I wonder if you’ve had a chance to see how the debate progressed. To make a loooooooong story short, Rosen shut down the thread because he doesn’t like people complaining of liberal media bias. I have commented on it at length here; neo-neocon has a post here. Somehow I have a feeling that we will be hearing about this thread for a while to come.

Thanks for that link; it’s amazing that the MSM don’t fixate on the people on that site that’ve been railroaded rather than the denizens of Club Gitmo. I hate to give those apparatchiks at PBS credit for anything but they broke with their Bill Moyers/Charlie Rose delusional snooze fests to give an excellent documentary of the Little Rascals case in North Carolina. Besides skewering those recovered-memory frauds, they featured a female prosecutor getting increasingly emotionally involved in the case until she reached the point of deranged inability to discern fact from dogma.

Of course the MSM can’t be bothered with such provincial fare; the likes of Ken Starr are the real threats to us regular citizens.

Lael Rubin – prosecutor in the McMartin case and progenitress of the publicity that led to the witch trials still draws a check from the county of Los Angeles. If investigative reporting actually existed within the national or regional press one might expect a story questioning why the person responsible for prosecuting the most expensive trial in California history to a series of hung juries still has a job with LA county.

I know that the Amirault case was the focus of Rabinowitz’s work. The impact of her work went far beyond that case, however. It brought a halt to a sordid practice exacerbated by the MSM – which could have brought the practice to a halt at any time by exercising a bit of common sense through an examination of lurid claims but instead printed tripe and fanned the flames to the point where as many as 1,000 people may have been unjustly convicted of crimes which they did not commit. (report)

Instead of lifting Rabinowitz and Rosett up as shining examples of what may be accomplished through actual investigative reporting, we are still seeing the lionization of FBI sock puppets Woodward and Bernstein, praised for their regurgitation of pap fed to them by an oath breaking Feeb with an ax to grind.

I’m not sure how the political/foreign affairs journos are going to remove the taint of the cesspool but I’m certain that they’re going to have to stop bathing in it daily as a first step.

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Aside from anything else—different fictional dog. It’s a fact.

And that notion died in what, 1785?

I think the hard sciences are no exception. I got pretty jaded as a grad student watching reputedly top journals let garbage slip in to papers by “big names” that they would never accept (and rightly so) from a less established researcher. I decided that if I was going to be in a field with lots of BS, I might as well be in a field where I get paid to shovel it.

Anyway, institutions like the LANL preprint server (with the delightful URL xxx.lanl.gov) are allowing people to bypass journals and their old boy gatekeepers. I saw one case where a paper was rejected by a top journal, sat on arXiv for a year racking up citations, only to have the journal back down and publish the paper. Nothing changed about the science. The editor just realized that the community was paying a lot of attention to this paper and skeedaddled to get back to the front of the parade.

Eventually, when some metric besides journal papers and citations is adopted for grant and tenure decisions, the journal system will collapse. Science will be better off, because part of your training as a scientist is sniffing the BS, and because public scrutiny will be much more fair and complete than secret decisions being made by direct competitors with a monetary interest in your failure. In other words, scientists don’t need anonymous, unaccountable reviewers deciding what they get to read. Sound familiar?

“In fact, a Rabinowitz anthology on that story would make an excellent read. Salem Witch Trials conducted “for the children” – and the scummy prosecutors with an eye for promoting themselves. Like, oh, Janet Reno, for example.”

Reno did her evil in Florida; the mutt in the Amirault case was Scott Harshbarger, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in Massachusetts. Rarely has the MSM dropped the ball and revealed their biases and indifference as much as in this case, where innocent people got railroaded and destroyed. Thanks to Rabinowitz’s efforts individuals donated their time and efforts to right this wrong. All the quisling politicians in Massachusetts should’ve been sent packing because of their indifference/cowardice/complicity in this case.

I wish Harshbarger and Reno could reap some consequences of their horrible actions. As for the MSM: Keep talking up that “truth to power” garbage. Lazy idiots.

Based on this evidence, the MSM attitude seems to be, “You think we’re not powerful and important? We’ll show you how powerful and important we are!”

It does not seem to have dawned on them yet that this behavior is self-destructive. Those who abuse power will have it taken away from them.

I’m sorry. The morning caffeine hasn’t kicked in. Are making a point about bias showing up in what the press doesn’t write, as well as what it (scribbles)?