The pros from Dover.
Bob Somerby is as ever on the case, and Lord knows the media is providing him with every reason in the world to howl, and Atrios is all over Jack Kelley and the festering illness of which he’s merely a symptom, but it’s the pseudonymously lower-case skimble with the perfect parable to put the journalistic integrity of today’s fourth estate into proper perspective:
Sometimes it’s not an ethics dilemma, just dumb stuff, that tarnishes credibility. MSNBC got gigged last week when Deborah Norville reported a federal study that supposedly said 58 percent of all exercise done in the United States occurs in those TV infomercials for body-sculpting workout machines.
But the story was a spoof from The Onion, a satirical newspaper and online publication. The network said it inadvertently dropped the attribution in picking up the story, but c’mon—most of the exercise done in America is on TV? Shouldn’t somebody in the control room have said, “Hey, wait just a minute …”
Oh, pshaw. Why start now?
