Now it seems that even the Washington Post and the Governor of Louisiana are partially blaming the media's reporting of rumor as fact in the post-Katrina days as a major factor in slowing the response and search and rescue operations. One must wonder, if it turns out the media was dead wrong there, then it ought to lend a lot more credence to those who say the media is giving a completely incorrect picture of what's going on in Iraq. Perhaps the soldiers and officers that keep saying that the situation is vastly improving over there are right, and the media people who rarely leave their Baghdad hotels are simply reporting what's happening through their biased filters and what they want to happen, since it makes Bush look bad. I mean if a major news outlet can't get a story that takes place in their own country anywhere close to correct, why do we expect them to be right about something happening half the world away? Their bias has been revealed time and time again (the memo scandal last year, for instance), and I imagine in 10 or 20 years historians will look back on this as a dark age of news reporting, when the news was more PR for the desires of the storyteller than the actual truth.

Where's the accountability that they demand of everyone else? Almost every single major news outlet reported fiction as fact, and few have acknowledged it in any way. The arrogance of some in the media is astounding. Paul Krugman of the New York Times, for instance, flaunts his refusal to follow his own paper's corrections policy. In one particular case he said he's tired of dredging up the same old stuff on the mistakes he made in a column. Ironically the column dredged up the same old tired story from the 2000 election in which Krugman continues to claim that Gore should have won, and the correction he refuses to admit regards the false statistics he used to support his position. The media is slowly lying itself in to oblivion.

Edit: Actually it seems a lot of media outlets are now saying they were dead wrong. At the same time I don't think there's much navel gazing. They seem to think an apology is enough, and they can go back to lying the next time something big happens. I wish they be a little more introspective, and start thinking about other things they are getting wrong, but I think the problem is that with a lot of issues (Iraq, anything related to Bush) they don't want to tell the truth, they just want to tell the story in a manner that reflects their own views.