Re: Yesterday's New York Times propaganda gets Jayson Blair award

[aburke5054@aol.com]

Jennifer Medina's article says the proposed NYC plan to track students' 
progress by teacher is contentious.  The article gives some research 
background and includes comments from Randi Weingarten about the plan 
is a bad idea, a comment by Deputy Chancellor Cerf that the formulaic 
use of the results would be a bad idea, and a comment by a principal 
that the results could, in context, be useful.  This hardly seems like 
a rush to judgment to me.

Accusing a journalist of fabricating or distorting a story or accusing 
a newspaper of propaganda are serous charges.  If you don't have more 
to back up your charges than innuendo and character assasination, 
someone might think that you yourself are merely a propagandist and not 
really a journalist.  What a shame that would be.

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Csubstance@aol.com
To: bobschaeffer@earthlink.net; arn-l@interversity.org; 
ARN-state@yahoogroups.com; arn2-strategy@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:26 pm
Subject: [arn-l] Yesterday's New York Times propaganda gets Jayson 
Blair award

1/22/08

Colleagues and friends:

Jayson Blair was the guy who conned the Times a few years back with his
fictional "reportings." This month's Jayson Blair Award has to go to 
yesterday's
page one article on New York's teacher evalution schemes.

One of the reasons we have always been skeptical of what passes for 
"news" in
the pages of The New York Times is that for the past decade they have 
been
uncritical cheerleaders for Chicago's version of dictatorial corporate 
"school
reform."

The article that appeared on page one of yesterday's editions (we get 
the
National edition here) was almost pure agitprop and would have made a 
great
subject for dissection as propaganda were I teaching journalism at this 
point.
"Experts say..." over and over, then only one side of the "experts" was 
just the
most obvious sleight of hand.

The more egregious nonsense takes place in the morphing of getting 
"good
teachers" into this Cerf and Klein test craziness. Although there is no 
connection
actually made, they just slip it into the narrative, and suddenly -- 
Presto!
-- it's part of the fact chain.

If "reporter" Jennifer Medina were in one of my high school journalism
classes years ago, she would have gotten an "F" for this piece of 
nonsense. It
should serve as a major warning to people who act as if a clip file 
from The New
York Times constitutes anything more than a window to look into the 
soul of
Standardisto propaganda. The questions anyone should have about all of 
the
unsubstantiated claims in this article would fill a few pages, yet 
somehow the piece
slips not only through any "editing" but into print without scrutiny.

So... the Jayson Blair award for this month goes to the people who 
edited
this piece, and to Jennifer.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net<BR><BR><BR>**************<BR>Start the year off 
right.
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