Allahpundit commenced the beating, Confederate Yankee took over to bat cleanup. Now its Mary Katherine Ham's turn to deliver the coup de grace. After all, Greg Mitchell decided he wanted to defend shoddy, faked news photos.
Turns out Mr. Greg Mitchell, who has so vocally defended the folks making up news in the Middle East lately, confessed to making up news himself, when he was but a young'un.
Of course, "confessed" isn't really the right word since he didn't seem too repentant about it.
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.
Why yes you did Mr. Mitchell. You got away with doing something honest people would not even consider doing. You got away with scamming people, for what really amounts to nothing but that you could. Which tells us quite a lot about your character and why you can't fathom why some people don't like to be lied to.
It's true, and as evidence, Mitchell has not grown out of it yet. If this guy was willing to fake a story about tourists at Niagara Falls, imagine how easy it'd be for him to do it for, I don't know, political reasons. Certainly not much of an ethical hurdle for him to jump.
In the short time I was a reporter, I covered something like 20 local deaths– some in car accidents, some of disease, about half of them children. It was my first job out of college. Would it have been easier to make up a quote than to call a family that had just lost four children in one car accident? Yes, a lot easier. And, I was only 22, so I would have had an excuse, right? Wrong.
So, Mr. Mitchell, can we expect a two part column explaining why your lies are acceptable?
Why do I think you'll never, ever answer that? Oh, it's that character thing.
You have none.
