Internet Scofflaw

In September 2018, the New York Times published an op-ed by an anonymous “senior administration official” who said that he and others were secretly working to sabotage the Trump administration from within.

Now, Miles Taylor has come out as “anonymous” and the NYT confirms that he is the author. At the time the op-ed was written, Taylor was the deputy chief of staff (i.e., an advisor) to the secretary of Homeland Security, which is not what most people would consider to be a senior administration official. Eyebrows are being raised, to say the least.

In a piece that accompanied the original op-ed, the NYT explained (sort of) what they mean by “senior administration official”:

I understand readers’ frustration that we didn’t provide a more precise description of the official. . . The term we chose, senior administration official, is used in Washington by both journalists and government officials to describe positions in the upper echelon of an administration, such as the one held by this writer.

(Emphasis mine.) This doesn’t say much, but the part in bold does confirm that they are using the term according to its conventional meaning.

The New York Times is trying to obfuscate this now. The profile of Miles Taylor they published today says:

On Wednesday, he disclosed his identity and his role in the administration as a top official in the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Taylor ultimately became chief of staff to Kirstjen Nielsen, Mr. Trump’s former homeland security secretary. In that position, Mr. Taylor was one of the most senior political officials in the sprawling department, which employs more than 240,000 people.

The chief of staff to a cabinet secretary might be considered a senior official, but he was not in that role at the time. In their profile, they do not mention anywhere what role Taylor was in at the time, which is weird since there’s no other reason why anyone would be interested in a profile of Taylor today.

The New York Times has published reams upon reams of attack pieces against President Trump using anonymous sources. Now that we know, for certain, that they are willing to lie about their anonymous sources, why should we believe any of their other reporting?

Today’s media has endless energy to fact-check Donald Trump (including fact-checking opinions, predictions, and literally true but arguably misleading statements), and the Atlantic is no exception. But it’s different when it comes to their own pages.

Two weeks ago the Atlantic ran an article in favor of “police abolition.” Central to the piece was a harrowing anecdote: when the author was 12 years old, she witnessed a police officer shoot a child at a local community center and faced no consequences for it.

Well, the Federalist did what the Atlantic would not; they fact-checked the piece, and found that nothing like it every happened. It’s impressive work; the community center wasn’t named in the piece, so they had to deduce it from hints in the piece, which was made more difficult by various minor errors (e.g., the age of the author, and which highway was nearby). They narrowed it down to two candidates. Interviews and a public record search found no evidence that any such incident had ever taken place.

The Atlantic refused to comment, but belated looked at the piece and has now admitted that the incident was not as described. The shooter was a security guard, not a police officer; the victim was an adult, not a child; and the guard was prosecuted for the incident. (They have not corrected their description of the 18-year-old victim as a “boy.”)

The Atlantic has edited the piece, adding an end note noting the correction. They don’t seem to have noticed that the correction eviscerates the piece. The author’s thesis is that we should abolish the police, and replace them with something else. (Exactly what we should replace them with, they never quite say.) Well here you have what they say they want: the law enforced by a city employee who is not police. The non-police officer didn’t have the professionalism of a police officer, and shot his (adult) cousin in a quarrel. The non-police officer apparently didn’t face consequences from his non-police department, and only faced consequences when the actual police became involved.

The author is unrepentant, cheekily tweeting:

I was not 12. I was 13. The shooter was a uniformed private guard with a badge and gun. When we say abolish the police, that includes private police, too. thank you for reading <3.

(Her tweets are now protected. I got the text of the tweet from the Federalist.)

That is just silly. People are not going to go unprotected. If you abolish the police, you will get more private police. You cannot disclaim the predictable consequences of your policies.

The Babylon Bee is a satire site, similar to the Onion but with rightward slant instead of the Onion’s leftward slant, plus they include a lot of humor about religious issues. Sometimes it is quite funny (much more often than the Onion these days). Yesterday, they ran this headline:

CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication

Given the headline, you pretty much know how the story is going to go, so I needn’t quote it further. First, let it be conceded this isn’t their best work, but that’s neither here nor there. This is nothing more than a pun; no reasonable person could possibly think that a literal washing machine could actually play any role in “spinning” the news.

But, don’t you worry, Snopes is on the case:

CLAIM: CNN invested in an industrial-sized washing machine to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.

RATING: FALSE

Oh good. That’s a relief. Thanks Snopes!

Now, this sounds like nothing more than some low-level buffoonery on the part of Snopes, but it’s actually illustrative of the serious problem that arises when social media uses Snopes as a gatekeeper for permitted content. Since Snopes went to the trouble to mark the piece false, Facebook is automatically marking it as false content, which results in warnings when people share the piece on Facebook, threats to the Babylon Bee’s ad revenue, and (presumably, although Facebook’s algorithms are shrouded in mystery) steps to prevent it from going viral.

This is bad however you slice it. On the one hand, it shows how easy it is for Snopes to drag down content on Facebook, and their failures are not always so amusing as this one. On the other hand, if you think these sort of automatic warnings are important and valuable, incidents like this train people to ignore them.

The quality of Snopes’s work has declined dramatically as they have become more partisan, but this one really takes the cake:

(Screengrab via Mediaite.)

They are complaining about this tweet:

This is false, Snopes explains, because Obama wasn’t president during Hurricane Katrina. Ha ha, what an idiot! Naturally, this led to a rash of people mocking Republicans for forgetting who was president during Katrina.

Except, the tweet never says Katrina. The entire premise of this fact-check is that if you’re talking about Louisiana floods, you must be talking about Katrina. But Louisiana has flooded lots of times, including once during 2016 when Obama was president. An unnamed storm dumped three times as much rain on Louisiana as did Hurricane Katrina, and Obama faced criticism for going golfing instead of visiting the disaster:

Here’s why President Obama isn’t stopping his vacation to visit the Louisiana flooding

Two important things happened today in the political world of President Obama.

The first was that the Advocate, a Louisiana newspaper chain, published an editorial calling on the president to come to the state to see the horrible flooding first-hand. It read, in part:

We’ve seen this story before in Louisiana, and we don’t deserve a sequel. In 2005, a fly-over by a vacationing President George W. Bush became a symbol of official neglect for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The current president was among those making political hay out of Bush’s aloofness.

Sometimes, presidential visits can get in the way of emergency response, doing more harm than good. But we don’t see that as a factor now that flood waters are subsiding, even if at an agonizing pace. It’s past time for the president to pay a personal visit, showing his solidarity with suffering Americans.

This isn’t to say that this criticism of Obama is necessarily fair (see below), but indisputably it is factually accurate.

It gets worse. The internet naturally pointed Snopes’s error to them, but (as we’ve seen before) they were too invested in it to correct it. Instead, they revised it to add this:

. . . during similarly pervasive flooding in Louisiana in 2016. Other users took that argument even further, knocking Obama for not “doing enough” to help Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina.

