ARE JOURNALISTS JUST LIARS OR CONTEMPTIBLE LIARS?

It is, arguably, the most serious problem in contemporary journalism.  And it’s getting worse.

Something really bad happens.  People want to learn more about it.  So they tune in to a cable television network. 

The cable news anchors know little more about what’s happened than do the people tuning in.  Not enough time has elapsed to gather the facts.  But the news anchors have all this airtime to fill.  So they speculate, and invite those they interview to speculate.

Competition in journalism is more about getting the story first than in getting the story right. So rumors are "reported" without being checked out. In the early hours of a crisis, news organizations often transmit more misinformation than information.

"Much of what was reported as fact by government officials and the media during the chaotic first week (after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans) turned out to be fiction," said Mark Memmott of USA Today in an October, 2005 retrospective.

The death toll was reported as ten times as great as it actually was, Mr. Memmott said, and the widely reported "crime spree" in the Louisiana Superdome never happened.

"A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on," Shakespeare wrote in Henry IV, Part 2.  This is especially true of disaster reporting, because people remember most what they first heard, not what dribbled out later once the crisis was past.

Media bias compounds the problem.  Many journalists are more interested in spinning the news than in reporting it.

On Saturday (1/08), Jared Lee Loughner, 22, opened fire in a Safeway in Tucson, killing six and wounding 14.  Among the dead was U.S. District Judge John Roll, a conservative Republican.  Among the seriously injured was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a liberal Democrat.

Long before anything was known about Mr. Loughner, journalists speculated about what really motivated his murder spree.

For Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, it was the "inflammatory rhetoric" of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-NE.,  said Mr. Loughner was upset by Republican opposition to Obamacare.

What pushed Mr. Loughner over the edge, said Rep. James Clyburn, D-SC was the reading of the Constitution on the House floor.

Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-ME, thinks he might have been inflamed by the Republican claim that Obamacare "kills jobs."

For most in the news media, the arch villain was Sarah Palin, who before the election had marked on her Web site with the crosshairs of a rifle sight the districts of Democrats she thought could be defeated. 

Among those complaining was liberal Web logger Markos Moulitsas, who on his Web site (Daily Kos) had put a bullseye of his own on Ms. Giffords just two days before (1/06) she was shot.  Mr.Moulitsas was upset Ms. Giffords had voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker the previous day.

"In all my years as a working journalist, I’ve never seen such shallow, thoughtless, agenda-driven drivel as I have in the past 36 hours," said former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg Monday (1/10).

Emerging details about Mr. Loughner reveal how shallow the drivel is.  A registered independent who didn’t vote last November, he was described by a classmate as a "left-wing pothead."  An atheist who thinks the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Loughner listed as a "favorite" on his Web site a video of the burning of the American flag. 

Mr. Loughner isn’t political.  His beef with Rep. Giffords apparently stemmed from his dissatisfaction with an answer she gave him when he asked her a question at a town meeting in 2007.  His question was, "What’s government if words have no meaning?"

Paranoid schizophrenia knows no ideology.  The only political figure who may deserve some blame for the shootings is Sheriff Dupnik.  Mr. Loughner had made death threats against others, of which Sheriff Dupnik may have been aware.

"I think what we really need to look into is what happened when (Loughner) had previous contact with the sheriff’s office with their negligence here," said James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal.  "I think the sheriff is trying to distract from that question."

So Sheriff Dupnik may have an excuse, albeit a bad one, for his blame assigning.  Others do not.  Law professor Glenn Reynolds asked these others the key question in the Wall Street Journal Monday (1/10):

"To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the ‘rhetoric’ of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either:

"(a) asserting a connection between the rhetoric and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be called a vicious lie; or

"(b) you’re not, in which case you are just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. 

"Which is it?"

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.