The tempest last week of Obama’s early schooling and Clinton’s alleged interest in it — invented by a Moonie website and promoted by Murdoch new pornographers — has subsided, temporarily. Watch for it, and others like it, to rise repeatedly in the years to come. Until we as a society come up with ways to make it less profitable to peddle lies we are going to get plenty of them
Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters.
But their anonymity has not stopped them from making an impact. In the last two weeks, Mr. Kuhner’s Web site, Insight, the last remnant of a defunct conservative print magazine owned by the Unification Church led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was able to set off a wave of television commentary, talk-radio chatter, official denials, investigations by journalists around the globe and news media self-analysis that has lasted 11 days and counting.
“…in an interview, John Moody, a senior vice president at Fox News, said its commentators had erred by citing the Clinton-Obama report. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” Mr. Moody said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”
But has Mr. Moody taken any disciplinary action? Have the sponsors of Rush Limbaugh’s bilious screeds reviewed their corporate guidlines?