Remember Editor and Publisher editor Greg Mitchell’s recent attacks on bloggers while rationalizing the use of propaganda in some of the photojournalistic coverage of the Israel / Lebanon skirmish? Well, it seems old Greg maybe had a reason to pitch that particular fit of justification.
From Media Info, back in 2003, here’s Mr Mitchell:
Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally “turned off” the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?
I never found out. Oh, I went down to the falls, all right, but when I got there, I discovered that I just could not wander up to strangers (even dorky ones wearing funny hats and knee socks) and ask them for their personal opinions, however innocuous. It was a puffball assignment, but that wasn’t why I rebelled. I just could not bring myself to do it.
So I sat on a park bench and scribbled out a few fake notes and then went back to the office and wrote my fake story, no doubt quoting someone like Jane Smith from Seattle, honeymooning with her husband Oscar, saying something like, “Gosh, I never knew there was so much rock under there!”
Of course, I got away with it. There was no Jane Smith to complain about being misquoted, and no one was going to call all the Smiths in Seattle to find out if she really existed. I suppose the world was none the worse for it. As a story, it wasn’t exactly on a par with a sniper shooting up the suburbs of Washington.
Still, I felt bad about it for years and (obviously) have never forgotten it. On the other hand, I was, at the time, just 19, it was a summer internship, and I’d only been on the job about a month.
Gee, guess you didn’t feel badly enough, huh Greg?—though kudos for finally managing to forget it. Quite an act of personal heroism it must have taken to get on with your life like that.
Fortunately for us, though, Google never forgets.
It’s kind of like Rock’n’Roll that way.
(h/t Confederate Yankee)
“Fake, but accurate”?
TW: Is this guy serious?
Uh. A reporter that’s too shy to talk to people?
Shocking!
That’s exactly what I told my wife about the “incident” in the llama house.
Greg Mitchell: Douchebag.
Tell us a story, Greg!
Wait a friggin’ minute – this guy sits in judgment of media accuracy?
BECAUSE OF THE…yeah, you know what it is.
Funny how some people can forget about bogus incidents that they were a part of, and for others, the bogus account becomes “…seared, seared” into their memory!
Why is it ever time I see, hear or read some snotty reporter type I can easily imagine them being one of those kids in grade school who used to get the crap beat out of them for being a whiny teacher’s pet?
My impression was that he couldn’t bear to lower himself to conversing with (ick) tourists. Sit him down with Hugo Chavez and he’d be a regular Chatty Kathy, I reckon.
Hmmm….. I guess this is an excuse, but I think it’s a little disappointing that a young journalist would start out his career cynical and brazen to the point of lying. Chalk it up to all the layers.
Poor Ben Demenche, he should have just made shit up!
Now we know when the self-loathing began….
And we loathe them, too. So they got that goin’ for ‘em…
Yea, it apparently begins with tourists and ends with faked and staged newsphotos.
Sometimes I think that someone has trapped me in a perpetual Fellini movie. Clowns and fat prostitutes everywhere.
Is there anybody over there on the “other side” that has an ounce of honesty, integrity, strength, courage or talent? Seems to be just a bunch of lying, limp-wristed, mean spirited nancy-boys. And don’t forget Deb. She’s over there, too.
I’ll take “Clowns and fat prostitutes everywhere.” for $500.00 Alex……
and the answer is, “peculiar delusion that equates liberal condescention with with hallucinogenic Italian cinema.”
ticktockticktockticktock
I can see clearly now…..Thank you
</blockquote>I can see clearly now…..Thank you
<blockquote>
You do???!! How…what..why…oh…huh?
SEEEEEGERRRRRR!!!!!
Man I loved that guy growing up. What happened to man-rock? What happened to guys playin’ music like that?
This Mitchell guy sure is a chump. He’ll look nice on the mantle next to Rather and the Reuters photos though.
BECAUSE OF THE ROCK AND ROLL!!!
Actually – Google CAN be made to forget with the instruction robots.txt which tells search robots not to probe for anything ‘whatever’ in it, and also tells them to delete their caches of anything with that search term (shades of Stalin’s airbrushing?).
Hypocrisy isn’t tolerated by these people, it is celebrated.
Rebelled?
