
This, however, is journalistic malpractice:
Someone substantially altered the text of the mediainfo.com story, after six different bloggers cited the article. If you type in the URL of http://www.mediainfo.com/ and press "enter" so that you could investigate who mediainfo.com belongs to, wondering how they could change such an old story so quickly, the URL will resolve to adweek.com.
Adweek is owned by VNU Business Media, the same company that runs media web sites BrandWeek, MediaWeek and—you guessed it—Editor & Publisher, where Greg Mitchell is the editor on the hotseat.
Read the whole post. If Mitchell altered the text of this article, what he's done is taken an embarrassing situation and turned into one that seriously calls his ethics into question. Nice job.
ALSO: Remember the howls from the left when it was reported that former editor of The American Enterprise magazine (now White House aide) Karl Zinsmeister had altered and then reposted on his web site an interview with another newspaper? (For the record, I criticized Zinsmeister here and here). I'm wondering if they'll hold Mitchell to the same standard.
GOTCHA: I'm not really wondering. They won't.
08/26 01:10 PM
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