1115.org

You know, I never went to J-school (journalism school, to the uninitiated) but I know people who did, and even if I didn’t, I would have a pretty good idea about some of the things that happen in Reporting 101.

For example, I’m pretty sure they drill into you the notion that if you get a tip from an anonymous source, the first thing you do is you try to corroborate it. You try, at least. So if you get a hot tip, for instance, that James Carville and Paul Begala are going to leave their CNN jobs to join Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the first thing you do is place calls to Carville and Begala and the Clinton campaign. I think in J-school that’s a truth they hold to be self-evident.

If Carville and Begala stonewall you, and resort to evasive runarounds, then maybe you have a decision to make. And even then, you think carefully about the advisability of going with a uncorroborated story. (And, of course, you do this partly because you worry about the damage to your journalistic credibility if you do go with the story, and it proves to be a crock of smelly stuff.) It’s always potentially damaging to go with stories that were whispered to you by anonymous sources, and which you could not confirm.

If, in some inexcusable abdication of all sense of journalistic responsibility, you chose to not even call Carville and Begala first, and you did indeed decide to publish the anonymous, unconfirmed story, and if Carville and Begala then issued firm and unambiguous denials to you (and the nationalpress) on the record, you really wouldn’t have much choice. You would pull the story, and issue an apology and a retraction, trying to bury it as far from public view as you could. That’s also deemed to be pretty axiomatic. It’s partly because you’ll be forced to do this if you’re wrong that you make strenuous efforts not to publish things that are untrue in the first place.

But none of this applies if you’re Fox News, no sir. Because Fox News has very little to do with journalism and, therefore, with generally accepted journalistic principles. Things are just very different when there’s no journalistic credibility to jeopardize in the first place.

Begala’s own account of the incident makes it abundantly clear exactly what distinguishes Fox News from every real news organization:

Fox News never even tried to contact me to verify their story, and when I contacted Fox, I felt like a character in a Kafka novel — or at least Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Fox’s Major Garrett — a good guy whom I’ve known for years — broke the story. My phone started ringing off the hook, and my email box bulged. There are still, thank goodness, a lot of real journalists out there. Tim Russert was first. I assured him it wasn’t true, he thanked me for waving him off a false story, and that was that. Then my own network, CNN, called. I told them if I were quitting CNN that CNN would know before Fox News. Soon after, others called or emailed: Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, George Stephanopoulos and Teddy Davis of ABC, Beth Fouhy of AP, Mark Halperin of Time, John Harris of the Politico, Jill Lawrence of USA Today, Peter Baker of the Washington Post, Patrick Healy of the New York Times, David Gregory of NBC and Bill Sammon of the Examiner. There were probably more. I list the names only to give credit to journalists who behaved like reporters, not repeaters.

After I told Fox it wasn’t true — and this is the surreal part — they kept reporting it anyway. In fact, Fox’s Garrett told me he’d “take it under advisement.” Take it under advisement?

Unreal!