| Accountability, media style. A Facebook friend suggests Ms. McCurdle should be axed for that paragraph alone. Personally, I think The Beast's economics and finance correspondent should keep her job if she sticks to her area of expertise (and as long as she doesn't suggest we gang-rush Wall Street). But the post got me thinking of media figures I would like to see fired - and never re-hired for their egregious affronts to journalism (not to mention public intelligence).
You'd think such a list would be comprised primarily for people guilty of the worst affront possible in journalism, which is to make outlandish predictions without offering evidence for why anyone should believe them or to get something horribly, factually incorrect. You know, like when Peggy Noonan wrote the Sunday before the presidential election that she knew a Romney victory was a lock because of her intuition based on yard signs. Instead, the list The Michigan View's Kathy Hoekstra would most like to see be fired include four people who advocated in favor of gun control, three sports writers, and a vague attack on Soledad O'Brien. None of the people on the list were there for making horrible factual errors. If you want to know why the media in this country sucks so bad, it's because there is no accountability to making errors. In fact, after the Iraq invasion last decade, some of the people most certain that there were WMDs there were promoted. |
