Internet Scofflaw

This is the actual image of President Bush’s book that CBS used in a story about book covers:

Power Line notes:

The New York Times’s Caucus blog reported tonight:

Sixty-one senators have now expressed support for repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, appearing to clear the way for passage if Democrats can bring the bill to a vote before the holidays.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is not “the military’s policy.” It is a federal law,10 U.S.C. Sec. 654. DADT was imposed on the military by Congress. This mistake is made by reporters frequently, but that does not excuse it. . .

As always, it is a mystery how such basic factual errors get past the presumed battery of editors that review articles and editorials in our leading newspapers.

I think Mr. Hinderaker is being rhetorical, because the mystery is easily dispelled if you drop the assumption of fact-checking.

The poll found that Obamacare has sunk to its lowest popularity yet.

There’s something special about Sarah Palin. Something about her inspires such hatred in the media that they behave very badly. In the latest instance, Palin was visiting Haiti as part of a mission run by Franklin Graham’s NGO Samaritan’s Purse. Palin was accompanied by her husband Todd and her daughter Bristol.

While they were there, Bristol had occasion to fix her mother’s hair. The Associated Press snapped a picture of the moment and captioned it:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, center, has her hair done during a visit to a cholera treatment center set up by the NGO Samaritan’s Purse in Cabaret, Haiti, Saturday Dec. 11, 2010.

implying that Palin had brought a hair dresser on her trip to a Haitian cholera clinic. Once that story went out, the usual outrage circus wasn’t far behind.

The AP eventually corrected its story, saying it hadn’t been “immediately clear” that the person was Bristol. But that doesn’t really absolve them. They had a story they liked and ran with it. Why risk ruining it by finding out the facts?

Sadly, we know how this plays out. The lie is halfway around the world, and hardly anyone will ever see the correction. The notion that Palin brings hair dressers to cholera clinics will be part of the folklore, and that folklore can never be stamped out. To this day, many people still believe that George Bush (Sr.) was amazed by a checkout scanner, or that George W. Bush waved around plastic turkeys in Iraq while our servicemen went hungry.

This must be the most misleading headline of the year:

North Shore Connector said to be on schedule and under budget

As anyone following the Pittsburgh boondoggle knows, the project is $117.8 million over budget (so far), and was rated the nation’s third-worst waste of stimulus funds.

So how do they justify calling it “under budget”? They’ve scaled back service so the project’s operating costs will be less than originally projected:

Mr. Simmonds said the North Shore Connector was projected to add about $1 million to the authority’s operating costs (the authority has a $300 million-plus operating budget). With its chronic financial problems and imminent layoffs, the authority has scrapped plans to hire additional personnel for the subway extension, so its cost will be less than originally projected.

That explanation appears at the very end of the article.

(Via That’s Church.)

The New York Times on the Climategate emails:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

The New York Times on the Wikileaks cables:

The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.

It all depends on whose ox is getting gored, I see. When the documents damage the credibility of global warming, their provenance is all-important. But, when the documents damage our national security, it’s all about the public’s right to know.

POSTSCRIPT: Interestingly, the former post now has an update attached:

In the last couple of days, some conservative commentators have compared the treatment of the East Anglia climate files in this post with the dissemination of Wikileaks files by The Times and charged that a gross double standard exists.

But I’m not sure why they bothered with the update. They go on to make two remarks (which I assume to be true, as I can’t be bothered to verify them), neither of which rebut the double-standard charge.

(Via Patterico.)

I’ve noted before that the St. Petersburg Times’s “Truth-o-meter” is useless, as it grades largely on the politics of the speaker, rather than the truth of the statement. They rate true statements as false when they come from the right, and false statements as true when they come from the left.

The latest example comes in regard to Senator-elect Rand Paul’s (R-KY) statement:

The average federal employee makes $120,000 a year. The average private employee makes $60,000 a year.

The facts:

Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.

So Paul is right. But not according to the “Truth-o-meter”, which rates Paul’s accurate statement as false. According to the St. Petersburg Times, we should be looking at pay only, not at total compensation. (ASIDE: Much of the discrepancy between federal and private employees comes from federal employees’ extremely generous benefits.) Looking at total compensation (i.e., what the employees actually cost) is an “exaggeration of the numbers”.

Keep in mind, if they wanted to argue the point, they have various intermediate ratings available to them: “mostly true”, “half true”, and “barely true”. Even “mostly true” would be a harsh judgement for an entirely accurate statement, but it would give them a hook to hang their nuance on. Calling it outright false is simply wrong.

(Via Mark Hemingway.)

