-By Warner Todd Huston
Always looking to find some reason to smear Fox News, the website Raw Story slammed the network for airing the name of a 16-year-old rape victim in a March 18 broadcast of America’s Newsroom. But in its zeal to slap Fox, the website neglected to note that other news outlets did the same thing.
Just before noon on March 18, Raw Story reported that during Fox reporter Mike Tobin’s segment on the guilty verdicts in the Steubenville rape case that morning, the name of the victim was broadcast without being censored.
In its original piece, though, Raw Story did not point out that several other mainstream media outlets also aired the victim’s name and did so before Fox News did on Monday.
It has been a long-standing, voluntary tradition that reporters redact the names of rape victims and once Raw Story’s report began to circulate, several other websites jumped on the story to attack Fox for violating that sensible tradition.
By 2 PM that day, Huffington Post jumped on the bandwagon to slam Fox for airing the name of the victim. Not long after that, the progressive site Think Progress also moved to attack Fox over the lapse as did the left-wing site Jezebel.
But, by 4PM Mediaite posted that these Fox critics didn’t bother to do their due diligence and look into the other media outlets that beat Fox to the punch of violating the no-disclosure tradition. Mediate found that both CNN, and MSNBC also aired the victim’s name and did so before Fox did.
So far, only two of the above mentioned Fox critics, Think Progress and Raw Story, added updates to their posts to reflect the truth.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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