"Fake, But Accurate" - the Continuing MSM Saga

Stephen Spruiell, on his Media Blog (via National Review Online) posts this interesting quote from Heath Allen, a reporter from NBC's New Orleans affiliate. Heath was being asked about the inaccuracies and exaggerations by the MSM in post-Katrina New Orleans.

I don’t think the media overplays. I don’t think the media exaggerates. Maybe the people on the ground were exaggerating because, hey, they wanted help, they needed help and they weren’t getting it. Perhaps they would say anything they could say. Maybe they would say the first thing that came to mind to try and get help. But if the photojournalist, if that photographer is there to capture it, who’s doing the overplaying? You’re certainly gonna take that person and you’re gonna tell that story because that’s the story of the need, of the person that camera is on. And I don’t think that’s over-exaggerating in the least…It’s the responsibility of the photojournalist to capture that and put it on television because those people at that point needed help no matter what was true, what was false, what was exaggerated.

(emphasis mine).

Hold the phone. So the new level of accuracy in journalism is that it doesn't matter what is true or false, what is exaggerated...as long as the end goal is helping people?

Well, depending upon your definition of 'helping people', this could be a dangerous philosophy. And how is Joe Citizen to know if the reports we are reading, hearing, seeing are accurate, fake, or 'fake but accurate'? How do we know if it is real or staged?

And, as Hugh Hewitt points out in his radio interview of Heath Allen (via Radioblogger), if they get it SO wrong this close to home, what is the hope of them having any chance of accuracy in somewhere far away.....say, like....Iraq for instance?

We had all the resources of the American media combined in New Orleans. Everything they had, they threw at it. With the help of locals like you and national networks, print, media, radio, everything, not one outlet could get inside the convention center or the Superdome to do accurate reporting. What's that tell us about the trustworthyness of American media, when it's far away from home in a war zone like Iraq. Isn't that in fact an obvious admission that not only can they not do the job in New Orleans, we can't expect them to do the job of accurate reporting in a war zone like Iraq.

Scary thought. And if they are motivated by 'helping us' understand the 'reality' behind the progress of the war as THEY see it (think quagmire), what hope is there of receiving accurate information from the mainstream media on Iraq? Or anything else, for that matter?

What the heck are they teaching in journalism school these days?