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.
Ilya Somin reports that not only did USA Today misrepresents his remarks on the individual mandate litigation, but they have refused to run a correction. Beyond that, they won’t run his letter correcting the record either. It seems USA Today has a policy (like the New York Times) that they won’t run letters that say they are wrong.
The New York Times has retracted a particularly appalling error from its March 30 editorial attacking Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS). The editorial claimed that Pompeo received $80 thousand in campaign contributions from Charles and David Koch. That claim was the entire substance of the editorial, and was the basis of its title “Without the Campaign Donors, This Wouldn’t Be Possible.”
Since $40k is well over the legal contribution limit, it would surprising if the claim were true. And it’s not. John Hinderaker shows that, to obtain the $80k figure, the NYT searched for every occurrence of the string “Koch” and added the sums together. Thus, they included the Koch PAC, every contribution made by an employee of Koch Industries (since contributors are required to list their employers), and even unrelated people who happen to have the name Koch.
In fact, Charles Koch gave just $2400 and David Koch gave nothing at all.
Hinderaker also asked the Times to explain what fact-checking, if any, is done on its editorials. They declined to answer, but I think we know the answer anyway.
President Obama says not to blame him for high gas prices: if you’re having trouble paying for gas, you ought to buy a more fuel-efficient car. Oh, I see. Thanks for nothing.
What Obama and the rest of the left fail to appreciate (or at least approve) is that people make decisions for their own reasons, and often their reasons are good ones. Cue to 1:48 here to see Obama make fun of the questioner for having a big car, then nearly do a spit-take when he learned the man had ten kids.
ASIDE: At that point, Obama said he needed to buy a hybrid van. If you’re having trouble paying for gas, can you afford an expensive hybrid? And hybrid vans (the few that exist) don’t get very good mileage either, for that matter.
There’s also a media failure aspect to this story. The Associated Press has sent this entire story down the memory hole and replaced it with a completely different story without the callous indifference. (Aaron Worthing says that doing so violated the AP’s policy, but come on, who really takes that stuff seriously?)
I don’t necessarily disagree with the overall point of this CNBC article on inflation, but this bit is appalling:
In futures markets, for every investor who’s long, there is one who’s short, so increased speculation itself cannot drive up prices. Speculators would have to be taking physical product off the market to actually affect prices, these officials say.
Although I agree that speculators are not responsible for soaring food and energy prices, this reasoning is complete nonsense. Of course buyers match sellers in futures markets, as they do in any market in equilibrium. That has no bearing whatsoever on whether they are affecting prices. Moreover, it is not at all difficult to draw a demand curve in which a speculator can affect a commodity’s price without actually ending up with any of it.
The New York Times is reporting, in all seriousness, that the Chinese government is monitoring cell phone calls and terminating conversations in which someone uses the word “protest” (in English!). This is based on two anecdotes in which the cell phone calls were dropped after the word was used.
This, of course, is complete nonsense. I’m sure the Chinese despots wish they could monitor every call in their country, and detect keywords from speech in real time. Not even the NSA can do that. To extrapolate such a fantastic capability from just two anecdotes is stunningly ignorant.
If the sheer impossibility of the claim weren’t evidence enough, the Shanghai Scrap blog ran the experiment and confirmed it to be nonsense. Apparently that minimal level of fact-checking was beyond the New York Times.
Ah, but it’s worse than that. The dateline for the story is Beijing, which means they had to have at least one reporter working on the story from Beijing. His name is Jonathan Ansfield. (You won’t find it on the byline, it appears in the very last line of the story.) Anfield confirmed to Shanghai Scrap that the story was nonsense, but “regrettably his input on the story made little difference.”
Obama is committed to partnering with other countries rather than going it alone as did his predecessor George W. Bush, which both broadens and complicates the decision-making process.
That’s crap. Obama is twice the unilateralist that Bush was. Literally. Bush had twice as many coalition partners in Iraq as Obama has in Libya.
I know “analysis” is a synonym from “opinion run in the news pages”, but it still ought to be factually accurate.
