I think that most Republicans going on MSNBC know what they are getting into. But when they buck the anti-Romney narrative, I don’t think they expect MSNBC to mute their mike and insult them on-air.
Fine; it’s their air to do with as they please. But they still shouldn’t lie. Host Tamron Hall said Carney went off the agreed topics:
You knew the topics we were going to discuss, you agreed to come on the show.
Indeed he did, and the topics were:
Panel: Tim Carney and Jimmy Williams
Romney’s haunted by high school memories
Does the story matter? Will it hurt Romney
(Emphasis mine.) The bogosity of the story is squarely in the range of topics he was invited to discuss. Hall lied.
BONUS: Hall’s parting shot was:
I greatly appreciate you [Williams] joining me. I would do the same for Tim but we have to be able to have conversations and not do hit jobs when we know we’re guests on the show.
That’s pretty amazing, since she cut off the conversation when he interfered with her hit job.
For some reason, Democrats and their enablers in the legacy media don’t want you to believe that light bulbs are banned, and engage in amazing hair-splitting to deny the fact. For example:
Opponents often describe the standards as a “lightbulb ban,” arguing that the rules would greatly restrict consumer choice by pushing out traditional incandescent bulbs in favor of more expensive, but more efficient, LED (light emitting diode) and CFL (compact fluorescent light) bulbs.
But the standards do not ban incandescent bulbs. They instead require them to be more efficient. While more efficient lightbulbs are often more expensive at the point of sale, experts note they save consumers money on their electricity bills over the long term.
Take that, straw man! No one contests the proposition that high-efficiency lighting saves money in the long run. People like incandescent bulbs because of the quality of their light. So, do high-efficiency incandescent bulbs generate the same quality light as traditional light bulbs?
If you’ve ever used a high-efficiency incandescent bulb, you know the answer is no. The light is colder and harsher, not so much as a fluorescent bulb, but visibly more so than a traditional bulb.
Moreover, this is what you would expect from the physics. Different physical processes tend to generate different spectra. Scientists often use those spectra to identify things that they cannot observe directly. We don’t know how to craft a made-to-order spectrum, at least not inexpensively. So if you change the process to generate less heat, you’re almost certainly going to change the spectrum.
Wow: A Quinnipiac poll finds that Hispanics are split almost evenly on Arizona’s SB 1070 (the controversial anti-illegal-immigration law), 49% against and 47% in favor.
I’ve heard people claim that most Hispanics oppose illegal immigration because illegal immigrants steal their jobs, but I had trouble believing it. It was too much at odds with the picture painted by the media. But it turns out to be true, or very nearly so.
It’s a valuable reminder not to believe what the media tells you.
If you try to load a non-existent page on the Politifact web site, this is how it signals the 404:
In a political context, it’s hard to see an Etch-a-sketch as anything other than a thinly veiled jab at the Romney campaign.
Politifact’s pretense as a neutral arbiter of truth in politics is growing more threadbare with each new hatchet job, but this still seems awfully blatant.
CNN says the Obama-eats-dogs story came from the Romney campaign. Not that there would be anything wrong with that, but it’s not true. The story came from Jim Treacher, a blogger with the Daily Caller.
However, I’ll bet that Romney would be more than happy to answer everything on the Daily Caller, if Obama is answerable for everything on the Huffington Post.
Nearly 70 percent of all guns found in Mexico came from the U.S. over the past four years, according to data released by the federal government on Thursday.
Simply untrue. The data say no such thing. The data say that 70% of the guns that Mexico submitted to US authorities for tracing came from the United States. Since Mexico only does so with guns that it already believes are from the United States, this statistic says almost nothing.
This lie has been debunked over, and over, and over again, but it keeps coming back like a bad horror movie villain.
The caption on a photograph featuring passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observing a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance for the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, wrongly referred to the city as the Israeli capital. The Guardian style guide states: “Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is”
In point of fact, Israel’s capital is in Jerusalem. All the branches of Israel’s government are headquartered there. But for ideological reasons, the Guardian doesn’t want Israel’s capital to be in Jerusalem, so they report that the capital is in some other city where in fact it isn’t. Simply bizarre.
Ezra Klein explains to us in the Washington Post that the reason we won’t have a budget again this year is because those dirty Republicans wouldn’t just sign on to Conrad’s (D-ND) plan. Those jerks insisted on debating the plan and offering amendments. What do they think they’re doing?!
I want to take the occasion of Tina Brown’s (editor of the Daily Beast and its new subsidiary, Newsweek) latest attack on the late Andrew Breitbart to set the record straight. First, what Brown said:
Breitbart didn’t report anything. What Breitbart did, really, was he was a provocateur. He was a death by 1,000 tweets. He was, you know, quite happy to take the flying sound bite – any sound bite – and misapply it in its context and create an absolute mayhem for the person concerned like he did for poor Shirley Sherrod who was the obscure official in the Agriculture Department. He gave the impression by the cutting of her words in a tape that he released that she was giving racially motivated financing decisions when she was doing the opposite.
This is a complete lie. The left has had great success in promulgating this lie, but there’s not a word of truth in it.
Breitbart’s original article has disappeared from the site, but you can find it on the Wayback Machine. The archive’s first capture of the article is here. The text contains the context of Sherrod’s remarks in every particular:
In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.
To reiterate: It’s an lie to say that Breitbart was trying to hide the context; he made the context completely clear. The video — the infamous “edited video” — similarly carried all these details.
In fact, Shirley Sherrod was never Breitbart’s target. Sherrod was not so obscure as Brown suggests (she was actually a lightning rod for criticism, which is why the Obama administration was so eager to get rid of her), but Breitbart didn’t care about her. He was attacking the NAACP:
We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. . . Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.
The NAACP had just condemned the Tea Party as racist, and Breitbart was demonstrating that the NAACP — or at least its members at the meeting in Georgia — were the real racists. The fact that Sherrod had a moral epiphany by the end is a defense for Sherrod, but not for the NAACP, who cheered her reluctance to help the white farmer without knowing the end of the story.
The Obama administration quickly fired Sherrod, in part because they were glad of an excuse to be rid of her, but mostly to change the subject. The NAACP, unlike Sherrod, was valuable, and they needed to put the focus somewhere else.
This story is being used to tarnish the legacy of a great man, and it needs to be set straight.
CNN is reporting this comment by Ted Nugent as a death threat:
If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year.
CNN excises all the context for this comment, and invites the viewer to believe that Nugent is threatening to try to assassinate the president. But there’s nothing of that in what Nugent actually said.
Nugent was saying that, if re-elected, President Obama would confiscate everyone’s guns. When the agents came for his (Nugent’s), he would refuse to give them up. Afterward, he would either be dead or in jail.
It’s hyperbolic, but he’s not threatening anyone. Suggesting otherwise is pure slander.
U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Convention, responded earlier this week, saying “threatening violence – or whatever it is that Nugent’s threatening – is clearly beyond the pale.”
To paraphrase: “I don’t really know what he meant, but I’m sure it was beyond the pale.” Awesome.
Esquire gets the facts of the Cornhusker Kickback wrong:
Thanks [Ann Althouse] for the link, but, seriously, I know there are better things to do in Wisconsin than to be this publicly dim. . .
But this part is seriously hilarious.
We know that the Cornhusker kickback — AKA the Nebraska Compromise — was a deal made by Harry Reid to get the vote of Senator Ben Nelson, the last hold-out among the Democrats. The state of Nebraska got 100% funding for Medicaid, unlike all the other states, so that extra funding to Nebraska approaches vote-buying.
Actually, what we know is that the “Cornhusker kickback” — a rightwing term of art — is not in the Affordable Care Act at all. Scalia was repeating something he heard on his radio or on his TV. It was eliminated before the bill passed. So Scalia was constructing his “hypothetical” around something that is no more part of the ACA than the public option is. He’s just not trying very hard anymore. Neither, apparently, are many of his defenders.
What’s great about this is the height of smugness that this Esquire columnist achieves while getting the facts completely wrong.
In fact, the Cornhusker Kickback was not eliminated before the bill passed. It was part of the Senate bill that the Democrats were not able to amend because Scott Brown has been elected. As a result, the House had to pass precisely the Senate bill. The House also passed a second bill (the “reconciliation sidecar” it was called) that removed the Cornhusker Kickback and some other provisions unpalatable to House Democrats (such as taxes on high value health plans favored by unions). The second bill passed the Senate under reconciliation (so only fifty-one votes were required) and amended the first bill.
Moreover, every single thing that Althouse wrote in that quote was accurate: The Kickback was a deal made between Reid and Nelson to buy Nelson’s vote, and it would have given Nebraska 100% funding for Medicaid.
The only reason the Kickback isn’t part of the law now is it was so outrageous that Democrats had to repeal it. Nevertheless, less-publicized special provisions for at least five other states are still in the law.
When you mock someone’s command of the facts, you would do well to get the facts straight yourself.
POSTSCRIPT: If I wanted to be smug, I would also correct his use of the phrase “term of art”, but I’ll let that go.
To the Washington Post’s “fact-checker” column, a statement that is indisputably true can still be false, if it is cited as part of an argument that it only imperfectly supports.
A few days ago, it was the Romney campaign’s statement that 90% of the 740k jobs lost under President Obama were held by women. The statistic is true, but it’s still somehow false (they actually said “true but false”!) because, er, well, um, it might not really be Obama’s fault.
In the latest example, the Post admits that Romney’s statement that Obama has added nearly 150,000 thousand federal employees is true, but says that the statement is somehow still false (“significant omissions and/or exaggerations”) because it was cited while on the topic of Obama’s legion of new regulators and not all of those 150k employees were regulators.
You see how this works? You want to cite the number of new regulators. There are tons of them (thousands from Obamacare alone), but it’s hard to come up with a precise number. You could try to estimate it, but then the “fact-checker” would quibble with your numbers and call you a liar. So instead you cite a statistic that is apposite (that two numbers are certainly correlated) and indisputable, but you still get called a liar because the figure only imperfectly supports your thesis.
Good lord, can you imagine if that standard were applied evenly? How often does the left cite facts that only imperfectly support their argument (if at all)? Essentially everything they say fits into that category:
A small fraction of Americans have trouble getting affordable health insurance, therefore we must nationalize the health insurance industry. A woman claims to spend over $1000 per year on contraception, therefore Catholics must be forced to dispense contraceptives and abortifacients. Warren Buffett masterfully exploits tax shelters, therefore we must leave the tax shelters in place but hike the top tax rate that Buffett isn’t paying anyway.
Washington Post columnist Patrick Pexton made a rather startling admission in the paper’s Sunday edition:
The Post never meant for their recent story about how President Obama’s health care law expands the budget deficit to become a viral Internet sensation. In fact, they deliberately tried to bury the story.
Putting the story (inside the paper) on A3 was the right judgment for a print publication. (Story author Lori) Montgomery urged her editors, correctly, not to put it on the front page: it wasn’t worth that.
The story in question was titled “Health care law will add $340 billion to deficit, new study finds.” It pointed out that the administration had double-counted Medicare savings in the law and once you adjusted for that it added to the deficit rather than reducing it, as the White House has claimed. . .
Pexton, the Post’s resident ombudsman . . . admits that they are ambivalent about this success, calling story’s popularity a reflection of our “our reactive, partisan, hyperventilating media culture.”
