False News
I saw the item pop on Memorandum yesterday about Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu supposedly being thrown out of a hotel. The story alleged that Menchu was wearing traditional dress and that hotel staff had tried to throw her out. (I did not post about it - it sounded a bit odd - a little too juicy to be true type of thing.) Libby Spencer, blogging at Newshoggers, reports that it was, indeed, a bit too good to be true. In fact, it was made up out of the whole cloth.
Our man in Cancun, Jules Siegel, follows up on yesterday's report that Guatemalan presidential candidate Rigoberta Menchu was removed from a high priced tourist hotel because she was mistaken for a common indigenous Indian. She stated today that the reports were erroneous and she was treated as a honored guest.
Menchu and her sister Anita said none of it had happened. "This was purely an invention of the press," Anita told Latina.com today in an exclusive interview. "Nothing at all happened in the hotel, and we didn't even know about the rumor until we got on the plane to go back to Mexico City."
[The reporter who broke the story], David Romero Vara of Cancun's Enfoque Radio, admitted on air today that nothing happened to Menchu, and that the only ones who were removed forcibly from the hotel were his station's reporters.
He apologized but Menchu wasn't placated. "The media should have been more careful. The press should not play with the feelings of the public, because it can cause a lot of damage," she said.
She's right and this underscores how our US media fails us today. They care more about being first than they care about correctly reporting the facts. They simply don't fact check. They wait for the blogs to do it. Meanwhile, they pick up any sensational story that they can attribute to a named source and run with it.
I rather agree that the media has a problem right now with their objectivity and a major problem with their fact-checking. Here's the one thing I disagree with Spencer about: It was not all that big of a media hyperventilation. I just searched Yahoo and Google news - most of the links to "Rigoberta Menchu" stories in the past few days were not from major media outlets. A blog search on Technorati reveals not a whole lot of posts about this. I'm not trying to say there was no coverage - I'm just pointing out it wasn't a huge amount.
Oh- and any media outlet - old or new - that ran the fraudulent story should retract and/or correct.
Blogosphere, World news | Gaius Saturday, 18 August , 2007
By daveinboca, Saturday, 18 August , 2007 @ 10:29 pm
There’s a problem, though, with the Nobel that Menchu won in the first place as some fact-checking after she won the prize showed she exaggerated or misled readers on several key points. However, when this was pointed out, the illuminati adjudged her narrative had “symbolic truth” even if it was not factually accurate.
That’s a problem that Newsweak imbecile Evan Thomas had with the Duke Lacrosse team story—you know, the narrative fit his bigoted preconceptions, so that when the facts contradicted Thomas’s factitious take on the stripper’s lies, Newsweak was still on the side of the good guys, even if Newsweak was wrong.
That’s the way the self-importance frauds present stories nowadays in the MSM. Menchu at least had the moral fiber to deny the fictions in the press, even though they might be “symbolically true” to a mandarinate of eunuch arbiters.
By Libby Spencer, Sunday, 19 August , 2007 @ 9:23 am
I said pretty big Gaius, not huge. It was big enough that I saw it and I’ve haven’t followed politics in the Americas much lately and it is illustrative of a larger problem. There has been much larger stories that are misconstrued and not corrected.
But thanks for the link though.