Why is Fox "easy"? They've never, AFAIK, broadcast anything requiring a major retraction on the scale of CNN's Tailwind story or CBS and the "fake but accurate" Bush National Guard memos.

If Fox ran corrections, I'm not sure they'd have time for anything else.

Bill O'Reilly's spent days on rants based on deliberately misrepresenting what Sandra Fluke testified about. (1. She wants government to pay for birth control. No, students pay for insurance and wants contraceptives covered by the insurance they pay for. 2. She can't afford birth control but she can fly all over doing interviews. No, she was testifying about other students who had problems affording birth control without insurance, so what Fluke can afford is irrelevant. Etc.)

Fox News's whole raison d'être requires this kind of misinformation.

Can we cut this thread short and just stipulate that all the major media outlets have had slipups in the past? I think we can all see where this particular argument leads, and it's nowhere productive.

Let's not cut it short. This isn't a digression, this is the subject at hand.

Calling lapses of journalistic integrity "slip-ups" is a disservice to serious journalism. Running a story without adequate fact checking because it will gain you viewers or because it closely aligns to your biases is a serious breach and shouldn't be downplayed, no matter what the ideology of the perpetrators are. The media is in a sorry state these days and this is a big part of why.

Edit: On second thought it's possible I may have misinterpreted your intent. If you mean that it's not worthwhile to delve into ideologically based score keeping, then I agree. I only object to the notion that we shouldn't highlight past transgressions, or that we should downplay them as effectively "accidents". In reality there is a history of effective hoaxes and "black bag" operations involving the press, in some of the most egregious cases where members of the press were fully complicit. That's worth talking about and bringing to the surface even if an attempted reckoning of the integrity of, say, Fox News vs. CBS is not.

Sure. I'll just say that it would be a rare major journalism outlet in this country that wouldn't post a retraction like this when this kind of fabrication came to light. I don't think PRI has behaved particularly impressively here.

I think we can probably all safely agree that they've cleared the bar without arguing by how much. PRI, by the way, has no oversight over TAL; you mean WBEZ.

Posting is one thing. E-mailing every member is another.

Emailing every member is easy to do when you have every member's email address. Their last mail to me, 7 days ago:

Towards our 10,000 member goal, we heard from 9,025 folks over the last eight days, and we couldn't be more grateful. Some of the Summer Pledge Drive has been eliminated, but with your help, we can still eliminate some more.

'twoodfin is right to be cautious about valorizing WBEZ.

The right thing to do is often easy, technologically. The harder part for an organization is deciding "yep, we want to e-mail everyone on our list and tell them we made a big mistake".

Getting people's email addresses in the first place is the "hard part" I'm alluding to.

They didn't merely post or email people.

They are devoting THEIR ENTIRE SHOW this weekend to the retraction.

If you honestly think Fox News would do this, I want some of your drugs.

You must have missed Fox's mea culpa during the 2008 election season. I believe it began: "Today on Fox we are devoting an entire hour to the retraction of our story regarding Candidate Barack Obama's attendance at an extremist muslim school."

James O'Keefe.

His "investigative journalism" of ACORN was shown to be edited to the point of nearly complete fabrication. No retraction from Fox.