A study has found that the government’s rigged estimates were rosy by half a trillion dollars, and to the Washington Post, that’s not news.
Pexton tried hard to make the case that the story was worth being buried, arguing that various official reports undermine the independent study, but he’s very selective about the evidence he is willing to admit:
He doesn’t mention that the CBO scoring was reverse-engineered by matching ten years of revenue against four years of cost, so merely the passing of time has been sufficient to explode its cost.
He doesn’t mention that Obamacare’s subsidy costs have risen 30% since the law was enacted.
He mentions the Medicare Actuary, but unaccountably fails to mention the Medicare Actuary’s finding that Obamacare dramatically underestimates costs, among other criticisms.
Even the official referees say that the CBO score was inaccurate, including the score’s own author. But the Post doesn’t want you to know that.
There is no “war on women”, except as just one front in President Obama’s war on nearly everyone (women, men, catholics, jews, evangelicals, children, the elderly, rich people, people who want to be rich, automobile drivers, automobile bondholders, medical companies that didn’t support Obama enough, medical companies that did support Obama enough (suckers!), Alaskans, Louisianans, gun owners, would-be gun owners, ISPs, people who want the lights to come on quickly, etc.).
But since the Democrats have proclaimed it a war, let’s look at some facts:
Over 90% of the 740k jobs lost since Obama came into office were held by women. (The Democratic apologists at the Washington Post and at Politifact both acknowledge that the statistic, used by the Romney campaign, is accurate, but still say it’s somehow false, which underscores just how damaging it is.)
The North Carolina Democratic Party paid hush money to keep a sexual harassment scandal quiet. (UPDATE: NC Governor Perdue, a Democrat, told a reporter asking about the scandal “Get over it.”)
Obama surrogate Hilary Rosen attacked stay-at-home moms saying that Ann Romney (who raised five boys) “never worked a day in her life”. Democrats have since tried to distance themselves from her, but Rosen works for the consulting firm that contracts with the DNC and has visited the White House at least 35 times. (For comparison, that’s about as many visits at Timothy Geithner and three times as many as Leon Panetta.)
Even Barack Obama joined the attack against stay-at-home moms in a more subtle way. Trying to turn it into a class-warfare talking point, Obama said that they “didn’t have the luxury for [Michelle] not to work.” In 2005, the Obamas made $479,062.
I’ve resisted commenting on the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida because I don’t know what really happened. With all the contradictory statements being made, I’d rather let the justice system sort things out. I certainly don’t trust the media to sort things out, and here’s a good example of why:
Both NBC and MSNBC played this excerpt from a 911 call made by George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin:
This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
That sounds pretty damning. Clearly Zimmerman was racially motivated.
Except that’s not what he said. This is what he actually said:
ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
911 OPERATOR: Okay. And this guy, is he white black or Hispanic?
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.
NBC deleted Zimmerman’s expressed reasons for suspecting Martin was “up to no good”, and also deleted the 911 operator’s direct question about Martin’s race, which Zimmerman answered. Their dishonest editing completely changed the exchange from one with no racial bias whatsoever into one with a clear bias. Put more simply, NBC lied.
ASIDE: It’s possible that Zimmerman’s motive was racial nonetheless. I can’t claim to know. But the 911 tape is not evidence of it.
NBC reportedly has launched an internal investigation into the matter. These things usually end in a whitewash, but we’ll see.
During our investigation it became evident that there was an error made in the production process that we deeply regret. We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers.
That is the full statement. NBC lies in order to further inflame racial tensions in an already tense racial controversy, and all we get is “oops, sorry”. No apology at all to the man they slandered. No disciplinary action.
Through his, even more than through the original offense, NBC shows that the truth is just not a priority.
UPDATE: NBC has reportedly fired a producer, but doesn’t seem to have identified who that producer is. (Via Big Journalism.)
Also, Richard Epstein comments on NBC’s non-apology.
UPDATE: Talk Left discovers that the Today piece was the second time that NBC aired the dishonest edit. Also, NBC’s Miami affiliate made the dishonest edit several times on their website (and presumably on the air as well), in articles that are still posted (for example). All of which seems to deny NBC their “one guy made a mistake” defense. (Via Instapundit.)
Big Journalism’s observation that the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column rewrote an column to make it much kinder to the Obama administration has been getting some attention. The column looked at the administration’s defense of its reams of new regulations, originally finding it quite bogus (“three Pinocchios”). Then the column was rewritten to remove the most cutting observations and downgrades it to the lowest rating (“one Pinocchios”). (Via Instapundit.)
Among the facts that were deleted in the rewrite is this one: When comparing the number of pages of regulations between the Bush and Obama administration, “that number doesn’t clarify whose rules have a larger negative impact.”
Obviously, the number of pages of rules gives only a very rough estimate of their impact. (Moreover, other deleted facts called into question whether even the page count comparison was accurate.) The cost-benefit analysis is much more telling.
As it happens, the Economist had an article (subscription required) last month about the questionable calculations that the Obama administration has been making to improve its cost-benefit justification. It turns out that when the administration quotes the benefits of its regulation, almost none of the claimed benefit is the direct result of the regulation:
IN DECEMBER Barack Obama trumpeted a new standard for mercury emissions from power plants. The rule, he boasted, would prevent thousands of premature deaths, heart attacks and asthma cases. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reckoned these benefits were worth up to $90 billion a year, far above their $10 billion-a-year cost. Mr Obama took a swipe at past administrations for not implementing this “common-sense, cost-effective standard”.
A casual listener would have assumed that all these benefits came from reduced mercury. In fact, reduced mercury explained none of the purported future reduction in deaths, heart attacks and asthma, and less than 0.01% of the monetary benefits.
Less than one-hundredth of one percent of the claimed monetary benefits, and no health benefits at all!
So how does the administration get from zero to $90 billion? In two ways. The first is “co-benefits”: the incidental benefit that happens to take place as a secondary effect of the regulation:
Instead, almost all the benefits came from concomitant reductions in a pollutant that was not the principal target of the rule: namely, fine particles.
So the entire benefit of the mercury reduction rules comes from the incidental reduction of an entirely different pollutant that might also take place when the rules went into effect. Clearly:
If reducing fine particles is so beneficial, it would surely be more transparent and efficient to target them directly.
The Economist goes on to note that the administration’s calculation of the benefit of reducing fine particles is completely speculative.
The second way that the administration conjures regulatory benefits out of thin air is “private benefits”:
Economists typically justify regulation when private market participants . . . generate costs—such as pollution—that the rest of society has to bear. But fuel and energy-efficiency regulations are now being justified not by such social benefits, but by private benefits like reduced spending on fuel and electricity. Private benefits have long been used in cost-benefit analysis but Ms Dudley’s data show that, like co-benefits, their importance has grown dramatically under Mr Obama.
They are helping us by making us spend our own money more wisely than we otherwise would. (Thanks guys!) As the Economist observes:
The values placed on such private benefits are highly suspect. If consumers were really better off with more efficient cars or appliances, they would buy them without a prod from government. The fact that they don’t means they put little value on money saved in the future, or simply prefer other features more.
In short, the entire benefit of Obama’s regulations are either dubious secondary benefits or unwanted private benefits.
The New York Times celebrates a murder-suicide. After 55 years of marriage, Adrienne Snelling came down with Alzheimer’s, and five years later her husband killer her, and then himself. The New York Times thinks that’s just great.
There’s no better weather-vane for liberal opinion than the New York Times. That’s the sort of people that President Obama will hire (if he gets the chance) to make life-and-death medical decisions for our elderly: ones who believe that sick, old people are better off dead. But at least they will never be called death panels.
MSNBC’s Karen Finney blames the Trayvon Martin shooting on Charles and David Koch. How? Well, the Kochs were responsible for Florida’s new self-defense law, and the new law was responsible for the shooting.
Neither of these statements is true. The second is absurd, but lies in the realm of (offensive) opinion. The first, however, is simply incorrect, as Koch Industries explains:
Because we saw this dishonest story line developing and were concerned other extremists would pick it up, we put out a public statement the day before Ms. Finney’s rant explaining that this story line was totally false and irresponsible. First, Koch has had no involvement in this legislation. We have had no discussions with anyone at ALEC, the legislative policy group at issue, about the matter either. In fact, the only lobbying on firearms issues we have ever undertaken in Florida was in opposition to the National Rifle Association’s support for a bill that mandated employers must allow employees to bring firearms onto company property.
MSNBC is making stuff up from whole cloth in order to blame a troubling incident on two people who had nothing whatsoever to do with it. If you believe anything you see on MSNBC, you’re a sucker.
UPDATE (4/20): After weeks of stonewalling, MSNBC has decided to do nothing at all to correct this. One wonders what took them so long.
When the press published a story about Malia Obama’s spring break in Mexico, the White House asked them to pull the story. Amazingly, the press agreed to do so. Politico even pulled a story about how the media was pulling stories (it’s back now).
I can understand the Obama family wanting the press to leave Malia alone (although the idea that it’s a security risk seems like a crock). I have much more trouble understanding why the press would go along with pulling an accurate story that was already published. Do they ever do such things?
This American Life has retracted its story on abuse of workers at a factory in China that assembles Apple products:
The public radio show This American Life has retracted an entire storyline told by comedian and self-described Apple fanboy Mike Daisey that aired in early January after Daisey’s translator said he made up significant details of the tale. . .
The China correspondent for the radio show Marketplace, Rob Schmitz, wrote that he decided to track down Daisey’s translator after he found it suspicious for Daisey to ferret out some of the worst labor abuses reporters have been hunting for years in a six-day trip to the site. Translator Cathy Lee told Schmitz that she never saw the underaged or poisoned workers, and that she also never saw armed factory guards, which Daisey describes.
As is often the case in this kind of story, the producers failed to uphold their own standards:
So why didn’t This American Life talk to Cathy Lee earlier, before they aired the episode? In a press release, the show says Daisey told them he lost her cell phone number. “At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” show host Ira Glass said in the release.
This should remind us that we cannot rely on the media’s self-proclaimed standards. They will drop those standards in a heartbeat if they stand in the way of a good story.
POSTSCRIPT: The list of Daisey’s lies is pretty impressive, but Daisey is stand by the old “fake but accurate” line:
Daisey, however, stands by his original storyline. “It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity,” Daisey said on his blog. On the show, he struck a more contrite note. “I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” Daisey says, according to the press release. “My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”
UPDATE: I forgot to add: someone brought up the This American Life piece at a meeting at work, before it was revealed as a fraud. It didn’t take us long to conclude that the story was implausible. A little critical thinking helps, people . . .
James O’Keefe brought down ACORN, exposed PBS’s hatred of the Tea Party movement, found fraud and waste at the Census Bureau, and lately has been showing how easy voter fraud is. To put it mildly, the left doesn’t like him very much.
But that doesn’t give them the right to lie about him. David Shuster and Keith Olbermann, who appear on Al Gore’s no-audience cable channel, described him as a convicted felon who is facing rape charges. Neither allegation is true. O’Keefe is not a convicted felon, and is not facing rape charges, or any other charges for that matter. He was accused of a felony when he brought hidden cameras into Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office, but was exonerated. And what Shuster and Olbermann describe as a rape charge was merely a harassment charge based on an accusation that O’Keefe said mean things on the phone and Internet, and that charge was dismissed for lack of evidence.
