"We need the truth"

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer didn't learn very much from the Jayson Blair scandal:

We already know that the story about Jessica Lynch's family -- the one told by New York Times' reporter Jayson Blair -- was merely the product of a fanciful imagination. The newspaper is investigating -- as it should.

The lesson should have been "don't always believe everything that the media reports". Instead, the P-I is already repeating the dubious claims of the BBC that the Jessica Lynch rescue was little more than a theatrical production, closing with the line

We need to know more; we need the truth

Glenn Reynolds has an entire page of links debunking the BBC account. Who's right? the BBC? or the various debunkers? The BBC version sounds pretty far-fetched, but who am I to say?, I don't have the time or the staff to investigate all the various claims and counter-claims. But the P-I does. And don't they have a responsibility to investigate such fantastic-sounding reports from a habitually biased source before promoting them on the editorial page?

Yeah, we need the truth all right. I've been reading the P-I for less than a week, and they've already convinced me that if I want the truth, I shouldn't expect to find it in the P-I.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 19, 2003 11:42 AM