Time’s James Poniewozik thinks that James O’Keefe edited his video of Ron Schiller unfairly. That’s crap. Unlike the legacy media, O’Keefe makes his unedited video available. If the video really were edited unfairly, NPR had all the material it needed to defend him. It did not.
But I want to take this thought a little bit further. Poniewozik has been Time’s “media and television critic” since July 1999, so he had the job when Michael Moore released his execrable Bowling for Columbine in 2002. Moore is notorious for his dishonesty, but he outdid himself in Columbine by featuring a Charleton Heston speech that Charleton Heston never gave. It was edited together from scraps of two different speeches. Moore even put sentences together from multiple sentence fragments.
Did Poniewozik ever complain about the unfair editing in Columbine? If so, Google knows nothing of it. (And it’s not as though Poniewozik was unaware of Columbine. He made a stir by criticizing Moore’s speech accepting the Oscar for Columbine; lamenting that Moore diluted his anti-war message with other complaints.)
To sum up: Time seems to be quite concerned with unfair editing on the right (where it isn’t), but not at all concerned with unfair editing on the left (where it really is, flagrantly).
If the Wisconsin union showdown had resulted in numerous death threats against Democrats, would the media have reported it? Of course they would have — they are oh so concerned about civility and the danger of political violence.
If the Wisconsin union showdown had resulted in numerous death threats against Republicans, would the media have reported it? We needn’t speculate. Despite numerous death threats, LexisNexis finds zero stories on ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NBC, or NPR. Also nothing in the Washington Post, the LA Times, or USA Today.
Fox (natch) and CNN did cover the story. The New York Times also ran one story, but managed to omit the party affiliation.
The New York Times’s Eric Lipton is unable to substantiate his allegation that the Koch brothers were somehow behind Wisconsin’s recent union standoff.
POSTSCRIPT: I find interesting that after the left failed to cast various GOP elected officials in the role of chief boogeyman, they’ve settled on a couple of private citizens to demonize.
The New York Times accuses Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, of affecting a southern accent to attract Republican primary votes. But their example is wrong. Plus, there’s more to a southern accent than using the word “ain’t” and dropping g’s.
Describing his speech as more colloquial would probably be true, but that description wouldn’t allow them to appeal to anti-southern bigotry.
In response to James O’Keefe’s sting video in which two journalists posing as Islamic radicals met with two NPR executives, NPR released this statement:
The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept. We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for. Mr. Schiller announced last week that he is leaving NPR for another job.
The statement was a little bit strange, in that the video focused primarily on Ron Schiller’s ignorant and intolerant views. But, sure, it’s good they refused the money.
Except now it appears that might not be true. In a second video, O’Keefe reveals that Betsy Liley, the other NPR executive at the first meeting, held a telephone conversation with one of the men in which she discussed the prospect of keeping their donation anonymous. She later emailed him to inform him that a draft agreement was being prepared by their legal counsel.
At what point NPR started refusing the contribution, if they ever did at all, is not yet clear.
UPDATE: NPR has released emails showing that it said it could not accept the money unless MEAC (the fake organization) could show it was a 501(c)(3) organization. That’s a long way from what NPR seemed to imply (that NPR wasn’t going to take money from Islamic radicals), but it is consistent with what they literally said.
Also, NPR says that — contrary to what Betsy Liley said in the new video — it will not hide donations from the IRS, and they have placed Liley on administrative leave pending an investigation. How NPR’s Senior Director of Institutional Giving could be so confused about NPR’s policy and the law is still not clear.
Ron Schiller said in the full two hour Okeefe video he is a Republican, and was raised as a Republican. that didn’t make it in video
Oh, come on! That doesn’t even pass the laugh test. This guy, who hates Republicans so much, is actually one himself? Please.
Patterico actually went to the trouble to prove it untrue and request a correction. His exchange is unreal. First he finds out what Schiller actually said:
I grew up a Republican and am proud of that even though I’ve voted mostly Democratic lately.
So, not a Republican. Then he sends the index into the video to Shepard. (ASIDE: The part about “that didn’t make it in video” was also untrue. Unlike the legacy media, O’Keefe always releases the full video.)
