Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

A war with no winners – with a bit of luck

Fox News, that bastion of journalistic integrity and unbiased news, is squealing like a scalded piggy because the Daily Mail, that bastion of journalistic integrity and unbiased news, has written stories that are rather similar - almost word-for-word similar.

In prose as lumberingly dreadful and faux-offended as the Mail could muster for a story about Estonian paedophiles being allowed to go to the top of the council house waiting list, Fox (website slogan: "We Report. You Decide." - no laughing at the back, please) blubs and bawls its way through the litany of crimes:

"Could Clinton still come back? Internet buzzes with rumours Biden will be replaced by Hillary as Obama's running mate."
That was the headline in Thursday's Daily Mail, a British tabloid that evidently rips off — very, very liberally — other news sources without informing its readers.
One of those sources includes FOXNews.com, which ran a story a day earlier bearing the headline, "Biden Dropping Out? Rumor Thrives on Internet."
People who read the story Thursday in the Mail — and there were many, thanks to a prominent link on the Web site DrudgeReport.com — may have experienced a powerful sense of deja vu.

It's not surprising. We're in the age where ctrl+c and ctrl+v are the heroes of modern journalism. Lift the quotes wholesale, renose the intro, make there enough of a change in the linking passages to make it look like you've written it yourself, maybe add a bit of background research by copying and pasting a chunk of Wikipedia - there, job done, in about 60 seconds. What could be easier? Well not a great deal, but what would be harder - and arguably better - would be looking at original source material, phoning other human beings up to get quotes direct and taking time to piece the story together without already having come to a conclusion about where you want it to go. But I imagine that sounds rather touchingly naive nowadays, in a world of a million deadlines a day, where desk-chained reporters barely ever see daylight.

Fox wheels out the evidence. Is it a slam dunk? You be the judge. After all, as they themselves say, "We Report. You Decide" - ha ha! You have to admire the chutzpah of that, if nothing else. Anyway:

The Mail reported:
Fight the Smears is a website the Obama campaign set up to quash just such damaging Internet rumours - but it has not yet touched this one, though that may be out of fear of fuelling the rumour.

One day earlier, FOXNews.com reported:
It sounds like a job for Fight the Smears, the Web site the Obama campaign set up to quash damaging Internet rumors. But Fight the Smears hasn’t touched this one, perhaps out of fear that it would only further a wild rumor.

(OK, OK, we'll admit: the Mail DID change the spelling of "rumor.")

The Mail reported:
Snopes.com, a site devoted to picking apart online rumors and urban legends, has labeled the status of the claim “undetermined.” Several online discussion boards have been loaded up with denials.

One day earlier, FOXNews.com reported:
Snopes.com, a site devoted to picking apart online rumors and urban legends, has labeled the status of the claim “undetermined.” Several online discussion boards have been loaded up with denials.

Fox appears to be grumpy not that the Mail has done this (and who's to say that they have? I don't know what went on in the Mail's newsroom. Perhaps someone just happened to come to exactly the same conclusion about the story that Fox did, and just happened to write it in almost exactly the same way using very similar paragraphs - in one case, an absolutely identical paragraph, right down to the US spelling of 'labelled'. You can't rule that out, of course, highly improbable though that may be) but that they haven't had the common courtesy to explain it to their readers, by simply saying "Fox News reports". Those are the rules of the game nowadays - you can lift what you like, but for heaven's sake at least provide a link to who said it first, or at the absolute minimum acknowledge their original work.

Now I'll admit that I don't like Fox News - they are a giant turd on the lawn of newsgathering, and their protestations about journalistic integrity would make even a reader who agrees with everything they say chortle at the sheer bollocks of it all. However, I can't disagree that they're right in this instance to call out the Mail for what appears to be - and what is, unless there's a fucking astonishing explanation - lazy, shite and pisspoor copying-and-pasting instead of actually finding stuff out themselves.

Fox:

The article on the Mail's Web site ran under the byline “Mail Foreign Service,” which presumably means that whoever "wrote" the Mail story simply "mailed it in."
The Mail did not respond to FOXNews.com's request for an explanation.

Do bear that last bit in mind whenever the Mail wants you to draw your own conclusions about the culpability or otherwise of someone in one of their stories 'refusing to comment'.

Anyway, more Fox/Mail fighting, please - and let's hope it's a war of mutually assured destruction.

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