Their revised version also demotes the featured “origin” tweet to be just the first in a collage of many. But this version is incoherent. They still have that tweet and a similar one first in the collage, even though they are perfectly accurate. The rest of the tweets in the collage, on the other hand, do mention Katrina, so why keep the first two? Because the first two (the ones that are right) are the only ones from Twitter “blue checkmarks.” The rest are all from random internet people. Fact-checking random internet people is silly.

And what about those random internet people? Are they just the kind of crazy people that blame everything on the opposing party? Maybe, but maybe not. Two of them specifically mention Obama being on vacation, as he was during the 2016 floods. One of them mentioned he didn’t answer for three days, a specific detail that fits if she was talking about the 2016 floods. (Obama broke his silence regarding the floods on their third day.) And nearly all of them mention the golf; Obama went golfing at Martha’s Vineyard three times while the floods were ongoing.

So I think that most of those random internet people remembered the vacation-golf-during-a-flood incident, but they didn’t remember the exact circumstances (the storm had no name to tie a memory to), and they erroneously attributed it to Katrina. In other words, I think those people committed exactly the same error as Snopes.

Snopes should rate the claim mostly true, but note that some of them misremember the incident’s name. But that’s not what they’ve done, even when their error was pointed out. Instead, they continued to peddle misinformation, and I’ve now seen that misinformation dozens of places around the internet.

That’s right, Snopes is now starting urban legends of their own.

POSTSCRIPT: Snopes makes it unnecessarily difficult to critique their work. I’d like simply to link to the original post on the Wayback Machine, but Snopes blocks the Wayback Machine so I had to settle for a screengrab that someone kept. I can’t think of any reason for Snopes to do that, other than to memory-hole their mistakes.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Is it fair to criticize Obama for golfing during a natural disaster? Chris Cillizza, now of CNN, makes a stab at defending him:

[I]t speaks to Obama’s unique and long-lasting commitment to not playing by a core rule of modern politics: making at least some decisions based on “how it looks” and/or “how it will play.” Obama has long been a rejectionist on this front.

First of all, this is nonsense. I’ll grant that the Obama had the unique conceit that he didn’t make decisions based on how they would play, but of course he did exactly that all the time. But never mind that; it’s beside the point. The question is: should the president engage in useless gestures in order to make people feel good? And the answer is yes.

The president is not just the head of government, he is also the head of state. That means that the job of being the country’s ceremonial leader falls to him. Other nations assign that job to a monarch, but America (thank God) has no monarch. The head of state should not be clowning around on the golf course in full view of cameras while a natural disaster is underway. Showing some solemnity during a disaster is part of his job.

(Via F. Bill McMorris.)

Just one month ago, the left was extremely concerned about “fake news” tricking people into believing false things. Here’s something they might want to look at:

• New York Times: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking
• USA Today: Obama sanctions Russian officials over election hacking
• The Guardian: Obama expels 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for US election hacking
• AFP: US sanctions Russia over vote hacking
• CNN: House Democrats to offer bill on Russia vote hacking
• BBC: Republicans Ryan and McConnell back Russia vote hack probe
• BBC: Can US election hack be traced to Russia?
• France 24: US expels 35 Russian diplomats over election hacking
• Fortune: Obama Administration Will Announce Response to Russian Election Hack
• CNBC: Russia’s election hack is a serious threat to US democracy
• Yahoo: What we know about Russia’s alleged hacking of US vote

I could go on, but you get the idea. What all of these have in common is they describe the theft of emails from John Podesta and a few others as “vote hacking” or “election hacking.” This is grossly misleading, as it suggests that, you know, the actual vote was hacked.

It’s particularly misleading as it comes on the heels on intense interest in allegations that the voting machine totals in three key states were hacked. These allegations were never substantiated (and were denied by the White House), but the idea was planted, creating fertile soil for the media’s extremely sloppy headlines.

Given all the fake news, it’s no great surprise that a recent YouGov/Economist poll found that a majority (52%) of Democrats believe that Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Trump elected.

Before the election, the media (e.g., the New York Times) were very concerned that hacking allegations could undermine confidence in the legitimacy of the election. But that was before Trump was elected. Now that Trump is elected, undermining confidence in the legitimacy of the election is the order of the day.

(Via Andrew Klavan.)

There was a time, not that long ago, when the New York Times was a good newspaper. It’s not good any more.  It’s not just the relentless bias, but how their relentless bias prevents them from employing good writing and reporting. Kevin Williamson edits an egregious example from two days ago.

Thank goodness for the fact checking. (Via Instapundit.)

Sixteen days later, the New York Times post a major correction of its reporting on the Planned Parenthood body-parts-for-sale scandal:

An article on July 21 about a video made by abortion opponents, which they said proved that Planned Parenthood sells tissue from aborted fetuses for profit, referred incorrectly to the timing of the release of what was described as the full-length, unedited version of the video showing a Planned Parenthood employee talking about how much clinics charge for specimens. The full video was posted at the same time as the edited version. It is not the case that the full video was not released until “after Planned Parenthood complained of selective, misleading editing.”

Sixteen days seems a bit long for an error that is easily checked in under a minute, if they had ever bothered to look. One might hope that the NYT would now be more hesitant to accept Planned Parenthood’s claims as fact, but that would assume that the NYT is more interested in accurate reporting than in protecting progressive institutions.

I don’t think Planned Parenthood can be at all dissatisfied in the service the NYT did them. Their misreporting aided Planned Parenthood in their claim that there was something dishonest or misleading in the videos. Planned Parenthood could never cite anything that was actually misleading, so they relied on a vague accusation that the video was edited. (As if a nine-minute video drawn from a lengthy conversation might somehow not have been edited.) The untrue notion that the Center for Medical Progress might have been hiding the full context certainly assisted that spin.

POSTSCRIPT: This is actually the second (at least) version of the correction. The August 5 version included this gem:

While the full-length video of more than two hours took longer to download than the nearly nine-minute edited footage, the full video was in fact posted at the same time as the edited version.

162 > 9. A New York Times exclusive!

(Via Twitchy.)

In 2009, Hillary Clinton was fed questions in advance of an appearance on Meet the Press.

(Via Instapundit.)

When a politician complains about the New York Times’s coverage, the NYT’s practice is to find some story attacking him and put it on the front page the next day. They admit this.

Obviously, though, that practice applies only to Republicans.

When Hillary Clinton complains about the New York Times’s coverage, they fix it overnight:

The Times also changed the headline of the story, from “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email” to “Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account,” reflecting a similar recasting of Clinton’s possible role. The article’s URL was also changed to reflect the new headline.

As of early Friday morning, the Times article contained no update, notification, clarification or correction regarding the changes made to the article.

One of the reporters of the story, Michael Schmidt, explained early Friday that the Clinton campaign had complained about the story to the Times.

