IN 2006, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was informed that the CIA was torturing suspected terrorists with fire ants. Over the next five months he interviewed more than 50 people before deciding that the evidence wasn’t up to his standards. Confident that the story was true, but wanting definitive proof, he didn’t report it.
As veteran newspapermen Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel observe in Blur, journalistic integrity doesn’t get better than that, yet in the sensationalist new media environment, standards are rare. Blur is foremost an attempt to compensate for unreliable information by teaching the “tradecraft of active skepticism”.…
