5 Years After Jayson Blair, Newspapers Too Broke to Care About Ethics [Journalismism]
Superstar MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman remembered recently that there was this young fellow who worked for the Times once who got in trouble for making things up and lying. It was a bit of a scandal! It happened five years ago this... season, so Friedman asks a couple folk what they think of the current state of media ethics. Salon's Joan Walsh says the Jayson Blair (for that was the fabricator's name) scandal forced writers and editors to remind themselves not to lie, or to maybe fact-check once in a while. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell says the scandal encouraged more papers to issue corrections more often and not plagiarize so much. But a couple critics note that Jayson Blair is really the least of the newsmedia's woes in 2008.
New Yorker media critic Ken Auletta sees mixed results: "I suspect that serious felons like Blair have been deterred. But cheating and cutting corners has not been. Declining circulation, falling advertising revenues, and the swooning stock value of traditional news organizations, coupled with expanding consumer choices, prompts slashed newsroom budgets.
"This leaves fewer editors and fact checkers to police newsrooms. Worse, with business declining, the folks who sign our checks push for more sensational stories, more conflict, more sharp opinion — anything — to lift their news stories from the clutter. The business culture imposes itself on the journalistic culture. In the contest between the two cultures, business usually triumphs," Auletta wrote.
Whoa, way to bring us down, Ken! Slate's Jacob Weisberg is more succinct: ""I think the print media's credibility issues have been largely overwhelmed by its economic issues."
And, you know, with the Times culling a hundred reporters today, yeah, we'd have to agree that no one's paying attention to their "credibility" anymore.
Earlier this month, crushing rains left 20 people dead and over 20,000 stranded when overwhelming rainfall left five feet of standing water in the low-lying areas. This is on top of already taxed landscapes that flooded when melting Himalayan glaciers burst the 200 rivers that web across the country last year. Bangladesh under water is seeming like a real and permanent possibility.
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — whose claims are usually conservative — said that Bangladesh is heading to lose 17 percent of its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050. That's like California and New York drowning, and the whole Midwest ceasing production of food.
If this happens, more than 20 million Bangladeshis will be without a patch of land to stand on. Though hardship in the country isn't entirely recent: since 1971, Bangladesh has endured over 200 disasters that have left a total of 500,000 dead and affected a total of 500 million people.
And I haven't even said anything about the plague of rats that's consuming all of their food. A plague of rats. I wish, wish there was more room for stories like this in the general consciousness — shouldn't we be hearing about this every night? Not to dwell on the gloomy, but just knowing about this makes the answer to this question pretty clear to me.
Reuters - The Polish prosecutor's office is
investigating allegations that there was a CIA prison in Poland
where al Qaeda suspects were questioned and guards might have
used methods close to torture, the prime minister's top adviser
said on Friday.
Superstar MarketWatch media columnist 
