News media's sloppy week: Column When newsrooms run with stories too good to be true, they should diversify their ranks.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

"So, basically, my butt refuted The New York Times."

That's what I heard in the press room at this weekend's NRA convention in Nashville, from gun-blogger SayUncle (real name: Chance Ballew).

The Times had editorialized that the NRA was a bunch of hypocrites because although attendees with gun permits were allowed to carry guns on the convention floor, those guns were actually neutered by having the firing pins removed: "Seventy-thousand people are expected to attend the National Rifle Association's convention opening (last Friday) in Tennessee, and not one of them will be allowed to come armed with guns that can actually shoot. After all the NRA propaganda about how 'good guys with guns' are needed to be on guard across American life, from elementary schools to workplaces, the weekend's gathering of disarmed conventioneers seems the ultimate in hypocrisy."

A damning assertion of hypocrisy — except that it wasn't even close to true. The only guns with firing pins removed were the display guns on the convention floor. In fact, several gun bloggers tweeted a photo of themselves carrying fully functional firearms from the press room, forcing The Times into an embarrassing — though still incomplete — correction. It was especially embarrassing because a simple check of the NRA website or The Tennessean would have revealed the truth. But The Times' editors saw a chance to score a cheap shot and got carried away in their excitement. (MSNBC got burned, too.)

They were not alone in their humiliation last week. The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism published on April 5 a review of Rolling Stone's utter failure in reporting on the alleged University of Virginia fraternity gang rape that turned out to be a hoax. The story's author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and the magazine's fact-checkers — who seemed much tougher in the movie Almost Famous — failed to perform even basic due diligence, to the point that they even quoted people who were never interviewed, based on uncorroborated hearsay that turned out to be false.

Why did Rolling Stone make such a colossal — and, potentially, very expensive — mistake? Like The Times editors, the editors at Rolling Stone had bought thoroughly into a narrative. For The Times, it was the hypocritical NRA. For Rolling Stone, it was sexually predatory fraternity members. In both cases, excitement about this narrative led to the reporting of things that weren't true, and humiliation for the reporters and editors.

But if misery loves company, then there's a bright side: More company. Last week Bloomberg News ran, and then retracteda report that Nancy Reagan had endorsed Hillary Clinton. Except that it came from a parody news site and wasn't even slightly true. Again, this was something that the editors just wanted to believe. In reportorial parlance, it was a story "too good to check."

There are a lot of those lately, it seems, and they have a couple of things in common. The first is that they are a product of ignorance stemming from a lack of newsroom diversity. Anyone with any knowledge of guns, or the NRA, would have doubted the claim that firing pins were removed from people's carry guns. But such familiarity is apparently unwelcome at The Times. Rolling Stone's lurid gang-rape story read like bad fiction (which it was) but fed prejudices about fraternities and "white privilege" in a campus "rape culture." And the notion that Reagan might endorse Clinton was believable only to people who didn't know much about Reagan but had high hopes for Clinton.

The other thing these stories have in common is that they all served Democratic Party talking points, whether based on anti-gun thinking, "war on women" sloganeering, or pro-Hillary sentiment. For whom journalists are rooting, of course, is no mystery to most news media consumers, but it's telling that the errors so often point in the same direction. (As columnist Kurt Schlichter tweeted, the corrections to news stories never seem to make conservatives look worse than the original.) That's a diversity problem, too, of course: When everyone in the newsroom shares the same political leaning, groupthink and outright propagandizing get a lot easier.

Even so, I don't think that big news outlets such as The Times, Bloomberg or Rolling Stone will start hiring people with different backgrounds and political views. Instead, I think they'll simply lose audiences, and trust, to people who do. In the marketplace of ideas, you can only go so far when you're one-sided. Though these humiliations should be a wake-up call, I expect them to keep snoozing.

, a law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

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