So TNR seems pretty solid on the Beauchamp thing. Not just in the sense that Beauchamp's story has yet to be disproven, and that evidence of his recantation has yet to be produced, but in that they're actually trying to figure out what's going on, and end up wherever the facts lead them. By contrast, the big news from earlier this week was that Drudge had laid hands on documents proving Beauchamp wrong, but the documents didn't do that, and Drudge soon removed them, and his story of Beauchamp, from his site -- no correction, recantation, or explanation offered. Now that's journalistic ethics.
As a general point, I don't care about Beauchamp's story. If it's false, it should be retracted. If it's true, it should be praised. What unsettles me is the methodology -- the feeding frenzy to disprove unpleasant facts by way of innuendo, random e-mail speculation, and character assassination, all of which are assembled into an overwhelming mass of "truthy claims and constant updates that offer the atmospherics of a proven case without hard evidence. It was the same thing with the Graeme Frost affair.
During the Frost affair, I got a (very respectful) e-mail from a conservative reporter asking why I objected to Malkin's reporting. Isn't this, my interlocutor said, exactly what the media should be doing? Uncovering the facts about this family?
But there's a procedure to reporting. You identify your question, you gather your facts, you check your sources, and then you offer the finished product. What you don't do is choose a target, then unleash an all-purpose call for supportive speculation, smears, rumors, pithy attack lines, pictures of the target's school, examples of the target's high school poetry, and put it all up in real time, long before you've found and checked anything that you'd be comfortable saying is The Truth. What the Right has been engaging in isn't fact-checking or reporting, but communal, speculative, character assassination. It's shameful, and to the targets, deeply cruel.
