The internet and bloggers in particular are making it more common to uncover factually incorrect, or otherwise just plain bad, journalism. Eric Muller pointed out how the New York Times just doesn't understand how the federal criminal appeals process works, but that didn't matter to the Times, which was just anxious to editorialize against John Ashcroft.
National Review Online has its Krugman Truth Squad to counter the inaccuracies and fabrications of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
And recently, the Times printed a correction to a story about military deaths in Iraq, which they had originally attributed to "military officials", even though the source was a single Private. No wonder the story was wrong.
I'm reminded of these things because of a simple piece of sloppy journalism. It doesn't rise to the level of the above journalistic malpractice, but it just shows that reporters don't really care about the most basic fact checking. From a story on FoxNews' trademark infringement lawsuit against Al Franken, I saw this jewel:
Fox News registered "Fair & Balanced" as a trademark in 1995, the lawsuit said.AP writer Hillel Italie (which I can't believe is a real name) thought it important to attribute the claim. It is so easily verifiable, why attribute the fact to "the lawsuit says"? Well, here's the record of the trademark registration. Fox also registered "FAIR. BALANCED. UNAFRAID."
Update: Those last two links don't seem to work. Go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, click on Search Trademarks, select "New User Form (Basic)" and search for FAIR & BALANCED. Still not that hard.