ABC invited Andrew Breitbart to be part of their election night coverage. Then, after — or possibly because of — outcry from the left (they really, really don’t like him), ABC retracted the invitation. They claimed that it was because Breitbart had been misrepresenting his role:

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABCNews.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

But Breitbart released the correspondence, showing that he had been told that the town hall (which was never referred to as a “digital town hall”) would air on the network:

ABC News is conducting a live event from Phoenix, Arizona for our election night special on Tuesday, November 2nd 2010. I am looking for political figures and newsmakers to appear in our Town Hall style panel. . .

The Town Hall is hosted by ABC correspondent David Muir and Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook, as well an ASU student leader. The audience will consist of 150 students equipped with laptops and Ipads who will participate in online political conversations. . .

This program will broadcast on the ABC Television Network, abcnews.com, ABC News Now, and ABC News Radio.

The show will be live on the web and ABC News Now as well as on the network from 4:00pm till 11:00pm MST.

We would love for you to be a part of our program, and please let us know what we can do to accommodate your needs.

(Emphasis mine.) Additionally, Breitbart’s participation was confirmed by an ABC News producer to Media Matters (who weren’t happy about it one bit):

Media Matters has confirmed that noted propagandist Andrew Breitbart will provide analysis for ABC News during their election night coverage.

After Breitbart’s BigJournalism.com website reported that Breitbart would “be bringing analysis live from Arizona” for ABC, Media Matters confirmed his participation in a town hall meeting anchored by ABC’s David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg that will be featured in the network’s coverage.

Asked about Breitbart’s history of unethical behavior and misinformation, ABC News’ David Ford told Media Matters: “He will be one of many voices on our air, including Bill Adair of Politifact. If Andrew Breitbart says something that is incorrect, we have other voices to call him on it.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Clearly, Breitbart was not misrepresenting his role to anyone. He and others were told that he would be on the air. Either ABC was confused about their own plans or they changed them. Either way, they shouldn’t be saying that “Mr. Breitbart exaggerated the role he would play.” Clearly, that isn’t true.

If ABC News can’t even report its own affairs honestly, how can we trust them for the rest of the news?

Reporters with CBS’s Anchorage affiliate have been caught on tape conspiring to embarrass Joe Miller, the Republican candidate for Senate from Alaska.

UPDATE: Oh, good grief. KTVA is trying to contest this, saying that the transcript is inaccurate. But the recording is available online, and the transcript sounds entirely accurate. You can decide for yourself.

UPDATE: KTVA has fired the producers.

The Daily Beast reports:

“It’s great for me to get out of the chair and into the world,” [Katie Couric] says. “I started out as a reporter, and I still enjoy reporting.” . . . That’s why Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls “this great unwashed middle of the country” in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.

(Emphasis mine.)

I found it so astounding that a news anchor would say something like this, I wondered if she really did. But evidently so, because Couric explained on Twitter that she meant “unwashed” in the positive sense:

Dictionary.com “Great unwashed”: the general public, populace or masses. Referring to overlooked people who r politically in the middle!

I think I might actually prefer Barack Obama’s condescension with a sneer to Couric’s condescension with a smile and a pat on the head.

(Via the Daily Caller.)

Kathryn Jean Lopez notes that the Washington Post is putting words into soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner’s mouth:

GOP leaders concede that point [that minor budget cuts will barely dent our structural budget deficit] and say they are open to broader bipartisan approaches to tackling the nation’s budget problems. Boehner, for instance, has embraced the possibility of higher taxes, suggesting in a speech in Cleveland this summer that lawmakers should look at clearing out the “undergrowth of deductions, credits, and special carve-outs” in the tax code that are little more than “poorly disguised spending programs.”

This is simply untrue. Boehner’s speech is here. There is nothing whatsoever in that speech to suggest that Boehner has embraced higher taxes. Quite the opposite. You can search for the word tax/taxes: you will find no occurrence suggesting they should be higher, and many suggesting they should be lower.

Boehner did make the point that Congress has discovered that it can disguise spending by putting in the tax code. (This is mainly a Democratic trick, but Republicans employ it too.) The public likes tax cuts, so this makes their pork barreling seem more palatable. Boehner is right that we should put an end to the practice. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with raising taxes to deal with our structural deficit.

The Post needs to issue a retraction.

The New York Times ran a story recently on a new grant to NPR:

With Grant, NPR to Step Up State Government Reporting

NPR has received a $1.8 million grant from the Open Society Foundations to begin a project called Impact of Government that is intended to add at least 100 journalists at NPR member radio stations in all 50 states over the next three years. The reporters, editors and analysts will cover state governments and how their actions affect people.

Reading the story, something seemed missing. What could it be? Here’s a hint: Fox News has a story on the grant as well:

Billionaire Soros Pays for Additional Reporters for NPR Partner Initiative

Not only is George Soros the founder and chairman of the foundation, his name is the foundation’s URL (www.soros.com). Nevertheless, the NYT managed to write an entire article on the Foundation without using his name.

It is no longer an exaggeration to say that people who get all their news by reading the New York Times are genuinely uninformed.