“It was a response to complaints we received from the Clinton camp that we thought were reasonable, and we made them,” Schmidt said.

(Via Hot Air.)

Dylan Byers writes:

No matter their perceived editorial biases, it would be difficult to imagine legacy news brands like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, NPR or Time magazine taking sides in a political debate that they were expected to cover. The Times, Post or Journal editorial boards would surely be expected to take a stand, but not so the news divisions.

You might have thought so, but:

UPDATE: CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin accidentally admits celebrating the decision. (Via Instapundit.)

I guess the public has no right to know:

The Associated Press and other press outlets have agreed not to report on suspected cases of Ebola in the United States until a positive viral RNA test is completed.

I would be very interested to know who it was that requested they adopt this policy. Usually the press rejects such requests, such as when national security is at stake. But I guess “avoiding a panic” has is important in a way that national security just isn’t.

(Via Instapundit.)

The latest Palestinian terror attack:

A three-month old girl, identified by her grandfather as Chaya Zissel, was killed and several US citizens and Israelis were wounded Wednesday evening when a convicted Palestinian terrorist from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan rammed his vehicle into a crowd of people in the capital. . .

The terrorist was shot by police and late Wednesday evening he died in hospital.

The Associated Press ran this headline:

Israeli police shoot man in East Jerusalem

POSTSCRIPT: The first paragraph makes clear that, even at the time, they had enough information to know their headline to be totally inappropriate.

With no apparent irony:

On Friday, a white lady named Clara Vondrich had her iPhone stolen out of her hand in Williamsburg but was able to catch one of the thieves, a 13-year-old boy. This story . . . taught us all important lessons about what not to do when you’re able to capture your own child mugger. . .

The boy will now enter New York’s vaunted juvenile justice system, which will likely [expletive] his life even further, simply because he snatched a white lady’s iPhone in Williamsburg.

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

Let the criminals steal; the world will be a better place. Amazing. And bonus leftism points for irrelevantly bringing up the victim’s race four times (twice in the excerpt).

Gawker speaks for no one, of course, but it’s illustrative of the sickness of today’s left.

(Via Vox Popoli.)

The Associated Press, reporting a story you’ve probably heard:

County Autopsy: Unarmed teen short 6 to 8 times

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — A St. Louis County autopsy has found that the unarmed black teenager killed during a confrontation with a white police officer was shot six to eight times.

This, and several other AP stories, give the deliberate impression that Michael Brown was a child, when in fact he was a very large 18-year-old adult. Avoiding this sort of misleading impression is presumably why the Associated Press forbids using the word “teenager” this way:

youth Applicable to boys and girls from age 13 until 18th birthday. Use man or woman for individuals 18 and older.

Why would the AP break its own rules? Indeed, why would they break their own rules to mislead the public on a point that, legally at least, doesn’t even matter? (After all, killing an adult, if unjustified, is just as bad — legally speaking — as killing a child.)

There seems to be only one conclusion. Their purpose here is not to report the facts; their purpose is to create outrage. The killing of a child is more outrageous, so that’s what they reported, even though it’s not what happened.

(Via Hot Air.)

Okay, CNN anchor Don Lemon doesn’t know the difference between an automatic weapon, and a semi-automatic (i.e., non-automatic) weapon:

If you don’t even know what the terms mean, you have no business reporting on gun policy. But this is much worse than merely that, because Lemon’s guest explains the difference to him, and Lemon says (paraphrasing): I don’t care; I prefer to use the word incorrectly.

There’s a word for using the wrong word when you know it’s the wrong word; it’s called lying.

POSTSCRIPT: The particularly galling thing about this, as Charles C. W. Cooke points out, is that recent gun control efforts have centered on making fine, nearly meaningless distinctions. Bill Clinton’s now-defunct assault weapons ban prohibited weapons with two or more scary-looking features. Here you have a major functional difference (automatic fire vs. single fire) and the liberals dismiss it with contempt.

The media’s practice of reporting Hamas’s fabricated casualty reports as if they were fact is flatly dishonest. There’s absolutely no excuse for it. Hamas’s official policy, announced in the open, is to falsify their casualty statistics:

Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.

If you know it’s a lie, and you report it anyway, you are a liar.

It’s impossible to know what the real civilian toll is, since the only people who could say won’t tell the truth, but we can see that military-aged males are strikingly overrepresented among the “civilian casualties”, while women and children are strikingly underrepresented.

POSTSCRIPT: As far the actual civilian casualties go, don’t forget that Hamas’s policy is to maximize them, not only on the Israeli side but on their own.

(Title shamelessly stolen from Rick Wilson.)

When the Senate defeated President Obama’s awful nominee to head the DOJ’s civil rights division, NPR reported it this way:

A handful of southern Democrats joined Republicans yesterday to defeat President Obama’s choice to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division. . .

NPR wanted to paint Adegbile’s detractors that way because in the NPR lexicon, “southern” is code for racist. Leaving that matter aside for now, the Democrats who jumped ship were from Arkansas, Delaware, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia. Only three of those states could be considered southern under even the broadest possible definition. Certainly none of them are from the Deep South.

But rather than omit their error, NPR covered it up, rewriting the story to begin:

A handful of Senate Democrats joined Republicans yesterday . . .

Not only did they change the story on the transcript, they actually went so far as to re-record it with the revised script.

This is so astonishing that you wonder if people simply misheard Werthheimer; if she really said “Senate” all along. Nope, Will Collier had the foresight to save the original.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the New York Times bestseller list is fake, and yet I still am. Is anything they do legit?

The Kitty Genovese murder is the classic story of “bystander apathy”, the phenomenon that people are prone to do nothing when they think there are others around who could help. The phenomenon may well be real (psychologists say so), but it turns out the story was a lie:

Word of the attack spread though the building. A woman named Sophie Farrar, all of 4-foot-11, rushed to the vestibule, risking her life in the process. For all she knew, the attacker might have still been there. As luck would have it, he was not, and Farrar hugged and cradled the bloodied Genovese, who was struggling for breath. Despite the attempts of various neighbors to help, Moseley’s final stab wounds proved fatal, and Farrar did her best to comfort Genovese in the nightmarish ­final minutes of her life.

The murder of Kitty Genovese shifted from crime to legend a few weeks later, when The New York Times erroneously reported that 38 of her neighbors had seen the attack and watched it unfold without calling for help. The Times piece was followed by a story in Life magazine, and the narrative spread throughout the world, running in newspapers from Russia and Japan to the Middle East.

New York became internationally infamous as a city filled with thoughtless people who didn’t care about one another; where people could watch their neighbors get stabbed on the street without lifting a finger to help, leaving them to die ­instead in a pool of their own blood. . .

But as journalist Kevin Cook details in his new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America” (W.W. Nor­ton), some of the real thoughtlessness came from a police commissioner who lazily passed a falsehood to a journalist, and a media that fell so deeply in love with a story that it couldn’t be bothered to determine whether it was true.

