Journaminimalism!

Fred Hiatt man on a mission:

The Washington Post killed my assigned piece for its Outlook section this weekend which mainly covered media failures re: Iraq and the current refusal to come to grips with that (the subject of my latest book)--yet they ran this misleading, cherry-picking, piece by Paul Farhi claiming the media "didn't fail." I love the line about the Post in March 2003 carrying some skeptical pieces just days before the war started: "Perhaps it was too late by then. But this doesn’t sound like failure."

Maybe Hiatt can appear on a blogger ethics panel with these NBC folks?

For the past several days, The Today Show has been hyping an "exclusive interview" with Jerry Sandusky set to air Monday morning. In this interview, The Today Show says, the convicted child rapist will "speak out for the first time since he went to prison." Sounds like NBC landed a(n ethically questionable) scoop right? Not so much, except for the ethically questionable part. Instead of interviewing Sandusky themselves, NBC is instead airing an excerpt of conservative filmmaker John Ziegler's documentary, The Framing of Joe Paterno.

Ziegler, perhaps best known for his David Foster Wallace-documented career as a radio talk show host and his conspiratorial documentaries Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted and Blocking the Path to 9/11, has long been critical of how the press covered the Sandusky case. In July 2012, he published a 4,800 word screed attacking the media's coverage of former Penn State Coach Joe Paterno in which he acknowledges Sandusky "engaged in illegal behavior" but also asserts his opinion that witness Mike McQueary saw "botched 'grooming'" in Penn State's shower and not a sexual assault.

"Botched grooming?"

Ugh.