Time Magazine Crashed And Burned Edition

There is so much to like about this post from Jamison Foser about the puff piece on Glenn Beck which makes the cover of the new edition of Time magazine. But the ending is really what sums up everything that is wrong with the piece and is wrong with our mainstream media in general now:

At this point, you have to wonder if the article was some kind of performance art, designed to prove the very skepticism about the media it seems to lament. See, this very Time article was the product of a "dishonest, incompetent, conniving media, which refuse to tell the truth." And not because I happen to despise Glenn Beck, but because there simply were not 1.7 million people at last week's protest. Because Time damn well knows there were not 1.7 million people at last week's protest. And because Time refused to say there were not 1.7 million people there. Not only that -- Time also insisted on pretending that only "liberal sources" say there were 70,000 people there, when, in fact, the D.C. Fire Department said there were 70,000 people. That's a dishonest and incompetent refusal to tell the truth. Actually, it's worse than a refusal to tell the truth: It's a dishonest and incompetent false claim.

At the beginning of his article, Von Drehle referred to a recent poll that found "record-low levels of public trust of the mainstream media." Guess what? Articles like this are why nobody trusts the media. When you pretend that obviously false claims about crowd sizes are valid, people won't trust you. When you pretend that only liberals say 70,000 people actually attended last week's protest, people won't trust you. They shouldn't trust you. You aren't trustworthy. You are doing your job dishonestly and incompetently.

And that dishonesty, that incompetence, is what enables Glenn Beck. When Glenn Beck says 1.7 million people were at the protest, and the Washington, D.C., Fire Department says 70,000, and Time runs an article saying conservatives and liberals disagree about the crowd size, that enables Glenn Beck's lies.

No wonder Beck liked the article so much.

Its worth your time to click on the link and read the whole thing because it is as thorough a take down of this kind of he said she said article as you will find anywhere. But the end result still ends up being the same as so eloquently put by Mr Foser. Its not just that this is a bad piece of journalism, its that it actually harms the readers of Time magazine when they will not call a lie a lie. And it also harms them in that by not calling a lie a lie it could possibly legitimize the lie and needlessly misinform them. It seems that good Villager outlets like Time magazine just will not figure that out until they go out of business, and I am cheering that day on every single day.