On Wednesday I discussed Christine O’Donnell’s gaffe-that-wasn’t, when O’Donnell asserted (correctly, of course) that the phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the First Amendment. I thought that the incident showed that Chris Coons (her opponent), the students at Widener Law School, and the Associated Press didn’t understand how recently (1878) the Supreme Court introduced the doctrine of separation of church and state.

In regards to the Associated Press, I may have been wrong. It now looks as though the AP might have understood perfectly well what O’Donnell was trying to say, but deliberately obscured her point.

Ace noticed something that I did not; the AP article fabricated an O’Donnell quote. Their original story quoted her this way:

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell asked: “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?”

(Emphasis mine.) This quote leaves unclear exactly what O’Donnell was referring to, and it lends itself to the interpretation that O’Donnell was unaware that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on church and state is anchored in the First Amendment. (That, of course, was the thrust of the original article, before the AP re-wrote it.)

But that’s not what O’Donnell said. In the re-write, the story reads:

She interrupted to say, “The First Amendment does? … So you’re telling me that the separation of church and state, the phrase ‘separation of church and state,’ is in the First Amendment?”

(Emphasis mine.) So it turns out that O’Donnell actually had been careful to make her point precisely. The AP writer edited the quote to declarify it, in order to make it fit the desired narrative.

To put it bluntly, the AP lied. What they put into the quotation marks isn’t what O’Donnell said.

They did later re-write the article, but they didn’t post a correction, which seems like a minimum they should do when their original article was a lie, and neither did the Washington Post, which ran the story.

POSTSCRIPT: I want to pile on a little more here. The original article also had this:

Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

“You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp,” Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O’Donnell’s grasp of the Constitution.

This immediately followed the falsified quote. Again, it contributed to the story’s narrative: if the audience gasped, O’Donnell’s statement must have been shocking.

But in light of the real quote, the gasp seems awfully peculiar. Were the students at Widener Law School really shocked to hear that the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the First Amendment? What kind of law school are they running there?

Glenn Reynolds has a theory for why the New York Times would write an article about Ann Coulter without actually having any idea what Ann Coulter believes:

To know what Ann Coulter writes in her books, they’d have to know what’s in her books. That would require reading Ann Coulter’s books — and worse yet, admitting it in print, which no self-respecting Timesian would do. Far better to make a major embarrassing error (one of three Kaus dissects) — and thus actually score points when busted by Mickey, since this makes it clear to the NYT crowd that your mind is unpolluted by contact with Coulter’s writing.

Or, here’s another theory: The New York Times is in dire financial straits; perhaps this is a cost-saving measure. Research can be expensive and time-consuming, and at the NYT it hardly seems to contribute much to their reporting anyway. Better to skip the research phase and go straight to writing.

An embarrassing historical error in The Atlantic. From the rebuttal:

Here’s a general rule: Absolutely nothing that a treasury secretary says to a president will affect the real economy if the president ignores his advice and does something else.

The New York Times doesn’t understand the tax code, but that won’t stop them from opining on it.

Rick Sanchez issues a non-apology apology for his anti-Semitic remarks: when he said Jews run all the networks and argued that middle-class Jews are inherently bigoted, he “never intended to suggest any sort of narrow-mindedness”.

(Via Instapundit.)

Richard Cohen, writing for the Washington Post, says that Tea Partiers are responsible for the Kent State massacre. Or something like that.

Ann Althouse gives the column a fisking, which is more than it deserves. Is it the stupidest column of the year? It’s certainly in the running.

(Via Instapundit.)

CNN’s Rick Sanchez is not only an idiot and a liar, he is also an anti-Semite. Okay, those three things often do go together.

In an interview with Pete Dominick (of whom I have not heard before), Rick Sanchez called Jon Stewart (who is Jewish) a bigot. When Dominick pushed back, asking how Stewart was a bigot, Sanchez could not produce any examples and described Stewart’s background instead, apparently implying that anyone from Stewart’s background was necessarily bigoted.

Then Sanchez added that Jews run CNN and all the other networks.

UPDATE: Fired already. That was quick.

The New York Times reporter who has been covering the Ground Zero Mosque story was trained by Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam leading the project, or so claims Rauf’s organization.

(Via the Corner.) (Previous post.)

Just to prove that incidents of media failure aren’t always interesting: the Kansas City Star bollixes a story about militias.

The Washington Post reports:

WJLA-TV has fired veteran anchorman Doug McKelway for a verbal confrontation this summer with the station’s news director that came after McKelway broadcast a sharply worded live report about congressional Democrats and President Obama. . .

[General Manager Bill] Lord took exception to McKelway’s reporting and asked to meet with him, according to several station sources who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive personnel matter. A shouting match between the two men ensued, leading to McKelway’s suspension, sources said.

