And… the hits just keep on comin'

From CJR, commentary on the scandals over at The New Republic and National Review Online:

NRO Joins TNR in Walk of Shame
Another day, another reporter making stuff up
By Paul McLeary

It looks like war-time fabrication isn’t just the domain of The New Republic anymore. The National Review’s W. Thomas Smith, a regular contributor and author of the magazine’s milblog The Tank, has been caught reporting fabrications fed to him by sources during a trip to Lebanon this fall. According to several critics—and Smith and the NRO themselves—Smith fell for the falsehoods his sources fed him completely, without ever bothering to try to corroborate or confirm them independently, while making it sound like he had witnessed more than he really had.

So, let's reflect a bit. You have Time magazine allowing Joe Klein to assert as fact items that are demonstrably false. When this is demonstrated, the Klein responds with "I have neither the time nor the inclination to determine who is right."

Then you have The National Review and The New Republic unquestioningly gobbling up Thomas Smith's every pronouncement when even rudimentary fact-checking would have shown his stories to be exaggerations or outright fabrications.

Al Franken was half right – The bias in media isn't just liberal/conservative – it's a lazy bias – but the lazy is applied to the ideas they are sure of. The ones they doubt, they will do their homework so you can crucify the opposition.

Lt. Col. Bob Bateman has it exactly right:

…what seems to have happened at the core of this issue was an editor’s willing suspension of disbelief because fact-checking was either “too hard” or because the storyline fit within their own vision of reality.

Or both.