This is the second in a seven-day series of essays to commemorate “Sunshine on the Media Week” here at Rathergate. While the media spend this week reminding people of the need for openness and access from the government, we remind them that they need to open their own curtains as well.

Every day I check media sites such as Columbia Journalism Review, Editor and Publisher and the Poynter Institute. It’s one-stop shopping for media arrogance and elitism, blog-bashing and entertainment — I enjoy watching liberal reporters and editors publicly flog themselves because Americans don’t trust them.

But it stops becoming entertaining reading why newshounds think the public distrusts the media. Nine times out of 10 the media’s arrogance leads them to a handful of conclusions:

1) People are stupid and listen to right-wing talk radio shows that program them to distrust the press.
2) People are stupid and trust blogs that dare to point out daily media errors and bias.
3) People are stupid and watch Fox News — Romenesko’s corner at Poynter especially pumps out a daily diet of “Murdoch and the Washington Times bad, liberal journalism = balance.”
4) People are just plain stupid:

Ultimately journalism is predicated on faith in the public. Here, journalists’ views have become dramatically more pessimistic.

The percentage of national journalists who have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the American public to make good decisions has declined by more than 20 points since 1999. Confidence among local journalists has fallen as well.

They just don’t get it. Year after year, the public whacks the MSM upside the head with a clue bat in the form of declining ratings, sagging subscription rates and polls indicating that they hold serial killers in higher regard. And year after year, the press shrugs and says, “Well, my au pair and my supper club on the upper west side says we’re not hard enough on the GOP, so that must be it.”

However, the press also likes to flog itself by dredging up its past sins in the form of miscreants who have been fired for lying. So today Rathergate.com will aid the MSM’s group therapy by not only offering a partial list of the MSM’s Hall of Shame, but also how these liars were able to get away with it for so long because of ingrained liberal bias and corrupt/stupid newsrooms.

You have to bear with me — this is a long post. But then again, if the MSM only screwed up one or two times, there wouldn’t be much need for Rathergate.com. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were only the latest in a long line of distinguished liars. So without further ado, fasten your seatbelts and hold your noses:

1) Diversity Uber Alles: Jayson Blair and the Gray Lady’s Black Eye — New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines wore his liberal bias on his left sleeve, and his willingness to fire and harass people who didn’t kiss his ass on his right. Liberalism, absolute monarchy and diversity at all costs were his Holy Trinity, all three of which contributed mightily to his fall.

Even before Jayson Blair gave the Gray Lady a black eye, Raines highlighted the Times’ liberal agenda by using its front page to wage war against all-male Augusta National Golf Club. Media began to notice — Newsweek columnist Seth Mnookin wrote “The Changing Times” to show how Raines was “coloring the Gray Lady’s reputation.”

Along comes Blair, a young black reporter who never graduated college and had a long history at the University of Maryland school newspaper of being caught in lies. He was fired in May 2003 after being caught plagiarizing an article from a San Antonio newspaper.

That was the tip of the iceberg. Not only did an internal investigation discover fabrications in at least 36 of 73 of Blair’s stories, but also that Raines systematically ignored people who tried to warn him. Raines told his staff at a testy meeting that his belief in diversity (which he actually said at a separate conference was more important that good journalism) gave Blair one chance too many. Raines and right-hand Managing Editor Gerald Boyd were pushed out after a year and a half of bias and oligarchy.

On a deliciously ironic note, the article on Blair’s deceptions quoted publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., whose newspaper frequently demands big-business heads on a platter, as stating “let’s not blame the editors.”

2) A Fallen Star (Reporter): Jack Kelley and USA Today: Jack Kelley had every journalist’s dream job — the top beat at the nation’s largest daily and the power to chase stories around the world. He was the face of the newspaper, appearing on TV and speaking engagements. Other reporters were encouraged to “be like Kelley.”

But some didn’t want to, and with good reason. Some reporters noticed quotes in Kelley’s work, as well as his perpetual knack for being in the right place at the right time, just seemed too good to be true. High-placed sources in Washington had told reporters that Kelley was getting it wrong. But their bosses, who took a page from the Howell Raines School of Management, told the reporters to keep it to themselves. Complaining about the bosses’ fair-haired golden boy would mean a pink slip.

An anonymous letter ended Kelley’s reign in January 2004 after a search of his computer revealed that he was asking friends to pretend they were sources that USA Today was contacting to fact-check a story under scrutiny. However, it soon became obvious that Kelley had spent the past decade making a behind-the-scenes mockery of “McPaper.”

An investigation of more than 700 Kelley stories written since 1991 revealed that Kelley fabricated numerous events and people. Not only that, but also that the newsroom climate of fear kept him from getting caught, just like the environment that allowed Blair to flourish at The New York Times. And like the Times, the top two editors at USA Today resigned under pressure.

And a postscript appropriate for the media’s self-serving “Sunshine Week,” the newspaper’s investigation deleted references to people and “sensitive” business information in its final report. Once again, people got to see that the media’s standard of total transparency from everyone did not apply to the media itself.