O’Keefe is suing for defamation. Defamation charges involving a public figure are awfully hard to prove in court, but since Shuster and Olbermann surely knew the facts when they made their slanders, I think he might have a case.
That brings us to The Atlantic, which (like nearly everyone) has higher journalistic standards than Current TV, but also defamed O’Keefe in reporting on how Shuster and Olbermann defamed O’Keefe. The Atlantic reported that O’Keefe “pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor ‘with the intent to commit a felony’”. It’s not true. In fact, the prosecutors conceded the opposite in court, that he had no intent to commit a felony:
In this case further investigation did not uncover evidence that the defendants intended to commit any felony. . .
The only reason O’Keefe has a criminal record at all is it turns out that it’s illegal to run a hidden camera investigation on federal property. His only mistake was not seeking legal advice before trying to get Landrieu’s staff on camera lying about their phones.
An amusing display of ignorance, as CNN talking head Soledad O’Brien argues with Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak over the meaning of “critical race theory”:
POLLAK: Derrick Bell is the Jeremiah Wright of academia. He passed away last year, but during his lifetime, he developed a theory called critical race theory, which holds that the civil rights movement was a sham and that white supremacy is the order and it must be overthrown.
O’BRIEN [interrupting]: So, that is a complete misreading. I’ll stop you there for a second then I’m going to let you continue. But that is a complete misreading of critical race theory. As you know that’s an actual theory. You could Google it and some would give you a good definition of it. So that’s not correct. But keep going.
POLLAK: In what way is it a critical misreading? Can you explain to me? Do you know what critical … Explain to your readers critical race theory is.
O’BRIEN: I’m going to ask you to continue on. I’m just going to point out that that is inaccurate. Keep going. Tell me what the bombshell is. I haven’t seen it yet.
POLLAK: Well wait a minute. You’ve made a claim … You’ve made a claim that my characterization of critical race theory as the opposite of Martin Luther King is inaccurate, you’re telling your viewers that but you’re not telling them what it is.
ASIDE: This is in the context of the newly unearthed video showing that a young Barack Obama was an admirer of Derrick Bell.
You have to see the video to appreciate how patronizing O’Brien is being when she tells Pollak he’s wrong. But at the same time, she refuses to say what she thinks critical race theory means, presumably because she doesn’t know (at least not well enough to explain it). She tries to get Pollak to drop the subject, apparently too obtuse to realize that the substance of critical race theory is his central point!
At this point, O’Brien comes up with a definition:
Critical race theory looks into the intersection of race and politics and the law . . .
which looks very much like a paraphrase of the top hit on Google:
Critical race theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic discipline focused upon the application of critical theory to the intersection of race, law and power. Although no set of …
So while she is pompously insulting her guest for not knowing what critical race theory is, she needs her staff to Google it and whisper the answer into her earbud.
The epilogue to all this is Pollak is right and O’Brien is wrong, at least according to the very Wikipedia page that she used as her source. O’Brien and Pollak argue for several minutes about whether white supremacy is a key component of critical race theory. O’Brien says no, but her source says:
First, CRT has analyzed the way in which white supremacy and racial power are reproduced over time . . .
POSTSCRIPT: The epilogue to the epilogue is funny too: An edit war is ongoing at Wikipedia as people have been trying to alter the article to conform to O’Brien’s definition.
UPDATE: Tom Maguire finds that the New York Times, which “we can count on . . . to present critical race theory in as gauzy and flattering a focus as possible”, has consistently described critical race theory in terms of white supremacy. On the other hand, I agree with John Hinderaker that the revelation of one more radical in President Obama’s past is unlikely to change many minds about him.
The head of the BBC admits that Christianity gets less sensitive treatment than other religions. One reason, he further admits, is that Christians aren’t prone to making violent threats.
I wish they’d think a little about the incentives they are establishing.
A previous version of this article misstated how many of the president’s proposals to reduce the country’s reliance on imported oil were new in his speech on Wednesday. None of them were, not one of them.
I saw this implausible headline at the Huffington Post today:
Santorum: Separation Of Church And State ‘Makes Me Want To Throw Up’
It’s pretty obvious Rick Santorum wouldn’t say something like that, so I clicked through to see what he actually said. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Santorum said:
Well, yes, absolutely, to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?
Alana Horowitz, the author of the HuffPo piece, reprocesses Santorum’s statement — that people of faith ought to be permitted to participate in the public debate — into opposition to the separation of church and state. Perhaps the two propositions are the same to her; perhaps she believes that separation of church and state does require religious people to remain silent, but that doesn’t give her license to write her own extreme views into a quotation.
In fact, even the part of the quote that lies within quotation marks — the part that is supposed to be a direct quote — isn’t verbatim.
Horowitz’s abuse of quotation marks doesn’t end there. In the article, in order to get “separation of church and state” into the same quote as “throw up”, she uses a very creative ellipsis:
“The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country…to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up.”
The ellipsis hides the fact that these were two different statements made in response to two different questions. She deletes twelve sentences of Santorum explaining what he meant, a new question from Stephanopoulos, and the beginning of Santorum’s answer to the new question, and she puts it together with a lower case letter as if it had been all one sentence.
POSTSCRIPT: The ultimate context of this was a remark made by Santorum that John Kennedy’s 1960 speech on his religion almost made Santorum throw up. I could understand the sentiment (although throwing up still seems a little strong) if Kennedy had really been saying that faith had no place in the public debate. I guess Santorum reads the speech that way, but I don’t. I read the speech to say that politicians should not take orders from clergy, which seems like a very different proposition, and one I agree with.
I’m confident Kennedy meant it that way, because, in historical context, this speech was pure politics. Kennedy was running for president and needed to defuse the “Catholic issue”, so his purpose was to reassure Protestants that he would not take orders from the Catholic Church. His intent was certainly not to tell them to keep their faith out of the public debate, because it would not have served his political purposes to do so.
The latest fuss in the global warming controversy is the leak of documents from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank I hadn’t heard of before that, among other things, is skeptical of climate change alarmism. Most of the documents deal with Heartland’s fundraising, but one very different document purports to describe Heartland’s strategy for the global warming debate.
The provider of the document originally claimed to be an insider at Heartland, but that turned out to be a lie. In fact, an outsider (later identified as Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute) obtained the documents by phishing; he wrote to Heartland claiming to be a board member and asking that they resend him the documents for the annual board meeting. Some gullible secretary complied.
Heartland acknowledges that most of the documents are genuine, but says that the strategy document is a fake. There is considerable evidence to support their claim: While the undisputed documents were pdfs generated from their original digital source, the strategy document is a scan. The strategy document was scanned weeks after the undisputed documents were generated, but just one day before Gleick went public. And, the strategy document was scanned in the wrong time zone: the pdf metadata dates the scan using Pacific time, but Heartland is in Chicago. (Peter Gleick, on other hand, is in Oakland, California.)
There are also a variety of the problems with the content: For example, it contains mistakes that a genuine document would be unlikely to contain. (Specifically, it said that the Koch Foundation gave $200k in 2011, when in fact it gave $25k, and even that $25k was earmarked for health care, not climate change.) For another, it curiously focuses on Peter Gleick and his writings for Forbes magazine, even though neither is particularly important.
But most strikingly, the content of the strategy document is all wrong. John Hinderaker goes through it line by line, but I’ll just quote one line that in conclusive in its own right:
We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. . . His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain — two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.
This isn’t even good forgery; this is just stupid. “Dissuading teachers from teaching science”? Oh, please. This is something that a dishonest leftist would write to attack climate alarmism skeptics, not something that skeptics write about themselves. All it missed as a supervillain’s monologue was the cackle.
Gleick, who was quickly suspected as the author of the forged document, has admitted phishing for the undisputed documents, but has not yet admitted to forging the strategy document. Ironically, Gleick chaired the American Geophysical Union’s task force on scientific ethics. He has been dropped. He has also stepped down as the head of the Pacific Institute.
POSTSCRIPT: There’s also a media failure angle on this story. The New York Times reported this:
Heartland did declare one two-page document to be a forgery, although its tone and content closely matched that of other documents that the group did not dispute.
This is simply untrue. As observed above (and as the link document further), the tone and content do not match the other documents at all.
The Democrats and their collaborators in the legacy media want to disappear this graph:
ASIDE: This particular version is nearly a year old, but suffice it to say that the red has still gotten nowhere near the light blue, much less the dark blue.
This graph (minus the red stuff) comes from “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan”, the document prepared by the Obama transition team to sell President Obama’s stimulus plan.
Obviously, nothing even remotely like this happened, so — being unable to change the unemployment numbers — the Democrats want to disappear the prediction. We’re told by Democratic tools such as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler that citing this chart as though it had anything to do with Obama is a lie. (Three Pinocchios!)
Got that? Just because the prediction was prepared by Obama’s team, and written by Obama’s chief economist, to sell Obama’s policy, which was then duly enacted by Obama’s Democratic Congress, doesn’t mean that it has anything to do with Obama!
Just to expand on the point, let’s take a look at the prediction was received by President Obama’s pet pundit, Paul Krugman. On January 10, 2009, Krugman wrote:
OK, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein have put out their estimates of what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan would accomplish. But Romer and Bernstein don’t speak for the administration-in-waiting; we’re going to have to wait to hear economic predictions from the President-elect’s own lips. It’s a pity that he doesn’t put something official on the table so we can argue policy with him.
Just kidding! Actually, this is what Krugman wrote:
OK, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein have put out the official (?) Obama estimates of what the . . . American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan would accomplish. The figure above summarizes the key result.
Kudos, by the way, to the administration-in-waiting for providing this — it will be a joy to argue policy with an administration that provides comprehensible, honest reports, not case studies in how to lie with statistics.
That said, the report is written in such a way as to make it hard to figure out exactly what’s in the plan. This also makes it hard to evaluate the reasonableness of the assumed multipliers. But here’s the thing: the estimates appear to be very close to what I’ve been getting.
Now it’s funny that Krugman lauded Obama for producing comprehensible, honest reports and then in the very next breath lamented that the report wasn’t comprehensible and honest. But never mind that. The point here is there was no doubt in Krugman’s mind over whether this was a serious document prepared by the Obama administration-in-waiting giving estimates for the results of its plan.
Krugman apparently entertained a slight doubt (written “(?)”) as to whether the “Obama estimates” (as he called them) were “official”, but never entertained any doubt as to whether this document was prepared by the administration-in-waiting or just a couple of staffers. For example, he wrote “Kudos, by the way, to the administration-in-waiting for providing this. . .”, and later wrote “So this looks like an estimate from the Obama team itself saying. . .”.
The chart is damning; it’s no wonder the Democrats want it to go away. But it won’t.
American Public Media’s Marketplace program recently ran a commentary by Leo Webb, supposedly an army sniper who was treated shabbily by the army and joined Occupy Oakland when he returned from Iraq. He also claimed formerly to have been a prospect in the Chicago Cubs organization.
It was all bogus, except perhaps the part about his participation in Occupy Oakland. Webb never served in the Army and he never played in the Chicago Cubs organization.