The more I read that piece, the more a peculiar lassitude creeps over my frontal lobe. Is he trying to sell some nobility in “rebeling” against the mighty editor? There is a weird honor coming clean on an inability to talk to creepy tourists?
Must. Stop. Reading… Crap, i have to clean up the drool AGAIN!
I guessing the dude looks as delusional as he is and no tourists would let him close enough to ask a question.
I’ll bet he froze up when he saw someone wearing a bolo tie.
It is sad that in his introduction to the news industry, he realized he could cheat and get away with it.
Ya suppose he typed a B where he meant to type a P?
B Moe sez:
That’s libtard for “cheated”.
Greg Mitchell, sniveling weasel or whiny bitch?
I already snarked at Mitchell on another blog, so in the interests of “fair and balanced” comments, didn’t we all love it when Reagan told the story about faking the sports broadcast?
Well Tim Blair’s got the Clowns, but I don’t suppose a guy in a Burqua robbing a bank counts as a fat prostitue, (although Fellini might have loved it).
Yes Turing, somewhat wierd
“Of course, I got away with it.” Natch!
Is it me or do leftists have a habit of keeping stuff secret for years and years and then disclosing it just when they need a publicity pop? The Grass is always greener over there I guess.
And no, I’m not suggesting that Niagra Falls Douchebag’s mea culpa is as important as Hitler Jungen Grass’ confession, I’m just noting that both a share the same spirit: the nobility of my revelation exhonerates my behavior.
And to bring it all back to Fellini’s clowns: those tears are now and have always been fake.
On the levels of morality, faking quotes from a puff piece is pretty small potatoes, reasonably on par with faking a sports broadcast. Neither are all that important, nor are they likely to cause anyone (outside of, say, some sports bettors) any harm.
Faking war news strikes me as a much, much more serious matter. Coming to the defense of faking war news is pretty serious, too. Toss in the fact that the person defending the fake news holds a position that’s supposed to be a press watchdog/moral authority, and the offense gets a bit more serious.
Toss in that the person defending faked war news started his journalism career faking news, and the serious moral offense gets that frisson of seeing a blowhard being exposed for the fake he has always been.
Rather like the reaction to Jimmy Swaggert’s fate, IMHO.
My impression was that he couldn’t bear to lower himself to conversing with (ick) tourists. Sit him down with Hugo Chavez and he’d be a regular Chatty Kathy, I reckon.
Yeah. How come the left has all kinds of self justification for their mediocracy, but you screw up just once and they’re all over ya.
Thanks PersonFromPorlock for turning me on to the Reagan’s story of a fake sports broadcast. Here’s the link.
It was an audition. Not quite the same as faking war photos, is it?
tw: view
View this great story about a great man. Who is not Greg Mitchell.
Alright, where’s the ‘dillo, Goldstein?
*snort*
klrfz1
Thanks for that. Many fond memories of Reagan. Back in 1984 I was a member of the “Old Guard”. Which to those of you don’t know is the Army’s branch of the Presidential Honor Guard. Reagan walked by me every morning for the 4 months that I had White House detail, and he never failed to greet us with a good morning and a hearty salute….
in the interests of “fair and balanced†comments, didn’t we all love it when Reagan told the story about faking the sports broadcast?
That’s really not the best way to describe it as he wasn’t passing it off as real to the general public.
I feel certain that PersonFromPorlock will work in the “Fake But Accurate” meme somehow, said creature already haven demonstrated an amazing ability for revising history.
That fucking liar! He quoted me verbatim for two whole fucking paragraphs! Little shit bastard. Best thing he ever wrote in his life!
So, the 19 yo little sh*t, a month on the job as a summer intern, couldn’t bring himself to do a basic task assigned to him, because? Well, he didn’t think the task worthy of him.
The task was practice, something small and not particularly consequential to the paper from a “having to get it right perspective”. But it was still important, not so much for the readers or the paper but for himself. It was a chance to train for the career he was pursuing.
But more importantly, and not that he knew it, he found himself confronted with the most important test to a reporter, reporting things truthfully. He failed and not just at the task. He failed the test—presenting the news truthfully. He had the choice and he lied; he simply made everything up.
