Likelihood of Success

How tawdry the Beauchamp story got at The New Republic! I’ve weighed in on their motivation already. Now they are hunkering down, circling wagons. The first order of business , described by Pajamas Media (in a piece linked to not only by PM biggie Glenn Reynolds, but even Matt Drudge — is that a first?), was finding and locating the mole within, former assistant Robert McGee:

Shortly after 7 AM on Thursday, July 26, McGee got a short phone call from The New Republic’s publisher. The magazine staff had tracked his anonymous web postings to his work station near the publisher’s office. Her message was short: “Your services were no longer needed.”

The magazine was at least as consumed by finding the whistle-blower (McGee) than in presenting a full accounting to its readers.

That’s not particularly surprising. No organization wants to be second-guessed by an insider who is no longer loyal, regardless of his idealism.

McGee has been out since college—and noted that few on the Right had raised any issues about his interest in men. He sometimes openly mentioned it on posts on Little Green Footballs. “No one ever made a big deal out of it,” he says, until the Huffington Post did. Then the stomach turning part, the now-inevitable personal attack — and, once again, some of the same people who decry disagreement on same-sex marriage as Nazism use their victim’s homosexuality as a weapon against him (NSFW), but McGee was already public about his predilections and the attack against him only demonstrated the left’s hypocrisy.

Here’s where I get exercised, however:

Still, McGee isn’t bitter. He thinks he did the right thing and has plenty of good references from prior temp jobs to get a new gig. His interview with PajamasMedia.com was his first and his last. He just got a cease-and-desist letter from The New Republic; he won’t be doing any more interviews.

Oh, please! What legal sanction could they possibly be threatening him with? I would love to see that letter.

But, what a sordid exercise.

Oh, we’ve said for a long time that journalism is something you do, not something you are. But now the returns are in, and something else that bloggers have been saying all along is also true: Journalism, at least at newspapers (that’s the “mainstream press,” folks), is mostly something you do wrong:

The average newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections if Scott R. Maier’s research is any guide.

Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a forthcoming research paper his findings that fewer than 2 percent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.

Everyone — all people, bar none — who has ever been interviewed or quoted in a newspaper has been misquoted, and not just once. (That certainly includes me.) Even assuming good faith, papers and magazines are just not particularly reliable. Neither are most sources of second- and third-hand information. This includes blogs, of course; and especially anonymous blogs.

This is not the same as asserting, however, that everything you know is wrong, i.e., in preposterous conspiracy theories are the “real truth.” These are always a lot wronger than even the accepted truth, and even when they do stumble on a legitimate truth being ignored by the mainstream, it has made some very smelly friends in the meantime.

Rather it is a formula for mature skepticism and a commitment to form one’s opinions about facts (for objectivity is subjective, after all) from a variety of fundamentally trustworthy sources, and then to align one’s views squarely, and accurately, with mine.