Catallaxy Files

This from Crikey today

Apology to Morry Schwartz

Crikey apologises to Morry Schwartz for the false claim and the harm done to his reputation.

I wonder if the apology was part of a settlement or an attempt to reduce damages in a defamation suit? It was a pretty damaging statement about a publisher.

I blogged about Crikey a while back but it seems to have been ground up and the electrons recycled.

A couple of recent gems:

Under the headline How Rupert Ruined the WSJ this NYT piece is linked.

A couple of quotes from the NYT:

“Murdoch didn’t ruin The Wall Street Journal; he just rendered it into a much more ordinary paper,” he said.
“It is an excellent paper,” Ms. Ellison said. “But it is entirely transformed from what it used to be.”

It’s one thing to use a misleading headline for one of your own articles but to do so in linking someone else’s is very poor editing, it seems to me.

Then there is this about COP15, under the headline Where are all the Scientists?

In fact the article says there are at least 650 scientists there, including the excellent Matt England from UNSW whose video interview is embedded.

The real complaint is that journalists don’t want to talk to the scientists. Understandable, as this is now a political matter (with all the nonsense that goes with politics) no longer a scientific one.

But I am probably in a small minority with my quibbles about Crikey. One commenter to a piece taking apart Tony Abbot (again) has this to say:
“great read, the thing that worries me with crickey is that not every one see these great articles if only we could get the abc to read them they end up on the evening news”

If only, indeed.