The primary culprit? The New York Times, of course.

UPDATE: More here. (Via Instapundit.)

The New York Times says it had a reporter on the scene during the Benghazi attack.

There has been a bit of public interest in the Benghazi attack, so why haven’t we heard from this guy? One possibility — never to be discounted with the NYT — is they are simply lying. But suppose it’s true. They must not want us to hear what he saw! And, given the NYT’s well-known partisan stance, it’s not hard to draw conclusions.

The Huffington Post breathlessly headlines:

Man Accidentally Kills Self With Gun During Demonstration On Gun Safety

This sounded strange, since gun safety lectures generally comply with the rules of gun safety, so I clicked through to find out what they were talking about. Here’s what happened:

The 36-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was showing his girlfriend how his three handguns are safe when they aren’t loaded, according to the Detroit Free Press. He was attempting to demonstrate the safety of the handguns by holding them to his head and pulling the trigger.

So, this isn’t a gun safety demonstration. It’s the opposite of a gun safety demonstration. It’s a gun stupidity demonstration. There are various versions of the gun safety rules, but all of them include this one (this formulation is by the NRA):

ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction.
This is the primary rule of gun safety. A safe direction means that the gun is pointed so that even if it were to go off it would not cause injury or damage.

Clearly no one at the Huffington Post, from the article’s author to its editors (actually, does the Huffington Post have editors?), knows anything about gun safety. A better headline would have been:

Man Accidentally Kills Himself While Screwing Around With Gun

Dana Milbank, the notoriously biased Washington Post reporter, levels an accusation so flimsy it was debunked by MSNBC:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been caught using purloined passages in several of his speeches. Now the aspiring presidential candidate stands accused of filing a lawsuit stolen from its author.

Since December, the libertarian lawmaker, a tea party favorite, had been working with former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein to draft a class-action suit seeking to have the National Security Agency’s surveillance of telephone data declared unconstitutional. . . But when Paul filed his suit at the U.S. District Court in Washington on Wednesday morning, Fein’s name had been replaced with that of Ken Cuccinelli. . .

Fein, who has not been paid in full for his legal work by Paul’s political action committee, was furious that he had been omitted from the filing he wrote.

Milbank backed up his claim by quoting Fein’s ex-wife. Amazingly, he never verified it with Fein himself. MSNBC did, and found it was bogus:

Did Rand Paul lift legal work from a celebrated conservative lawyer without fully paying him? The attorney in question says he didn’t. . .

A spokesperson for RANDPAC forwarded an email from Fein denying Mattie Fein’s allegations. “Mattie Lolavar was not speaking for me,” Fein said in the email. “Her quotes were her own and did not represent my views.  I was working on a legal team, and have been paid for my work.” Bruce Fein confirmed to msnbc that the email was from him.

Seems convincingly debunked to me, but Milbank isn’t ready to give up. In a column entitled “E-mails back claim that Sen. Rand Paul ‘stole’ NSA lawsuit”, he dumped a bunch of internal emails (presumably leaked by the ex-wife) that indicate he was disgruntled about being left out of some key decisions. But they also make clear that Fein was indeed hired and paid for his work.

In Milbank’s original column, he claimed that Fein wasn’t paid at all. (ASIDE: I haven’t been able to verify this myself, since the Washington Post won’t let Archive.org crawl their site, but Milbank says so (“An early version of my Wednesday column said that Fein had not been paid and that Paul’s aides had not responded to inquiries.”), and I assume he wouldn’t lie about his own work in a way that makes him look worse.)

Now Milbank has edited his column to say that Fein “has not been paid in full,” as you see it in the quote at the top. That is technically true but deliberately misleading. What Milbank doesn’t say, but you can see in the emails he publishes, is that the outstanding payment isn’t even due until today:

My outstanding invoice for work indispensable to the lawsuit should be paid no later than Friday, February 14, an expectation which is completely justified in light of all the circumstances.

Truly shoddy work, and typical of Milbank. I’ll bet the Post is glad they have him off the news page and onto opinion.

(Via Instapundit.)

Charles Blow, a New York Times columnist, says that Barack Obama can’t be a lawless president, because he hasn’t issued very many executive orders.

Apparently he is arguing that the number of executive orders matter more than their contents! If the next president were to issue an executive order to imprison one Charles Blow for excessive ideological idiocy, that wouldn’t make him lawless, because that would be just one order.

He can’t actually be stupid enough to believe this, which tells you what he thinks of the New York Times’s readership. I wonder if he’s right.

(Via Instapundit.)

NBC calls communism one of history’s pivotal experiments. No matter how low your opinion of them, they still manage to disappoint.

UPDATE: Meredith Vieira calls the end of communism “bittersweet”.

The New York Times revisits the Plame-Novak-Armitage affair:

Retaliation is hardly unusual in politics either. The Christie affair reminds me of the I. Lewis Libby scandal, when top White House officials, including Mr. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide, decided to punish Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador critical of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert C.I.A. agent.

I’m sure the NYT wishes this were true. It certainly would tie up the affair in a neat bow if were. But, as the NYT is well aware, it isn’t true.

Plame’s name was leaked by Richard Armitage, who did so accidentally, without any nefarious intent, and without any direction from anyone, including Libby or any other “top White House officials”. Libby went to jail on an unrelated charge.

The story is dated 10 days ago, and it carries no correction yet.

(Previous post.)

The Washington Post managed to write an entire article entitled “2013 is the year that proved your ‘paranoid’ friend right” without ever once mentioning the IRS scandal.

NSA, EZ-Pass, even Area 51, but they managed to memory-hole the biggest political scandal in more than a generation.

(Via James Taranto.)

Because Christians are awfully into Jesus, dontcha know:

The same men who will stand up in the church of all men. “I put my God, Jesus, overall women. I love him more than I love her.”

Hmmm. Do you really? That sounds interestingly homoerotic to people who are outside your religious traditions. I’m not suggesting it is but I’m suggesting that there are some very interesting, subtle, narrative tensions within the Bible itself and within Christianity beyond that.

ASIDE: Don’t be distracted by the “I’m not suggesting it is”, since that’s exactly what he’s suggesting. Otherwise, why bring it up?

Now, this is so stupid, it’s hard to be offended by it. But I am a bit offended that this guy is teaching sociology at Georgetown University, which I thought was a respectable school. He teaches sociology and he’s ignorant of the very existence of non-sexual love? Yikes.

Ah, the Huffington Post. If it didn’t exist, we would have to invent it:

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article referred incorrectly to Hawaii as an independent country.

These people like to style themselves as morally superior. They’re not:

“If a lie is told to a corporation, it’s not really a lie,” Touré [Neblett] declared.

CBS confuses famed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover with President Herbert Hoover.