It turns out that Shepard never watched the video, she was working from a transcript that someone prepared. (Even when Patterico sent the index, she still didn’t want to watch the video.) But even the transcript didn’t support her statement. She was just guessing what Schiller said where the transcript read “unintelligible” and guessed wrong. In fact, if she had watched the video she would have found that part wasn’t the least bit unintelligible.
In the end, Patterico finally gets through, and Shepard posts a correction. But despite the fact that her original tweet was flat wrong, she calls her correction a clarification.
Keep in mind that this is the ombudsman. It’s not the first time she’s done such shoddy, dishonest work either. Sounds like NPR needs a meta-ombudsman.
With their most recent undercover video investigations, independent journalists James O’Keefe and Lila Rose have set a new standard of transparency in the field of journalism — a standard I call on all media outlets — print, online, and broadcast — to adopt and to institute immediately. Within hours of releasing what the AP called “heavily edited” video footage of a high-powered NPR executive’s troubling statements . . . , Mr. O’Keefe then released to the public the full, unedited two-hour video of the entire conversation. Another New Media pioneer, Lila Rose, also released the full video of her undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood.
While the biased AP apparently only whips out the term “heavily edited” when the institutional left is under fire, . . . every facet of the MSM broadcast and publishing world release reports no less “heavily edited” than Rosa and O’Keefe’s initial video releasse. However, unlike Rose and O’Keefe, the mainstream media never allows the public to view the full, unedited material in order to judge the full context for ourselves. . .
Let’s start a new era of responsible journalism that we’ll call The Rose/O’Keefe Standard of Journalistic Transparency, where the insidious practice of “heavily edited” interviews and reporting finally comes to an end. . .
As a show of good faith from the MSM in accepting this offer, we call on Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric to release every frame of video involving their 2008 interviews with then Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin.
An LA Times book reviewer lambastes a book based on a passage that doesn’t appear in the book. The passage apparently came from a humor website. The legacy media seems to be making that mistake a lot lately.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compares Sarah Palin to Moammar Qaddafi. Let’s see, one of them is oppressive dictator who carpet bombs his own cities to cling to power, the other is a private citizen who sometimes says things that Chris Matthews doesn’t like.
Matthews later allowed that Palin is not as bad as Qaddafi. How magnanimous of him.
In an effort to reverse the pummeling they are getting in public opinion over the Wisconsin affair, Democrats have invented a new line of attack, which the legacy media is repeating uncritically. Here’s MSNBC’s Chris Matthews:
My question of course is why does the Governor pick on the unions that didn’t endorse him in the last campaign but give a free ride to the firefighters and the cops who did and the localities? Why did they get off and are allowed to continue to negotiate collectively?
(ASIDE: I love the “of course”. That’s the Democratic attack narrative; “of course” that’s his question.) And here’s CBS’s Chris Wragge:
You say this is a modest request. Now some state workers have been hit harder than others. Your teachers union, which votes Democratic under normal circumstances, hit very hard. Yet your police, state trooper, firemen unions, who all supported and endorsed you, did not get touched in any of this. Why is that?
The allegation is that Governor Walker is letting his friends off, while punishing his enemies.
Walker says the allegation is ridiculous; he is exempting police and fire fighters because he doesn’t want public safety threatened. And events have proven the wisdom of his policy: police and fire fighters can’t legally strike in Wisconsin, but neither can teachers. That hasn’t kept the teachers from walking off the job illegally for days. When teachers strike it inconveniences people and hurts education, when police and fire fighters strike people die.
But that’s all beside the point, because the premise of the attack isn’t true. Walker did not get most of the police and fire fighter endorsements. As he explains to Wragge:
Well, Chris – Chris that actually is not true. There are 314 fire and police unions in the state. Four of them endorsed me. All the rest endorsed my opponent.
So 310 of 314 opposed Walker. Moreover, the large statewide unions of police and fire fighters both endorsed Walker’s opponent. If the legacy media had made even a cursory effort to check the facts before parroting the Democratic line of attack, they would have learned there was no truth to it.
