Today's Baltimore
City Paper has a great article summarizing the media complicity and laziness surrounding Maryland's spiralling Oreos not-thick-as-locusts story.
Cookie Monster
Baltimore City Paper
11/23/05
By Gadi Dechter
A few more thoughts and then a related request on the B-side...
Included in the story are a timeline of media references and mucho background on how this false story has escalated to quasi-urban legend status being reported from as far away as London and Chicago, all with little to no fact-checking on the part of journalists. Moreover, Dechter provides great analysis on the media's pseudo-balance, such as:
So what actually happened? "The answer seems to be," the Sun's Green says, "that it is not possible to get a definitive answer one way or another."
And yet for three years, many reporters, columnists, editorial pages, and pundits have produced definitive-sounding reports of the Oreo story, despite there being no published news report that has independently confirmed that Oreo cookies were even present at the debate.
A LexisNexis search shows that only people directly connected to the Republican Party have ever been quoted attesting to the accuracy of any version of the Oreo story.
That hasn't stopped The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Sun, the (London) Daily Telegraph, the Associated Press, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, and this paper, among others, from reporting as fact, without transparent sourcing or attribution, some version of the incident over the years.
Of the two newspapers that have most frequently discussed the event, the Sun's reporting has been largely circumspect, typically reporting the incident as a claim made by Republicans. The Washington Times, by contrast, has more freely propagated the most incendiary version of the incident, repeatedly reporting as a given fact that Steele was "pelted" by cookies at the debate.
And now for something not-so-completely different...
I'm working on a report which discussed media laziness and the impact on politics. I recall reading about several incidents (esp. last year during the campaign season) about conservative 'plants' acting as innocent 'man on the street' types who were interviewed for their take on the candidates by unsuspecting reporters.
But... I'm having trouble finding sources for those incidents.
Does anyone have any material that could help me out? Newspaper or magazine articles... Links to TV news transcripts... Blogs that posted analyses and background info on the culprits... etc.
Thanks everyone and Happy Thanksgiving!