A longstanding news-business maxim exhorts journalists to “get it first, but first get it right.” Sometimes in 2014, newsroom practitioners of that maxim seemed as lost as the typesetters and hot wax from the glory days of newspapers.
Other times, American readers were provided examples of journalism at its best. So here are some of the best and worst moments from 2014.
The lows:
1. CNN really wants to find that plane
When Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 went missing in March, CNN couldn’t get enough of the story. However, there was a moment when CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage bottomed out, and reporter Don Lemon asked if it’s “preposterous” to wonder if a black hole swallowed the missing airliner. That really happened.
2. Fox News blindly rushes to rancher’s aide
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s tense standoff in April with federal agents over his non-existent “right” to graze for free on federal property made him an instant hero in some areas of Fox News.
Unfortunately for the cable news outlet, Bundy also had some questionable notions about the “negro” and whether African-Americans would be better off under slavery.
Fox personalities who gave Bundy a platform to preach against supposed overreach by the government, including Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly, immediately abandoned the Nevada rancher, his cause and his story.
3. Ted Cruz and online fundraisers
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in September stormed out of a gala event in Washington, D.C., telling a room full of Middle Eastern Christians that he couldn’t stand with them because they “don’t stand with Israel.”
Shortly after the flap, this author (then working on the Washington Examiner’s commentary desk) reported that Cruz’s team turned his pro-Israel gala speech into a fundraising opportunity. However, the online fundraising ad at the center of this claim was not, in fact, created in response to his impromptu speech, but had been in existence for long before that.
4. Football fail
Deadspin erroneously reported in October that Senator-elect Cory Gardner, R-Colo., never played football in high school. In fact, Gardner definitely played football in high school.
“We’re still not sure what happened with [the story’s source] between his certainty Tuesday that Gardner hadn’t played and his certainty Wednesday that Gardner had,” Deadspin’s Tommy Craggs said in a note to readers.
The Denver Post debunked the story almost immediately after it called the school in question, confirming that Gardner had, in fact, played football.
5. Oppo gone awry
Democratic operatives during the midterm elections tripped up BuzzFeed in October by feeding the online news site with shoddy opposition research.
The progressive political action group American Bridge provided BuzzFeed with footage of what appeared to be Georgia Republican Senate candidate David Perdue signing a woman’s hip at a rally.
Unfortunately for BuzzFeed, it wasn’t as tawdry as it appeared: The woman asked Perdue to sign her diabetic pump “to help raise awareness for juvenile diabetes,” a campaign spokesperson explained.
BuzzFeed initially amended the article headline to read, “Tracker Fail: Dems Miss Insulin Pump In Video Of Perdue Signing Young Woman.” The website eventually discarded the “Tracker Fail” in the headline and replaced it with “CORRECTED.”
6. Skewed priorities
The three broadcast networks in November reported immediately on an obscure GOP staffer announcing that she would resign over disparaging remarks she made about President Obama’s daughters.
In contrast, it was days before ABC, NBC, and CBS News reported on Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects of Obamacare, saying that the health care law passed in 2010 thanks to a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of American voters.”
American Commitment, a conservative activist group, posted Gruber’s 2013 statement on YouTube on Nov. 7, 2014.
It took CBS six days to get to the story, ABC News 11 days. NBC News didn’t get around to mentioning Gruber until Dec. 9.
7. The wrong woman
Following reports in November that the White House planned to nominate U.S. attorney Loretta Lynch to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, Breitbart News somehow published a story confusing the president’s nominee with a different woman.
“Obama’s new attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch represented Clintons during Whitewater,” read the article’s quite incorrect headline.
The mistake was noticed by other news groups almost immediately, prompting Breitbart News to issue a correction. The erroneous report was eventually removed from the conservative news website.
8. Rolling Stone steps in it
Rolling Stone magazine in November published a bombshell exposé on campus sexual assault that may or may not be a hoax. The article, titled “A Rape at Campus,” alleged that a young woman, “Jackie,” had been brutally gang-raped at a fraternity party.
“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana said in a note to readers in December.
Since issuing that note, Rolling Stone magazine has gone silent, refusing to speak to most media outlets as it continues to investigate the rape report and whether its author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, knowingly advanced a falsehood. The magazine has asked the Columbia University journalism school to review the story’s creation.
9. The wunderkind millionaire who wasn’t
New Yorker magazine apologized in December after it published an article that falsely reported that a teen in the Empire State had earned $72 million trading stocks.
“After the story’s publication, people questioned the $72 million figure in the headline, which was written by editors based on the rumored figure,” the magazine said in an apology to its readers. “The headline was amended. But in an interview with the New York Observer last night, Islam now says his entire story was made up. … We were duped.”
The highs:
1. The Washington Post cleanup crew
Following Rolling Stone magazine’s report on an alleged sexual assault at the University of Virginia, the Washington Post decided to dig into the story to determine its validity.
The Post managed to track down nearly every person involved in the original rape report, many of which now claim Rolling Stone never contacted them.
Simply put, the best information available now on what may or may not have happened that evening in 2012 at UVA isn’t from the original Rolling Stone report, it’s from the Washington Post’s cleanup crew.
2. An upstart takes on the Clinton machine
The Washington Free Beacon in 2014 did what few media groups have been willing to do: Dig into Hillary Clinton’s past, including her correspondence with controversial Chicago activist Saul Alinsky and her defense of a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
Legacy media types scoffed at the details unearthed by the WFB, with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell at one point writing off the conservative news outlet as an “anti-Clinton website.”
Scoffing aside, the fact is this: An upstart news group made headlines in 2014 by digging into decades-old documents that major media groups, including NBC News, apparently never bothered to investigate.
3. Not-so-secret service
If you were a Secret Service agent in 2014 and you didn’t want the public to know about your agency’s serious security lapses, you had terrible year.
Thanks to in-depth reporting by the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner, the agency’s chief resigned in disgrace and the agency has vowed to take more seriously its duty to protect the first family.
4. VA scandal hits front page
The Examiner‘s Mark Flatten began exposing the horrendous conditions with the Department of Veterans Affairs in February 2013. He kept at it and people in Congress and other media outlets took note. His work — and that of Aaron Glantz at the Center for Investigative Reporting and CNN’s Drew Griffin — paid off in 2014 when VA Director Eric Shinseki resigned and Congress passed legislation to begin repairs.
5. Humbling a celebrity scientist
Sean Davis of the Federalist, a recently launched conservative webmagazine, noticed in the fall of 2014 that celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson had a penchant for fabricating quotes and attributing them to former President George W. Bush.
And Davis discovered that it wasn’t a one-time thing: Tyson had been falsely attributing quotes to Bush for years.
The Federalist kept digging, finding no proof of the alleged quotes and repeatedly contacting Tyson for explanation, until the celebrity scientist admitted — albeit halfheartedly — that he supposedly mis-remembered the quotes. Tyson has since retired the supposed Bush quotes.