Megan McArdle does her Krugman fact-checking bit again:

This is sort of impressive: Paul Krugman simultaneously castigates Republicans for the fiscal irresponsibility of wanting to extend tax cuts for the rich that cost about $700 billion–and for irresponsibly threatening the extension of tax cuts for the middle class which cost three times as much. Yet you could read the entire column and not realize that it’s the middle class tax cuts which are the really expensive, budget-busting bit.

The LA Times botches its statistics on judicial confirmations.

The BBC’s director general admits the BBC had a “massive bias to the left” and “struggled with impartiality”. But it’s okay, he promises it’s all in the past now. . .

(Via Power Line.)

Jim Treacher notes a striking commonality among media reports on the Glenn Beck rally. They want to imply that the rally was racist, but they certainly would never have resorted to such weak beer if they had any actual racism to report.

Moreover, the media routinely reports that the Tea Party movement is “overwhelmingly white” when, in fact, polls show that the demographics of the movement are very similar to America. It’s probably not true of the Beck rally either.

(Via Instapundit.)

Legal Insurrection catches the Washington Post using a dishonest photo to illustrate its story for the Glenn Beck rally.

I miss the old, liberal but honest Washington Post. I really don’t understand their change from a business perspective either: liberal but honest was an underserved market niche (and is even more so now). Liberal and dishonest papers are a dime a dozen.

Count the blunders.

(Via Instapundit.)

Years ago NBC News sent actors dressed in Muslim garb to a NASCAR race, in hopes that NASCAR fans might mistreat them in some way. (It didn’t work.) NBC never apologized.

NBC’s ploy crossed the line from reporting news to trying to create news. Now ABC News has been caught doing something similar. According to a speaker at a rally against the Cordoba House project, ABC sent a man undercover into the crowd, who tried to stir up the crowd while an ABC cameraman recorded at a distance. The man refused to identify himself, and later tried to hide his connection to ABC, which seems to settle any question about whether this was an innocent project.

(Previous post.)

The Associated Press has issued rules to its staff dictating how the Cordoba House controversy is to be covered. Those rules seem calculated to obscure the facts and make opponents of the mosque project sound unreasonable:

We should continue to avoid the phrase “ground zero mosque” or “mosque at ground zero” on all platforms. . . The site of the proposed Islamic center and mosque is not at ground zero, but two blocks away in a busy commercial area. We should continue to say it’s “near” ground zero, or two blocks away.

and again:

No mosque is going up at ground zero. The center would be established at 45-51 Park Place, just over two blocks from the northern edge of the sprawling, 16-acre World Trade Center site. Its location is roughly half a dozen normal lower Manhattan blocks from the site of the North Tower, the nearer of the two destroyed in the attacks.

I think it’s fair enough for neutral reporting to avoid the term “Ground Zero Mosque”, which is used by the project’s opponents. But is it true that no mosque is going up at Ground Zero? That question ultimately turns on your definition of “Ground Zero”. If Ground Zero means the World Trade Center site only, then the AP is right. However, if Ground Zero refers to buildings in New York that were destroyed or damaged beyond repair due to airplane impacts on 9/11, then the site is indeed on Ground Zero.

The only buildings to collapse on 9/11 were WTC 1, 2, 3, and 7. Several more buildings were damaged beyond repair, including 4WTC, 5WTC, 6WTC, 130 Liberty Street, 30 West Broadway, and 45 Park Place. The latter, at which location the Cordoba House is slated to be built, was hit by the landing gear from United flight 175. The subsequent inspection found that the impact destroyed three floor beams and severely compromised its interior structure.

These facts are important, and the AP should not be trying to hide them. The AP’s document later mentions in passing that the building was damaged on 9/11, but it gives no indication that that damage was far more extensive than that of the countless other buildings damaged on 9/11, and required the building’s demolition.

The AP wants to portray the project as a mosque that just happens to be going up near Ground Zero. If that were true, some people would probably still take offense, but not remotely as many. But the fact is that this location became available precisely because of the damage done on 9/11, and in fact, the developers have said it was picked for that reason. The majority of the American people find that extraordinarily unseemly.

No one has established a link between the cleric and radicals. New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne said, “We’ve identified no law enforcement issues related to the proposed mosque.”

The first part is simply untrue. Feisal Abdul Rauf is an apologist for Hamas and blames America for the 9/11 attacks. He wrote a book entitled A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11. And, providing a link to other radicals, an edition of that book was published in America (under a different title) with funding from Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

The second part may well be true, but it is still misleading, as it gives the impression they’ve looked. As far we know, they haven’t.

Here is a succinct summary of President Obama’s position:

Obama has said he believes Muslims have the right to build an Islamic center in New York as a matter of religious freedom, though he’s also said he won’t take a position on whether they should actually build it.

That is the position he is taking now. Earlier, when he first waded into the controversy, he gave every impression of support for the project.

