Twice in recent weeks big news outfits embarrassed themselves when affiliated Internet operations ignored basic principles of journalistic practice. What's apparent is that although legacy media may regard their Web sites as domesticated showcases for traditional work, heeding the same rules, the Internet is no petting zoo. It's a wilderness, and the wildlife has free-ranging ideas of their own about what they should be doing.
When political candidates say things that aren't true they're exploiting the marketplace of ideas at its weakest point. That's because although the marketplace handles the clash of opinion reasonably well, it has never done a good job filtering out falsity.
For a while, it looked as if U.S. politics had entered a new era in the way presidential campaigns were conducted and covered. For people who grieved over the decay of electioneering into bloopers and bites, it was an encouraging moment.
A curious, slow-motion momentum is building for new rules on online privacy. The Federal Trade Commission, after three years of inquiries, sent a report to Congress in June with sobering findings about just how thoroughly Internet companies are tracking their customers' Web use so they can be targeted with advertising. Committees of both the Senate and the House held hearings this summer.
From all the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth, you'd think the story the news media missed was one of huge consequence, like going to war on fabricated grounds. Instead, it was an affair involving a once-viable presidential candidate, ex-U.S. Sen. John Edwards, and a videographer who worked for his campaign.
Apparently, Barack Obama sells. According to The New York Post, the July 21 New Yorker magazine issue with the satiric cover cartoon of Barack as an Islamist and wife Michelle as an armed militant sold 75,000 newsstand copies, compared with an average 43,000. Time magazine, the leading newsweekly, says its five covers this year featuring Obama, Hillary Clinton or both sold either ''significantly'' above average or above average. (Its single John McCain cover sold below average.) Time's 2006 Obama...
FERNEY-VOLTAIRE, France -- In a park near the center of this serene town on the Swiss border is a glass-and-concrete community center named for Jean Calas, an 18th century merchant who was put to death for hanging his son.
Amid the dismal reports of cutbacks, layoffs, fear and trembling in the country's newsrooms, the birth of Pro Publica has been reason for cheer. It's the dazzling new investigative reporting outfit, a nonprofit venture funded with $10 million a year from a California philanthropy to hire two dozen top-dog journalists to 'focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with `moral force,' '' it says.
David Sedaris is a hugely successful humorist who has been pushed into a revealing literary mini-scandal after The New Republic ran a long article that concluded that his best-selling books, which he characterizes as factual, make notable use of fabrication.
