Guest Post by Morbo
As the Carpetbagger noted earlier this week, religious right claims of a “war on Christmas” are melting faster than a snowman in Miami. This week, one of the kook right’s favorite horror stories about anti-Christmas bias abruptly imploded.
Fox News Channel blowhard John Gibson asserts in his new book about alleged anti-Christmas bias that public schools in Plano, Texas, forbid students from wearing red and green at Christmas time. The claim has been repeated over and over by Fox correspondents. On Dec. 9, Jim Pinkerton, a Fox “news analyst,” repeated the Plano tale to Bill O’Reilly.
Guess what? It’s a crock. The Plano schools’ website contains a statement from Superintendent Doug Otto stating bluntly that this “rumor is not true.”
Noted Otto, “The school district does not restrict students or staff from wearing certain color clothes during holiday times or any other school days.” Otto instructed the school district’s attorney to write to O’Reilly and demand that he correct the error.
In the letter the attorney wrote, “It would be our hope that you would engage in fair and balanced reporting of this nationally recognized school district in the future.”
Sweet. The reference to “fair and balanced” is a nice touch.
Will O’Bully correct the record? Probably not. I don’t expect much from Fox these days. What does toast my Christmas cookies, however, is the number of legitimate news outlets that have repeated, and continue to repeat, this story uncritically. Every time a lazy reporter wants to do a “war on Christmas” story, Plano is included among the bulleted examples.
Here’s a tip to my friends in the media: Just because something is all over the Web doesn’t mean it’s true. One of the tools journalists from the old school rely on to uncover the truth is the telephone. Use it.
The Web can be useful too, but the Web should supplement, not supplant, the telephone. In this case, it took me approximately 14 second to plug “Plano schools” into Google and learn the truth. But if the school had not posted anything, I was fully prepared to pick up the phone, call Plano and get the straight dope. It’s a journalist’s job to uncover the truth. When the right wing is spreading wild tales that sound suspicious, start digging.
I don’t expect O’Reilly and Gibson to behave like objective journalists interested in the truth because they are not; they’re demagogues. Legitimate news sources have no business helping those hysteria-mongers spread lies. Rather, they should be debunking them. Skepticism is among the most powerful tools in a journalist’s toolbox.
Next lesson from Morbo’s School of Journalism: Why allowing yourself to become “embedded” when covering a war is a really, really crummy idea.