What’s especially sad about this isn’t that American Public Media failed to verify any of the claims this man made. (“Too good to check”, as they say.) What’s sad is that it is immediately obvious to anyone who has ever been in the Army that this guy never was, from this line alone:
I killed all these people and watched half my squadron die.
“Squadron”? Seriously?
Also, Webb said he “blew their brains out”. Soldiers are trained to aim center mass; head shots are for movies and video games.
Not a single person in the editorial process at Marketplace had even a passing familiarity with the military. That’s what’s sad about this story.
POSTSCRIPT: The editor in charge of the piece responded to questions with this:
Mr. Webb has been subsequently placed in a VA live-in care facility specializing in PTSD so I’m unable to seek his response to your comment at this time.
Since Webb is not a veteran, this is clearly a lie.
A Daily Caller piece exposes Media Matters’s operation for channeling opposition research to the legacy media:
“[MSNBC was] using our research to write their stories. They were eager to use our stuff.” Media Matters staff had the direct line of MSNBC president Phil Griffin, and used it. Griffin took their calls. . . “If we published something about Fox in the morning, they’d have it on the air that night verbatim.”
“Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”
“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge.
“The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate. . .”
“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”
“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources.
Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”
None of which is a surprise, of course. What is amazing is somehow Media Matters is tax-exempt.
POSTSCRIPT: In another Daily Caller article, we find that Ben Smith was grateful enough for all the free content that when he found himself in possession of a scoop about Media Matters, he chose not to report it.
I trust you won’t be shocked to learn that this story had to be reported off the Beeb:
BBC ‘buried Savile sex abuse claims to save its reputation’. . .
The BBC had hoped to broadcast the Newsnight report in December, two months after Savile’s death, but bosses ordered that the investigation be dropped. Instead, the corporation screened two tribute programmes celebrating Savile’s lengthy BBC career as presenter of Jim’ll Fix It and Top of the Pops, and also as a Radio 1 DJ.
A British court has called [Abu] Qatada a “truly dangerous individual” and even his defence team has suggested he poses a “grave risk” to national security.
Despite that background, BBC journalists were told they should not describe Qatada as an extremist. The guidance was issued at the BBC newsroom’s 9.00am editorial meeting yesterday, chaired by a senior manager, Andrew Roy.
According to notes of the meeting, seen by The Daily Telegraph, journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist – we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”
I’ve often been critical of Politifact and other “fact-checking” operations, so Scott Johnson’s case study in how that outfit operates is no surprise to me. It’s quite instructive though. Johnson corresponded with two different experts who Politifact asked to comment on Mitt Romney’s statement that our navy is weaker than it’s been since 1917, and our air force is weaker than it’s been since 1947. Both experts told Politifact’s Louis Jacobsen that the claim was true. For example, Ted Bromund told him:
Lou,
(1) This is not just technically true. It is actually true (unless you want to ding the Governor for saying 1917 when he should have said 1916). . .
(2) I find it a bit depressing that you only list considerations that — if they applied — would tend to make the Governor’s statement less accurate. I trust that you’ll also look for contextual factors that would add to his argument. . .
Considering all the technical, strategic, geopolitical, and cultural factors involved in US force structure would require a book, and involves judgments that are well beyond fact-checking. As a matter of fact, the Governor’s statement is correct.
Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly), Bromund’s trust was misplaced. Jacobsen continued shopping for experts until he found some who would say what he wanted. The result: He rated Romney’s accurate statement, not just false, but “pants on fire”.
The Arizona Republic’s “fact check” column rates a statement made by sheriff Joe Arpaio false. Arpaio’s mistake? Relying on reporting from the Arizona Republic.
Well, trusting the media’s reporting is a big mistake, to be sure.
It takes a lot of context to fully appreciate this story, so I’m going to pull a long quote from Power Line:
A few years ago, as part of its strategy of facilitating voter fraud as a means of winning close elections, the Democratic Party undertook a campaign to secure as many Secretary of State offices in swing states as possible. From those perches, the Democrats would be in a position to oversee elections and enforce (or decline to enforce) election laws. That strategy has been quite successful, but the Democrats suffered a setback in Iowa in 2010 when conservative Republican Matt Schultz won an upset victory in the Secretary of State race. Since then, Iowa Democrats have targeted Schultz.
That targeting has taken a sinister turn–a criminal one, in fact–as the Des Moines Register reports:
A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office. . .
Edwards is a former Obama staffer who directed “new media operations” for Obama in five states during the 2008 primaries. Thereafter, he was Obama’s Director of New Media for the State of Iowa. In the Democratic Party’s lexicon, “new media” apparently includes identity theft.
Edwards now works for LINK Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm with extraordinarily close ties to Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin.
POSTSCRIPT: For a media failure angle on the story, Newsbusters notes that the Des Moines Register sat on the fact Edwards worked for a prominent Democratic consulting firm until it could safely report that he had been fired.
The New Yorker refuses to issue a correction, despite an inarguable error. By the end of the farce, the New Yorker is reduced to arguing semantics and contradicting the dictionary.
In another example of how utterly lame Politifact (and most “fact-checking” columns) are, Politifact rated this statement “mostly false”:
New energy standards will take away “our freedom of choice and selection in the light bulbs we have in our homes.”
Which is entirely true, of course. Politifact argues that it is mostly false because consumers will be able to buy different (and more expensive) bulbs in place of the current light bulbs. That’s no rebuttal at all. The existence of other remaining choices hardly means that one of your choices isn’t being foreclosed.
By PolitiFact’s logic, people who think abortion should be outlawed are pro-choice because they would allow other choices (childbirth, adoption, avoiding pregnancy via abstinence or contraception).
POSTSCRIPT: People defending the light-bulb ban keeping talking about these high-efficiency incandescent bulbs that we can supposedly get. Even setting aside the higher price, are these bulbs actually available? Has anyone ever seen them for sale? I haven’t.
And do they actually produce the same quality light as a traditional bulb? I’ve never seen one, so I can’t say.
A few weeks ago (yes, I’m still catching up), the very interesting story broke of the White House’s extravagant 2009 Halloween party. The White House was decorated in Alice-in-Wonderland style by director Tim Burton and the party was attended by Jonny Depp in character as the Mad Hatter. One participant came wearing the original Chewbacca costume!
Realizing how bad this looked, the White House hushed up the event, and asked the press not to report it, claims a new book on the first couple:
“White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged,” the book says.
The fascinating thing is that the press went along with it!
This isn’t a White House scandal (although it is curious that neither Burton nor Depp appears on the White House visitor logs), but it’s a first-rate media failure scandal. How much were the White House press corps in the tank for President Obama? So much that they would agree not to report a story that made Obama look bad.
What’s amusing about this story is how it was the White House that persuaded me that it’s true. The official White House blog attacked a straw man, saying that the party wasn’t a secret. That’s beside the point; no one is saying that the fact that a party was held was a secret. What was kept quiet was the extravagance of the party. On that subject the blog weighed in as well:
The author attempts to paint the fact that some involved in the film attended and were not singled out in previews of the event as an attempt to hide their involvement — this was a large event, word of their involvement was certain to be reported, and indeed it was.
Oh, it was reported? That would change things, but let’s not take the White House’s word for it; let’s follow the link to the Politico story (archived here):
The official White House social media releases and the reporter pool dispatches from the party do not mention either Burton or Depp, but the Depp fan site JohnnyDeppNews.com reported that the actor was in attendance with Burton. And the Nashville Tennessean also reported that both Depp and Burton were at the White House for the party.
Seriously? JonnyDeppNews.com and the Nashville Tennessean?! That doesn’t refute the story, it confirms it. The White House pool (and Politico, for that matter) didn’t say anything. The only reporting they can find was in a Depp fan site and some local paper no one’s ever heard of. Very well, I will happily concede that neither JonnyDeppNews.com nor the Nashville Tennessean seem to be in the tank for Obama. For the rest of the media, and especially the weasels in the White House press corps, the charge remains.
The Washington Post offered online readers a dramatic example of “whiplash journalism” yesterday, reporting that the goal of U.S. sanctions against Iran was to topple the regime in Tehran then rolling back that stunning report.
Left thoroughly unclear was how the Post got the story so utterly wrong in the first place.
A recent blog post at the Washington Post accused the military of dishonesty:
Consider the Army’s dogged initial insistence that Pat Tillman was not, in fact, killed by “friendly fire;” the fabrication of the story of Jessica Lynch; and the recent embellishment by the Marine Corps of their medal winner’s story. This is lying to the people the military is meant to protect, and who pay for it. It is absolutely, completely, unacceptable. Yet it now has become common.
That’s strong stuff, and it fails to allow for human fallibility, exacerbated by the fog of war.
But in regard to Jessica Lynch, it’s not even factual. As W. Joseph Campbell explains, the Jessica Lynch story was fabricated, not by the military, but by the Washington Post. That’s right, the very same publication using the incident to besmirch the military.
AP wins when news breaks, but after an hour or two we’re often replaced by a piece of content from someone else who has executed something more thoughtful or more innovative. . . More than ever, we need to infuse that sensibility into our daily process of news and planning.
…
Journalism With Voice. We’re going to be pushing hard on journalism with voice, with context, with more interpretation. This does not mean that we’re sacrificing any of our deep commitment to unbiased, fair journalism. It does not mean that we’re venturing into opinion, either. It does mean that we need to be looking for ways to be more distinctive and stand out in the field — something our customers need and want. The why and the how of the news are as crucial as the who, what, when and where.
This is exactly the opposite of what they should do. We need more straight reporting, not more “journalism with voice”.
Also, I always think its amusing (but sad) when these people can immunize themselves by giving lip service to their “commitment to unbiased, fair journalism”. The fact is they are creating new channels through which reporters can transmit their bias, and that’s how those new channels will be used, whether they admit it or not.
Completing today’s trifecta of New York Times dishonesty, there’s this incident, in which the NYT lied to its readers about its own actions:
The New York Times thought it was sending an email to a few hundred people who had recently canceled subscriptions, offering them a 50 percent discount for 16 weeks to lure them back. Instead, Wednesday’s offer went to 8.6 million email addresses of people who had given them to the Times.
That was the first mistake. The second came when the Times tweeted this: “If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.”
But the Times did send the original email, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said.
The New York Times wants you to believe that holders of firearms permits are dangerous:
The New York Times examined the permit program in North Carolina, one of a dwindling number of states where the identities of permit holders remain public. The review, encompassing the last five years, offers a rare, detailed look at how a liberalized concealed weapons law has played out in one state. And while it does not provide answers, it does raise questions.
More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter.
Here’s the hint that the NYT is trying to deceive you: these are all absolute numbers. What matters is the crime rate, and how it compares to the general population. They don’t say. But Robert VerBruggen does:
Fortunately, state-level murder data are easy to find. North Carolina has a statewide murder rate of about 5 per 100,000. Even without counting manslaughter, that’s 25 murders committed per 100,000 North Carolinians every five years. There are about 230,000 valid concealed-carry permits in North Carolina, so by pure chance, you’d expect these folks to be responsible for nearly 60 murders over five years. And yet only ten of them committed murder or manslaughter.