And he still doesn’t know that he hasn’t changed much since his first chance.
anybody seen the varmint?
TW: lower, as in “search high and lower”
“Or”…?
When I was 19 I lied about liking the band Psychic TV.
But I lied to get into a girls pants. So its alright.
Totally off topic.
Look what happened to the kook deborah frish:
http://www.blogpi.net/laffaire-goldfrisch-iii-we-all-knew-this-was-coming
Sgt wrote” Why is it ever time I see, hear or read some snotty reporter type I can easily imagine them being one of those kids in grade school who used to get the crap beat out of them for being a whiny teacher’s pet?”
Sgt, I share that vision with you. Right on, right on.
Actually, I remember Reagan telling another story, one where he was doing the play-by-play of a baseball game by reading it off a ticker-tape when the ticker-tape machine got disconnected for a while. He went on with a fake commentary until the connection was reestablished and he was relieved to find out that the score had remained the same.
Google never forgets. Jeff, maybe I’m wrong, but that’s got ‘t-shirt slogan’ written all over it.
Well, that’s something to be proud of: a career that starts out in an atmosphere of brazen, mendacious cynicism and is all downhill from there… You go, Greg!
TODD: You were in the Presidential Honor Guard? Kiss me.
Seems the story has changed.
Well, from one perspective, I would not look too deeply into this… having been an intern, I know how internships are (mostly B.S.)
However, what he did was very cowardly. Had they known his conduct he certainly would not have made it as far as he did (at least not in my news agency.)
I remember when I worked for this pizza place. One of the things I did was hand out flyers (it wasn’t an excellent business practice overall, but it was part of my duties.)
Other kids he’d hire would just walk down the street and throw away the flyers, mostly because they didn’t want to do the actual work involved. Well, some of them, anyway. In some cases it was laziness (not going from door to door handing out flyers is mostly just laziness.) But in other cases, it was cowardice. Walking into a business and handing a flyer to someone? Who do you hand it to? What if they don’t want it? What do you say to them? What if they don’t like the pizza joint? What if they don’t like solicitors? (etc.)
As for myself, I did not once shirk my responsibility. Before I give myself too much credit, it was partly out of naivete. But– I also did not want to conscience lying about whether I had handed out the flyers or not. Sometimes I didn’t get too many businesses done because of traffic, or a lot of ‘no solicitors’ signs.
But it was a transformative experience, having to figure out what to say to people on the fly.
This man shows the opposite– a lack of courage. What he should have done is at least try to get their opinions, and if he got few good ones, explain it to his boss. His boss, were he a reasonable person, would understand. But the key responsibility he had as a intern– actually getting the guts to go up to people and ask them questions– he failed miserably at. He didn’t even TRY.
Sad. But that’s the MSM. No innovation, no ambition, no courage. Rest In Peace, old media– know that you were not undone by the nature of the changing world, but by the changing nature of your own people. Rotten from the inside.
TW: once upon a time…
Well, since he seems ok to make up ‘puff pieces’, maybe he sees photography of historical events as just that.
I am quite tired of the media deciding to report things out of context, decide not to report facts but analysis in lieu of facts, ommit things that do not fit a ‘story’, decide that ‘fake but accurate’ is good enough and, generally, put deceit for a good cause in place of the good itself. Now we see defense of propaganda as ‘what is really going on’ and much hand waving at the high ethics of those involved with no effort to demonstrate ethical behavior. There is a reason that the proxy of the public in the person of a reporter is important. Without reporting fully and contextually on what is going on and leaving the damn ‘story’ to those doing ‘analysis’ we are deprived of the facts actually speaking for themselves.
Perhaps we can get fictional reporters to report the news as they seem to have a higher ethical standard than the real ones. Clark Kent, Peter Parker: hang up your costumes as there is real work to be done for the public good in an ethical and responsible manner.
The ‘dillo is dead. Long live the ‘dillo.
This story gets more and more confusing. Six bloggers all quote a version of the story as it was originally published. According to the Wayback Machine the story was edited by Mitchell some time between November 2003 and January 2004 to add some details to make himself look young and dumb. The blockquotes and link to Media Info provided by the bloggers suggests they actually took their blockquote from the Media Info site. Now the story at CY is that the Media Info site was changed just yesterday.
