Bad News

They went looking for crap, and by golly they found plenty of it. Students in Howard Rheingold's journalism class at Stanford recently teamed up with NewsTrust, a nonprofit Web site that enables people to review and rate news articles for their level of quality, in a search for lousy journalism. The students, along with other NewsTrust users, spent the last week of February engaged in the "News Hunt for Bad Journalism." The idea was to highlight work that fell victim to poor sourcing, bias, inaccuracy, spin, or other journalistic lapses. Each day was dedicated to a different type of reporting, from straight news reports to opinion columns to the work by partisan media watchdogs like Media Research Center and fact-checkers such as PolitiFact. Some of the news organizations that fell into their crosshairs include The New York Times, the New York Post, the Washington Times, The Nation, Reuters, and the Associated Press.