The News and Observer wants to be graded on a curve. Yeah, they say, we made out mistakes, but we did better than most media. There's a ringing vision statement to hang in the newsroom:
We don't suck as bad as the other guys.There is no denying that Joseph Neff has done great reporting. His current series on the collapse of the case is just outstanding.
As Jon Ham points out, great reporting does not erase bad reporting, and the N&O did a lot of bad reporting early in the case.
In a recent blog post, Sill defends her paper by asserting that journalists have to verify while bloggers can traffic in rumors. She gives no examples of the rumors or the blogs that ran with them. That seems like a big omission when you are touting your love of facts and your distaste for the internet's culture of assertion and opinion.
An even bigger problem is that she mischaracterizes her paper's biggest mistakes. It is not that the N&O was slow to at reporting the truth; that is forgivable. Their key failure was that they obstinately defended and promoted falsehood.
This post is a summary of the N&O's performance. It is hard to square with Ms. Sill's rosy assessment.
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