UPDATE: Frank Gaffney at Big Peace also fact-checks the piece. Interestingly, he claims that Rauf originally called his project the “Ground Zero Mosque”. He doesn’t substantiate the claim, though.

UPDATE: I found a page on the Cordoba Initiative web site that refers to the project as “Ground Zero Mosque and Cultural Center”, which backs up Gaffney’s claim, at least in part. The page is archived here in case it gets airbrushed. (UPDATE: Yep, it’s down the memory hole.)

Also, an NYT story (backing up the USA Today story linked above) confirms that the site’s connection to 9/11 is why it was selected:

The location was precisely a key selling point for the group of Muslims who bought the building in July. A presence so close to the World Trade Center, “where a piece of the wreckage fell,” said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the cleric leading the project, “sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

Finally, the developers seem to have been not all bashful about referring to the project in terms of Ground Zero, at least until the connection became radioactive.

UPDATE: NPR joins the obscurantist bandwagon, calling “Ground Zero Mosque” a “killer phrase”, meaning a phrase that is politically powerful but inaccurate and misleading. Not once in the article do they mention that the site was available because it was damaged beyond repair on 9/11, nor that the project picked the site because of its connection to 9/11.

(Previous post.)

The New York Times has belatedly corrected its week-old story that reported Rep. John Lewis’s (D-GA) fictional tale of Tea Party racism as though it were fact:

The Political Times column last Sunday, about a generational divide over racial attitudes, erroneously linked one example of a racially charged statement to the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party supporters have been connected to a number of such statements, there is no evidence that epithets reportedly directed in March at Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, outside the Capitol, came from Tea Party members.

But this correction is woefully inadequate. It suggests that the epithets were issued, but it hasn’t been shown that they came from Tea Party participants. In fact, there is no evidence to suggest that the epithets were issued at all. To the contrary, all the available evidence suggests that Lewis and company made the whole thing up.

Still, the NYT’s partial correction shows that this particular fabrication is losing its effectiveness.

POSTSCRIPT: There’s also the pathetic smear that “Tea Party supporters have been connected to a number of such statements.” Out of the hundreds of thousands that have attended Tea Parties, I’m sure that the Times could find a few racists (although most of those are plants). Among the NYT’s darling Democrats, one hardly has to wade into the crowd to find the racists.

(Via Big Government.) (Previous post.)

Jon Kyl (R-AZ) says we should consider amending the Constitution to withdraw birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. CBS reported his remarks to say that Kyl called for repeal of the entire 14th Amendment:

Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., said today that Congress should hold hearings to look into denying citizenship to illegal aliens’ children born in the United States, as the fight over immigration widens into the explosive “birthright” issue.

Kyl told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he supports a call by fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to introduce a new amendment to repeal the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Sheesh. You would think that they would understand the difference between “repeal” and “amend”, since the 14th Amendment is, in fact, an amendment already.

CBS has since corrected its article. It still spells Kyl’s first name wrong though. (It’s Jon, not John.)

POSTSCRIPT: Although it has no bearing on the media failure aspect of this, I think such an amendment would probably not be a good idea.

Dana Milbank ought to learn to check original sources:

“I think there’s a good reason for a conservative to vote yes, and that’s provided in the Constitution itself,” Graham told his peers before reading to them from Federalist No. 6, by Alexander Hamilton. “The Senate should have a special and strong reason for the denial of confirmation,” he read, such as “to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from family connection, from personal attachment and from a view to popularity.”

Milbank is wrong: Graham was not reading from Federalist #6. First, a quick glance would reveal that #6 has nothing whatsoever to do with confirmation. In fact, Graham was referring to #76. More importantly, the passage that Graham “read” does not appear in #76 either; it is stitched together from bits and pieces with some additions and deletions.

Once Milbank’s appeal to the authority of Hamilton’s text is ripped away, one can debate whether Lindey’s paraphrase is faithful to the spirit. (The answer is no.)

It’s sad to see Milbank doing less fact-checking than Internet Scofflaw.

The New York Times reports fiction as truth:

The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

It. Never. Happened.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

So the NAACP has passed a resolution declaring that the Tea Party movement is racist. It’s a lie, but I wouldn’t expect any better from today’s NAACP. The NAACP long ago ceased to be a civil-rights organization and became a standard leftist pressure group instead. They are reading off the Democratic script.

But would it be too much to ask that the media, in its reporting on the resolution, mentioned that the allegations to which the resolution refers (racial epithets and spitting at a Tea Party rally) are a lie? The best the ABC News story does is quote some unknown tea party activist disputing the allegations, and that’s half way through the story where they can feel confident that most aren’t reading any more. The Associated Press story isn’t much better.

