The E&mPeror Has No Clothes

The notoriously critical Editor of Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell, can't seem to get his corrections any closer to correct than the incorrect facts in his original piece dealing with a story Mitchell previously admitted to making up.

CORRECTION, August 27, 2006: Several readers of the 2003 story below have informed us that the water flowing over Niagara Falls was turned off in June 1969, not in 1967, as the article below stated. We have corrected or deleted that date and Mitchell’s age where they appeared in this column. Mitchell worked at the Gazette in the summers of 1968 and 1969 before graduating from college in 1970. The incident recounted below occurred in his second summer at the paper, not in the first, as the original had it.

The original did not state that the incident took place in 1968, which, according to the correction, was the first year of Mitchell's alleged internship with The Niagara Falls Gazette. Mitchell's original claimed the incident took place in 1967, which now appears to be a full year before Mitchell had any connection to the Niagara Gazette - a connection Mitchell has previously asserted he would never forget.

"You never forget your first newspaper job -- especially when it's the only one you've ever had -- and in my case that's the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette, at the tail end of the 1960s

Now, in a new bit of irony, it would seem that the Editor of the famous trade publication, which touts itself as America's oldest journal covering the Newspaper Industry, may have never actually worked as a permanent full time employee of a serious newspaper at all.

According to this interview, immediately after college Mitchell opted for writing in counterculture magazines in New York, as opposed to the legitimate press. Given that Mitchell has admitted his failure as a journalist, apparently unable to ask a casual stranger a simple question, no wonder some newspaper types feel that Editor & Publisher is making itself irrelevant as a force within the trade. It's fair to ask, if he couldn't muster the discipline to interview someone as regards The Falls, how is it he has ever managed to do any substantive reporting? It seems E&P's Editor may not have any work experience in the hard news trade at all.

Mitchell seems to have emerged from his counterculture career long enough to write for a giveaway Cable Television marketing publication, Channels in the eighties and somewhere along the line for The Nuclear Times.

Evidently while Reagan was dismantling the Soviet Republic by likely doing everything the Nuclear Times presumably protested, Mitchell wasn't doing journalism - though perhaps, in all fairness, he was reviewing Sanford and Son re-runs on Nick at Night.

While his writing credentials can't be questioned given six or seven possibly not very widely read and politically motivated books, his chief claim to fame appears to be CrawDaddy, which gives him about as much expertise on journalism, political and world affairs as your average writer for Rolling Stone. One has to wonder if he'll be nominating RFK, Jr. for a Pulitzer for his recent laughable Was the 2004 Election Stolen that appeared in that magazine.

All this isn't to say Mitchell isn't entitled to express his point of view. But, as has been documented, his standards of journalistic integrity seem to fall below that of many bloggers and his experience is no more significant than many more.

E&P may have made Mitchell an emperor of sorts by giving him the Editor's slot; however, in this case, it's increasingly clear the emperor has no clothes. However will he make up his next riveting bit of journalism without the whole cloth to begin?

See Allah for the latest and Mary Katharine Ham for a full review. Also see where Ace weighs in here.