The cover of Time magazine from a few weeks ago, when Vladimir Putin was having his way with Obama’s flailing, incoherent foreign policy, was really very revealing of how Time (and, by extension, the legacy media) see their role in the body politic. The European edition had this cover:

The text reads:

America’s weak and waffling, Russia’s rich and resurgent — and its leader doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.

The Asian and South Pacific editions had these covers:

So Time gets it. Obama’s foreign policy is a disaster, and Putin is making him look like a fool. Time is going to tell the truth, and make sure everyone knows what is going on.

Everyone except Americans. The American edition had this cover:

In Time’s view, it’s great for America to look weak overseas. But in America, where the future of American foreign policy is determined, the people must be shielded from the truth of how foolish we look. God forbid, we might actually correct the problem.

Once, the mission of the media was to keep people informed. (Or so we’re told.) Now, the mission of the media is to keep people from being informed.

If you want to understand the maneuvering going on in the Senate over the budget and Obamacare — that is, if you want informed reporting on breaking national news — you won’t get it from the New York Times.

Evidently, the NYT is no longer in the business of reporting news; it is only in the business of reporting Democratic spin to the credulous. I can sort of see why liberal ideologues might want to be in that business, but why does anyone pay for it?

UPDATE: Just to be clear, this isn’t a case of the NYT distorting the facts in favor of its side; heck, most of the NYT’s readers probably want that. This is the NYT straight-up failing to deliver its promised product: Something important is going on in the Senate, and the New York Times doesn’t understand what’s going on.

Brandon Darby turned in his left-wing terrorist friends who were planning to attack the 2008 Republican convention. For that, NPR calls him an “FBI rat”.

As they say, there’s no enemy to the left.

UPDATE: I got the names of the documentarian and his subject backwards. Fixed now.

Top journalists are giving up the pretense and going to work for the Obama administration:

Whether the number is 15 or 19, the fact that this many so-called journalists from outlets as influential as CBS, ABC, CNN, Time, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times want to work at the very same administration they are supposed to hold accountable, is not only troubling, it also explains a lot.

Why would anyone enamored enough with an Obama administration they want to go work for, do anything that might make a potential employer uncomfortable — you know, like actually report on ObamaCare and the economy honestly, or dig into Benghazi and the IRS?

The media is left-wing and crusading enough without the potential of a cushy government job being held out as a carrot.

And don’t think the Obama administration isn’t doling out these jobs for a reason. What a wonderful message to send to the world of media: Don’t go too far, don’t burn a bridge, don’t upset us too much and there just might be a lifeline off the sinking MSM ship.

But the problem isn’t those guys; the problem is the ones who stay.

(Via Instapundit.)

The “fact-checkers” at the Washington Post and PolitiFact, commenting on President Obama’s absurd denial that he ever set a “red-line” in Syria, can’t bring themselves to call a lie a lie, but can’t produce a plausible argument to call it true either, so in the end they refrain from rating the comment.

That said, the Washington Post’s article is actually pretty good at laying out the facts; it’s too bad Glenn Kessler didn’t have the guts to draw the required conclusion. PolitiFact, on the other hand, is useless as always.

WTAE breathlessly reports a topless protest in Pittsburgh:

Topless protestors take over Pittsburgh
Group says women still not treated equally

Except, the thinly attended protest hardly took over Pittsburgh, and did not in fact contain any topless protestors (unless you count men):

Pittsburgh topless rally winds up anything but
Fewer than a dozen protesters showed up Sunday, and none of the women bared their tops — though a handful of men did.

Aside from that, the headline was accurate. . .

60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft admits that they are “not going to play ‘gotcha’ with [Obama].” That’s a pretty amazing admission, since ambush interviews are pretty much 60 Minutes’ bread and butter.

The New York Times says that it won’t correct any errors over a year after it runs a story, even in its online archive.

(Via Instapundit.)

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously said, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. But that’s a problem for CNN’s Piers Morgan, because the real facts don’t support his position:

When guest A.W.R. Hawkins cited Virginia as an example where violent crime fell in 2012 as gun sales increased, Morgan answered that “It’s Virginia, the very state you just quoted to me actually has the highest murder rate in the country. According to 2009 statistics by the FBI.” Morgan’s assertion was entirely false, according to the FBI’s 2009 report on crime.

The FBI’s 2009 Crime In the United States report placed Virginia behind 23 other states plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico in the murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate per 100,000 inhabitants. And in case Morgan was referring to the firearm murder rate, Virginia still did not have the highest in the country.

The 2009 FBI statistics are here. But why dwell on 2009, anyway? In 2011 (the most recent year for which the FBI has published statistics), Virginia’s murder rate had improved further, by more than the nation as a whole I might add.

Moreover, the FBI cautions against making the sort of comparison Morgan is trying to make in the first place:

Each year when Crime in the United States is published, many entities—news media, tourism agencies, and other groups with an interest in crime in our Nation—use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rankings, however, are merely a quick choice made by the data user; they provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents.

In this case, I think a misleading perception is what Morgan was going for.

Don’t trust content from the Huffington Post. If you did, you might buy in to stuff like this:

Next time you feel uncomfortable showering at the gym, blame it on liberals and their abortion rights agenda. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) does.

Speaking to anti-abortion group Students for Life after receiving an award last month, Santorum attempted to explain what he saw as an enthusiasm gap between liberal and conservative activists. During his speech, a clip of which can be seen above, via Right Wing Watch, Santorum argued that the pro-choice movement infuses passion about abortion rights into “every aspect of their life.” He said that because of this, showering at a gym had become an “uncomfortable” prospect for students.

“They make it uncomfortable for students who come to Austin to shower at a Young Men’s Christian Association, YMCA, gym,” he said.

This led various people to chortle about Santorum having some sort of weird obsession about youths in showers. In fact, Santorum was referring to a specific incident in which Students For Life were barred from using the showers at an Austin YMCA after pressure from abortion supporters:

For one week the students planned to rally during the day, shower at the Town Lake YMCA, and then head to a church to sleep. . .

“We had absolutely no incidents. They talked to us afterwards and said, ‘You guys were great. You were respectful,” Coombs added.

But Tuesday morning, Coombs got an unexpected call from the Town Lake YMCA.
“Said, again, ‘You guys were respectful. We have no problems with you, in particular, however there were some people that support abortion who talked to our staff, intimidated them.’ They actually said that they felt threatened, and they asked us not to come back,” Coombs said.

It’s wouldn’t have taken much for the Huffington Post to contact Santorum’s office and find out what he was talking about. But even that modicum of actual reporting is more than we can expect from them.

(Via Twitchy.)

A few days ago, one meme circulating the internet was the skyscraper in Spain in which they accidentally forgot to put an elevator shaft. For example, here’s the New York Daily News:

In what will surely go down in history as one the greatest architectural blunders, the town of Benidorm in Alicante, Spain, had almost completed its 47-story skyscraper when it realized it excluded plans for elevator shafts.

