News? Politics? The decline of common sense and ethical standards.

In the news today from the Washington Post:


Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration aide and Republican Senate staffer, wrote that President Obama would "please" much of his base by picking the "first openly gay justice." An administration official, who asked not to be identified discussing personal matters, said Kagan is not a lesbian.


CBS initially refused to pull the posting, prompting Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director who is working with the administration on the high court vacancy, to say: "The fact that they've chosen to become enablers of people posting lies on their site tells us where the journalistic standards of CBS are in 2010." She said the network was giving a platform to a blogger "with a history of plagiarism" who was "applying old stereotypes to single women with successful careers."

\The network deleted the posting Thursday night after Domenech said he was merely repeating a rumor. The flare-up underscores how quickly the battle over a Supreme Court nominee -- or even a potential nominee -- can turn searingly personal. Most major news organizations have policies against "outing" gays or reporting on the sex lives of public officials unless they are related to their public duties.

Where to begin?  The news is suppose to be, well, news; presumptively containing significant elements of fact.  That is, unfortunately, no longer true.  This item, while particularly egregious is unfortunately typical.  Consider, CBS purports to report news; ie. a report of a recent event; intelligence; information.  Instead, what happened here is that CBS took something from a blog, apparently made no attempt to fact check, and then published it as though fact.  When initially challenged, CBS declined to withdraw the item! 

I've long taken a rather jaundice view of what passes as news today in a world of 24hr news cycles.  Much of it is little more than hyperbole wrapped around a minimum of fact.  Worse still, much of the hyperbole is cast as war like confrontation.  Why then are we surprised when civil discourse is, well, anything but civil.  Instead, we have a pervasive environment of uncivil, confrontational, discourse that makes it all but impossible to find real solutions to real problems.  

So now, thanks to CBS, there will be some number of people that without regard to any fact truth believe that a potential justice on the Supreme Court is unqualified because she is "gay."  Now, being "gay" is, at least as far as I know, a sexual orientation having nothing to do with someone's judicial qualifications or suitability for appointment to the Supreme Court.  Never mind that there is no fact to support the rather scurrilous allegation.

Common sense suggest that we all be much more suspicious of  what is passed off as news, particularly by CBS.  It further suggest that a reasonable first assumption is that blogs are NOT evenly remotely reasonable sources of fact.  After all, one of the fundamental truths of the Internet is that anything can write anything independent of the truth.