"Alleged"
It seems an innocuous enough little word on the face of it, but when used by L.A. Times reporter Meredith Blake in her article, entitled Republican Convention's Noteworthy Media Moments Few, Far Between, it becomes emblematic of so much of what is wrong with the mainstream media today.
http://www.latimes.com/...
Here she is writing about Chris Matthews' infamous take down of Reince Priebus on Morning Joe last Monday:
In order to stand out, Jarvis claims, media personalities have to resort to histrionics. Witness MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, whose dressing down of Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus during an appearance on "Morning Joe" went viral early in the week. Matthews, incensed by Romney's ill-advised birth certificate joke and alleged distortions of Obama's welfare policies, accused the GOP of race-baiting
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Got that? Alleged. Even though every single fact-checker on the planet has declared the Romney campaign's assertion that Obama has dropped the work requirement for welfare to be a pants-on-fire lie, the best this reporter, Meredith Blake, can come up with is calling the charge "alleged."
Now, I realize that her assignment was to write a politically neutral media puff-piece, but even under that circumstance, shouldn't anyone who calls herself a "journalist" be willing to do some actual journalism? Honestly, if I, who never took a course in journalism, can know that the assertion is a bald-faced lie, certainly she can know it. And, if she doesn't, might I suggest she spend a few seconds finding out if the charge is true or not. It's really not that difficult. And once she found out the truth, would it really have tarnished her reputation as a "fair-and-balanced" reporter to have left out the "alleged"? By adding it in, she befogs the situation and leads people to believe there are two sides to the allegation when there is really only one. Ms. Blake became a journalist for this? In fact, she's doing the exact opposite of what a true journalist is supposed to do.
Perhaps it's unfair of me to pick on this one person for doing what so many so-called journalists do every day of the week. But I think this practice really needs to be called out whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head. The purpose of journalism is to inform the public of what is going on in the world, and if journalists fail to do that, they are not only not doing the job for which they are being paid, they are misleading the very public they are supposed to be enlightening! If we can't trust reporters to tell us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, how are we as a free people - who don't have the resources at our fingertips that journalists do for finding out the truth - to cope with the many problems that confront us?
Which brings me back to my original question: Meredith Blake, why did you become a journalist?