McMegan wrote a piece about journalistic fraud.
It's essentially impossible to prevent journalistic fraud--if I tell you that I saw someone doing something, there's rarely a videotape of the event. If I'm doing an interview on the cell phone, there isn't a recording, either. And so our readers have to trust us.We don't.
I'll leave it to Susan to find examples of the countless times McMegan relied on unnamed sources and vague "my liberal friends say..." attributions. There was a "local" (meaning black) woman on a bus who happened to love McMegan's gentrifying presence and echoed all her views of the neighborhood in an extremely Friedmanesque column which I'm too lazy to find, as well. She only really names sources if she's actually interviewing them, or maybe if it's a name she can drop. I think this column was basically her trolling for links from her critics and a backlash traffic spike, and she knows how full of shit she is to even glance in the direction of this topic. Or maybe I'm giving her too much credit. But I'm not worried that she'll see a big spike in traffic from us.
Her work is so truly awful she really shouldn't be paid for it by anyone, anywhere, and thus this blog still has some purpose. Joy.
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1 comment:
No, we don't have to just trust journalists. There are really only a few reasons not to disclose the identity of an interviewee; because their safety or livliehood is at risk but their story is important enough to tell. Or because they are fictional. Otherwise, you can trust a journalist going on the record with source names because they are accountable through public records and libel laws. Fraud is incredibly easy in journalism. Hence the career of Megan.
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