The Chronicle penned yet another house editorial today that took what could have been reasonable points and veered right off into fringe territory.
Criticizing the process that bestowed press credentials on one James Guckert is reasonable enough, although Laurence Simon reminds us that Helen Thomas still enjoys credentials despite being a frothing lefty partisan who launches into long lectures during her “questions.”
It’s also reasonable enough to criticize the Bush Administration for funding a handful of friendly opinion columnists (although they ARE opinion columnists, and one should always read opinion columnists with a discerning eye).
What isn’t reasonable is to take these few instances, and conclude it’s a propaganda effort designed to subvert the free press in the country. There’s no whiff of the gas chamber here, and it’s hardly a new development that a Presidential Administration is attempting to manage its media coverage.
However, if the Chronicle editors need an example of why savvy news consumers AND pols are looking for alternatives to traditional media, they need look no further than this line of their own editorial:
His identity was exposed by bloggers, and he turned out to be associated with a number of sexually oriented Web sites.
That’s flat out wrong. Sunday, Howard Kurtz’s column in the Washington Post pointed out,
They discovered that he had registered such Web addresses as hotmilitarystud.com for a previous business, though the sites were never launched…
Thus, there were no “Web sites” as the Chron editorial asserts, but merely domain names. There’s a difference. One supposes the Chronicle editors might have read the Kurtz column, since a reprint was posted to the Chron online edition yesterday.
As another example of why savvy news consumers and pols might look for alternatives to traditional media, there’s also this line:
A journalist familiar with the process says it’s likely Bush was tipped by his press staff that “the bald guy would lob him an easy one.”
It seems to me that editorials that rely on hearsay aren’t exactly in an ideal state!
We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again — the Chronicle editorial board desperately needs to come up with some mechanism that exposes the members to some new worldviews, to act as a reality check and to moderate their rhetorical excesses, as well as to save them from embarrassing gaffes. One such mechanism would be a blog — with comments and trackback — so that readers and other bloggers could help them work out the kinks of some of these editorials before they are committed to print.
ANNE LINEHAN ADDS: That was a jaw-dropping editorial. The Chronicle editors decided to cover the scandal of a journalist writing under a different name, but so far haven’t felt the need to cover the CNN executive who resigned over the furor raised by his assertion that the US military had purposely killed journalists in Iraq. The editors cover the Bush Administration funding several columnists who then expressed opinions favorable to administration policies, yet the editors have not covered the very same problem that goes on with environmental groups and lobbyists. Many receive taxpayer dollars, get opinion columns published in newspapers and don’t disclose the taxpayer funding they receive.
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