Except, the building actually does have elevators. The story apparently goes back to a Gizmodo article that mistranslated an article from a Spanish newspaper.

Gizmodo defends itself, claiming that the Spanish article “plainly states” that it had no elevators. I don’t read Spanish, but according to the Google translation that doesn’t seem to be true. The article mentions elevators twice. Both mentions refer to problems with the elevators, but the existence of elevator problems would seem to imply the existence of elevators.

What is particularly striking about this story is how it spread without anyone — including the journalists — checking the facts. Apparently CNN and CBS both sent TV crews to Benidorm to cover the story.

But in the absence of fact-checking, there’s always fact invention. Here’s an amusing fact from the New York Daily News:

Because of the way the building was constructed, there is no space for a shaft anywhere.

It’s amusing because it seems the Daily News made it up from whole cloth. No space for an elevator shaft? Actually it has eleven elevators.

(Via Instapundit.)

After President Obama foolishly implied that Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville are on the Gulf Coast, the AP came to his rescue, rendering the remark:

“If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf – (and in) places like Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga., or Jacksonville, Fla. – if we don’t do that, these ships are going to go someplace else and we’ll lose jobs,” Obama said.

Incidentally, in the usual quotation usage, editorial remarks and corrections are inserted in square brackets, not parentheses. Putting them into parentheses is simply wrong.

The AP issued a correction the next day.

Internal investigations usually are merely whitewashes, but occasionally one gets results, since as the NPR ombudsman’s investigation of a deeply flawed 2011 NPR story attacking South Dakota’s foster care system. The ombudsman reported:

The series committed five sins that violate NPR’s code of standards and ethics. They were:

1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;
2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;
3. Factual errors, shaky anecdotes and misleading use of data by quietly switching what was being measured;
4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;
5. No response from the state on many key points.

No doubt the investigative team was driven by the history of injustices suffered by Native Americans. There is much to be outraged about. But good intentions are not enough. Specifically, there is no whistleblower, no document — no smoking gun even — to support the unmistakable allegation that for nearly the last 15 years, state social workers have been so evil as to take Indian children from their families as a way to reap federal funds for the state government. The charge is so shocking and such a potential insult to many dedicated social workers that the burden of proof should have been especially high.

One would like to view this as a story of NPR doing the right thing, if belatedly. Alas, we cannot. The NPR editors have blown off the ombudsman’s damning findings, proclaiming:

NPR stands by the stories.

Wow. We can see how dedicated NPR is to their espoused standards.

Bloomberg very nearly comes right out and says it:

House Republicans Set to Defy Obama Are Mostly White Men

When the Boston Marathon bombing happened, the media leftists immediately jumped to the conclusion that it must have been perpetrated by Tea Party types, as they always seem to do. Of course, we quickly learned that Islamic terrorists were responsible. But the BBC, it would seem, has not given up trying to pin it on the right:

One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learnt.

What right-wing literature? Tracts in support of small government, individual liberty, low taxes, and sound monetary policy? Not at all. No, it was just a bunch of crazy stuff:

The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were government conspiracies.

Another in his possession was about “the rape of our gun rights”.

Reading material he had about white supremacy commented that “Hitler had a point”.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev also had literature which explored what motivated mass killings and noted how the perpetrators murdered and maimed calmly.

There was also material about US drones killing civilians, and about the plight of those still imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

Some of this could be representative of the right (such as gun rights and concerns about drone strikes), some could be representative of the left (9/11 conspiracy theories, Guantanamo), and much of it isn’t representative of either, even in extreme form. If you really wanted to generalize this stuff, the best you could do would be to call it anti-American. (Of course, revealing that some terrorists were anti-American is something less than a major scoop.)

What’s going on here is the liberal trope that anything leftists don’t like (now) must be of the right. Thus the common spectacle of the Nazis being called right-wing, even though their ideology (to the extent it fit on the left-right spectrum at all) was of the left.

But just because it’s lazy doesn’t make it any less dishonest.

The New York Daily News makes a serious accusation:

ARLINGTON, Va. — This state is good at peddling guns. Now it’s peddling lies about New York.

A war between the states erupted Friday, after Mayor Bloomberg blasted Virginia for its weak gun laws. . . The office of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell tried to turn the tables, arguing that Virginia’s “homicide and robbery (rates) are significantly lower than New York City’s.”

The funny thing about this “lie” is that it is actually entirely true. The story’s point is that the comparison is apples-and-oranges, and that’s probably even true. But there’s a world of difference between “your argument is rebuttable” and “you are lying”. If you say the latter when you mean the former, then you’re the liar.

The worst kind of scoundrel is the man who lies in calling another man a liar.

The New York Times doesn’t like Antonin Scalia, I get that. But that doesn’t really excuse an organization whose purported business is gathering news for not getting the facts before writing:

Scalia’s Latest Outburst . . .

Justice Scalia brought Godwin’s Law to Snowmass, suggesting in an address to the Utah State Bar Association that activist judges helped bring about the Holocaust.

Godwin’s Law refers to inappropriate reference to the Nazis to score rhetorical points. Is that what Scalia did? Not exactly:

The context is vital. . . As you can see Justice Scalia was the principal speaker on Saturday morning—Day 3 of programming. On Friday morning (Day 2 of the meeting), the principal speaker was Dr. William F. Meinecke of the Holocaust Memorial Museum giving his presentation “Law, Justice, and the Holocaust: How the Courts Failed Germany.” It is a fascinating presentation of how the Nazi party co-opted the Courts and lawyers to further its agenda against the Jews and used the judiciary to “legalize” its conduct.

Justice Scalia opened his remarks by noting that, at the previous evening’s Utah State Bar’s Past Presidents Dinner, there had been a great deal of discussion about Dr. Meinecke’s talk. Justice Scalia then indicated that, prior to beginning his prepared remarks, he had some observations about Nazi Germany and the law.

Scalia was adding to an ongoing conversation about Nazis and the law, which the NYT belatedly acknowledged, once someone else had gathered the facts for them.

I think the NYT’s real point, which they doubtless stand by, is that Scalia really shouldn’t say anything about anything.

When the media can’t tell a story without seasoning it with lies, that’s a hint that the narrative might not be true. On PBS:

JELANI COBB: . . . we can’t escape — and finally the fact of the matter is, Mr. Zimmerman had called the police 46 times in previous six years, only for African-Americans, only for African-American men.

Not so. In fact, only six calls had to do with African-American men, and two of those were Trayvon Martin. Most of the calls were this sort of thing:

8/12/04: Reports male driving pick-up without car seat
9/20/04: Neighbor’s garage door open
8/20/04: Reports white male walking in the road carrying a paper bag, presumably drinking
3/17/05: Pothole
4/27/05: Neighbor’s garage door open

(Previous post.)

