Fauxtography, From Michelle Malkin's Hot Air Vent

This is just one of many examples of faked photography. The list of duped news sources reads like a "Who's Who" of journalism - Reuters, Associated Press, New York Times, Time Magazine, US News & World Report, BBC, etc. & on & on. If I were disingenuous, I would say I was shocked, but in truth such sloppy and biased journalism meets my low expectations of the Main Stream Media.

Where is the media outrage that their once proud profession is being dragged through such a gutter of lying and falsification? In the military, we had a crude saying pertaining to being careful with the things that are important to you, "Don't shit in your messkit."

Doesn't anyone in the Main Stream Media understand that they are valuable only to the extent they are honest and credible?

In my field, accounting, Arthur Anderson lost sight of the fact that their very existence depended upon their trustworthiness and independence, and now they are no more. Reuters, Associated Press, New York Times, Time Magazine, US News & World Report, BBC, etc., seem to be headed in the same direction, following the lead of the increasingly irrelevant CBS News. After the Mike Wallace "interview" of Ahmadinejad this Sunday on "60 Minutes," irrelevant will be one of the nicest things said of CBS News. Among many words, "senility" and "butt kissing" leap to the top of the list.

Each time I remark that television and print journalism can't get any worse, they prove me a liar.

My first year of college, 1960 at Humboldt State near Eureka, (actually, in Arcata, the Green Capital of the World), idealistic fire burned in my eighteen-year old mind and I wanted to be a journalist and change the world by providing the truth that would set it free. It didn't take me long working for the college newspaper, The Lumberjack, to realize that I would be the one seeking freedom, freedom from the tyranny of my Editor. I changed majors. Idealistic fire met cold realism. Far from being fueled by idealism, journalists seemed to draw from a deep well of cynicism. But at least they were meticulously honest cynics.

Now evidence pours in every minute, every day, that cynicism is still in fashion, but meticulous honesty isn't.