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Now that’s genuine

8 comments on Now that’s genuine

Now that’s genuine

: N.Z. Bear takes on Sarah Boxer’s unjournalism in The Times:

When I telephoned a woman named Sarah Boxer in New York last week, I wondered who might answer. A DNC flack? A hack posing as a journalist? Someone paid by The New York Times to craft hatchet-jobs on Iraqis who dare to express thanks to America for deposing Saddam? Or simply a lazy writer with some confused ideas about fact-checking and objectivity? Until she picked up the phone, she was just a ghost on the page.

: UPDATE: See also Patterico.

8 responses to “Now that’s genuine”

  1. Marc Orchant Avatar
    Marc Orchant

    Thanks for the link Jeff! That’s a brilliant piece of satire.

  2. Jim Avatar
    Jim

    Right Marc, except no and I mean No One has taken her to task in the newspaper media regarding her entire disregard of Blogs, Bloggers and Blogging. If we’re so smart to write all of our thoughts here in this emerging media, it has been around awhile and people like Ms Boxer never go on line to back her facts what use is the Blogworld to her? She denies it existence in her writings.

  3. maha Avatar
    maha

    I was just checking to see if you’d noticed that Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post had already named all three brothers in full and written up the Oval Office meeting; see Kurtz’s column, December 20 and January 10. The Sarah Boxer story (which was lame, no question about that) was essentially a padded re-write of Kurtz. The Sarah Boxer story said the brothers had already been named in the Washington Post; you must have missed that. And Ali wrote on January 3 that news of the meeting with President Bush had been picked up (from Kurtz) in a widely read Arabic newspaper.
    So as to the charge that Sarah Boxer put the brothers in danger — no more so than they were in already, thanks to Howard Kurtz.

  4. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Maha…
    Stipulated, your honor. I messed up on the issue of publishing their full names; correction and much discussion in the post below.
    That was a parenthetical problem I had with the story. There are many, many more. And I think that yields a more interesting and fruitful discussion.

  5. Michael Zimmer Avatar
    Michael Zimmer

    Right, Maha. And the whole IraqTheModel / Martini Republic / CIA issue was discussed in a 12/23/04 National Review article, complete with the brothers’ full names.

  6. button Avatar
    button

    ‘BD’ made a good point in the long thread below: that the NYTimes feels financially threatened by blogs. I’ll bet they do and with good reason.
    I am finding it very interesting to see which Big Media individuals and which Big Media institutions are sincerely trying to incorporate the Net into their existance and province and which are ignoring it, blocking it out, pretending it doesn’t exist, or even denigrating it.
    I haven’t been a regular reader of that paper since AM Rosenthal ‘fixed’ it, so I don’t know where Boxer came from. For example: ‘pink collar ghetto’ ie, The Society Page, etc. But she constructed this story on a traditional Print Media basis. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ Find the conflict in it; no conflict, no drama, no story.
    Maybe Jeff is a bit tired of this formula because he came out of Big Media. But maybe her editor insisted on it. It used to be common that the many photo editors wouldn’t publish a photo of a demonstration, unless there was an ‘incident,’ something violent or some conflict. The shape her story took may be due in some part to what her editor or management wanted.

  7. Soldier's Dad Avatar
    Soldier’s Dad

    Maha,
    Implying that someone is(might be) an agent for the CIA amounts to a death sentence in much of the world. Maybe Ms Boxer should spend a month in Harlem wearing a white sheet with the letter’s KKK spray painted on her front door.

  8. Michael Zimmer Avatar
    Michael Zimmer

    Implying that someone is(might be) an agent for the CIA amounts to a death sentence in much of the world
    Meanwhile, the Plame affair remains unresolved, arguably a much more serious event than Boxer’s 1000 words.