BRIT YELLOW JOURNALISTS IN SHOCK ETHICAL ROW!

Posted By Annie Lowrey Monday, March 30, 2009 - 12:24 PM Share

That's how we'd title this post if FP were printed on Fleet Street -- according to an article by the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel on the relative lack of journalistic restraint (or relative excess of narrative enthusiasm) of British reporters in D.C.

Weigel says stories that don't pass muster for U.S. papers, which have stricter rules on anonymous sources and rumor, end up in U.K. papers. Drudge and the cable news channels then still pick them up. (And, let's face it, occasionally, this blog as well.)

One example: the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph chalked up President Barack Obama's gift of DVDs to Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a a failure to "even fake an interest in foreign policy" because the White House was "overwhelmed."

“The British reporters are the best,” said Andrew Breitbart, a former part-time editor of the Drudge Report who is now editor of Breitbart.com and its Big Hollywood opinion site. “They have such better attitudes than our guys. They’re less simpering. You read their stories and you want go out and drink beers with these guys. The Left just hates them because they tell good stories and the Left doesn’t want good stories if it means they’ll lose a couple of innings.”[...]

“They’re cheap dates,” said one former McCain campaign staffer. “If you give something to the British press you know it’ll make it into their story and then whether it gets around is a matter of whether other people want to take it seriously.” The staffer pointed to the example of a Sunday Times (U.K.) story that quoted McCain staffers, accurately, as saying that they’d talked about a pre-election “shotgun wedding” between Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston. The plan was scuttled, but the gossip was real, so it became a story that bounced all over the political media. “That was a lot of fun.”

 All of which sort of makes us wish we were printed on Fleet Street...

EXPLORE:BRITAIN, MEDIA
 

VIRGIL TIBBS

10:14 PM ET

March 30, 2009

Well, you're right in many

Well, you're right in many ways. But none of this is a surprise to anyone. The Times ceased to be a quality newspaper the moment it was taken over by a certain Mr Murdoch. Papers such as the Telegraph and the Daily Mail are so rapacious in their partisan point-scoring that accuracy and ethical issues get left by the wayside.

But we still have the Economist and the FT!

 

FORLORNEHOPE

6:18 AM ET

March 31, 2009

Libel

But then you would have to put up with UK libel laws; the worst thing for free speech since the creation of the NKVD.

 

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