Subject Of The Day: "Fake, But Accurate" Redux

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Is Talal's rationale very different from that of the many post-Watergate Americans who became journalists in order to change the world; to work for peace; to spread the news about environmental disaster; to be adversaries of (Republican) administrations; and so on? How different is Mary Mapes' use of "evidence" that she must have known or suspected was fake, in her case the purported Bush National Guard documents, from the Palestinians' use of staged video footage and altered photographs? There is great peril, it seems to me, in the whole concept of advocacy journalism that is devoted to a "higher truth," wherever that supposedly-idealistic ethic may take root. It is easy to imagine Palestinians and their supporters in France and elsewhere defending the Al Dura footage in exactly the terms the New York Times used to describe Mapes' bogus documents: "fake, but accurate."