WHY NO OUTRAGE OVER KELLY? Yesterday, we had some thoughts on Jack Kelly, who was discovered making stuff up at USA Today.
Nick Gillespie of Reason wonders why there isn’t the same level of outrage over Kelly as there was over Jayson Blair. Leftwing Blogger Atrios believes it’s because of racism, but as one of Gillespie’s commenters notes, “USA Today isn’t the Times, and hasn’t been (as far as I know) under scrutiny for editorial office shenanigans”.
It’s worth remembering that Blair’s firing came after three years of Howell Raines reworking the Times from a fairly staid, if left-leaning publication, to an activist one, all the while claiming:
Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and that strives to be independent of undue commercial or governmental influence….But we don’t wear the political collar of our owners or the government or any political party. It is that legacy we must protect with our diligent stewardship. To do so means we must be aware of the energetic effort that is now underway to convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise of, in disinformation, of alarming proportions, this attempt to convince the audience of the world’s most ideology-free newspapers that they’re being subjected to agenda-driven news reflecting a liberal bias.
And as Bernard Goldberg made clear in Arrogance, stories that the rest of the media picks up on usually begin in the Times–and rarely, if ever, in USA Today.
UPDATE: I just checked Memorandum and Technorati, and found that over 25 blogs, many of whom could safely be classified as conservative, or at least, right-leaning, have linked to the AP story on Kelly.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Welcome OxBlog readers!
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