This particular lie has been going around throughout the left, but I’ll take The New Republic for the canonical version:

[George] Zimmerman was an edgy basket case with a gun who had called 911 46 times in 15 months, once to report the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy.

Every single statement in this sentence, other than Zimmerman owning a gun, is a lie. He did not call 911 46 times; most of his calls were to the non-emergency number. His calls were over the course of nearly a decade, not 15 months. And, most libelously, he never called to report a seven-year-old boy. In regards to the last, the record of his call reads (original document here):

Advsd is walking alone & is not supervised on busy street compl concerned for well-being.

Zimmerman wasn’t reporting the boy for suspicious activities, quite the opposite; he was concerned for the boy’s well-being.

ASIDE: As I said, this lie is popular on the left. Here’s the Daily Beast’s version:

April 22, 2011 – 7:09 p.m.
Type: TEL
Subject: Suspicious activity
Report: Juvenile black male “apprx 7–9” years old, four feet tall “skinny build short blk hair” last seen wearing a blue t-shirt and blue shorts

Again, the reference to “suspicious activity” is a fabrication.

When made aware of their error, the New Republic was loathe to correct it. Here’s their first semi-correction:

Zimmerman was an edgy basket case with a gun who had called the polics [sic] 46 times in 15 months, once to report on a seven year old black boy.

They corrected the least significant of the falsehoods (911 vs. non-emergency call) — replacing it with a typo — but left the substantive lies in place. Yes, they did remove the explicit reference to “suspicious activities” but replaced it with a phrase (“report on”) that implies the same thing.

As Michelle Meyer comments:

It’s one thing to make a mistake about facts. It’s quite another to double down on damaging falsehoods after having your mistake pointed out. In that respect, TNR’s cure here is worse than the disease.

TNR’s next version finally removed the seven-year-old-boy lie, and the typo, but left the 15 months lie:

Zimmerman was an edgy basket case with a gun who had called the police 46 times in 15 months.

They also failed to note the seven-year-old-boy correction in the editor’s note.

Finally, today, they got the last of the correction out, finally writing:

Zimmerman was an edgy basket case with a gun who had called the police 46 times in about eight years.

They also recognized all three error in an editor’s note at the end. However, they did not mark the correction at the top where it might be noticed. Moreover, by stalling the correction for ten days, they ensured that almost no one would see it, other than those drawn to the article by the controversy itself. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Now, what about the “edgy basket case”? Wendy Dorival, who coordinated Neighborhood Watch Programs for the Sanford Police didn’t think so. She had high praise for Zimmerman’s work, and even tried to recruit him into Sanford’s “Citizen on Patrol” program, but Zimmerman declined.

And what about those 46 calls? Here’s the first five calls, just to get the flavor:

8/12/04: Reports male driving pick-up without car seat
9/20/04: Neighbor’s garage door open
8/20/04: Reports white male walking in the road carrying a paper bag, presumably drinking
3/17/05: Pothole
4/27/05: Neighbor’s garage door open

If he hadn’t been a Neighborhood Watch member, it might be safe to call him a busybody.

(Previous post.)

MSNBC thinks that George Wallace was a Republican. Like Jefferson Davis, Roger Taney, James Buchanan, George McClellan, Lester Maddox, and Bull Connor.

Haters of Fox News like to call it “Faux News”, a lame play on words that doesn’t even work if you actually know how “faux” is pronounced. But the real faux news channel is at the other end of the political spectrum, where MSNBC now admits that it’s not really a news channel:

At a time of intensely high interest in news, MSNBC’s ratings declined from the same period a year ago by about 20 percent. The explanation, in the network’s own analysis, comes down to this: breaking news is not really what MSNBC does.

“We’re not the place for that,” said Phil Griffin, the channel’s president, in reference to covering breaking events as CNN does. “Our brand is not that.”

I’m reminded of years ago when professional wrestling admitted it was fake, in (if I recall correctly) a legal filing that argued it was entertainment, not sport, which thereby improved its legal position somehow.

In MSNBC’s case, the article goes on to say — hilariously — that political opinion is the brand that MSNBC “has cultivated with success”. (Sure, if by success you mean having no one watch you.) But Fox, CNN, and even Headline News all manage to have both opinion and news. By managing only the opinion side, they fall into the same category as Current TV, Al Gore’s network (now owned by Al Jazeera) that manages to draw even fewer viewers than MSNBC.

(Via Jennifer Rubin.)

I can’t excerpt this story any better than Andrew Johnson, so here is his version:

French police are investigating a recent attack on a rabbi and his son outside a Paris synagogue. An Iranian man screaming “Allah-u-Akbar” slashed the rabbi’s throat with a box-cutter. The AP reports that “an official investigation [is] underway to determine a possible motive.”

Gee, I hope they can figure it out.

There’s an old adage that goes: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. The legacy media ought to keep it in mind when they consider quoting wonderfully implausible people, like self-hating gun owners. Yes, he’s a fake.

When Michelle Obama, interviewed by Good Morning America, made an important factual error (claiming that a shooting death in Chicago was at the hands of an automatic weapon, which it almost certainly was not), the folks at ABC were good enough just to edit her mistake out.

I wonder if I’ve simply misunderstood what the phrase “news coverage” means? I always thought it meant to cover (i.e., report) what people say and do, but maybe it means to cover for them.

I think Jim Treacher is right:

At this point, it’s a given that any audio or video that’s aired on NBC News or MSNBC could be faked in some way.

In the latest, Rachel Maddow edits a video of John McCain, making him seem unsympathetic by editing out all the sympathetic parts.

Have you noticed that the legacy media are much more willing to believe obviously fake stories when they come from a leftist point of view?

In the latest, the Atlantic was taken in by an obviously faked still from a Fox News broadcast, photoshopped to say “Was the Russian meteor a plot by President Obama to prove that global warming is real?”

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour gets behind the fist, wishing Robert Mugabe — Zimbabwe’s murderous dictator — a happy birthday. Weird.

Oops:

The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., saying he sees some in the his party favoring a 2016 presidential candidate with an immigration policy that would “round up people … and send them back to Mexico.” . . . A subsequent Associated Press review of an audio recording of the show determined that the transcript had dropped the word “don’t” from that quote, and Paul actually said, “They don’t want somebody who wants to round people up, put them in camps and send them back to Mexico.”

(Emphasis mine.) In other words, the AP story reported the exact opposite of the truth.

The correction blames Fox News for the error appearing in its rush transcript. I guess that indicates that the AP does no independent fact-checking of its own, regardless of how outlandish the report is.

(Via the Corner.)

In an piece on NPR’s weekend edition on Lance Amstrong and doping, a commentator (ESPN’s Howard Bryant) dropped in an ad hominem attack against the NRA, apropos of nothing at all. NPR edited out the attack when it re-aired the piece in later time zones, and then left it out of the archived recording and the transcript. These facts are all confirmed by NPR’s ombudsman.

