Reading Aaron Barlow's book (reviewed by Carol White's for ePluribus Media and available from Amazon), I came across the nine points from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. They are listed in our Toolbox on the right, but it seemed fitting to put up a commentary solely dedicated to them.

• Journalism's first obligation is to the truth.
• Its first loyalty is to citizens.
• Its essence is a discipline of verification.
• Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
• It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
• It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
• It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
• It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
• Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

Last Friday, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Rupert Murdoch sat on a panel where he lamented what he described as a "loss of power" due to the ascension of the Internet and other new media. The notion that this captain of one of the most dominant media conglomerates in the world is trembling in the shadow of bloggers is simply absurd. Especially when you consider the fact that his company is also a dominant player on the Internet with an aggressive acquisitiveness that includes MySpace, the world's largest online social networking site.

But there was a more shocking exchange that took place that ought to have caused more of a stir amongst professional journalists and all freedom loving people. It was an exchange that revealed something that most conscious beings knew, but which I have never seen explicitly articulated.

Cross-posted at...
News Corpse, The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.

A bit more than thirty years ago, I spent a little time as a reporter for a small daily in Rhode Island.  Most of what I did involved school committees and village councils in outlying communities, but sometimes I was allowed feature assignments.  For me, the plum of these left me wandering around a county fair for a week, staff photographer in tow.  We had a grand time exploring the fair, interviewing people and preparing friendly stories on potters and pigs.

On Saturday, the fair ended with a performance by an old-timey band ("Don't call it `Bluegrass,'" the leader warned me) and a beauty pageant whose contestants were local high-school seniors.  Though I really wanted to stick with my story on the musicians, I knew that I had better feature the young women, so I settled on the grass beyond the stage and the photographer (as usual) prowled around for his shots.

Plagiarism!  When we hear the word we think devious undergraduates out for the grade at any cost.  Or we remember Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose and careers taking a hit.  Earlier in the year, it was a wannabe writer and blogger named Ben Domenech who felt the heat.  Today it's Ann Coulter.

Last week, David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin published an articled on their Front Page Magazine titled "Joel Beinin: Apologist for Terrorists."  It has to do with a lawsuit Beinin has brought against the authors over the use of a picture of him on the cover of a pamphlet called Campus Support for Terrorism.

On today's edition (May 20, 2006) of NPR's On the Media, guest host Mike Pesca (a correspondent for Day to Day) spoke a piece called "Cribbing Through the Ages."  His point was that plagiarism was "no big deal" in Elizabethan times and would be no big deal in twenty years.

Pesca's argument, in part, is based on the fact that the public often doesn't know who wrote something anyhow: the newsreader mouths words created by a producer, the film's credited author may have been followed by others who radically altered the script.  This "convinces the consumer that a byline might just be a vestige of a bygone era."

At this point, it cannot be deemed an overstatement to say that the American right suffers from an epidemic of lying.  Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter (among others) have been caught red-handed by Al Franken.  Blogger and plagiarist Ben Domenech even have the temerity to claim that P. J. O'Rourke had given him permission to claim O'Rourke's work as his own--something O'Rourke himself quickly put the lie to.  David Horowitz, once a leftist liar, joined the right a quarter of a century ago--and lies still.  These are far from the only examples (and I have left out the politicians completely).

At a quarter after five this afternoon (Sunday, October 23), I was driving on Route 222 south of Reading, heading for Lancaster.  The stretch of road I was on is under construction, two lanes instead of four, with a tall concrete barrier on the west side separating us from where a new cement roadway was being poured.  Traffic was heavy, but moving at a good clip, considering that we had all been funneled into the narrow roadway.

There was a gap in traffic heading north, the opposite direction.  The next car coming was a black SUV, a Jeep.  Suddenly, it swerved into our lane.