…and just when we were feeling optimistic…

…Mickey Kaus reminded us that there was ticking time bomb of sketchy reporting out there to make us all look bad. Remember Alan Feuer? The NYT metro reporter who wrote a book about his experiences fudging facts and approximating details in his stories filed from iraq? The same book that the NYT told the NY Observer that it didn’t think was a big deal?

Yep, that one. We wondered why so few people (esp. the Times) seemed concerned about the fly-by-night reporting in which Feuer had admitted to engaging. Meanwhile, the book officially came out on May 24th, and today’s review in the New York Sun might explain why no one cares: apparently he doesn’t actually say much about Iraq, let alone his reporting from there. Graeme Wood writes:

The factual crimes implied in “Over There” do not reach [Jayson] Blairian heights of shamelessness, and they are disproportionate to the attention they have received. The real scandal is not that the Times reporter misspelled a source’s name, but that a Times reporter is incorrigibly disinclined to engage seriously with the story he is sent to cover.

The Times hasn’t even reviewed Feuer’s book, and this story hasn’t gotten any ink since Tom Scocca broke it in the Observer in mid-April. Still, we’re talking about the implication of shoddy reporting on the always-contentious, highly-charged issue of the Iraq war. Recent events suggest that where the news from ‘over there’ is concerned, anything can happen.

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