There are some relevant facts that ought to be mentioned:

• No one, other than the Congressmen who made the allegation, has ever come forward to corroborate the allegations. (Another Congressman was erroneously reported to corroborate them but did not.)
• Not one iota of evidence has ever been produced to support the allegations, despite a $100,000 bounty being offered for such evidence.
• Several videos have surfaced that contradict the allegations, capturing no hint of the racial epithets that were supposedly screamed in a “chorus” “fifteen times” by “hundreds of people”.
• The Congressmen’s story changed as contradictory videos surfaced.
• One of the Congressmen (Cleaver) who “witnessed” the alleged incident wasn’t even there.
• Video proves that the spitting incident did not happen, and the Congressman making that allegation (Cleaver again) has retracted it.

With these facts, one simply cannot escape the conclusion that these Congressmen were lying and the incident is a fabrication. But ABC News and the AP paint this as some sort of one-word-against-another situation and even structures the article to suggest that we should believe the liars.

(Via Power Line.) (Previous post.)

Democrats need to learn what the rest of us have learned already, the media cannot be trusted:

Democrats are slamming House Minority Leader John Boehner for reportedly saying the Social Security retirement age should be raised to pay for the war in Afghanistan — though Boehner’s office vehemently denies he made that connection.

The comment came during an interview Monday with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Boehner said the retirement age should be raised to 70 for those at least 20 years away from retirement and suggested wealthy taxpayers should not be receiving benefits at all. . .

Though a video clip of his Social Security comments does not include any reference to Afghanistan, the newspaper’s article on the interview said Boehner cast the changes as a way to pay for the war.

Democrats seized on the interview, accusing Boehner of wanting to pay for war on the backs of seniors. Ohio House Democrats held a press conference Wednesday to denounce Boehner, with Rep. Marcy Kaptur calling it “un-American” to cut Social Security.

“The House Republican Leader John Boehner and his GOP colleagues want to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70 and cut benefits in order to pay for George Bush’s war and their failed policies of the past,” House Democratic Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a written statement. “Democrats will not stand for this.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office put out a “fact sheet” accusing Boehner of wanting to “slash” Social Security not to stabilize the program, but to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan – though Iraq was not mentioned anywhere in the Tribune-Review article.

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler called on her state’s Republican congressmen to “renounce” Boehner’s comments, accusing him of looking to “break America’s promise to her seniors.”

The Trib has since corrected its story. The Democrats could have avoided some embarrassment if they had checked the facts first.

Martha Raddatz, the chief foreign correspondent for ABC News, says:

Of course, there’s been no such uproar in the U.S. Should we be surprised? Traditionally, when a nation went to war, it had to invest its blood and treasure, but today’s joystick-wielding drone pilots can launch a missile strike from here at home, then hop in the minivan to meet the wife and kids for dinner. War couldn’t get any more impersonal.

If I’m reading this correctly, and Raddatz thinks the (supposed) impersonality of this war is lamentable, then she is literally saying that we ought to be investing more blood. That is, more soldiers ought to be dying.

This cries out for a clarification, but I can’t find one.

Keith Olbermann, as smug as he can be, says that Abraham Lincoln only ever lost one race, and that Sharron Angle is a fool for saying he lost “quite a few”. He elaborates: Lincoln won 7 of 8 races, losing only in 1832.

In fact, Lincoln won 8 of 13 races, if you count two primary losses and two US Senate losses.

Personally, I would do the research before calling someone ignorant on network television. But then, I wouldn’t even have to. I won’t claim that I can rattle off Lincoln’s electoral history off-the-cuff, but I certainly can tell you off-the-cuff of the famous race that he lost: against Stephen Douglas after the most famous political debate in history.

UPDATE: Corrected some errors in my count.

UPDATE: Olbermann says all those other races he lost don’t count; they weren’t real elections. Daniel Foster points out that that’s a stupid position: by Olbermann’s argument no one, including Lincoln, has ever been elected president.

True, but I think it misses the point. Olbermann didn’t say “I disagree with Sharron Angle’s count, because when you think about it, 4 of his 5 losses don’t really count.” That would have been a defensible argument (if still wrong in my view). But no, Olbermann just said Angle was a fool, implying that there’s no reasonable argument for Angle’s statement. That is simply not true.

If Olbermann now wants to claim he knew the facts all along, I am willing to stipulate he may be a liar rather than a fool. He can pick.

It’s the juiciest story of journalistic malpractice in a while: Some wire service out of New Zealand ran a story last month headlined: US Republican Apologises for Elena Kagan “Sextape”. The story reported that “GOP consultant” Martin Eisenstadt had apologized for implying that the Heritage Foundation was involved in a purported incident involving an Elena Kagan sex tape. The story noted that Eisenstadt is a senior fellow at the Harding Institute and had been an advisor to John McCain and Sarah Palin.

I guess the story was, as they say, too good to check. ABC News, USA Today, and NPR picked up the story, and even ran the headline verbatim.

