The folly that passes as modern journalism: phony story wins award

What It Takes To Be An "Award-Winning Journalist"

May 23, 2011Posted by John at 6:36 PM

This year's National Magazine Award for Reporting was won by Harper's magazine and Scott Horton, for an article that claimed three detainees were murdered by American troops at Guantanamo Bay. Unfortunately, the story turned out to be a lie. Not only that, but a lie that was peddled to a number of other left-wing news outlets that turned it down because it wasn't plausible.

Scott Horton's named seemed familiar. Sure enough: we wrote about another transparently fictitious Horton article, which also attacked the U.S. Army, and was also published by Harper's, back in 2007. And Horton collaborated with MSNBC in a laughably stupid smear of Karl Rove in 2008.

The linked article in Adweek is a devastating expose of a work of fiction that has just received a prestigious industry award. The articles that were nominated for the award manifested, shall we say, a certain consistency:

Of the five finalists in the category, there were three real contenders, and most people working in the ever-shrinking category of serious magazine journalism were sure the award would go to Rolling Stone for the article by Michael Hastings that led to the downfall of Gen. Stanley McChrystal or The New Yorker for Jane Mayer's profile of the billionaire Koch brothers.

I agree that serious magazine journalism is "ever-shrinking;" left-wing agenda journalism, however, is thriving.

Somewhat weirdly, the fact that Horton's story was a lie from top to bottom didn't seem to trouble Adweek as much as one might expect:

Horton's piece had all the elements of a great story: a gripping narrative, a whistle-blower, an explosive expose, and a murder mystery--not to mention an admirable aim: to speak truth to power.

In what world is peddling yet more smears against the dedicated military personnel who run Guantanamo Bay "speak[ing] truth to power?" The world of the American Society of Magazine Editors, evidently. You might wonder: who, exactly, are these leaders of the journalism industry who honor left-wing fables lacking even a fig-leaf of plausibility? You might wonder, but you aren't going to find out:

ASME refused to identify the editors who acted as the judges in the category.

Via InstaPundit.