So the murder rate among permit holders is a sixth of that among the general population. The NYT knows this — you can’t tell me that at no time in their investigation did it occur to them to perform this simple calculation — but they chose not to share the fact with their readers. They want you to believe the opposite.
If you trust content from the New York Times, you’re a sucker.
POSTSCRIPT: VerBruggen’s calculation is good, but here’s one that’s even better: The crime rate among members of Mayors Against Illegal Guns (Mike Bloomberg’s anti-gun astroturf group) is at least 45 times higher than among Florida’s permit holders. (Via Instapundit.)
The New York Times, reporting last month on Israel’s release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an abducted Israeli soldier, wanted to emphasize how the released prisoners were innocent of any real crime:
Sarah Abu Sneineh came with her family to greet her grandson Izzedine Abu Sneineh, who was arrested three years ago at age 15 for throwing stones and hanging Palestinian flags from telephone poles.
And the article misstated Israeli charges against one of the freed prisoners, Izzedine Abu Sneineh, who had been arrested three years ago at age 15. Israel had accused him of weapons training, attempted murder and possession of explosives — not throwing stones and hanging Palestinian flags from telephone poles.
John Hinderaker explains how this sort of “mistake” happens:
It is not hard to see what happened here. The Times article is by Ethan Bronner, and it also credits two individuals whom I take to be stringers: Khaled Abu Aker in Ramallah, and Fares Akram in Gaza. Since the incident described here was in Ramallah, the information presumably came from Khaled Abu Aker, a Palestinian journalist. Further, he interviewed Sneineh’s grandmother, and it seems safe to assume that she was the source of the misinformation about the charges against her grandson. Israeli officials could have supplied the real facts, but evidently no one asked them.
This is how reporting works at the NYT, I guess. Just talk to one side — the side you like — and report what they say. Don’t let the other side spoil the narrative.
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, it was only a few days before this that the NYT was calling out the Washington Post for doing the same thing:
Don’t just repeat it. Report it.
That’s the lesson this week for MSNBC and for The Washington Post, both of which apologized for repeating a liberal blog’s claim that [blah blah blah] . . . The [Post's] correction stated that it “should have contacted the Romney campaign for comment before publication.”
The legacy media is running a story claiming that Rick Santorum, taking questions at a campaign event, said “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” The story apparently began with NPR.
The first thing I want to note is there is nothing inherently offensive in this statement (unless you are so liberal that you’re offended by the idea of not redistributing wealth). What might make this offensive would be if he had brought it up outside the context of inter-racial redistribution of wealth, in which case it could be race-baiting. That’s the allegation in this case.
But he never said it. Here’s the video:
He said “I don’t want to make [unintelligible] people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” It’s not clear to me what he did say; I’m getting “lah”. Tommy Christopher renders it “mmbligh”. Ed Morrissey renders it “lives”. But one thing he clearly did not say is “black” — there is no K sound.
The story gets muddier with an interview Santorum gave to CBS News. They asked him about the statement, but they didn’t play the context. So what is Santorum to answer?
He can’t explain why he said it, because he doesn’t remember saying it, because he didn’t say it.
He can’t deny it and tell them what he did say, because he doesn’t know, because they didn’t play him the context.
He can’t deny it and tell them he would never say such a thing, because (as above) there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It’s only wrong in context, and they didn’t play him the context.
So in this situation, all he can do is say something like what he said “I’ve seen that quote, I haven’t seen the context in which that was made”. He then guessed (incorrectly) at what the context might have been:
Yesterday I talked for example about a movie called . . . ‘Waiting for Superman,’ which was about black children and so I don’t know whether it was in response and I was talking about that.
NPR acted shabbily by putting words in Santorum’s mouth; if you can’t tell, don’t guess. (Although perhaps the reporter really did hear “black”, which — being completely out of context — would tell us a lot more about him than about Santorum.) CBS acted shabbily by ambushing him with the question and not giving him the information to answer. Santorum made a political blunder by guessing.
There had originally been some confusion about whether Santorum actually said the word “black,” which he appeared to clear up in the CBS interview by acknowledging that was in fact the statement he made.
That’s simply a lie. Santorum did not confirm making the statement.
Finally, I can’t help but observe how disingenuous it is for the left to pretend shock and amazement at race baiting (which, at the risk of repeating myself, Santorum didn’t do), when their response to every single criticism of this administration is to accuse the critics of racism (for example).
The Associated Press reports on the horrors of income inequality:
Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
That’s right, nearly one-in-two Americans are below the median. How dreadful!
Think I’m being overly glib? I’m not. The Obama administration’s new poverty line really is defined in terms of income quantiles. It’s not literally set at the median; the actual definition is more complicated, but we can expect the two to track each other pretty well. (The actual definition is 150% of the 30th percentile of a particular wealthy population.) The definition was designed to ensure that there will always been plenty of people in poverty, and the AP is playing along.
UPDATE: Tom Blumer also takes a critical look at the new poverty line. Oddly, his account of the definition is different in detail than the one I linked, but it’s still quantile based.
Because the really cannot be made too often, Mark Hemingway blasts the new fad of “fact-checking” columns, which are anything but. There are lots of examples there, but the ripest one is this:
Smith was quite rightly annoyed with Glenn Kessler, who writes “The Fact Checker” blog on the Washington Post website. (Kessler’s gimmick is rating political statements on a scale of one to four with cutesy Pinocchio-nose graphics.)
On August 17, Kessler wrote an item supporting President Obama’s denial at a town hall in Iowa that Vice President Joe Biden had called Tea Party activists “terrorists” in a meeting with congressional Democrats. . . After supplying a rudimentary summary of what happened, Kessler reached a conclusion that is at once unsure of itself and sharply judgmental. “Frankly, we are dubious that Biden actually said this. And if he did, he was simply echoing what another speaker said, in a private conversation, as opposed to making a public statement.”
Awesome, a “fact-checking” column with zero facts! To paraphrase: “I don’t know if he said it, but if he did say it, I’m quite sure he didn’t mean it.” What a gig! Reporters who actually report news are suckers.
How many times have we been told that the legacy media is superior to the blogosphere because of the media’s layers of fact-checkers and editors? This week MSNBC and the Washington Post got burned for lifting a story from a leftist blog without making any effort to verify it.
The story was from Americablog (no link; I’m not going to reward their lies with traffic) in which they claimed that Mitt Romney was using an old KKK slogan in his stump speeches. He wasn’t: Romney’s line was “keep America America” (a conservative sentiment), while the KKK’s line was “keep America American”. This is quite clear from their own video.
This level of journalistic malpractice was too much even for the New York Times which ran a short story on the incident:
Don’t just repeat it. Report it.
That’s the lesson this week for MSNBC and for The Washington Post, both of which apologized for repeating a liberal blog’s claim that Mitt Romney had uttered a phrase on the campaign stump that was used in the past by the Ku Klux Klan. . .
MSNBC apparently did not contact the Romney campaign for comment before it briefly reported on Wednesday morning that “you may not hear Mitt Romney say ‘Keep America American’ anymore, because it was a rallying cry for the K.K.K. group.” The anchor credited AMERICAblog; the graphic on the screen read, “Romney’s KKK Slogan?” . . . When executives at MSNBC and NBC News saw that, they were disturbed that the blog’s observation was reported as fact, without any added reporting. . .
The Washington Post also issued an apology on Thursday for factual mistakes in its blog post about the phrase. The correction stated that it “should have contacted the Romney campaign for comment before publication.”
Indeed they should have. Now I really don’t expect any better from MSNBC, but I am disappointed by the Washington Post. They were a liberal but responsible paper not so long ago; now they’re being called on the carpet by the New York Times. It’s sad to see that they’ve fallen so far, so fast.
It goes without saying, of course, that they could only make this mistake in one direction. If they ever picked up a story from the conservative blogosphere (a fanciful prospect in its own right), you can be sure that they would verify every detail before running it.
POSTSCRIPT: The liars at Americablog are somehow still sticking with their story, despite it being clearly a lie. This should be a lesson to anyone who would contemplate cribbing from them again.
The Times’s Jason DeParle, Robert Gebeloff and Sabrina Tavernise reported recently on Census data showing that 49.1 million Americans are below the poverty line — in general, $24,343 for a family of four. An additional 51 million are in the next category, which they termed “near poor” — with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. . .
The worst downturn since the Great Depression is only part of the problem. Before that, living standards were already being eroded by stagnating wages and tax and economic policies that favored the wealthy. Conservative politicians and analysts are spouting their usual denial.
Here’s the truth: these figures use the Obama administration’s new “poverty line”, which has nothing to do with actual poverty. Rather than being based on the cost of a basket of goods that families need (and without which they are impoverished), as the traditional poverty line was, the new “poverty line” is defined in terms of other people’s income (in particular, the 30th percentile of a particular population).
The beauty of the new “poverty line” — for liberals — is there will always be millions in “poverty”, no matter how much their lot improves. Not only is the 49.1 million figure not shocking, it’s inevitable. The “near poor”, being 150% of the other meaningless number, is just as meaningless.
With the new “poverty line”, liberals will always have an excuse to demand billions in welfare spending, (funneled through their cronies like ACORN of course). But this depends on the public remaining ignorant that the “poverty line” has nothing to do with poverty and is rigged so that there will always been lots of people in poverty.
Put simply, this only works if the liberals succeed in tricking us. And the New York Times is doing its part.
Dramatic footage of a polar bear tending her newborn cubs in the flagship BBC show Frozen Planet was filmed in a Dutch zoo using fake snow. In one of the most engaging moments of its Winter episode, the tiny bears are shown mewling at their mother and nuzzling her for milk.
Eight million viewers were led to believe the scene had been captured by BBC cameramen inside an underground cave in the brutal sub-zero temperatures of the Arctic wilderness.
It’s always dangerous to trust the media, but it’s even more dangerous to trust their headlines. Mickey Kaus notes a Politico story headlined “CBO figures throw cold water on cuts-only approach”. What does the story actually say?
Even if spending were frozen in place, the nation’s debt keeps piling up, absent more structural benefit reforms and tax revenue.
This is perfectly obvious to anyone paying attention. It’s not good enough to keep spending “frozen in place”, we need deep spending cuts. We particularly need deep cuts to entitlement spending, which is exactly what “structural benefit reforms” are. Nothing here throws even a drop of cold war on a “cuts-only approach”.
POSTSCRIPT: Kaus pointed out the inaccurate headline a week ago and Politico still hasn’t fixed it.
If your fact-checking column finds the need to use the nonsensical phrase “true but false”, that’s a hint that you’re not actually doing fact-checking. In this instance we can see the absurd lengths to which the Washington Post will go to avoid acknowledging a Republican claim as true.
The claim in question is John Boehner’s statement that over half the people who would be subject to the Democrats’ proposed new millionaire surtax are actually small-business owners. The claim is true. In fact, it’s overly conservative: according to the Treasury Department, the actual number is 70%.
But the Washington Post doesn’t want to leave it there, so they search for a more nuanced analysis. Unsurprisingly, if you narrow the definition of “small-business owner” to exclude some small business owners, you can make the percentage go down. If you narrow it enough, you can get the percentage below 50%. The narrow definition is better, they argue, and thereby conclude that Boehner’s true statement is actually false.