3) Going Bananas in Cincy: The End Justifies the Means at the Enquirer: Before Blair and Kelley, a slew of journalistic misdeeds proved that the MSM suffers from a “star system” that enables editor favorites to break the rules. Mike Gallagher and another reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote a damning package of stories in 1998 questioning the business and legal practices of Chiquita International, which is headquartered in the city. (Although the stories have been discredited, they can still be found.)

To help prove their numerous accusations, the stories relied on Chiquita voice mails — an impressive and juicy coup indeed for a reporter. Gallagher’s stories claimed that an insider with access to the voice mail system provided them with the tapes. The only problem, which Chiquita legal counsel pointed out the day the stories ran, was that no one person had access to the entire system. Chiquita’s technical personnel, which had been investigating unauthorized access to voice mail, now had its answer: Gallagher had been illegally tapping into the system.

Gallagher was canned (the other reporter did not do anything wrong), the newspaper paid out a huge settlement (which included not writing investigative pieces on Chiquita), and its reputation was tarred. Chiquita has been a controversial operation, to say the least, since the 1950s, but thanks to Gallagher, the focus quickly shifted from Chiquita’s ethics to the media’s ethics, or lack thereof.

4) Something Stinks, and it Sure Ain’t Nerve Gas: CNN/Time’s Fraudulent “Tailwind”: Talk about a ground-breaking story to inaugurate a new partnership between CNN and Time Magazine in 1998: The military supposedly used nerve gas to kill U.S. defectors in Laos during the Vietnam war.

The eight-month investigation was debunked in eight days after criticism made it apparent that CNN’s conclusion could not be supported by what pitifully little hearsay it had accumulated. It convened a two-member investigative panel to investigate what went wrong, and three producers were shown the door (gosh, that sure sounds familiar). A misquoted source sued and settled out of court.

5) Bargain-Basement Columnist Shopping in Boston: Patricia Smith and Mike Barnacle: The Boston Globe’s standards for columnists must have been torn out of the same book (or at least fished out of the same dumpster) as the CBS News ethics and practices manual. The year 1998 marked the disgrace of two columnists in short order: “Boston Mike” Barnacle for several plagiarism offenses, and Patricia Smith, for making up people and events.

Click here to read (and laugh) about how it took management so long to nail them to the wall. After fictional column after fictional column, an editor finally grew a brain and tried to find a cosmetologist quoted by Smith (cosmetologists are licensed by the state).

Peter Carbonara in Salon made the same scathing indictment seven years ago that I am making clear this week:

“[Smith] provides an object lesson in journalistic arrogance and the refusal of many in the media biz to be held to the same standards of truthfulness and responsibility they require of everyone else.”

6) You Mean, We Should Know Who Your Sources Are? Janet Cooke and “Jimmy’s World”: It must have been sad for the Washington Post, which 10 years prior had forced Richard Nixon from office through solid, world-class journalism, to give its latest Pulitzer Prize back. But that’s what happened in 1981 when reporter Janet Cooke won the prize for a figment of her imagination.

The nation was shocked in September 1980 to read “Jimmy’s World,” which chronicled an 8-year-old boy in Washington, D.C., whose mother and boyfriend had strung him out on heroin. This obviously alarmed police and school officials, who spend time and money trying to find “Jimmy.” Two days after Cooke won the prize in 1981, she admitted the story was false after her editors grilled her over discrepancies in her resume. City officials considered going after Cooke for the cost of tracking down “Jimmy.”

Once again, the media’s standards were found to be lacking. Managing Editor Bob Woodward, who had tackled Nixon with Deep Throat’s help, famously stated that it would be “absurd” to fact-check stories nominated for prizes.

7) Not With a Bang But With a Whimper: Dateline NBC’s Monster Truck Pull: In November 1992, Dateline NBC showed “Waiting to Explode,” a segment setting out to prove that trucks can explode after low-speed collisions. They showed a GM truck blowing up to prove their point. They neglected to inform their viewers that they used remote-control incendiary devices to help their point along. GM sued and won.

8) Clueless Yet Again: A Lying Liar Deceives The New Republic: It appears that 1998 was the (First) Year of the Lying Reporter. Stephen Glass, a reporter and associate editor for The New Republic, completely fabricated “Hack Heaven,” a story about a 15-year-old hacker who breaks into a company’s mainframe and is later offered a job by the same company. After being fired, his editors conclude that Glass made up parts of 27 of 41 articles.

Yes, I know I just gave you a lot of reading. But I was merciful — this is far from a complete list of sins against journalism.

What do these miscreants all have in common? They were smart enough not to get caught by their supervisors, which doesn’t seem to require that much skull sweat these days.

They were further enabled by:

* Liberal newsroom bias (”Well, everyone knows the GOP are a bunch of crooks, so this must be right.”)
* Favoritism (”Hey, great piece on the Moon really being made of green cheese. Tennis this afternoon, buddy?”)
* Incompetence (”The editor tasked to fact-check our big star reporter is off today. Screw it and run the piece.”)

These are just the people who got caught. While the press is commemorating “Sunshine Week,” there are people in its newsrooms skewering the facts and editors letting the jokesters get away with it. So, remind me again why the media’s “Sunshine Week” is appropriate when it’s obvious they can’t open the curtains on their own glass house.

Tomorrow: The reason we are here in the first place, the reason that reporters and editors dive for cover upon utterance of the word “blog” — the one, the only, Memogate.