Topic: Accuracy in Media
By Cliff Kincaid's own standards, he should be unemployed.
Kincaid uses his Nov. 11 Accuracy in Media column to call for the firing of anyone who got Donald Trump's election wrong:
Journalists and columnists should not be fired for their opinions, but for their lack of objectivity. It’s fine to have anti-Trump opinions, but that should not have interfered with an analysis of why Trump was striking a chord with the American people.
[...]
The problem with people like Stephens and publications like The Huffington Post is that they let their anti-Trump orientation interfere with the need for a professional analysis of what was actually happening in America’s cities and towns.
One Huffington Post writer with egg on his face is Ryan Grim, who was promoting the bogus story that Trump had raped a 13-year-old girl. Regarding the rape story, Grim informed his readers on November 2 that “a woman who says Trump raped her as a 13-year-old in the 1990s is planning a press conference at 6:00 EST today. I coincidentally was working on a piece explaining why this case has gotten so little coverage.”
It got little coverage because it was false.
The woman, who had a history of drug abuse, pulled out of the news conference. She was identified by name and dropped the lawsuit. The allegations were obviously fabricated.[...]
But nobody in the media loses their jobs for getting the facts wrong and doing their work in an unprofessional manner.
By Kincaid's own standard, Kincaid should not have a job. We've documented how Kincaid has promoted false claims and overheated, paranoid rhetoric about Barack Obama. He also hurled false smears at a gay former Obama administration adviser and irrationally hates gays to the point that he endorsed a proposed law in Uganda that would permit the death penalty for mere homosexuality.
If that Huffington Post writer should be fired for reporting on the Trump rape case, Kincaid should be fired for promoting the work of discredited filmmaker Joel Gilbert. Kincaid promoted Gilbert's false film claiming that Frank Marshall Davis is Obama's real father and libelously asserting that Obama's mother posed for nude photos for Davis, and he also enthusiastically touted Gilbert's exploitative campaign to exploit Danney Williams' never-proven claim that he's Bill Clinton's illegitimate son (something we'll probably never hear about from Gilbert again now that Hillary Clinton lost the election).
Kincaid concludes by grousing, "Any ordinary business that got things so wrong and performed so incompetently would go out of business." Yet AIM still exists, and Kincaid is still employed there.
Does Kincaid have the guts and intellectual consistency to enforce his own standards on himself? Highly unlikely.