The general problem here, once again, is opinion-policing masquerading as fact-checking. It is perfectly legitimate to debate the meaning of small-business owner. I might even agree with their general point, if not with exactly where to put the knob. But that is argument, not fact-checking. You can’t call someone a liar just because you have a counter-argument.
Time magazine says that Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper that was firebombed after printing a cartoon of Mohammed, pretty much had it coming.
Oh sure, they give lip service to the notion that firebombing is a bad way to express your objection to a publication, but always with the “BUT”.
Journalists in the legacy media have been advising the Occupy Wall Street protesters on how to craft their message. Then they’ve been turning around and reporting on those protesters as if they were disinterested observers.
John Hinderaker has a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) at Power Line absolutely demolishing the recent Bloomberg hatchet job on Koch Industries. The Bloomberg story purported to expose Koch’s misdeeds in Iran, but in fact: (1) what Koch Industries did was legal, (2) Koch has greater ethical standards for its dealings in Iran than other companies, (3) the Koch employee that violated those standards was fired, and (4) those other, less ethical companies that went un-”exposed” are Democratic darlings.
In order to procure an interview with Marco Rubio (R-FL), the Spanish-language network Univision dug up dirt on Rubio’s brother-in-law (a 24-year-old drug arrest) and threatened to run a piece on it unless Rubio agreed to appear on its program Al Punto. Rubio refused to play ball and Univision carried out its threat.
Univision’s action may well constitute criminal blackmail, depending on whether an appearance by Rubio is considered “something of value”. It is certainly considered unethical by all reputable media, and I’m setting the reputability bar very low.
The Hill (together with other legacy media) would like us to believe:
Former Sen. Rick Santorum (Penn.) – an outspoken critic of gay marriage – was asked a question via YouTube about what would happen to openly gay servicemen if Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was reinstated. The Orlando crowd began booing.
It’s a lie. The Hill’s earlier reporting was misleading, but at least literally true:
Some members of the GOP debate audience booed a gay soldier who asked . . .
Yes, “some members” booed. But let’s be precise. Two members. (Ann Althouse thinks it was only one, but it sounds like two to me.) Don’t believe me? Listen for yourself.
The Orlando crowd did not begin booing, as The Hill and others would have us believe. Two yahoos amidst the crowd booed.
POSTSCRIPT: Additionally, there’s something bizarre about the media’s take on this and another recent debate-audience controversy. They seem to think that the candidates on stage are answerable for anything that two or three people in the audience might say. We don’t know who those people are (they might be provocateurs!), and they are speaking in violation of debate rules. On the other hand, President Obama can share the podium at a rally with someone like Jimmy Hoffa, and Obama isn’t answerable for anything the man says. The only way to make sense of it is as a flagrant double standard.
Social Security is obviously a Ponzi scheme. Here is Wikipedia’s definition:
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation. The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering returns other investments cannot guarantee, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors to keep the scheme going.
The only thing to quibble about here is whether Social Security “entices” new investors; enticed or not, you’ve got no choice. Some might also dispute whether it is “fraudulent”. It is: it makes promises it cannot deliver. (In fact, now we get that promise explicitly, in the form of an annual letter from the Social Security administration listing all the promised benefits we’ll never see.)
Jonathan Last has already identified a 1967 Newsweek column by liberal economist and Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson as perhaps the earliest use of the Social Security/Ponzi-scheme comparison in public argument. Samuelson was actually drawing on the Ponzi analogy to defend Social Security. His claim was that the perpetual succession of human generations establishes the conditions for a sustainable Ponzi scheme. Regardless of whether Samuelson was the first commentator to use the Ponzi analogy, he has clearly been the most influential. Policy briefs and books churned out by conservative think tanks such as Heritage and Cato have cited Samuelson’s Ponzi column for years. . .
The unfortunate weakness of Samuelson’s model is its assumption that a growing economy will produce continual population increase. In an April 1978 follow-up in Newsweek to his original 1967 column, Samuelson acknowledged that demographic reality was disproving this assumption. Samuelson repeated his use of the Ponzi analogy and continued to defend his hopes for Social Security as best he could.
Note to CBS: If you’re going to pluck a story from an obscure blog, maybe you should do a little research to see if it’s true first. (You could at least Google it!) This is particularly important if the story makes an extremely outlandish claim, like a major presidential contender shouting to her audience “who likes white people?”
Part of the problem is that CBS’s editors are so removed from the right half of American opinion, they apparently didn’t realize this was outlandish.
John Hinderaker coins the perfect phrase — “opinion police” — for the journalists who claim to be fact-checking, but really are evaluating opinions. This is a pernicious phenomenon that is becoming far too prevalent.
In this particular instance, Hinderaker was complaining about a Washington Post column by Glenn Kessler called The Fact Checker, which reported Rick Perry’s “newbie mistake” on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Kessler said Perry’s was factually incorrect when he said:
I certainly have some concerns. The first step in any peaceful negotiation for a two-state solution for the Palestinians is to recognize the right of Israel’s existence. They have to denounce terrorism in both word and deed. And they have to sit down and negotiate with Israel directly. Anything short of that is a non-starter in my opinion.
Kessler claimed Perry was wrong on all three points. On the first point, he says that Palestinians have indeed recognized Israel, but this is debatable.
For starters, many say that the Palestinians never really changed their charter to remove its anti-Israel language. They argue that merely voting to revoke the charter’s provisions is not the same thing as producing a new charter without those provisions. (Here’s an example of that school of thought.) Personally, I think that what Palestinian authorities did in 1996 or 1998 to revise a document written in 1964 is beside the point. What matters is what they say and do now. Just last month, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas denied the existence of Israel:
The Palestinian Authority will not be recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday, adopting a belligerent tone ahead of his planned statehood bid in September. . .
“Don’t order us to recognize a Jewish state,” Abbas said. “We won’t accept it.”
And this very day, the logo of the Palestinian mission to the UN denies Israel’s existence. In short, Perry’s position is, at the very least, a defensible opinion, not a factual error. Frankly, I think he’s right.
Kessler is even weaker on the other two facets of Perry’s statement. Perry says the Palestinians must denounce terrorism in word and deed. Kessler produces one example of the Palestinians denouncing terrorism in word. He does not produce any examples of the Palestinians denouncing terrorism in deed (okay, I’ll grant that that’s clumsy wording), because there are none to produce.
On the third point, that the Palestinians need to negotiate with Israel directly, Kessler seems to concede that Perry is right. The Palestinians are not negotiating with Israel directly, and haven’t since March 2010. But somehow this point too shows Perry’s ignorance. Kessler doesn’t explain how.
Nowhere in this “fact-checking” piece on Perry’s “newbie mistake” does Kessler demonstrate any factual errors. On the contrary, there is one difference in opinion, and two correct facts. But wait, Kessler talked to three anonymous “experts”, and all three said that Perry sounded remarkably uninformed. Oh, well then.
But wait, there’s more! Kessler concludes that Rick Perry’s campaign is a “fact-free zone” (no facts at all!) because they have never replied to any of his inquiries. Clearly, Kessler is using the word “fact” to mean something entirely different from what it means to me.
A group called the Franklin Center alleges that New York Times reporter Ian Urbina deceived readers in his reports attacking fracking. According to the Center, Urbina described his sources deceptively — making them sound better connected than they were — and described single sources using multiple different descriptions — making his sources sound more numerous than they were.
The Washington Post says this claim by Speaker John Boehner isn’t true:
At this moment, the Executive Branch has 219 new rules in the works that will cost our economy at least $100 million. That means under the current Washington agenda, our economy is poised to take a hit from the government of at least $100 million — 219 times.
They give it three “Pinocchios”.
The problem is, it’s entirely true. If you go to the government’s web site, it lists 219 “major regulations” that are “under development or review”. The law defines “major regulation” as one that, among other things, will cost the economy $100 million or more. Boehner’s claim is unarguable.
So how do they say it’s false? The same way that other “fact checking” hacks try to call true statements they don’t like false. They make a “nuanced” argument that the facts don’t mean what Boehner implies they mean. Fine, make your argument. But that’s an editorial, not a fact check.
At the Republican debate on Monday, there was an exchange in which Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul whether society should let uninsured people die. Yahoo News reported that the audience cheered the idea of letting them die. Paul Krugman piled on, writing:
The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.
One difference between the moral visions, apparently, is that the left feels justified in making stuff up. To wit: the report that the audience cheered letting uninsured people die is a complete lie.
Play the video if you don’t believe me. After Blitzer asks the question, a small number of people (about three) yell yes. Then Paul gives the exact right answer, which is there is a difference between society and government. No, society should not let the uninsured die, and Paul explained that when he was practicing medicine, they never turned anyone away. And that is what the audience cheered.
In short, the truth is the exact opposite of what Yahoo and Krugman said.
In his another-stimulus-will-fix-everything-this-time-I-swear speech on Thursday, President Obama said that Abraham Lincoln founded the Republican party. (This was part of a cheap shot at Republicans.) Not so: Lincoln was the first Republican elected president, but he wasn’t even the first Republican presidential candidate, much less the party’s founder.
It’s easy to see how someone could make such an error, as Lincoln was the first Republican of any importance. But we must be frank; a similar error by a Republican would nevertheless be trumpeted as proof that he or she is a lightweight. We need not speculate: The exact same error by Mike Huckabee in 2008 was taken as proof that Huckabee was “loose with the facts”. (Via Just One Minute.)
ASIDE: Note that Time didn’t even give Huckabee the courtesy of assuming he made an honest mistake. The author of that piece? Jay Carney, now chief media flack for President Obama. I’m looking forward to seeing Carney try to square that circle.
Now PBS has gotten themselves in trouble for leaving Obama’s error out of their transcript. It turns out that they didn’t airbrush it out (not that it’s crazy to think they might have, as such things have happened). Rather, they simply posted the White House’s prepared version (which did not have the ad-libbed error) and called it a transcript. Later they put up a real transcript.
That’s dishonest. A transcript is text taken down (transcribed, one might say!) from language spoken aloud. A prepared text is not a transcript. PBS was trying to pretend to publish a rush transcript without doing the hard work of preparing a rush transcript.
One of the less consequential false statements in the New York Times’s hatchet job on Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is that his office overlooks a golf course. The Times now admits that the golf course is not visible from Issa’s office (the video proves that), but they argue that their characterization of Issa’s office as “overlooking a golf course” is accurate because you can see the golf course from somewhere in the building.
That might be barely true. On the map you can see that the two locations are not particularly close, and there is a big hill between them. But the building containing Issa’s office is three stories tall, so although you certainly can’t see the golf course from the ground (you can look at the building on Google Street View here, then turn south-southwest to face the golf course), you might just be able to see part of it in the distance from the top floor, around the hill, if the intervening structures aren’t too tall.
Still, “technically barely true” is a low standard for journalism, or at least it ought to be.
POSTSCRIPT: I know, this isn’t all that interesting, but I enjoyed the opportunity to link Street View.
The New York Times at first refused to correct or retract its error-ridden hatchet job on Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), except for the most trivial error. The NYT bureau chief wrote:
Happy to consider any mistakes they point out, and we are looking at those. But I’m not seeing a need for any sort of retraction.
