The Usual Suspects

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Since when does one ask the suspect to conduct the investigation into himself?

Yet this is precisely what the editors of the Arizona Daily Star did by asking reporter Rob O'Dell to fact-check the response from the City of Tucson to an opinion by the Star's opinion writer Josh Brodesky (Josh Brodesky: Miracle Mike Letcher: a job well-spun).

You see, Rob O'Dell did the original questionable reporting, and then Josh Brodesky simply cited O'Dell's reporting (some Star editorial opinions have done the same). It is a closed-loop system – the Star is its source. Rob O'Dell is fact-checking himself and – surprise! – through mendacious parsing of his own words and playing his favorite game of "fun with facts and figures," finds that Brodesky, er, O'Dell is correct. Ta-da! City issues rebuttal of Brodesky column.

Shouldn't this fact-checking of the tag team duo of O'Dell and Brodesky have been done by a managing editor? Better yet, how about an independent journalism review not controlled by the Arizona Daily Star?

The inability or unwillingness of the Arizona Daily Star to ever concede an error and to publish a correction of its reporting is a long-running recurring problem. It is so bad that the Tucson Weekly took it upon itself to begin a New Tucson Weekly Feature: The Star's Correction Section.

A little help, guys. This dispute is one that the Tucson Weekly is going to have to weigh in on with a Star Correction. After all, the Tucson Weekly is the only other publication in Tucson that can challenge the monopoly of the Star.

We here at Blog for Arizona do our part to hold this corporate media publication accountable – and they hate us for it – but we are "only a blog" that the Star sneers upon as having little redeeming value. (See Michael Bryan's response here Blogs with pseudonyms add to discourse). Which is ironic, because the Brodesky opinion at issue reads like a badly written blog post.