Posted at 08:17 AM ET, 01/13/2012
Media news derivatives: Jan. 13
By Erik Wemple

In case you missed it—Jeez, how did the Tennessean manage to scoop the entire Beltway press corps in nailing the story about Johnny Depp and Tim Burton attending a Halloween party at the White House in 2009? Through good local reporting — that’s how.

Also: Stop the nonsense about “keeping Aaron Rodgers off the field.”

Also also: Please let it not be said that the Daily Caller doesn’t run corrections. It did that just this week, reporting that a guy in an argyle sweater didn’t belong to the age demographic into which the Daily Caller originally placed him.

Elsewhere:

?Public awareness that it’s perfectly fine for a person to run a super PAC that supports his business partner has never been higher, thanks to this Stephen Colbert ploy:

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?Bill O’Reilly takes after ABC for being “dishonest”in characterizing his characterization of Michelle Obama as “angry.” In the segment, O’Reilly says he is “not going to let” this presidential race “degenerate into a race-baiting, media propaganda exposition.” Good thing he has such power!

?Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan makes quick work of an Oklahoma legislator who wants to impose a tax on newspapers.

?Yesterday was Art Brisbane Day at the New York Times. The guy penned a note asking whether the Times should act as a “Truth Vigilante.” On the question of fact-checking, Brisbane wrote:

…how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

’Course, folks figured that acting as a truth vigilante was already in the paper’s job description. When you’re writing under the banner of the New York Times and you ask such a question, the Internet quickly becomes your torture chamber, courtesy of Salon, Poynter, Romenesko, and many others. Jack Shafer of Reuters ran a bit of interference for Brisbane, essentially editing him:

At the risk of being the ombudsman’s ombudsman, what he was trying to ask his readers was how much time and effort the Times should put in refuting or contesting every flawed expression of “fact” that they come across when writing about newsmakers. Of course, Brisbane did himself no favor by labeling the aggressive refutation of squirrelly facts as “truth vigilantism” in his headline.

But to be fair to Brisbane — and I promise not to make this a habit — I think he was asking how fully reporters must tweeze every utterance spoken by newsmakers. Politics teems with gray areas and half-truths. If a reporter were to investigate every assertion of fact — assuming that that’s possible on deadline — the story he was supposed to be working on would dissolve into pixel dust. Infinite skepticism is swell, but it requires infinite fact-checking, and who has time for that?

Brisbane struggled all day to add clarity and spin to his original post, but Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson sort of had the last word on the the matter when she wrote a little note saying, more or less, Hey Art, we’ve got that covered.

By Erik Wemple
 | 
08:17 AM ET, 01/13/2012

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