US newsrooms, more geared toward rooting out scandal than generating it, are emerging from a torrid 12 months that severely dented press credibility and dethroned a brace of high-profile editors.
May 1 marks the first anniversary of the resignation from The New York Times of reporter Jayson Blair, whose exposure as a serial plagiarist and fabricator plunged the newspaper into a crisis that eventually forced out executive editor Howell Raines.
The Blair fiasco, which was accorded blanket coverage because of the Times's reputation, was just one of a string of similar scandals at other prestigious news organizations that triggered a bout of intense soul-searching in the media industry as a whole.
The door had barely swung shut on Blair when another Times journalist -- Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Rick Bragg -- was forced to quit for his extensive and unattributed use of material from freelance journalists.
Then there was Associated Press reporter Christopher Newton, fired after the news agency found it could not verify the existence of more than 45 people and a dozen organizations cited in 40 articles he had written.
In April of last year, The Los Angeles Times sacked a staff photographer working in Iraq for electronically manipulating a picture showing a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians to take cover from a firefight.
Most recently, in March, the biggest-selling US newspaper, USA Today, exposed a former star foreign correspondent as a plagiarist and fabricator in a front-page story.
The paper said Pulitzer Prize nominee Jack Kelley faked major stories, embroidered others with gory details and appeared to lift portions of material from other sources without attribution.
The fallout prompted the resignation last week of USA Today editor Karen Jurgensen.
While some observers categorize the spate of press scandals as an errant annus horribilis, others see it as symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise at a time when public trust has been battered by corporate fraud on Wall Street and questions over the motives behind the war in Iraq.
"The proper borderline between fiction and reality has never been less visible than it is today in our culture generally," said Mark Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University.
"Here we are living in a time when there's a genre called reality TV, which actually has nothing to do with reality at all," Miller said, adding that journalistic ethics had suffered as a result of so many news entities being absorbed by media conglomerates.
"The news division is expected to yield as much profit as the entertainment division and [is] subjected to the same ratings pressure," Miller said. "These instances of dishonesty and deceptiveness are often just indirect reflections of this fact."
Press scandals, however, are nothing new.
Prior to Blair's exposure, the most notorious case was that of Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict who never existed.
"And it goes back way beyond that," said Columbia University journalism professor Richard Wald, who cited the beloved Depression-era American comedian Will Rogers and his catchphrase, "All I know is what I read in the newspapers."
"It always got a big laugh," Wald said. "Why? Because everyone in the audience knew back then that what they read in the papers was nonsense."
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese