Press: "too willing to throw skepticism to the wind"

[hoosier]

In the wake of the Newsweek scandal, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen offers a defense of the post-Vietnam news media:

"By Tuesday the critical blogs had been joined by the Wall Street Journal. It opined that the error stemmed from the press's--and Newsweek's--basic "mistrust of the military that goes back to Vietnam." Here the Journal has a point, but it makes it sound as if that mistrust is totally unearned. The lies of Vietnam--beginning with the murky cause for the war, the Gulf of Tonkin incident--were legion and well documented. Had reporters not taken a lesson from all this--had we not learned something from the revelations of the Pentagon Papers and the later confessions of Robert McNamara--then we would truly be unqualified to practice our profession. Skepticism is to journalists what faith is to the clergy."

But Newsweek's problem arose from credulity, not skepticism. The magazine was too willing to believe a story that made the military look bad (and that came from a Pentagon source, to boot). This whole problem might have been avoided if someone at Newsweek had been skeptical enough to ask: How do you flush a book down a toilet, anyway?

A little skepticism likewise could have saved CBS from that fraudulent National Guard story, and the whole press corps from the problems it is now having after flogging Joe Wilson's unsubstantiated allegation that his wife had been illegally "outed."

The trouble with American journalism, in short, isn't that it's too skeptical, but that it's too willing to throw skepticism to the wind when it suits the agenda of proclaiming every war a Vietnam and every Republican president a Nixon.

- Opinion Journal