Wag the dog

Howard Kurtz told Megyn Kelly last night . . . the decision by Rolling Stone not to fire anyone involved . . . “one of the worst journalistic scandals in the last half-century.” In one sense, that may overstate the issue, as other scandals have involved deliberate fabulism on the part of the reporter rather than the source — Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke are all examples, the last of whom won a Pulitzer for her false reporting.

Finding a parent or volunteer or administrator who stole money from your school or city government is not "worst" because it's criminal and deliberate. It's a relatively rare criminal act, something at the extreme, that almost never involves an amount of money that is material to the entity.

But the stuff that's done casually and pervasively, that's the damaging stuff. Rolling Stone is just a rare case where they've been caught. LAGuy says there's nothing inherently wrong with agenda journalism, but of course there is. Right off the bat it's a failure. It won't be fixed by prophylactic measures such as checking your premises. And when it is the dominant mode of production, then we simply don't have journalism. A shame, really, and probably fatal.