In his column on the controversy, the ombudsman then goes on to explain why, with NPR’s procedures, it’s perfectly reasonable for this to go down the memory hole with no trace in the permanent record outside the memories of those who heard it. Let’s even stipulate that that makes sense.

Nevertheless, when people are alleging that you have edited a remark out of the transcript, and when you have, in fact, edited that remark out of the transcript, exactly as alleged, you don’t get to malign them as “conspiracy theorists”:

Brown contacted our office suspicious of a conspiracy.”There is no explanation for the post-broadcast edit. Is this instance a representative one, for NPR editing and posting policy(ies)?”

Well, in some ways, yes, as I myself discovered when I went to ask.

and:

I did wonder whether online transcripts and audio files could have some sort of a routine date-time stamp for when they were broadcast by NPR. Stencel told me that NPR’s systems do not have a way to do that now, but that he would look into the idea. It wouldn’t satisfy conspiracy theorists . . . But, it would create an official baseline of sorts.

You’ve just admitted that they are right, and NPR doesn’t keep accurate transcripts. They’re not “conspiracy theorists”, they are “critics”.

The Washington Post’s crack reporting staff delivers:

Sarah Palin tries to stay relevant

CORRECTION:  An earlier version of this post and the post’s URL incorrectly reported that Sarah Palin had signed on as a contributor to the Al Jazeera America news network. The blogger cited a report on the Daily Currant Web site as the basis for that information without realizing that the piece was satirical.

Apparently sneering has replaced fact-checking at the Washington Post. Here’s the deleted material:

Late last week Al Jazeera America announced the former vice-presidential candidate would be joining their news network.

“As you all know, I’m not a big fan of newspapers, journalists, news anchors and the liberal media in general,” Palin told the Web site The Daily Currant. “But I met with the folks at Al-Jazeera and they told me they reach millions of devoutly religious people who don’t watch CBS or CNN. That tells me they don’t have a liberal bias.”

Oy. Anyone who would believe that is as stupid as they they think Sarah Palin is. That isn’t even good satire.

Anyway, the piece’s author, Suzi Parker, who apparently has not been fired for incompetence, now has her very own hashtag trending on Twitter.

POSTSCRIPT: This is actually a case of fake news imitating real news, as Iowahawk notes:

Leftwing satire headline: “Palin to work for Al Jazeera.” Rightwing satire headline: “Al Gore sells CurrentTV to Al Jazeera.” #SatireisDead

The story of the Alabama nutcase that abducted the 5-year old is horrifying (although it ended well), but unfortunately for the gun-control movement, it didn’t have any relevance to their efforts to ban modern sporting rifles, since the man used a shotgun. But never mind that, the Associated Press will simply transmogrify that shotgun into an “assault rifle”. This can’t be an honest mistake, since they had the story right, and then changed it.

To add insult to injury, they didn’t even issue a correction when caught in the lie. Indeed, they didn’t even change the weapon back to a shotgun. Instead, they used the less-specific phrase “firearm”. Why not be specific, unless it’s to leave open the possibility that the reader might misunderstand the weapon as a modern sporting rifle?

(Via Instapundit.)

In politics, it seems there are three levels of discourse. Level one: if you have a good argument, you make it. Level two: attack the opposition with truth. Level three: attack the opposition with lies. It tells you something about the weakness of the gun-controllists case that they are settling for the bottom level.

The buzz of the day is over how gun-rights supporters heckled the father of a victim of the Sandy Hook massacre at a hearing on gun-control measures. Or, more precisely, the buzz of the day is over how that didn’t happen, but the media reported that it did.

The story seems to have started with a story in the Connecticut Post, which reported that gun-rights supporters interrupted Neil Heslin as he argued for gun control. But the video (cue to 15:00) shows that that didn’t happen. On the contrary, Heslin asked a question and was answered:

Heslin: Is there anybody in this room that can give me one reason or challenge this question, why anybody in this room needs to have one of these assault-style weapons or military weapons or high-capacity clips?

[Pause. Heslin looks around the room as if waiting for a response.]

And not one person can answer that question or give me an answer.

Audience members: [unintelligible] The Second Amendment shall not be infringed.

Heslin: Alright.

Lawmaker: Please no comments while Mr. Heslin is speaking. Or we’ll clear the room. Mr. Heslin please continue.

Not content to merely lie in their descriptions, MSNBC and CBS went further, airing videos that made it appear as though Heslin really was heckled, by editing out “Is there anybody in this room that can give me one reason . . .” to hide the fact that Heslin asked the room a question and was waiting for an answer. MSNBC’s original editing reportedly was even more dishonest. It’s gone down the memory hole now, but the appended update tacitly admits it (“the original video has been replaced with a fuller version”).

The story being completely debunked hasn’t put it to rest. Although a few have admitted their error, the claim that Heslin was “interrupted”, “heckled”, or even “shouted down” remains throughout the media, to say nothing  of the leftist blogosphere.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Video of MSNBC’s earlier, even-more-deceptive editing, is here. It not only edits out the question (as their later video did), but also edits out the several seconds that Heslin waited for a response, and his follow-up statement that no one could answer him. It jumps in the middle of Heslin’s sentence to the audience members answering his question, making it appear he was interrupted, when he was not. Martin Bashir, you are a damned liar.

UPDATE: Some of the the people who joined in the lie: Eric Boehlert (Media Matters), David Frum, Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo), Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs, which once was good), Piers Morgan (CNN), as well as publications and/or group blogs Gawker, Wonkette, the Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post. A few other credulous fools (Slate, and Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed) joined the liars but later retracted.

If CBS had any journalistic standards left to mock, this would be a good opportunity:

CBS forced CNET staff to recast vote after Hopper won ‘Best in Show’ at CES.

Politifact called this Mitt Romney ad its “lie of the year” for making this claim:

[Obama] sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.

This is, of course, the absolute truth.

How does Politifact get away with such an outrageous lie? They say that they aren’t attacking the actual statement, which they concede is true:

Like many political distortions, Romney’s claim contained a grain of truth. . . Bloomberg reported on Oct. 22 that the company was planning to restart production of Jeeps in China.

and:

The Romney campaign was crafty with its word choice, so campaign aides could claim to be speaking the literal truth, but the ad left a false impression that all Jeep production was being moved to China.

Instead, they claim to be criticizing the ad’s implicit message, a completely different statement that the ad didn’t make and wasn’t true, but that Politifact claims is what the Romney campaign was really trying to say.

This of course, puts paid to Politifact’s whole pretense of running an objective operation. More than that, their ability to divine a “clear message” different from the ad’s actual content is highly dubious in light of their need to hedge about exactly what that supposedly clear message was. Moreover, even setting all that aside, it’s just not true.

(Via PJ Tatler.)