So now I am confused as to who is playing loose with the facts. The story was edited, that is true. But when was it edited and why do all six bloggers have the 2003 version of the story? And does all this suggest that Editor & Publisher has a standard operating procedure of editing stories post-publication without informing their readers? And if so, is this a procedure they would advocate for all news publications?
Jeff, did you get your blockquote from Media Info or did you quote it off CY? Can you clarify?
TW: Surely there has to be a reasonable explanation!
Mitchell would have been 21 years old when he faked that 1969 (not 1967) Niagara Falls Gazette story, as he was born Dec. 1947 – and had been writing for the paper for several summers, by his own reckoning. So even his statement about being on the job about a month appears fake and inaccurate.
Just two years later, he became Executive Editor of Crawdaddy [1971 to 1979].
He freely admits to being “a bit of a hypocrite.”
http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mitchell-greg.asp
Since it’s confession time: I grew up in Niagara Falls and I’m a few years younger than Mitchell. I never knew the guy.
You didn’t actually expect anything juicy or incriminating, did you? I’m neither drunk nor insane.
I wonder how this stuff gets a pass? If I damaged my employer’s computer systems or willfully violated procedures, I’d be fired in an instant and probably find myself unable to work in this field, ever. The only thing my employer has to sell is the skills of its employees. If we can’t be trusted, they have nothing. I guess that’s at least partly why the NYT circulation is falling and the stock is tanking.
Mitchell is innocent. Doug Thompson says so! And he quotes George Harleigh so you know it must be true.
From June 12, 1969 to November 25, 1969 he only found a weekend to visit the dry falls? Couldn’t find any friends who had been there and talk to them? By July it was a major attraction…
Just lazy, I guess.
As Instapundit points out, w3, Mitchell’s edited the story after the fact and after the bloggers already quoted the original piece.
Or as he states right to the point, “ANOTHER UP
I think the operative word here is “arrogant.”
Ya think after Ra<sup>th</sup>gate and Reutergate that people like Mitchell just might be a bit more careful in their fake-but-accurate assertions.
Even Greggy’s original “mea culpa” and comparison with Jayson Blair rings false because he tries to elicit sympathy
Cue the violins .. 19 v 27, 4 weeks on a job v several years… Until someone does the actual math.
So Greggy, or more likely, someone covering for him, decides to alter the lead paragraph not understanding that the alteration is factually incorrect in the first place and makes it easier to debunk (and brings the sloppy “covering” to light).
Anothernother update:
The changes were done more ineptly than an Adnan Hajj fauxtoshop. The Wayback Machine crawled the page twice, within 12 minutes, and came back with 2 ‘2004’ edits, IN REVERSE ORDER of what the webserver claims the dates to be.
Detailed analysis at LGF.
TW: In trying to cover up the changes, they put up a lousy front
Someone on Michelle Malkins site brought up that The Falls didnt get turned off till June of 1969 so that would make Greg 21 wouldnt it? Someone also mentioned there was a Draft going on at that time. If he’d of timed it right he might of ran into John F Kerry in Vietnam and had a Ripper of a Story or two to Fake. Just think.. the two of them could of reminisced about how it all was “Seared into their Memory” No Wonder Kerry wont sign Form 180.. the Airbrushing would be too much for even Greg to handle. OT Just thinking about Sandy Berger and how much easier it use to be for these guys.. The Possibilities are endless… Our History in effect is a Fraud.
Monster, I think it was on Dan’s site that I suggested you go read the FAQ on Wayback. The site was not crawled yesterday. Also, Alexa donates the crawls to Wayback 6 months post-crawl.
All this leads me to believe that the page we are pulling up for any date in 2004 is really a live version, per their FAQ which states that they do not actually archive all pages that change but they do flag pages as changed. In the absence of an actual copy of the old page, they serve up the one they have OR a live version. What we’re seeing pulled up as a 2004 page is the live version.
And what that means is that, just as has been stated by CY and other bloggers, Mitchell changed the pages ala Doug Thompson on 8/25 after 5:01PM.
Perhaps we shall see an announcement on E&P Monday that, after an extensive review, ledes of certain stories were changed to make them more
searchablereadable.