Mike Rogers

I am culture and media critic-- who doesn't hide their conservative bias and ideology.

Like a lot of the media, Mona Charen didn't learn the lesson Andrew Breitbart taught everyone.

It's not only about bias. It's about honor.

Last week Charen was asked to do an interview on NBC. As she noted soon after, the interview was edited in a way that misrepresented her views. But more importantly, too many journalists are dishonorable..After meeting Alter, I began to notice that the City Paper was getting letters, and lots of them, from profile subjects claiming that they had been misquoted. Every journalist will get a few of these in their life. But this was a steady stream.

On Sept. 19, 1997, the City Paper ran a story by Jason Cherkis entitled "Congressional High: Killing Time on Capitol Hill." The piece told the story of high school interns who worked on Capitol Hill. Two of the interns profiled, Curtis Banks and Rodney Bunn, wrote a letter claiming that quotes had been fabricated by Cherkis.

It seemed like a month would not go by without a letter of complaint to the Washington City Paper and Jason Cherkis. Examples here and here and here. Perhaps the most damning was from Barbara Rice, an attorney, who wrote:

Jason Cherkis pestered me to answer questions about wheter I had sex with my boyfriend, and used profanities -- all in an apparent effort to have me say or do something inappropriate in response.