One problem: the only thing accurate about the story is the Heritage Foundation exists. There is no Elena Kagan sex tape (thank heavens). There is no Harding Institute. Eisenstadt is not a GOP consultant, and he never advised McCain or Palin.

In fact, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t even exist. He is a hoax, created by two filmmakers. Over the years the two have duped numerous publications into running stories based on Eisenstadt, including MSNBC, the LA Times, the New Republic, and Time. (Wikipedia cites Mother Jones too, but I can’t confirm that.) But the media keep getting taken in, perhaps because Eisenstadt’s exploits are so deliciously damaging to Republicans.

They don’t even change his name, so it would just take a single Google search to uncover the fraud. That’s right, these publications do less fact-checking than Internet Scofflaw! ABC News should be particularly ashamed, since they themselves once ran a story about Eisenstadt being a hoax.

Keep this in mind whenever you catch yourself believing the media.

(Via Ace.)

Mika Brzezinski, weekend anchor for NBC’s Today and co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, admits to working with the White House on its talking points.

The New York Times makes an interesting claim about crime in Arizona:

It is a connection that those who support stronger enforcement of immigration laws and tighter borders often make: rising crime at the border necessitates tougher enforcement.

But the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as has illegal immigration, according to the Border Patrol. While thousands have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars, raising anxiety that the violence will spread to the United States, F.B.I. statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe.

That Mr. Krentz’s death nevertheless churned the emotionally charged immigration debate points to a fundamental truth: perception often trumps reality, sometimes affecting laws and society in the process.

Judith Gans, who studies immigration at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, said that what social psychologists call self-serving perception bias seemed to be at play. Both sides in the immigration debate accept information that confirms their biases, she said, and discard, ignore or rationalize information that does not.

(Emphasis mine.)

The Times’s expert phrases her hypothesis is in a neutral way: both sides are suffering from perception bias. But the article as a whole argues that it’s really the anti- side that is suffering from it, putting undue emphasis on anecdotal evidence. (That’s rather hypocritical, since current journalistic practice is always to lead with an anecdote where possible, but never mind.)

In support of its argument, the Times makes two claims: (1) violent crime is dropping at the border, and (2) violent crime is dropping statewide. The first claim is relevant to its argument, while the second is not. But they go on to provide data only for the second claim, and none at all for the first. A quick google search finds numerous articles making the same faulty argument.

So where should we look for crime data along the border? The FBI statistics don’t report such figures, so we’re forced to look for a proxy. The AP looked at one proxy: the crime rate in three Arizona border towns (Yuma, Nogales, and Douglas). They found that the crime rate in those three towns has been flat.

Tom Maguire looked at another proxy: the statistics for areas outside Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The only metropolitan area near the Arizona-Mexico border is Yuma, so rural crime rates in Arizona give some indication of the situation along the border. When he found was striking. While the rate of violent crime per capita in Arizona metropolitan areas dropped 20% from 2000 to 2008 (which doubtless accounts for the statewide drop), the rate in non-metropolitan areas went up a staggering 45%. The rate in cities outside of metropolitan areas went up a similar 39%.

So it seems that rural Arizonans, at last, have good reason to be concerned about rising crime. Now, this doesn’t prove that illegal immigration is at fault. Indeed, I think that the drug war can be blamed for a lot of it. But it certainly does show that the New York Times is guilty of the same perception bias that it decries in opponents of illegal immigration.

POSTSCRIPT: For any non-regular visitors, let me reiterate that I’m generally for immigration from Mexico. Unfortunately, today’s welfare state is incompatible with unrestricted immigration. I would rather scrap the former and allow the latter. But one way or the other, it’s certainly clear that the current arrangement — wherein we largely cut off legal immigration but permit nearly unrestricted illegal immigration — is untenable and tends not to select for the immigrants we want.

Charles Johnson catches Reuters in two separate cases of cropping photos from the Mavi Marmara incident to remove weapons carried by the “peace activists”.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: Reuters claims it was an accident. That might be more plausible if Reuters didn’t have a record.

Helen Thomas is retiring.

In a situation like this, a simple “good riddance” doesn’t suffice. This woman should have retired years ago, but I’m glad she didn’t. If she’d retired a week ago, the world wouldn’t know what a dirtbag she is. Now she can enjoy some well-deserved ignominy in her retirement.

Also, the press is going now to have to take a long look at themselves and wonder why they allowed her such a privileged position for so long. The White House Correspondents Association sees the problem:

The incident does revive the issue of whether it is appropriate for an opinion columnist to have a front row seat in the WH briefing room. That is an issue under the jurisdiction of this board. We are actively seeking input from our association members on this important matter, and we have scheduled a special meeting of the WHCA board on Thursday to decide on the seating issue.

