In a rare move by a modern news outlet, Felix Salmon on his Reuters blog schools Reuters over a wildly inaccurate and conservative-oriented take on the Occupy Wall Street movement that appeared on the news service earlier in the day. The original article garnered wide derision throughout social media after it credited George Soros with funding OWS. That charge is of course false.
So I was pleasantly surprised to see this mea culpa from Salmon, concluding with this telling paragraph (emphasis mine):
Reuters cannot — must not — get a reputation as a right-wing media outlet. We have to report the news as impartially as we can. In this case, there was no story, and nothing to report. Inventing a tenuous and intellectually-dishonest link between Soros and OWS might get us traffic from Matt Drudge — but that’s traffic which, frankly, we don’t particularly value or care for. Much more importantly, it serves to undermine the heart of what Reuters stands for. And we can never afford to do that.
Boo Reuters for publishing the shoddy bit of propaganda in the first place. Hooray Felix Salmon for setting straight the distortions of the original story.
UPDATE: Commenter mattbastard correctly notes that this mea culpa is not the official position of Reuters. Notes MB:
From Salmon’s post: “I should mention here explicitly that this post, just like everything else on this blog, is my personal opinion. It may or may not be shared by others within the organization. But it should emphatically not be taken as representing the views of Thomson Reuters”.
The post has been adjusted to accommodate these corrections. Thanks Matt.
