On Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, as noted at HonestReporting.com, host Cooper devoted a one-minute segment to informing viewers that his show on Thursday had used footage of a Palestinian man in Gaza who was apparently faking injury for the benefit of cameras. Cooper began his retraction:
Fake News
CNN Gets 'Fooled' by a Palestinian Child's Death; Real Story Is Hamas Barbarity Against 'Its Own' People
By Tom Blumer | November 18, 2012 | 9:43 PM EST A video at CNN with reporting by Sara Sidner from Gaza tells us "how a small child became a symbol of civilian casualties." Some of her narrative: "A scene no parent should ever have to endure"; "Four year-old Mahmoud Sadallah lies dead in the arms of a neighbor, a child of Gaza, another victim of an airstrike"; "we saw no evidence here of military activity." There's even a scene where Ms. Sidner reports having to flee where she is currently reporting because "there are airstrikes" and "rockets." Since Hamas doesn't have an air force, we're supposed to assume that Israel's military is responsible for Mahmoud's death.
Except, as Joel Pollak at Breitbart noted this morning, others have shown that Sidner wants us to believe isn't the truth (bolds are mine throughout this post; links are in originals presented):
By Randy Hall | October 12, 2012 | 6:15 PM EDT
Liberals unwittingly bolstered the concept that they have no sense of humor on Wednesday, when several people responded angrily to a rumor that if he's elected to the White House, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney would outlaw the sale and use of tampons.
The incident began when a poster named Lexi Johnson stated on the Twitter website that the Republican official would ban the use of the medical device because "it is unnnatural for a woman to insert a foreign object into here body for the sake of stopping the menstrual flow."
By Mark Finkelstein | May 2, 2012 | 9:52 AM EDT
If this is how Dan Rather at peace looks like, wonder what he's like when angry and embittered . . .
On Morning Joe today, Rather emphatically alleged that he was "at peace" over the Memogate fiasco that led to the end of his career. But he couldn't help himself from suggesting that his reputation had been destroyed by anonymous partisans employing "lies." View the video after the jump.
By Tim Graham | March 25, 2012 | 6:09 PM EDT
Mike Daisey shamelessly lied about Apple's abuse of factory workers in China on stage, which was then picked up by the trendy public-radio show "This American Life," which airs on many NPR stations. It caused a black eye for NPR (by their one-degree association), but The Washington Post has proclaimed Daisey's "voice" is too important to shame off the stage.
Post theatre critic Peter Marks announced Sunday that "after days of wrestling with what’s been found to be Daisey’s dysfunctional relationship with candor, when I have felt angry and a bit betrayed — you put your own reputation on the line when you embrace someone else’s in a review — I’ve settled on a sense of solidarity with Shalwitz." That's Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of Washington's Woolly Mammoth theater, which plans to put "dysfunctional" Daisey back in the spotlight.
By Tom Blumer | April 13, 2011 | 2:16 PM EDT
This is about as weak as it gets.
This morning as seen here (saved here at my web host for future reference), an unbylined 90-word Associated Press report at 9:57 a.m. told readers the following, in part:
By Clay Waters | March 15, 2011 | 3:10 PM EDT
The New York Times provided decent front-page coverage of the emerging scandal that took down top executives at National Public Radio, a hidden-camera sting that caught top fundraiser Ron Schiller making prejudicial remarks against Republicans in general and the Tea Party movement in particular. The backlash resulted in the resignation of Ron Schiller as well as NPR President and chief executive Vivian Schiller (no relation).
But Times media reporter Jeremy Peters took an incomplete look at the recent rash of hidden-camera hoaxes on Saturday under the strongly worded headline “Partisans Adopt Deceit As a Tactic for Reports.” Peters falsely implied that "gotcha" journalism had faded from view, ignoring two recent examples in the mainstream media, one from NPR itself.
By Clay Waters | January 11, 2011 | 4:22 PM EST
On Sunday, New York Times political reporter/columnist Matt Bai wondered if we are at the start of a “terrifying new” moment in political violence in “A Turning Point in the Discourse, but in Which Direction?” Bai argued that the act of Republican politicians saying standard political things was somehow fueling the rhetorical flames.
He at least appeared evenhanded at the beginning.
Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin’s infamous “cross hairs” map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her “dead to me” after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.
By Tim Graham | September 13, 2010 | 8:04 AM EDT
The Washington Post has repeatedly featured a full-page ad in recent days for a Get Motivated! Business Seminar in Washington in October. One of the big names at the event (alongside Colin Powell, Steve Forbes, and Rudy Giuliani) is disgraced former CBS anchor Dan Rather, teaching "How to Communicate Effectively." Then the ad copy gets ridiculous:
Dan Rather, Legendary News Anchor and Journalist, has covered every major story of the last 50 years, with distinction and a fierce dedication to hard news. He is always ready to deliver the truth the way it is! [Emphasis mine.]
Hello, Better Business Bureau? Someone's misleading the public about Dan Rather's record of "distinction" in trying to sell fraudulent documents about President George W. Bush's military service in the fall of 2004. His "fierce dedication" wasn't to hard news. When his story was exposed as phony, he refused to admit he'd mangled the truth.
By Tim Graham | September 3, 2010 | 7:10 AM EDT
The Poynter Institute welcomed disgraced former CBS anchor Dan Rather to share his thoughts on his long career and on the media in general this week. In an interview with Poynter's Mallary Tenore, he complained "So often, particularly covering politics, enterprises that describe themselves as journalistic enterprises, and journalists who describe themselves as journalists, in fact just become transmission belts."
That's exactly what Poynter's interview was, a transmission belt for Rather's lamest hits, including how the press needs a "spine transplant" and his shameless insistence that his phony-documents Texas Air National Guard story is still true. If Poynter cared about the reputation of journalism, why continue to entertain and spread doubt about the falsehood of Rather's most atrocious "scoop"?
The only thing fresh here is Rather's growing socialism, as he insists (just like Bill Moyers) that money is corrupting politics and the government needs to break some alleged media monopoly where only four mega-corporations distribute most of America's news:
By Lachlan Markay | April 5, 2010 | 1:17 PM EDT 
An April Fools prank designed to trick bloggers into running with a contrived story ended up snaring the Gray Lady.
An April Fools prank designed to trick bloggers into running with a contrived story ended up snaring the Gray Lady.New York attorney Eric Terkewitz told his blog's readers on April 1 that he had been hired as the White House's "official law blogger." Unlike the political bloggers at which the stunt was aimed, the New York Times apparently did not check the claim, and posted the story to its website.
The incident serves as a reminder that, as journos like to say, "if your mother says she loves you, check it out."
By Lachlan Markay | February 10, 2010 | 4:24 PM EST
Salon columnist Max Blumenthal continues to get flak for his slanderous, factually-challenged hit piece on conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe last week. The column, premised on a host of omissions and baseless assumptions, contended that O'Keefe's is a racist.
Blumenthal's latest critic is Columbia Journalism Review, Old Media's paragon of journalistic elitism. CJR has requested that he correct but one of the many errors that comprise his column.
But CJR really has a problem, it seems, that Blumenthal has given ammunition to critics who claim Old Media is rife with liberal bias. CJR contributor Greg Marx lamented that Blumenthal and other quasi-journalists, in ignoring facts to support their agendas,give "ready-made ammunition for that broader campaign."