MSM Breaks Promise to Distrustful Public
With the public increasingly distrustful of MSM, the major papers made a commitment last year to reduce the number of anonymous sources quoted in their “news” stories. Jack Shafer, writing for Slate, finds that this is a commitment that hasn’t been honored:
This morning, for example, I baited an anonymice trap by querying Nexis for all stories containing the words “senior administration official” and “President Bush” over the past week from America’s top dailies. As you may recall, the president toured Europe last week and met with state leaders.
I figured a Nexis dump would trap a few of the contemptible rodents, and I was right. The worst offender over this interval was the Los Angles Times, followed by the New York Times, the Washington Post (owned by the company that owns Slate), the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. The good news is that I found no infested clips in USA Today, which is more vigilant than most papers in eradicating anonymice, and none in the Wall Street Journal via its subscription site.