An article on Aug. 15 about Representative Darrell Issa’s business dealings, using erroneous information that Mr. Issa’s family foundation filed with the Internal Revenue Service, referred incorrectly to his sale of an AIM mutual fund in 2008. . . The purchase of the mutual fund resulted in a $125,000 loss, not a $357,000 gain.
Oops.
And the article . . . misstated the purchase price for a medical office plaza Mr. Issa’s company bought in Vista, Calif., in 2008. . . Therefore the value of the property remained essentially unchanged, and did not rise 60 percent after Mr. Issa secured federal funding to widen a road alongside the plaza.
Oops again.
Several other major errors remain uncorrected, so we’ll probably see some corrections dribble out in the coming days. But the value of a correction drops dramatically over time, as the correction becomes less and less likely to reach the same people that saw the original misinformation. They make it less likely still to reach the right people when they tuck the correction away in the back pages of the paper .
Which is all pretty much what they intend, I imagine.
UPDATE: The NYT is standing firm on the Toyota error and the golf course error. (Actually, since they have had the opportunity to correct and have chosen not to, we can call them lies now.) More on the golf course here.
More on the New York Times’s front-page hatchet job on Darrell Issa (R-CA): Issa has sent the NYT a letter pointing out 13 errors (some of them quite serious) and demanding a front-page correction. I noted some of the errors in my previous post, but this one is new:
The “1,900 percent” profit allegation is, again, based on reporting errors by the New York Times. This … assertion is based on an incorrect form obtained by the Times. According to a financial transaction record, the Issa Family Foundation’s initial investment in the AIM Small Company fund was not $19,000 but $500,000. The asset was later sold for $375,000 resulting in a $125,000 loss – not a 1900 percent gain as was reported.
The New York Times is refusing to correct any of the errors other than the most trivial of them.
Today is the twentieth anniversary of the final day of the Crown Heights Riots, in which blacks were allowed to riot against Jews in the Crown Heights neighborhood of New York for three days before the police intervened. This may seem like ancient history, but it’s worth noting that that was the last time New York City had a Democratic mayor.
Anyway, one of the people looking back is Ari Goldman, who was a reporter for the New York Times in 1991 and was one of the primary reporters the NYT had covering the riots. Goldman has written an article, “Telling it Like it Wasn’t“, which savages the NYT’s dishonest reporting on the story:
When I picked up the paper, the article I read was not the story I had reported. I saw headlines that described the riots in terms solely of race. “Two Deaths Ignite Racial Clash in Tense Brooklyn Neighborhood,” the Times headline said. And, worse, I read an opening paragraph, what journalists call a “lead,” that was simply untrue:
“Hasidim and blacks clashed in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn through the day and into the night yesterday.”
In all my reporting during the riots I never saw — or heard of — any violence by Jews against blacks. But the Times was dedicated to this version of events: blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions. To show Jewish culpability in the riots, the paper even ran a picture — laughable even at the time — of a chasidic man brandishing an open umbrella before a police officer in riot gear. The caption read: “A police officer scuffling with a Hasidic man yesterday on President Street.”
I was outraged but I held my tongue. I was a loyal Times employee and deferred to my editors. I figured that other reporters on the streets were witnessing parts of the story I was not seeing.
But then I reached my breaking point. On Aug. 21, as I stood in a group of chasidic men in front of the Lubavitch headquarters, a group of demonstrators were coming down Eastern Parkway. “Heil Hitler,” they chanted. “Death to the Jews.”
Police in riot gear stood nearby but did nothing.
Suddenly rocks and bottles started to fly toward us and a chasidic man just a few feet away from me was hit in the throat and fell to the ground. Some ran to help the injured man but most of us ran for cover. I ran for a payphone and, my hands shaking with rage, dialed my editor. I spoke in a way that I never had before or since when talking to a boss.
“You don’t know what’s happening here!” I yelled. “I am on the streets getting attacked. Someone next to me just got hit. I am writing memos and what comes out in the paper? ‘Hasidim and blacks clashed’? That’s not what is happening here. Jews are being attacked! You’ve got this story all wrong. All wrong.”
I didn’t blame the “rewrite” reporter. I blamed the editors. It was clear that they had settled on a “frame” for the story.
We’re quite familiar with this phenomenon today, in which facts are secondary, or even irrelevant, to the narrative.
If you were wondering whether the Politifact “fact-check” was still grading statements as “false” because they disagreed with them, wonder no longer.
In this latest case, Politifact graded Florida Governor Rick Scott’s remarks on high-speed rail as false, because Scott made the outrageous twin assumptions that there would likely be cost overruns, and the state would end up paying for them. This is nonsense — Politifact tells us — because supporters of high-speed rail have assured us that won’t happen.
The Times piece has the odor of a rush job. It gets some small but important facts wrong. For example, contrary to the Times, Issa’s San Diego company doesn’t have an office in a building overlooking a golf course. The Times also accused Issa of splitting a holding company into “separate multibillion-dollar businesses” when he owns none (The Times corrected this in a later edition). The Times even suggested Issa went easy on Toyota during its recent troubles because his company is a supplier to the Japanese automaker. It’s not.
But the big stinker in the Times hit piece is its central accusation — that a building Issa bought for $10.3 million appreciated 60 percent after he secured congressional earmarks for nearby road construction. The Times used the wrong sale price, which was actually $16.6 million. So much for the Times’ 60 percent appreciation accusation. We hope the timing of the Issa slam has nothing to do with his subpoena threat to Sebelius, just as we hope the Times’ oversight regarding Waxman’s trial lawyer lucre and Obamacare is coincidental. But we’re not holding our breath.
That black cloud that Perry is talking about is President Barack Obama.
This, used in support of Schultz’s contention that Republicans are racists, is perhaps unintentionally revealing. If he is resorting to this, he must have nothing. After all, if he had any real evidence that Perry was a racist, he would use it, rather than making up lame crap like this.
UPDATE: Schultz apologizes, sort of. He apologizes for editing the quote, but he doesn’t apologize for lying about what Perry said. The latter, he’s hoping people simply forget.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Tuesday there is “no risk” the U.S. will lose its top credit rating amid a new analysis that revised its outlook on American debt to “negative.”
Geithner took to the airwaves of financial news networks to push back against a report Monday by Standard & Poor’s that lowered its outlook on U.S. debt to “negative,” reflecting political uncertainty over whether lawmakers will reach an agreement to address long-term debt.
There is no chance that the U.S. will lose its top credit rating, Geithner said, forcefully disputing the notion that S&P or other ratings services might downgrade U.S. bonds from their current AAA rating.
A cornerstone of the global financial system was shaken Friday when officials at ratings firm Standard & Poor’s said U.S. Treasury debt no longer deserved to be considered among the safest investments in the world.
S&P removed for the first time the triple-A rating the U.S. has held for 70 years, saying the budget deal recently brokered in Washington didn’t do enough to address the gloomy long-term picture for America’s finances.
I don’t see how the Democrats will blame the Tea Party for this, since S&P’s complaint is we didn’t do enough of what the Tea Party wanted, but I’m sure they will find a way.
UPDATE: Well, now we know how they will blame Republicans: just lie. I heard on NPR this morning that the reason S&P was downgrading our debt was concern over our dysfunctional legislative process, or something like that.
For years now, the anti-gun movement has been promoting a factoid that 90% of the guns used in Mexican crimes were purchased in the United States. It’s a lie. The true figure is closer to 8%. (The 90% figure refers to guns that were traced by U.S. authorities, and Mexican authorities generally don’t bother asking U.S. authorities to trace guns unless they already have reason to believe they come from the U.S.)
Despite having been debunked conclusively, the anti-gun nuts have continued to cite the “statistic”, as recently as the Democratic minority report on Gunwalker this very month.
But perhaps the truth is leaking through a little, because the New York Times is now lowering its version of the bogus statistic from 90% to 70%:
It is an open and deadly scandal that at least 70 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico’s bloody drug war originate in the United States, where shady gun buyers operate freely thanks to loopholes in American law.
They don’t cite a source, of course, and 70% is still a lie, but it’s progress.
POSTSCRIPT: Oh, by the way, the “shady gun buyers” have been operating freely, not because of loopholes in American law, but because of the ATF was ordering gun stores to allow them free rein, despite the law. Amazingly, the NYT manages to write an entire editorial on the subject of American guns in the hands of Mexican drug cartels without even mentioning Gunwalker! (Bob Owens goes on to correct some further errors.)
A new study contradicts was nutritionists have been telling us for years:
For years, doctors have been telling us that too much salt is bad for us. Until now. A study claims that cutting down on salt can actually increase the risk of dying from a heart attack or a stroke. The research has left nutritionists scratching their heads.
Its findings indicate that those who eat the least sodium – about one teaspoon a day – don’t show any health advantage over those who eat the most.
Personally, I welcome this news, whether it holds up or not. The truth is that different people need different amounts of salt, regardless of the averages say. I’ve known for many years that I happen to be one of the people who needs more salt than most. Unfortunately, the anti-salt campaign has occasionally made it difficult to get it. Anything that hinders the anti-salt campaign is good for me.
POSTSCRIPT: There’s an amusing addendum to attach to this story. The New York Times, in its reporting on this story, shows that media bias is not limited to politics:
Low-Salt Diet Ineffective, Study Finds. Disagreement Abounds.
A new study found that low-salt diets increase the risk of death from heart attacks and strokes and do not prevent high blood pressure, but the research’s limitations mean the debate over the effects of salt in the diet is far from over.
The article continued with four paragraphs telling why no one should believe the study before it deigned to report what the study actually found.
UPDATE: According to Scientific American, the anti-salt campaign has always been on shaky scientific footing. For example:
For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not. Part of the problem is that individuals vary in how they respond to salt. “It’s tough to nail these associations,” admits Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University and the chair of the salt committee for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. One oft-cited 1987 study published in the Journal of Chronic Diseases reported that the number of people who experience drops in blood pressure after eating high-salt diets almost equals the number who experience blood pressure spikes; many stay exactly the same.
Indeed. People are trying to cut my salt intake, even though I need more than average. Of course, this is always the problem with one-size-fits-all policy.
UPDATE: In light of this article, I’m going to strengthen this post’s title.
UPDATE: I said that the New York Times’s hit piece on the salt study proves that media bias isn’t limited to politics, but on further reflection, I think it’s entirely political. The New York Times is, after all, located in New York, where the mayor has waged a high-profile war on salt (and just about anything else that people enjoy, it would seem). If New Yorkers learn that Bloomberg’s entire war on salt was based on false information, they might wonder what other infringements of their personal liberty are unnecessary and/or counterproductive.
“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” he told troops at Camp Victory, the largest U.S. military outpost in Baghdad. “And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”
He’s right, of course, but it’s interesting that he would say so, since the denial of any connection between Iraq and the global war on terror has been an article of faith among the left.
UPDATE: There’s a media failure angle to this story as well. The Post claims:
His statement echoed comments made by Bush and his administration, which tried to tie then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. But it put Panetta at odds with Obama, the 9/11 Commission and other independent experts, who have said that al-Qaeda lacked a presence in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
I don’t care about what Obama and “other independent experts” say, but this is wrong as regards the 9/11 Commission, as Aaron Worthing notes. Moreover, even if (counterfactually) al Qaeda did lack a presence in Iraq before 2003, it wouldn’t change the fact that Iraq was a state supporter of terrorism. There are, after all, terrorists other than al Qaeda.
