Stephen Gray

I am a blogger and critic.

This is an excerpt from my latest column:

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. Yes, journalists are all liberals. But more importantly, too many of them are dishonorable people.

After meeting Alter in 1996, I began to notice that the City Paper was getting letters, and lots of them, from profile subjects claiming that they had been misquoted and misrepresented. Of course, 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, who now writes anti-conservative articles for the Huffington Post, 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.

It seemed like a month would not go by without a similar letter of complaint to the paper about some Jason Cherkis story. Examples here and here and here.

Perhaps the most damning was from Barbara Rice, an attorney, who wrote:

[The writer] pestered me to answer questions about my divorce, asked if I had sex with my boyfriend, and used profanities -- all in an apparent effort to have me say or do something inappropriate in response. When I didn't, Cherkis simply fabricated a quote to get back at me for complaining for his bad behavior towards me and discredit me if I were ever to say a word about what he did.