Talking Points Memo | Annals of Reporting:
[T]his morning I was alerted to an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University. The sum of the piece is that the blogosphere is as rife with disputation as it is thin on information, or more specifically, reporting, writing that demands “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance.”
[…]
I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to remember what he’d written in his own opinion column[…].To which I got this response: “I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples … ”
And this is from someone who teaches journalism?
Perhaps I’m naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.
Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.
I remember this guy when he was at the Atlanta papers: 10 years haven’t improved him. What’s ironic about this is the claim that bloggers don’t have editors to keep them on the reservations, that discipline and true attention to detail can only be learned at a Real Newspaper, preferably after getting a degree from a reputable J school.
So a professor at a J school, who used to work at a big newspaper, allows an editor to insert copy into an OpEd, copy he doesn’t know enough about the subject to object to, and we’re supposed to take him seriously?
Excellent.
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