CBC Newsworld's “news.real” - Lazy Reporting for the younger generation

This is an email I wrote to the CBC Newsworld show after they did a typical 'echoing the background noise' report on the Newsweek scandal

A question about the "Newsweek" story:

Does Neil MacDonald and the producers of the "Newsweek" report on May 21st's "News.real" program mean to have us believe that Newsweek's circulation is so wide that it's stories can spark protests in Afghanistan? That's pretty good since I didn't think a magazine could ship its latest issues to the Middle East so quickly.

Of course, even the Pentagon says the Afghan protests were unrelated to the Newsweek story, http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-05-12-voa74.cfm , but that hasn't stopped the White House PR machine, nor it seems, your program, from making a lazy connection between the two.

What scares me the most about this affair is the growing push on news organizations to watch themselves with a line like "people died because of that story." Don't they teach about censorship techniques like this in first year journalism classes?

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