Sandhya Somashekhar Is the Worst Reporter That the Washington Post Can Be Conceived to Have
Samuel Brittan Is a Sensible Conservative

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Spencer Ackerman writes:

It Wouldn’t Kill You To Give Noah Shachtman His Due: I noted that mainstream media outlets have a widespread and unfortunate tendency to refuse crediting any rival outlet -- print, online, TV, whatever -- with being first on a story if they can somehow get away with it. Here's a great example. My friend Noah Shachtman runs Wired's Danger Room groupblog.  For the past week, he's broken and advanced a story about the Marines banning social media like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace from its networks. This comes on top of years' worth of reporting on the military's adjustment to Web 2.0. If you've read anything about this issue, it's because of Noah....

Here's a Los Angeles Times story about the social media ban that doesn't reference Noah [Schachtman] at all. Here's a Wall Street Journal story about the social media ban that doesn't reference Noah at all. Here's an AFP story about the social media ban that doesn't reference Noah at all. Here's a Christian Science Monitor story about the social media ban that doesn't reference Noah at all. Here's a Voice of America story about the social media ban that, perversely, references the AP, AFP and Reuters and doesn't reference Noah at all.

This isn't the fault of any individual reporter. It's the fault of an outdated newspaper convention that equates proper referencing with an admission of professional failure...

I'm curious. In what sense is it not the fault of every individual reporter? Are we still allowed to deny the moral agency of delinquents? "He's a good boy; he just runs with a bad crowd" would seem to be the kind of limousine liberal egghead thinking that has no place in modern America, isn't it?

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