But here’s what is particularly galling about this attack: What Democrats are unfairly accusing Governor Walker of — rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies — is standard practice for the Democrats. The best recent example is the Democrats’ health care nationalization law, which contains a big new tax on medical devices. The reason they levied the tax on the medical device industry as opposed to some other is because the industry was insufficiently enthusiastic in its support for health care nationalization. Industries that supported the effort were left alone, and those that did not were punished.
The New York Times says that talking about someone being on the Endangered Species List constitutes a threat. Now, if you’re thinking that the Times has surely used that metaphor themselves, you’re thinking more clearly than the Times.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow says that Wisconsin — the home of this week’s budget battle, illegal strike, and truant state senators — has a budget surplus. “What?!” I hear you cry. “That can’t be right!”
Indeed it’s not. The Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel explains. Most charitable explanation: poor reading comprehension and useless editors. (There’s much more to the budget than just the general fund.) Most likely explanation: she’s just lying.
The Associated Press is taking a page from the McClatchy playbook: taking as fact the unsupported allegation of one party to an incident.
The scene of the incident was a meeting of the Dallas County Commissioner Court, at which many citizens attended to complain about the dismissal of the elections administrator. One such attendee named Jeff Turner referred to Commissioner John Price (who happens to be black) as the “chief mullah of Dallas County.”
As I’m sure any reader of this blog knows, the mullahs are the unaccountable religious leaders in the Islamic theocracy of Iran. It’s a strange insult in context, but one without any racial implications.
John Price didn’t see it that way. Price thought Turner had said “chief moolah”. Price claims that “moolah” is a racial slur against black people. It is not, as far as I can tell, but after some googling I believe Price confused the word “moolah” with “moolie”, which is an obscure racial slur in Italian slang.
The incident culminated in Price dismissing the complaints, saying “All of you are white. Go to hell.” Price, incidentally, is a piece of work. He previously gained notoriety by taking offense at the term “black hole” (he says it’s racist), and he has a long history of assaults (although he always manages to get acquitted of the most serious charges).
When the Associated Press reported the story, they accepted Price’s version as fact, reporting that Turner called him “chief moolah” (false) and that “moolah” is a racial slur (also false):
Note that the AP’s bogus history of “moolah” as a racial slur is cribbed from Price’s press release. The local CBS affiliate later corrected its story as to what Turner said, but has yet to correct its description of “moolah” as a racial slur.
This, it seems, is how the Associated Press reports a controversy now: Pick one party and report his side, and don’t bother checking any facts. Moreover, the party they picked to support is the one who said “All of you are white. Go to hell.” Nice work, AP.
The left’s hatred for Sarah Palin makes them do some amazingly stupid things. After Christina Aguilera butchered the national anthem at the Superbowl, Us Weekly reported some crackpot commentary from Sarah Palin:
The TLC reality star also criticized both the NFL and President Obama’s administration for allowing Aguilera to perform, arguing that “spicy Latin princesses” shouldn’t be permitted to sing at such events.
“Unemployment is at nine percent, yet we have to suffer through a performance by a foreigner with a poor grasp of the English language?” Palin argued. [Ed.: Aguilera is from Staten Island.] “If I were president, I’d deport Ms. Aguilera back to wherever it is she’s from and give Amy Smart a call.”
Now, if you’re not suffering from Palin Derangement Syndrome, you’re probably thinking to yourself that Sarah Palin said no such thing. And you would be right. The interview was invented out of whole cloth by a satire website and then plagiarized by Us Weekly. They later apologized.
Of course, Us Weekly is just a supermarket tabloid. No real news publication could make such a mistake, right?
Was Christina Aguilera’s Star-Spangled Banner slip-up enough to provoke war? Conan apparently thinks so. And you thought Sarah Palin went overboard by commenting that she wanted to deport the singer?
And that’s not even the pathetic part. When Time learned of its error, it was unable to maintain the high journalistic standards of Us Weekly. Instead of admitting it made a mistake, it claimed that it knew the quote was bogus all along:
(CLARIFICATION: Palin did not, in fact, say this. It was a tongue-in-cheek link to an article that was intended as a joke.)
In other words, “I meant to do that.” Pathetic.
Actually, it’s even more pathetic than it first appears, when you consider that their defense is that they printed the line knowing it was false. They would rather that people thought they knowingly print libel than be thought a bunch of buffoons.
