Journalistic Truth. An Oxymoron?

Please help me. I need help because somewhere, some time ago, they changed the meaning of the word truth, or at least as it applies to journalism. There seems to be two types of dictionaries, one is used by the common, sane, thoughtful, thorough, and ardent researcher, and the one used by the main stream media. Here is the entry I found:

Truth: (noun, pronounced: trooth)

1. the true or actual state of a matter
2. conformity with fact or reality
3. a verified or indisputable fact
4. the state of character of being true
5. actuality or actual existence
6. an obvious or accepted fact; truism; platitude
7. honesty; integrity; truthfulness

This is what is printed at dictionary.com for the entry: Truth

Here is proof of the oxymoron as I encountered it:

Today, as I drank my coffee, I was reading my morning dose of the Boston Globe editorials and found that the editorial board wrote a piece on :"Wasilla made rape victims pay":

ONE QUESTION that Sarah Palin should answer during tomorrow's debate is why, during her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, the town started charging rape victims or their insurers for hospital emergency-room rape kits and examinations.

The policy so outraged the Alaska Legislature that in 2000 it passed unanimously a bill forbidding such fees. But Palin has never explained why, under her leadership, the town stopped picking up the cost of the swabs, specimen containers, and tests.
...

Whether the fee-for-kits policy reflected Palin's budgetary zeal or her extreme view on abortion, voters deserve to know. As Alaska's governor in 2000, Tony Knowles, put it: "We would never bill the victim of a burglary for finger-printing and photographing the crime scene, or for the cost of gathering other evidence."But in Wasilla they would, if the crime was rape.

Read the rest.

The truth is however much different and has been totally debunked, yet the Globe saw fit to publish this tripe in an effort to knock Palin once again.

Little Miss Attila posted the following:

The Media and the Democratic Party Lied:
Palin Did Not Charge For Rape Kits

We previously debunked this smear campaign . . . but it is nice to now have Governor Palin on the record in her own words.

Flush another steaming, stinking, Associated Press-carried, Democratic Party-complicit, liberal-blogosphere- astroturfed lie down the toilet:

The entire notion of making a victim of a crime pay for anything is crazy. I do not believe, nor have I ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test. As governor, I worked in a variety of ways to tackle the problem of sexual assault and rape, including making domestic violence a priority of my administration.

A small liberal blog started the rumor, apparently after two Democratic Party researchers scoured the archives of the Frontiersman for dirt, and came up with an ambiguous story from 2000 that quickly bounced to a muckraking liberal blog.

Top Alaskan Democrats for Obama Tony Knowles (whom Palin beat in the governor's race) and Eric Croft, the sponsor of the law HB 270, both claimed in a recent press conference that Democrats falsely asserted the law was passed because Wasilla's police charged victims.

That is a demonstrable, bald-faced, and proven lie.

Read the committee minutes for yourself: Palin, Fannon, and Wasilla are never mentioned.

Three expect witnesses testified that they knew of no police agencies in Alaska that billed victims. The law was needed because hospitals occasionally exercised bad judgment and billed victims.

The media and Democratic Party should be ashamed.

Update: The New York Times-owned Boston Globe is still attempting to carry on with the smear. Perhaps you should register for a free account and let them know what you think about their editorial standards--or lack thereof.

If you go to the site, you will see several comments posted to muck up the story from what appears to be web seminar folks from the left. These folks repeatedly send in comments so no one can discuss the issues in a cogent, thoughtful manner because they spammed it to death. This is how we have to battle those who need not the facts, they have already made up their minds and they want to make up yours for you.

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At the now questionable FactCheck.org, an ambiguous entry tries to explain this urban myth, or what it should have done was explain whether it was a myth or not. Here is how the issues is reported by FactCheck.org:

We've seen countless Internet and e-mail claims that Sarah Palin forced women to pay for their own forensic testing when reporting a rape. Unlike some claims about Palin, this one has some merit, though Palin's precise role is unclear.

Read the rest.

More precisely, this issue has been debunked repeatedly as is witnessed when one reads the actual hearings on the subject. Jim Geraghty wrote on the subject and pointed out the following:

1.Wasilla was not mentioned in any of the hearings.

2. The deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Public Safety told the State Affairs Committee that he has never found a police agency that has billed a victim.

3. Three times, witnesses told the committees that hospitals were responsible for passing the bill on to victims, not police agencies.

Read the whole story.

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Yet another serious inquiry made by the people at Confederate Yankee has also debunked this myth that it found was created by a small liberal blogger called "Stop All Monsters." I found this and many other similar inquiries that you can read at Schema-Root.org.

Confederate Yankee tells us the following:

(Snip)

The Wasilla City Finance Department can't provide us with much of anything useful, but the Police Chief seems to state that the Police Department records don't show any evidence that any victims were billed.

I'm attempting to clarify if that means that no rape victims were ever billed for rapes in Wasilla from 1996 to mid-1999 (the 2000-2002 data is irrelevant) despite the fact then Police Chief Charlie Fannon reserved the right to do so, but Fannon has declined multiple media requests for comment, and I doubt he'll start with me.

At the same time, current Police Chief Long's statement of, "A review of files and case reports within the Wasilla Police Department has found no record of sexual assault victims being billed for forensic exams" would seem to stand on it's own, would it not?

If current Police Chief Long's information is correct, then Mayor Palin didn't know that rape victims were charged for rape kits, because none were.

If that is indeed the case (and I'm not 100% sure that it is), why, then, is this story about nothing even making the rounds, and where did it come from?

You be the judge. If I can find all this information in less than an hour, why did the Globe decide to run a smear piece other than to continue its liberal bias. By the way, its parent company is the New York Times, go figure!

It gets worse however. Check out the following:

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Vice President's Debate Moderated by the author of a book entitled: "Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama"

Did anyone notice who will be the Moderator at the Vice Presidential Debate? Yes, its Gwen Ifill. Yes the author of a book due for release on January 20, 2009, the day of the inauguration. Michelle Malkin wrote a great piece about this debacle.

Where is the honesty? Where is the integrity? Where is the truthfulness? These are part of the definition of the word truth as stated above. It appears lost and like many other words, it has been trampled into non-existence. How can so-called journalist be expected to moderate in a totally middle of the road manner when she is deeply in the camp of Obama?

I think the problem lies in the definition of the middle. After so many eons of left leaning journalism, our society has a skewed view of moderation. If you step one scintilla to today's "right", you are an extremist, yet, sit in the "middle" or take a step to the "left" these journalists think you are just main stream.

Like the frog in the water heating to a boil, we have just not noticed the constant move to the left because we no longer have any frame of reference. Where those tingles going up an MSNBC commentator right, middle, or left?