CJR's Campaign Desk Responds

Whenever I criticize someone in print (or in pixels) I like to give them a chance to respond. So, after thwacking the Columbia Journalism Review's "Campaign Desk" website for its insufficient and inaccurate coverage of RatherGate, I asked its managing editor, Steve Lovelady, for a response.

Steve was kind enough to send me a short piece he'd written on the subject at another website, and since I couldn't find a link to it on its original site, I have reproduced it on TheGantelope.

If you read it, I think you'll agree that it doesn't address the concerns I raised in my earlier castigation of Campaign Desk.

In his e-mail, Steve pointed to critical coverage of CBS in the Washington Post, ABC News, and the LA Times. But that's beside my point. I was arguing that Campaign Desk had all but ignored the story, and what little coverage it gave was patently flawed. No response on that score.

As for the broader question about the media at large, Steve hasn't convinced me that any of the MSM should be trusted further than we can throw them. Yes, a few news organizations have jumped on CBS's bleeding carcass, but that does not prove that they aren't also producing shoddily researched and biased pieces of their own on a regular basis. Finding fault with someone else is always easier than finding fault with oneself. (That's one reason why I like to let the people I criticize respond to me, to see if I've missed the obvious because of some bias of my own that I can't see.)

Campaign Desk and the big media world have a very long road ahead of them to prove to the public that we should believe anything they say that cannot be independently verified, and to believe that they are not filtering out news that is inconsistent with their biases.