The New York Times editorial page has weighed in on the constitutionality of Obamacare. It’s failure on a basic factual level isn’t a good sign for nationalization supporters. If they had a strong case, you would think that they could describe the debate accurately.
UPDATE: The Times runs Barnett’s letter. In keeping with NYT policy, the letter doesn’t say that they were wrong — a reader would have to go back and compare with the editorial to discover that.
Last week Kathryn Jean Lopez caught ABC News republishing a story from Mother Jones. Now David Bernstein finds the New York Times republishing a story from Bay Citizen, a Bay-area lefty online magazine. Unsurprisingly, it’s a mess.
The NYT has a lot of problems (to say the least!) but they still have a reputation to protect, a reputation that is damaged (further) when they run dreck from lesser publications. Why would they do that?
The Times editorial writers are knowingly and intentionally misstating the law in order to misinform their readers. . . The general point is that the Times repeatedly states, often in very strong terms, that detention without trial is unlawful. And it refuses, in doing so, to give a minimally correct account of the body of cases that say precisely the opposite. The latest editorial on detention, published yesterday, reads in relevant part as follows:
Much of the public and most politicians seem to feel that as long as these suspects are held out of sight on the island of Cuba, they can be held indefinitely without trial, in violation of basic constitutional protections and international treaties.
Once again, the Times is clearly alleging that detention without trial is unlawful–contrary both to “basic constitutional protections” and international law. And once again, it is doing so either without reference to or by grossly mischaracterizing a large and growing body of case law that stands for precisely the opposite proposition. . .
Because the Times’ last editorial acknowledged that “judges have upheld” these detentions (while flamboyantly misstating the basis for those decisions), I can no longer attribute these misstatements of fact to gross ignorance of these cases. They are willful, not incompetent.
The Times is actively and repeatedly propounding a theory of law to its readers as though it were an established principle that the federal courts have, in fact, consistently rejected. It is no more complicated or defensible than if the Times described its preference for the legality of same sex marriage (which I share) by describing same-sex marriage as “legal in every state.”
While in context “this is unconstitutional” may sometimes be understood by readers of some kinds of publications as “I think this is unconstitutional under the right reading of the Constitution, whatever courts might say,” I agree with Wittes that this is not how a casual reader would understand the statement in the Times editorials.
W Joseph Campbell debunks a recent article by Bill Keller, the NYT’s executive editor:
In an article to be published Sunday, Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, rubs shoulders with a tenacious media myth linked to the newspaper’s reporting in the run-up to the Bay of Pigs invasion nearly 50 years ago.
I devote a chapter to the New York Times-Bay of Pigs suppression myth in my latest, mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong.
The suppression myth has it that the Times, at the request of President John F. Kennedy, suppressed or emasculated its reporting about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
But as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, in the 10 days before the ill-fated assault, the Times published several detailed reports on its front page discussing an invasion and exiles’ calls to topple Fidel Castro. And, I note, there is no evidence that Kennedy either asked or persuaded the Times to suppress, hold back, or dilute any of its pre-invasion reporting.
ABC News is republishing stories from Mother Jones, probably the most notorious of all the left-wing opinion magazines. Having been called on it by National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, the ABC version has gone now down the memory hole, but Lopez has screen shots.
So is this how ABC sees the news now? They are republishing opinion pieces as news (and this was a particularly vicious, dishonest piece), and when caught, they are trying to hide what they did.
When Paul Krugman — without a shred of evidence — accused Sarah Palin of culpability in the Tucson massacre because of her supposedly violent rhetoric, which resulted in a spike in death threats against her, the New York Times sided with Krugman. So much so that they even adopted Krugman’s calumny themselves.
But, when Glenn Beck — entirely accurately — noted that Frances Piven (once an infamous communist agitator who mostly faded from the public scene decades ago) was explicitly calling for political violence, and that reportedly resulted in some death threats, the Times sides with Piven.
So when the right uses violent rhetoric (that isn’t), they are evil. Their critics are doing right. But when the left uses violent rhetoric (that really is), their critics are evil.
