ninme

This is wonderful. Clear, concise, thorough, and with that dash of retaliation to make it exiting:

The Australian - Part One: Janet Albrechtsen’s Good News from Iraq

What Albrechtsen’s column got wrong was the precise web address at which the The Wall Street Journal publishes the round-up of good news from Iraq. Rather than wsj.com, the Iraq good news round-up is published on www.OpinionJournal.com, the website of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. This is arguably the most influential editorial or oped page in the English-speaking world. Certainly it is more influential in the world of ideas and opinion than The Wall Street Journal’s news pages. Albrechtsen’s argument gained no strength by referring to wsj.com rather than OpinionJournal.com. Both are websites of The Wall Street Journal. OpinionJournal.com editor James Taranto, who also works for the print version of The Wall Street Journal, described the error in referring to the newspaper’s wrong website as “honest, and very small”. Taranto said Albrechtson’s column “misidentifies” which Wall Street Journal site carried the good news round up from Iraq but was “not substantially inaccurate”. “OpinionJournal is part of what we call the WSJ.com network”, he said. For the purposes of Albrechtsen’s column, OpinionJournal is a no less “prestigious” (to use Jackson’s word) source than wsj.com.

On the 9 May broadcast, Jackson mocked the “27 pages of good news, from the prestigious Wall Street Journal? We wanted to know more … but couldn’t find it on their web site”. She added: “Good News from Iraq is not published on the highly respected Wall Street Journal website …” She referred to OpinionJournal.com as a “sister site”, a “spin-off site” or a “Dow Jones website”. Jackson did not make it clear that OpinionJournal.com is a Wall Street Journal website. At best, the relationship between wsj.com and OpinionJournal.com was left muddied by the 9 May broadcast…

Remember that Albrechtsen merely said that The Wall Street Journal’s website carries a regular round-up of good news from Iraq, but cited wsj.com rather than OpinionJournal.com. Only those who closely followed the various off-air exchanges would have noticed that “misrepresentation” been toned down. Now, Albrechtsen was guilty of the lesser crime of having given the round-up of Iraq good news “a journalistic credibility it doesn’t deserve”. But all Albrechtsen did was refer to a “round-up” - a compilation of media articles and media releases - of good news on Iraq published online by The Wall Street Journal. Note that Media Watch has been careful not to challenge the journalistic credibility of The Wall Street Journal - in part by not making it clear on air that The Wall Street Journal does in fact publish, pay for and edit the round-up referred to by Albrechtsen.

And there’s a part two tomorrow! Joy!