Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley: US Military Targets Journalists

This story has been on the Internet for a couple weeks, but there has been mighty little in the mass news media. When it first appeared I watched the video: she really did say it, and apparently she really doesn't have any evidence at all. She is a very big figure in the newspaper industry, but the industry isn't holding her accountable. Go figure.

Thomas Lipscomb covers it tho in the newspaper industry journal Editor & Publisher:

Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley made a public statement on May 13 that journalists are “being targeted for real in places like Iraq.” She has been trying to slide out of it ever since. Pressed by E&P's Joe Strupp, Foley offered a clarification on who specifically was doing the targeting: “I was careful of not saying troops, I said U.S. military.”

...Sound familiar? It should. Eason Jordan, president of CNN News, had to resign for making exactly the same accusation at Davos four months ago. He had a major problem--no evidence to back up his charges....

...Foley had the advantage of seeing what happened to Jordan and, as the head of a powerful union of 35,000 journalists and media workers, she knew anything she said about targeting journalists would likely be scrutinized. So one would expect that she has a pretty solid case for her revival of the discredited Jordan charges? But one would be wrong. Her spokesperson, Candice Johnson, told me Foley can provide “no evidence” to support her charges either....

Foley braced for the worst....

Sherlock Holmes’s key clue to who stole the racehorse in “Silver Blaze” was a dog in the stall that didn’t bark. And something equally odd happened on the way to the Foley firestorm: To date, not a single pundit, editorial writer, or newspaper ran anything, with the exception of the Chicago Sun-Times story I wrote, a St. Paul Pioneer Press column by Mark Yost, and a Washington Times column item.

Clearly Foley was correct in assuming the Right was the only danger to her repetition of the statement that got Eason Jordan canned. The Mainstream Media couldn’t be bothered to cover “Easongate: The Sequel.” And positioning Foley as the gallant defender of the lives of journalists targeted by the U.S. military was inspired PR. After all, Sherlock Holmes’s dog didn’t bark because he was good friends with the thief.

Lipscomb concludes that news media credibility, or lack thereof, is behind the major drop in circulation suffered by newspapers over the past few years, and winds up with:

If the press isn’t going to take its own standards seriously, it is hard to think of why anyone should take the press seriously enough to pay for it.

Good point. I wonder if the pros who read E&P will pay attention.

Another gripe which I have long had: remarkably little data per column yard. Most news stories are loaded with blather rather than info. A couple months ago I saw a local news article which was so packed with data that I figured the writer had to be a beginner who would quickly be slapped down. I've never noticed anything by her since.

My impression is that newspapers could convey the same data in 15% of the space, and do a bang up job of informing us in 40%. I won't hold my breath.

Thanks to Power Line for the tip.