Calling this a double standard is doing it too much credit. The NYT is simply full of crap, making whatever argument serves them on that particular day.
And that’s in his defense of the paper. He doesn’t mention the Times’s editorial or its even worse Krugman column, presumably because they were indefensible.
MSNBC says that Arizona doesn’t have a holiday celebrating Martin Luther King. In fact, has had a Martin Luther King day for nineteen years.
BONUS: MSNBC goes on to say that if Arizona won’t enact an MLK holiday, it should secede from the Union. Al Sharpton, never one to be outdone in the race-baiting department by some network talking head, says that Arizona’s failure to enact such a holiday (that it enacted nearly two decades ago) means that it has somehow already seceded from the Union.
In the most bald-faced lie I have ever read in The New York Times — which is saying something — that paper implied Loughner is a pro-life zealot. This is the precise opposite of the truth.
Only because numerous other news outlets, including ABC News and The Associated Press, reported the exact same shocking incident in much greater detail — and with direct quotes — do we know that the Times’ rendition was complete bunk.
One Pima Community College student, who had a poetry class with Loughner later in his college career, said he would often act “wildly inappropriate.”
“One day (Loughner) started making comments about terrorism and laughing about killing the baby,” classmate Don Coorough told ABC News, referring to a discussion about abortions. “The rest of us were looking at him in shock … I thought this young man was troubled.”
Another classmate, Lydian Ali, recalled the incident as well.
“A girl had written a poem about an abortion. It was very emotional and she was teary eyed and he said something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomber,” Ali said.
PJ O’Rourke’s takedown of the New York Times’s disgusting performance of the last week is full of sober, measured criticism, but the pull-quote is this:
Liberalism, as personified by the New York Times, became a dotty old aunt sometime during the Johnson administration. She’s provincial, eccentric, and holds dull, peculiar views about the world. Still, she has our fond regard, and we visit her regularly in her nursing home otherwise known as Arts and Leisure and the Book Review. Or we did until Sunday, January 9, when she began spouting obscenities and exposing herself.
A liberal makes death threats against a Tea Partier on a national television show, and the threat is indisputably fueled by rhetoric from the left, but Christiane Amanpour won’t show the incident because it’s not newsworthy.
Had it been the other way around, not only would it have been newsworthy, it would have been the top story for days.
UPDATE and CORRECTION: Apparently ABC did broadcast the threat, so it’s not accurate to say they aren’t showing the threat. But it’s also widely been remarked that ABC paid no attention to the threat (which certainly would not have been the case the other way around). I haven’t found a transcript and I don’t have the time or inclination to watch the program, so I’ll leave it at that.
By nearly all accounts, President Obama rose to the occasion in his remarks yesterday on the Tucson massacre. The most important line, at least from a political perspective, was this one:
And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.
(Emphasis mine.) In this way, the president contradicted all those who attempted to place blame for the massacre on right-wing rhetoric. As we I’ve noted numerous times over the last few days, a principal offender was the New York Times.
In today’s editoral, the New York Times praised Obama’s speech (of course), but also renewed their line of attack. How could they do so, when Obama contradicted the attack? They wrote:
This horrific event, he said, should be a turning point for everyone — “not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation.”
Note the omission of the key clause. This is high journalistic malpractice. They edited the president to remove his rebuke of their position, and they did so without ellipses.
If you read the editorial now, you will find that they have corrected the quote. (Consequently, it makes no sense any more, but it never made much sense in the first place.) And, as we have come to expect from the NYT, they did so without any correction, indeed, without any indication whatsoever other than to say “A version of this editorial appeared in print . . .”
POSTSCRIPT: I have no screen grab of the uncorrected editorial, but it was quoted by many, including Ace, Ed Driscoll, Verum Serum, and an NYT commenter.
Daniel Farber, the editor-in-chief of CBSNews.com, has two pieces attacking Palin in the wake of the Tucson massacre. In the first he echoes Paul Krugman, et al. in blaming Palin for the attack while at the same time admitting that we don’t know what motivated Loughner. In the second, he renews the attack while at the same time criticizing Palin for defending herself.