There’s also this:
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday appeared to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq as part of the war against al-Qaeda, an argument controversially made by the Bush administration but refuted by President Obama and many Democrats.
As an Althouse reader points out, “refute” means “disprove”, not merely “contradict”. The Post has since changed “refuted” to “rebutted” (without noting a correction). That’s still a little too strong; usually “rebut” means the same as “refute”. But I suppose “rebuttal” is often used in politics for any counter-statement, whether or not it really rebuts or even addresses the statement.
Kids sometime play a game called telephone (at least, that’s what we called it when I was a kid), in which a story is passed from person to person, and what comes out is very different from what went in. I was reminded of that when Reuters managed to turn Jon Kyl’s (R-AZ) statement that “we’re not talking about increasing taxes” into a concession for a $150 billion tax hike.
You know, if Reuters were to say that water is wet, you might want to wait for confirmation.
Ed Whelan generally demolished the New York Times’s recent editorial attacking the Supreme Court, but I want to focus on one point in particular:
The editorial states (emphasis added):
Among the court’s 82 rulings this term, 16 were 5-to-4 decisions. Of those, 10 were split along ideological lines, with Justice Anthony Kennedy supplying the fifth conservative vote.
The hyperlink (not available in the print edition, of course) instructs the reader, “See p. 11, SCOTUSblog Stat Pack.” Any reader who follows the link will discover that 14 of the 16 decisions “were split along ideological lines,” with Kennedy supplying the fifth liberal vote in four of the cases. But the NYT instead gives the false impression that the conservative side won all the 5-4 cases decided “along ideological lines.”
I suppose that “gives the false impression” is the polite way to put it. I call it lying.
The New York Times’s ombudsman comes out against the Times’s practice of airbrushing its articles:
My preference would be that The Times do more to document and retain significant changes and corrections like those I have described. It has a policy against removing material from its archive (except in rare cases), on the principle that the record should be preserved. The Times should clarify its policy on replacing stories online, which looks like de facto removal to me, and offer the public a better-documented archive that includes all significant versions and all corrections. . .
Right now, tracking changes is not a priority at The Times. As Ms. Abramson told me, it’s unrealistic to preserve an “immutable, permanent record of everything we have done.”
There is a saying that I think is appropriate here: That which has been done, can be done. Lots of blogs and newspapers manage to keep a fairly complete record by the simple expedient of not replacing their stories. Barring that, maintaining a change history is technologically quite feasible. For instance, as an Instapundit reader points out, Wikipedia manages to do so, and in a much more difficult setting.
USA Today headline writers had a piece about suggestions that Delta is discriminating against Jews and Christians in their service to Saudi Arabia, and this is what they came up with:
Airline to Jewish rumor: ‘Delta does not discriminate.’
If Congressional Republicans are really intent on getting to the bottom of an ill-conceived sting operation along the border by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, they should call President Felipe Calderón of Mexico as an expert witness.
Mr. Calderón has the data showing that the tens of thousands of weapons seized from the Mexican drug cartels in the last four years mostly came from the United States.
That is simply a lie. That claim has been debunked so conclusively that it simply cannot be offered in good faith. The NYT cannot be unaware that it is false. They must just be hoping that their readers are.
How did the Gunwalker scandal happen? Did the ATF deliberately facilitate the smuggling of weapons into Mexico in order to bolster the (false) story that weapons used in Mexican crimes mostly come from the United States, in order to advance a gun-control agenda?
We don’t know. It’s hard to believe that any administration could be so corrupt. But so far, it is the only explanation that has been offered that makes any sense. Why did the ATF traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels? It defies all reason!
The agents who are talking don’t know. They warned that the scheme would be a disaster, but their pleas were ignored.
Those who do know, on the other hand, aren’t talking. And that makes me suspect the worst. If they had a good faith reason, they should tell us. Instead, the ATF and the Justice Department have been stonewalling for months.
We don’t know when Eric Holder was briefed on the scheme. It’s hard to believe that a plan to traffic weapons into a foreign country would have been approved without going to the top. (And it hardly absolves him if he is such a careless manager as to allow crazy schemes to be put into motion without his knowledge.)
But what we do know for certain is that Eric Holder has approved the cover-up. We know that because the cover-up is ongoing and he could put a stop to it. Regardless of what he knew and when he knew it, Holder should go for that reason alone.
The latest development is someone at the DOJ is trying to fight back against Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). The Washington Post ran a story yesterday alleging, based on an anonymous source, that Issa was briefed on the scheme in April 2010 and raised no objections. Issa categorically denies the report, and adds that his office has been contacted by several publications to whom the story was shopped. The Post was the only publication to find it credible.
Even if the Issa story were true, it would not absolve the ATF, Eric Holder, or the Obama administration. But there’s no good reason to believe it, since there’s no good reason for the source to remain anonymous, unless he’s lying. He can’t be afraid of retaliation; one simply does not face negative consequences for running interference for your boss by attacking a Republican congressman.
If the Gunwalker scandal is as bad as it is starting to look — trafficking guns into a friendly country, for political purposes, leaving countless dead including a federal agent — it would be the worst scandal in American history. No one died in the Watergate burglary.
It appears that the former prime minister [Margaret Thatcher] has no intention of meeting the darling of the Tea Party movement [Sarah Palin]. . .
It would appear that the reasons go deeper than Thatcher’s frail health. Her allies believe that Palin is a frivolous figure who is unworthy of an audience with the Iron Lady. This is what one ally tells me:
Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.
I have spoken to Lady Thatcher’s Private Office regarding the story, and they confirm that the attack on Sarah Palin definitely did not come from her office, and in no way reflects her views. As a former aide to Margaret Thatcher myself, I can attest that this kind of thinking is entirely alien to her, and that such remarks would never be made by her office. . .
There was never any snub of Sarah Palin by Lady Thatcher’s office. However, there has been a great deal of mischief-making and unpleasantness from sections of the liberal press in a vain and futile attempt to use Margaret Thatcher’s name to smear a major US politician.
A headline at CNN Money earlier today: “Wingnut debt ceiling demands”. Now it’s been changed to “Goofy debt ceiling demands”, which is probably about as objective as CNN can manage.
It’s astonishing to watch the legacy media’s feeding frenzy over the Palin emails. When the mainstream newspapers are hiring hundreds of Palin haters to go through her mail, it’s not journalism, it’s opposition research.
And it’s not even rational opposition research at that. Palin isn’t a candidate, and she’s not likely to become a candidate. So why are they investing time, money, and their last scraps of credibility to find dirt on her? They hate this woman with a passion that exceeds anything rational.
Oh, and we mustn’t miss the fact that they’ve found nothing at all. The Huffington Post page screams “Sarah Palin Emails Released By Alaska Government (LIVE UPDATES)”. Two days later, how many updates? Zero.
They wanted to find dirt. Many were self-deceived enough to believe they would find dirt. Instead they’ve proven she’s clean. Oops.
UPDATE: While the feeding frenzy goes on, there are plenty of things the legacy media doesn’t think it’s important for you to see.
When the New York Times’s top editor, Bill Keller, steps down in a few months, he will be replaced by Jill Abramson, a New York Times true-believer. Literally, according to the NYT’s profile:
Ms. Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”
“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”
Interestingly, you won’t find that quote if you read the article now. It’s been scrubbed. Does absolute truth need to be scrubbed?
Don Surber fact-checks the Associated Press fact-checker. He finds, not too surprisingly, that the AP twisted the facts much worse than its subject (Tim Pawlenty).
But more importantly, he observes the that the fact-check format actually lends itself to dishonesty more than ordinary news copy does. This is an important lesson, since it runs against our intuition: When a paper runs a fact-checking piece, it’s more likely that they are lying to you than otherwise.
A disgruntled soldier shops a story about the murder of three Guantanamo detainees to the media. His story is deemed implausible by 60 Minutes, ABC, NBC, and the New York Times. (None of whom, I might add, have shown any great reluctance to run weakly sourced stories attacking the military.) But the soldier persists, and eventually, despite the inconsistencies in his story, he gets Harper’s Magazine to run with it.
The resulting article wins the National Magazine Award for Reporting.
My question is, what is the award grading articles on? Obviously not the quality of the reporting.
Ed Morrissey comments on all the rapture nonsense:
I suspect that the media feeding frenzy Stanley describes has less to do with an impulse to lampoon the ridiculous than an impulse to ridicule Christianity in general. Despite Camping and his followers being an extremely small fringe group, the media has covered this story as if the entire Southern Baptist church made this prediction.
Indeed. I never heard of this guy before a few days ago. Since when does an obscure preacher’s prediction of the end of the world constitute top news?
Contrast this with the prediction in 2005 by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, that the end-times were less than two years away. That prediction, by a man eager to play a role in the end of the world, actually mattered. But almost no one ever heard of it.
When Osama Bin Laden was killed two weeks ago, a lot of reporters and commentators had trouble with the name, confusing Osama with Obama. On one level it’s understandable; the two names are just one character apart, and we say Obama’s name much more often.
But here’s my problem. Osama is the terrorist’s first name. Why did those people feel like they are on a first-name basis with Osama Bin Laden in the first place? Needless to say, this man was not our friend. If they had called him Bin Laden, they couldn’t have made the mistake.
I think the proliferation in our culture of first names for people we don’t know is unfortunate, but times do change and far be it for me to stand in the way. But can we at least eschew friendly terms with villains?
During the last administration, poorly-drawn, poorly-reasoned, vitriolic cartoons attacking the president had no trouble being published. Now, Ted Rall complains that he can’t find a market for his crap.
Double standard? Sure. But on the bright side, Obama’s election has improved the quality of editorial pages everywhere, so that’s one thing he’s doing right.
I’m a fan of the Economist. I love the wealth of information it offers from all around the world, which is really unmatched by anything else in the media (new or old). But they like to drop unsupported ideological nuggets into their reporting. Those nuggets tend to be opinion, but sometime they venture into assertions of fact.
Case in point: In a recent article (subscription required) on efforts to defund NPR, they assert that James O’Keefe’s NPR sting video was deceptively edited:
Those suspicions were reinforced earlier this year, when a video appeared to show the network’s top fund-raiser making disparaging comments about Republicans. Though the tape was deceptively edited, the fallout cost NPR’s president her job.
(Emphasis mine.) This is typical of the sort of nugget I’m talking about: it’s not supported by any reporting and it’s not essential to the story. They just want the reader to know, in passing, what they are supposed to think of the video.
But it simply isn’t true. First of all, the original video was not deceptively edited. More importantly, O’Keefe, within hours, released the entire unedited video so that people could judge for themselves. That is a standard of ethics unmatched by the legacy media, which generally won’t release raw video at all, much less contemporaneously.
The Economist is great because of the news it reports that you can’t get anywhere else, but stuff like this makes you wonder how much of that reporting is accurate.
The Guardian describes Rachel Maddow as the “top US news anchor”. What? Not only is she not the top overall, she doesn’t even win her timeslot. And, for that matter, she’s not an anchor either, at least as I understand the term.
The Guardian is famous for its diligence in corrections, but I don’t see one for this story yet.
Posted by K. Crary 
