Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

This post stemmed from an article that came from Harry's Blog.

This is a fascinating snippet from the article:

CBS's underlying problem -- and the commonality between the three items that I described above -- is the arbitrary and largely ineffectual nature of the fact-checking process employed by the mainstream media. I have written for perhaps a dozen major publications over the span of my career, and the one with the most thorough fact-checking process is by some margin Sports Illustrated. Although this is an indication of the respect with which SI accords its brand, it does not speak so well of the mainstream political media that you are more likely to see an unverified claim repeated on the evening news than you are to see in the pages of your favorite sports periodical.

Sports Illustrated deals with concrete versions of the facts. Sports are numbers. How many points did Michael Jordan score in 1993? Well, there's a number out there somewhere. One number. It's not a contested story. And, if Sports Illustrated got this number wrong, a sports statistician would know. He could point to all of the examples of Michael Jordan scoring a point, and thus SI would probably print a retraction and everyone would move on.

However, when we move on to the more nebulous realm of the MSM, when it comes down to "facts," what are we discussing? Versions of the truth? Whose version? I think these questions are at the heart of all the other questions we've discussed this year, from bias to comedy to race.

Take this picture of Kim Jong Il, for example.


It looks like he's really there at first glance doesn't it? He couldn't be dead. Surely not. There's photographic evidence that he is standing of his own power with his troops. But is he really?

Perhaps in a lot of ways, the MSM is, in some ways, duping the public, like Kim Jong Il's regime. Not to that extent, mind you, I'm not calling the MSM a fascist regime, but most people in America trust the MSM and don't believe that a) the media would lie, or b) the media could lie.

The media won't lie outright; the public would find out, I imagine. But, consequently, how do biases, the need for ratings, and liberal or conservative apeasement change the credibility of stories? Do people question what they hear or just repeat it without judgement or their own filter?

Look closer at the above photograph.


Discrepancies abound, but how many people who are under Kim Jong Il's (possibly dead) thumb would even know that such as thing as Photoshop exists? Editing pictures? Editing the photographic evidence - editing the facts. It sounds like science fiction. No one would inspect a photograph this closely if they didn't know that editing photographs was possible.

Take this picture and the 538 story as an example of a larger phenomenon. Sometimes the media isn't lying, they're stretching the truth, maybe, but they do it for a purpose. Don't forget that sometimes, what CNN, MSNBC, or FoxNews wants is ratings. They're not non-profits. Your attention equals money in their pockets, and sometimes that attention has to be manufactured.