Newsweek's "He said, She Said"

The buzz this week in the media was Newsweek's big misstep in attributing a quote criticizing Obama to Nancy Pelosi. It turned out, she never said the quote - she wasn't even interviewed for the article! Fortunately enough, that didn't matter for Newsweek, who wrote most of a front-cover article about content surrounding the quote.

The quote was as follows (and has since been corrected online):

“I think you need to talk about how poorly they [the White House] do on message,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tells Newsweek’s Howard Kurtz. “They can’t see around corners; they anticipate nothing.”

It was perfect enough for Republican bloggers to jump on, laughing that even Obama's biggest supporters are now critical of his strategy. Of course, none of this was true at all.

This is another example of one of the most annoying characteristics of "reporting" today: basing an entire story off of a single non-meaningful or irrelevant (and in this case, false!) quote or fact. One single piece of news does not good journalism make. Real journalism should be about more than just filler or horse-race content, and should involve research and, it goes without saying, accurate quotes. This sort of "content" - and I use the term loosely - is mostly useless.