ABC News Imitates The New Republic
facts? we don't need no stinkin' facts
By streiff Posted in Culture — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
ABC News has joined The New Republic, Reuters, and the New York Times on the ash heap of journalistic integrity.
For five years a consultant named Alexis Debat worked for ABC news and has provided information to their reporters. Now it turns out that quite a few of the interviews he alleges to have conducted, interviews which found their way into ABC news reporting, simply did not take place.
Alexis Debat, the terrorism consultant who put his name on a bogus interview with Barack Obama, now admits he never spoke to several other prominent people whose interviews were published in a French magazine under his byline.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan "has never spoken with Debat," said Tracy Locke, associate publisher of Penguin Press, which is bringing out Greenspan's memoir. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she never talked with Debat either. "Perhaps he cribbed it from somewhere," said her spokesman, Brendan Daly.
Debat, 35, also published interviews in Politique Internationale with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg without speaking to them, according to ABCNews.com.
read on
ABC News, unlike Fred Foer at The New Republic, did the right thing and fired Debat when it was discovered, five years after his hiring, that his academic credentials were fraudulent. But we still don't know the extent of Debat's fraudulent reporting. The instances revealed thus far have not come from ABC.
The fact is that if you put weak personalities under enough pressure they will do most anything to remove the pressure. If you add a monumental ego to the mix and a corporate culture which is at best credulous when it comes to dealing with colleagues you have the recipe for repeated instances of fraud.
I think we can confidently predict that people like Stephen Glass, Jason Blair, Mary Mapes and Scott Beauchamp are the mere tip of the iceberg.
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ABC News Imitates The New Republic 5 Comments (0 topical, 5 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
therefore I did."
I mean all of those mainstream outlets have editors and staff that review the work of their reporters to insure accuracy. It's only those guys in the blogosphere who are typing in their jammies with no supervision that you have to worry about.
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CongressCritter™: Never have so few felt like they were owed so much by so many for so little.
And he was a staff expert on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Middle East, Terrorism/National Security affairs at the Nixon Center. I'd bet someone over there is red in the face as well.
At least ABC didn't compound matters by trying to defend his reporting when it learned of the problems as did CBS with the fake national guard documents, or the New Republic with Beauchamp.
The state of journalism in 2007 is such, that no one should be surprised by this. In fact, much like with scandals in sports, I simply await the next one to come along.
Journalism (as practiced, not the industry) is dangerously close to falling into a state of perpetual corruption.
R.J.