From the LA Times via Yahoo:
The Sacramento Bee announced Thursday the resignation of an award-winning columnist, the latest in a series of cases across the nation in which journalists had been forced from their jobs because of questions about the veracity of their reporting.
In an explanation to readers, Bee Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez wrote that Diana Griego Erwin could not adequately answer questions that first arose last month about whether "people mentioned in several recent columns actually existed..."
The departure of Griego Erwin, who wrote three columns a week, continues the run of recent embarrassments for newspapers, many of which have cost writers their jobs.
Last week, USA Today Pentagon correspondent Tom Squitieri resigned under pressure after lifting quotes from another newspaper and using other quotes without attribution.
That followed on the heels of the resignation of veteran Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Al Levine, who pilfered information from two Florida newspapers without crediting them.
Los Angeles Times reporter Eric Slater was dismissed last month when editors at the newspaper could not verify information in an article he wrote about fraternity hazing at Cal State Chico.
The recent headliner in the string of news scandals was bestselling author, sports columnist and TV personality Mitch Albom, who was suspended from the Detroit Free Press for describing a scene in the stands at an NCAA basketball tournament game before the game had been played.
Most of these firings are due to nothing more than plain laziness and/or the desire to take credit for other peoples' work. Yes, that's disturbing, but it's not nearly as bad as what would seem to be the fanaticism of these "journalists" like Ms. Griego Erwin who make up stories and people out of thin air.
Think about it: their rationale seems to be: "Even though I can't seem to find any real people who will illustrate my point of view, I know that my point of view is correct, so what's the harm in making them up?"
They just know that their opinion is shared by millions upon millions of people, so why do the work of actually going out and finding said people.
Or, worse yet, they can't find any real people who actually agree with them, but it must be a fluke, because they know that they're right. It's the arrogance of the Leftist elites.
Either way, it's a perfect illustration of the Leftist-run MSM.
The real problem with these so-called "journalists" is their inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Some of the best newspaper writing of the past 30 years came from guys like Mike Royko and Lewis Grizzard, who drew from a cast of fictional characters based on people they knew and cared about. Their work was clearly humorous, and their readers could clearly understand that the characters were indeed both fictional and based on reality. These contemporary idiots don't know people outside of their tight little cliques so they can't build an argument the way Royko and Grizzard (who both ran very afoul of the Political Correctness police in their later years) did so well using their casts of characters. The fact that most of these people have no sense of humor about anything at all can't be overestimated, nor can their sense of their own importance. Their talent, however, is another story.
ReplyDeleteGood post!