It's another thing to report "opinion" without proof of fact.
I'm sorry, Karen, but I don't follow your thinking. If someone in a knowledgeable position offers the press an opinion that the climate is warming or that Vince Foster was murdered or Cisco is likely to miss its numbers, you report it along with the basis for the person's opinion. Readers assess its credibility. If the story is interesting enough, you and/or your colleagues report related information, including the opinions of others in knowledgeable positions. Maybe this process eventually leads to the truth of the matter or maybe people are left to assess validity on their own and to form their own conclusions.
How do we know that Clarke is telling the truth?
We don't. And we may never know. He may be flat out lying. Or he may honestly remember things differently from other participants. We all know that different recollections are the norm rather than the exception because people enter transactions with different perspectives. If I go into a meeting with the specific objective of finding out x and others are interested in different aspects of the meeting, I will clearly remember the particulars of x whereas others may not have noticed or remembered because they were focusing elsewhere. They may not even remember that I was in the room. Meetings are like dreams. If you think about the dream when you first wake up and write it down or tell someone about it, you remember it. If you don't, it's gone. If you talked about it with someone else, that person will remember it just as the two of you discussed it. Doesn't mean it happened that way.
is there any meeting minutes from any of the meetings
If there are meeting minutes, you can bet they are mentioned in the book. There's no point in asking the subject if there were minutes recorded. If there were any, they would have been referenced. It's obvious that there is no documentation so what's the point of asking?
If someone write a book, and says things by innuendo that have the potential to damage a public figure, does anything happen to the person who said those things?
If people slander or libel they are punished by law. If they make rash accusations than turn out to be unfounded, they are punished socially and career-wise. We don't punish people for having different opinions or different recollections or for framing them with a different perspective. There is always a lot of natural variation.
It's another thing to report "opinion" without proof of fact.
I don't think you can justify a position that only proven facts should be reported. If we waited for "truth" on every issue, we'd get no information and what we got would be too late. Sure, we can wait to report on, say, global warming until we have a statistically significant trend line, but by then we would have wasted a lot of time and we would be accusing reporters of withholding information. There are problems both ways.
I understand that you don't like hearing unfavorable opinions reported, but I don't see an alternative process that wouldn't have worse problems. I don't think you'd really want that. And even if we wanted to stop it, we couldn't. People want to hear this stuff And a free press is going to give it to them. Even if we were to stifle the press, there's a book out there in the book stores and people are going to read it whether reporters report on its content or not.
Or IF there are any articles showing the disagreements on content....will those articles be buried on the side of section A page 19, etc?
I agree that there is a journalistic responsibility to report evenly. So far, every source in this story has gotten prominent treatment. It's clearly a hot story. I don't see any basis for a beef that anything's being buried.
P.S. I don't recall your complaining about reports of Kerry's participation in assassination meetings. My recollection that you've commented on that and similar subjects. Of course, we may recall those things differently. <g> |