I’m astonished that the LA Times is reporting that Loughner was driven by right-wing politics — in the news pages no less! — days after that calumny has been discredited.
The only comparable thing I can think of off the top of my head is when the New York Times ran a 5,700-word front-page story attacking the Duke lacrosse players, after the case had already collapsed. (The piece was based almost exclusively, and unskeptically, on the fabricated notes of the police sergeant in charge of the case.)
The Huffington Post likes to fancy itself a newspaper and not merely a group blog. I think they have arrived. Just before the New Year, they ran an article that libeled Peter Wallison and Charles Calomiris of the American Enterprise Institute. The article (in the Google cache for now, also here), tried to rebut a 2008 AEI publication on the irresponsibility of Fannie and Freddie. The article, by David Fiderer — labelled by HuffPo as a “financial professional” — did not only contest Wallison and Calomiris’s conclusions, but repeatedly accused them of lying.
And I mean repeatedly: “lied”, “lying”, or “lies” appeared six times; “fabricate” or “fabricated” three times; “deceitful” twice; “fraudulent” or “fraudster” twice; “liar” twice (one of those referred to John Boehner); “falsehoods” twice; “bogus” once. That’s eighteen accusations of outright lies.
If you are going to take a tone like that, you need to be damn sure you have your facts straight. There is no scoundrel like the man who lies in accusing another of lying.
But he did not have his facts straight. Wallison and Calomiris published a response that substantiated all the facts in their 2008 publication and explained where Fiderer erred.
The Huffington Post pulled down the piece, replacing it with this:
Editor’s Note: This post has been removed from the site due to factual inaccuracies.
But they did not, as far as I can tell, post any further correction or retraction. Thus we can see that the Huffington Post has truly arrived as a newspaper: weak editorial standards and a lack of integrity after the fact. Congratulations HuffPo!
New claims for jobless benefits moved higher last week, but a decline in the four-week average to a nearly 2-1/2-year low suggested the labor market continues to improve.
Good grief. This means that November was sufficiently good as to counterbalance December, not that December is somehow good. As Glenn Reynolds notes, they didn’t look this hard to find a silver lining when Bush was president.
Retailers sealed their strongest holiday sales increase since 2006, as a robust November more than offset spending that tapered off in December. The results reported Thursday suggest steadily improving consumer spending. For investors, whose expectations were riding high, the December figures were disappointing.
Once again, the news for December is somehow that November was really good. Interestingly, the original headline for the story, which was linked from Instapundit and Drudge, was more honest: Retailers report surprisingly weak December. You can still see that headline in the permalink.
Early in his presidency, [President Obama] issued several signing statements that made relatively uncontroversial challenges. But he has not issued any since June 2009, when lawmakers of both parties expressed outrage over a statement he attached to a bill saying that he could disregard requirements imposed on certain negotiations with international financial institutions.
POSTSCRIPT: The subject of the article is the possibility that President Obama might issue a signing statement asserting that he can ignore the budget’s provision that forbids him to move terrorist detainees from Guantanamo to the United States. I’ve remarked before that signing statements — in the abstract — can be entirely appropriate. But the idea being asserted in this case, that Congress’s legislative power does not extend to the manner by which detainees are held outside a theater of war, is absurd.
A hilarious example of a liberal narrative running aground on the facts:
SCHLAPP: . . . [The Obama administration] made the language [bringing back the controversial end-of-life planning provision] worse, instead of doing this once every five years, now the Obama administration is allowing this to happen every year and actually reimbursing doctors to do it every year. So, that’s quite a slight of hand. And doesn’t government — aren’t they a little conflicted here? They have to find this huge health care savings for seniors at the same time they’ve become the counselors to seniors in their end of care decisions?
POWERS: Where was your outrage in 2008 when the Bush administration said that Medicare would reimburse end of life counseling?
SCHLAPP: It was a veto that was overridden by the Democrats. So, I give President Bush credit for vetoing that bill.
POWERS: No, it was a 2008 law. I mean, I don’t know what are talking about.
SCHLAPP: Yes, that became law over the president’s veto.
POWERS: No, that’s not true.
