Or they could have used the tried and true liberal response when caught flat out lying,

HEY, WE WERE JUST KIDDING, IT WAS A JOKE.
YOU NEOCONS ARE JUST TOO STUPID TO GET IT.

Semper Fi

I have said it before and I'll say it again, TNR doesn't need to come clean, fire people, or do any of the things they rightly should do. They know who their audience is and their audience doesn't care one bit about truth. They care about the narrative. So TNR and their audience are in scynch here. That's all that matters to them.

Bob -- Kudos to you, Michelle and Michael for staying on TNR's case. By all means keep up the good work.

However, at this point TNR has doubled-down twice in the Beauchamp affair and lost. For anyone who cares to know, it's clear TNR has once again fobbed off agenda-driven fables as insightful truths without fact-checking. Then they went on to lie about their fact-checking, their intended follow-up, and the Army's handling of Beauchamp.

At this point, what more does TNR have to lose? Why not continue to stonewall?

The really sad thing about this whole fiasco is the willingness of TNR to abandon legitimate journalism to propagandize.
What is even sadder is the fact that so many news and information journals are doing the same thing every day of the week.

Which raises the question -- was American journalism always this bad? Is the only difference now with the internet and blogs that the media get caught like this over and over again?

Huxley - My best guess would be yes and no. Yes, there were always some lazy reporters who made up details when getting the real story would have been too much work. In the past, the newspaper-reading public didn't have the tools to catch them, so exactly how many reporters "phoned it in" (or telegraphed it in) over the course of history cannot be known.

And no, not all reporters were like this. Look, for instance, at the WWII reporting. There were always good reporters as well, people taking the time (like Mr. Owens did) to get all the facts and get the story right.

In the end, it boils down to human nature, which never changes. There are heroes and there are zeroes, and there have always been both.

Robin -- I've noticed since I was a teenager that newspaper accounts of events I experienced often got a lot of details wrong in a lazy or careless way.

But I don't remember the "news" news so propagandized as it is today, where editorializing creeps in everywhere and even fabricated evidence like Beauchamp or Rathergate or the Lancet study on Iraqi deaths are used to bolster agendas.

Perhaps I should look back and see.

I personally think the media has always been this way. Its just the explosion of information technology combined with the radicalization of our political discourse that makes it seem so bad now.

Congrats on the interview CY. You really hammered it home.

In the end it won't matter though. TNR is just a third tier declining rag now. They aren't going to clean this up because their audience doesn't want them to and from what I can tell they have no personal or organizational integrity pushing them to Do the Right Thing. They're just hunkering down waiting for it to go away.

Gentlemen, as a former managing editor of a newspaper, let me assure you that the quality of news reporting has declined measurably over the past 20 years, and most of the blame can be attributed to liberal J-schools, who are turning out agenda-driven graduates as brainwashed as students in a Pakistani madrassa. That is why you see little if any reaction within TNR, as they are convinced that they are telling the truth even when they are lying. They are nothing but brainwashed propagandists. Sickening, really.

Thanks for weighing in, TK! That's my sense of it too.

Back in the eighties, I was your basic San Francisco leftie. While I was often unhappy with the balance of news coverage, the editorials on the editorial page, and the accounts of what government officials said, I never had the impression that the media itself was foisting outright propaganda disguised as news.

Not that long ago, I think the staffs of most newspapers and magazines would have been deeply ashamed if they were caught pushing a story based on fabricated evidence. That's not true today. Mostly they brass it out, like Rather, Mapes and now Foer.

Assuming that the comments above are correct, that TNR has no reason to come clean because they are giving their subscribers exactly what they want, what leverage does Bob or anyone else have to get the truth out or to make anyone pay a price?

One wonders where the usual lefty suspects are...

>...what leverage does Bob or anyone else have to get the truth out or to make anyone pay a price?

Exactly. I don't see it happening. I enjoy watching Michelle Malkin's ambush attempt in the TNR office and I appreciate Bob's continuing efforts to cut the ground out from underneath TNR, but these people seem shameless.

Rather, Mapes and CBS never apologized or even acknowledged using forged docs on 60 Minutes, why should TNR and Foer apologize for Beauchamp?

There are still a number of people in the newspaper business who were trained prior to the J-school madrassas, many in positions of authority. The recent outrage in Seattle, I believe it was, where the reporters in the newsroom applauded the resignation of Karl Rove is a case in point. The editor, who was obviously trained at another place and time, took control of the situation. One such as he is rare in the media these days, but these are the ones we appeal to for justice.

Mark

The price that Bob and others are forcing TNR (CBS, etc.) to pay is very high--trust in the publication. Ultimately that is death--once a majority of readers/viewers believe that the publication can no longer be trusted, fewer will read it and even fewer will risk ridicule citing it.

CBS understood that calculus very well when they dumped Dan and Mary Mapes. TNR clearly does not understand it at all.

Templar

Old-school journalists appear to be a dying breed. At least at the major dailies. In ten years that editor will be gone and the newsroom would cheer at an assasination attempt of their politial enemies.

I still don't really understand what is so special about a j-school degree. A college degree would be useful--general knowledge, ability to learn, and abilty to write/speak--but a good english or history degree with science distribution would accomplish that quite nicely. All the rest should be learned via mentoring, training, ojt. Wrong?

It is now obvious that the editors at TNR have now teamed up with OJ in the quest for the truth.

A truth that can be found in any mirror.