The Other McCain

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New York Times: ‘Media Colonoscopy’ of Palin E-Mails Was ‘Not a Witch Hunt’

Posted on | June 14, 2011 | 22 Comments

Clay Waters at NewsBusters calls attention to an article by New York Times writer Jeremy Peters:

The New York Times and The Guardian sent reporters armed with scanners and then solicited readers’ assistance. Politico enlisted a dozen editors, reporters and interns who worked as a team from their Northern Virginia newsroom “plowing through” the documents, as one editor described it. The Washington Post initially asked for 100 volunteers to sift through the documents. They were quickly overwhelmed with too many applicants. Unable to screen all of them, the paper abandoned the plan late Thursday, opting instead to invite reader comments.
Were news organizations Dumpster diving, as one outraged reader of The Washington Post put it?
News outlets insisted that they were trying to be as thorough and efficient as possible while reporting on information that the public was entitled to know.
“This is not a witch hunt,” said Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor at The Times. “There are 25,000 documents here, and we can use all the eyeballs we can get.”

It was Greta van Susteren of Fox News who called this ridiculous exercise a “media colonoscopy.”

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