Schlapp is absolutely correct; “enacted under Bush” is not the same as “signed by Bush”. But what I love here is how Powers’s immediate reaction, when faced by the facts, is to deny the facts.
POSTSCRIPT: Powers eventually conceded the point, blaming the Wall Street Journal for her error. The Wall Street Journal didn’t try to blame the Obama administration’s misinformation for their error. Both of them did better than The Hill and Politico, neither of which has corrected their story yet.
By the 17th century, people were imagining trips to the Moon and encounters with lunar inhabitants who, Mr. Brunner tells us, “are hardly ever imagined as inferior, ill-natured or threatening.” Perhaps the most famous work in the genre is Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon,” which was published in Paris in 1865, and which accurately predicted not only that people from the United States would be the first to set foot on the Moon but also, among other details, that the craft carrying them would be launched from Florida, splash down in the Pacific and be rescued by the United States Navy.
The NYT gets two points right: the book was published in Paris in 1865, Verne’s travelers did launch from Florida. We can allow them a third if we’re not too picky: The travelers were rescued by the Navy, not in “From the Earth to the Moon”, but in its sequel. However, they failed to land on the m0on.
President Felipe Calderon reported this month that Mexican forces have captured more than 93,000 weapons in four years. Mexican authorities insist that 90 percent of those weapons have been smuggled from the United States. The U.S. and Mexican governments have worked together to trace 73,000 seized weapons, but both refuse to release the results of the traces.
This is false. The number is not 90%, but closer to 8%. And, the US government has released quite a lot of information on the traces. (Perhaps by the “results” of the traces, the Post means the raw information, but that would obviously be inappropriate to release, not to mention illegal.)
POSTSCRIPT: The actual topic of the article is an astonishing fact: There is only one gun store in all of Mexico and it’s very hard to buy a gun there. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of gun crime in Mexico. Imagine that.
The Wall Street Journal is piling on to the St. Petersburg Times’s PolitiFact for labeling “a government takeover of health care” as its “lie of the year”:
So the watchdog news outfit called PolitiFact has decided that its “lie of the year” is the phrase “a government takeover of health care.” Ordinarily, lies need verbs and we’d leave the media criticism to others, but the White House has decided that PolitiFact’s writ should be heard across the land and those words forever banished to describe ObamaCare.
It’s a good (if petty) point that a sentence fragment can’t really be a lie. But we’ll set that aside because the important point is that Obamacare is a de facto government takeover of health care.
I’ve noted that many times before (for example). What I want to note here is that the St. Petersburg Times seems to have made a major blunder. Their PolitiFact bit has been, all along, not about truth but about grading statements for ideological correctness from the liberal perspective, leavened with some straight-up fact checking to build credibility.
Their strategy works only as long as they can maintain their credibility. So far they’ve managed to do so. Around the last election they had an entire piece on NPR in which they debunked a bunch of Republican “lies” (and I think one or two Democratic ones in order to maintain credibility).
ASIDE: In that NPR piece (which I never blogged because I couldn’t find a transcript or audio online) they gave their worst “pants on fire” rating to a Republican Senate candidate (I think it was Dan Coats, but I don’t remember for sure) who said that Obamacare was going to force seniors into a government-run health care plan. This was absurd, they said, because Medicare already is a government-run health care plan. But that ignores Medicare Advantage, which is privately run. Obamacare imposes severe cuts on Medicare Advantage that essentially kill the program, which will force its participants into ordinary (government-run) Medicare. The cuts to Medicare Advantage were a big deal: Medicare Advantage represents almost a fifth of Medicare, and Senate Democrats had to agree to exempt Florida seniors from the cuts to get Bill Nelson’s vote for the bill. (The exemption was later revoked as part of the reconciliation shenanigans.)
By making such a patently indefensible statement in such a high-profile way, I think the St. Petersburg Times has gone a bridge too far. People are now noticing that PolitiFact (which they also call their Truth-o-meter) is anything but a fact check. It is now going to be common knowledge on the right side of the political spectrum that PolitiFact is worthless and Republicans will have ready ammunition to refute PolitiFact’s future pronouncements.
POSTSCRIPT: Reason is piling on as well, noting all the lies from the left that PolitiFact had to pass up.
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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