Journalism Schmournalism

NBC Nightly News reported on Bush's rose garden presser today, hitting a few of the supposed key moments. One of the highlighted questions had to do with the release of the Johns Hopkins' study on the wartime Iraqi fatalities which according to the report has exceeded an astounding 650M citizens. Bush's response: "that study's methodology has been discredited". OK, fair enough....But don't you think it would be easy enough to establish whether or not the analysis was statistically sound and within accepted guidelines for measuring these types of numbers? There was no further mention about that clearly unambiguous Presidential statement but damn, shouldn't there have been one? Like, Hey we checked and these methods are solid and whoever discredited them is full of shit. Or, how about: We found x number of others in addition to the WH discrediting the methodology....or expounding on any alternate process that back up the contentions? Too much trouble I guess. I'm now of the rather jaded opinion that if Bush were to pronounce that 2 + 2 is no longer 4, the press would report it....they just wouldn't challenge it...and that is a serious problem.