I’m sure they will exonerate themselves, but I’m glad they’re feeling a little discomfort.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg adds:

Can we do away with all of the shock and dismay at Thomas’ statement? Spare me Lanny Davis’s wounded outrage. Everyone knows she is a nasty piece of work and has been a nasty piece of work for decades. . .

All of these condemnations, equivocations, repudiations, and protestations are all fundamentally silly because they are part of a D.C. Kabuki that treats the last straw as if it was wholly different than the million other straws everyone was happy to carry.

Suddenly, all of these people and groups are stunned to discover that Helen Thomas is . . . Helen Thomas. Feh.

Well, I think that taking a pro-Holocaust position is a bit further than even Helen Thomas has gone before, but his point is well taken.

UPDATE: John Hinderaker notes that the New York Times has yet to cover the story in its print edition.

An editor at the Atlantic writes a story relishing the arrest of Kenneth Starr for operating a Ponzi scheme. It never occurs to him that Kenneth Starr the crooked Hollywood investment adviser might not be the same person as Kenneth Starr the former Appeals Court judge and independent prosecutor.

So the editors are the big advantage of the mainstream media over blogs? Quis edet ipsos editores?

(Via Professor Bainbridge.)

Despite all the well-deserved mockery he received, the “Investigative Editor” of McClatchy’s Washington Bureau is standing by his position that Congressmen can be trusted to tell the truth:

I say we checked it out and stand by the story and really, and I mean this, can’t believe that anyone – congressman or garbageman – would make up this fact that one of the nastiest racist terms was hurled.

He simply can’t imagine that a Congressman could make up a racially charged incident for political purposes. In fact, he was so sure, he wouldn’t even talk to an eyewitness who contradicted his service’s reporting. This guy is in charge of investigative reporting.

(Previous post.)

Ann Althouse notes that the Washington Post’s story on Texas’s new social studies curriculum is highly misleading. I was unimpressed by the author’s (Michael Birnbaum) earlier effort on the subject, but this one is even worse.

POSTSCRIPT: I’m not defending the Texas Board of Education. My earlier thoughts on the controversy (mostly that there shouldn’t even be a mandatory state curriculum) are here.

In an article plugging Fair Game, the new Sean Penn alternate history movie, the LA Times has some trouble with the facts:

Starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, “Fair Game” is part spy thriller, part domestic drama, and tells the story of Valerie Plame, played by Watts, the undercover CIA operative whose name was leaked to the media by the Bush White House in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson (Penn). Wilson had publicly accused the administration of misrepresenting evidence of an Iraqi nuclear arms program in the run-up to the Iraq war. The administration retaliated by “outing” his wife as a CIA operative, ruining her career and, some argued, violating a law that forbids exposing CIA agents on the grounds it jeopardizes the lives of field agents.

Let’s see: Plame’s name was not leaked by anyone at the White House, but rather by Richard Armitage, who worked at the State Department. Armitage was a moderate and leaked her name accidentally, rather than out of any effort to punish anyone. It’s true that Wilson made various public allegations, but the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report found that he lied. And, it’s awfully rich for the left to pretend, in this one case only, that they care about exposing the identities of CIA agents.

As they say, everything is spot on aside from that.

(Previous post.) (Via Big Government.)

The Washington Post’s army of editors and fact-checkers seems to have fallen down when it comes to Tom Shales’s piece on the end of Law and Order:

Fred Thompson, who growled around for a few seasons as a DA and later ran for Congress, never seemed to be doing much beyond playing himself: an old grouch.

Let’s see. Thompson was first an attorney, then an actor (he got his start playing himself in a movie about a case that brought down a corrupt governor), and then he was elected to the US Senate. After eight years in the Senate, he retired and joined the cast of Law and Order. He played the DA for six seasons, and then retired to run for president.

I don’t remember much growling either, but I’ll agree Arthur Branch did have a lot in common with Fred Thompson.

(Via the Corner.)

The Washington Post is moving hard left:

The once-cautious Washington Post has begun to invest heavily in the liberal blogosphere, transforming its online presence – through a combination of accident and design – into a competitor of the Huffington Post and TalkingPointsMemo as much as the New York Times.

The Post’s foray into the new media world received some unfavorable attention last weekend when its latest hire, Dave Weigel, who covers conservatives, referred to gay marriage foes as “bigots.” But the resulting controversy brought into relief a larger shift: The Post now hosts three of the strongest liberal blogs on the Internet, and draws a disproportionate share of its traffic and buzz from them, a significant change for a traditional newspaper that has struggled to remake itself.

I’m sad to see this happen. The Washington Post has long been the most respectable of the major liberal papers. Sometimes they even deviated from liberal orthodoxy. But that aspect of the Post seems to be dying.

One recent story illustrates a microcosm of the Post’s shift. The Post ran a story about how the Obama administration exempted BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from environmental scrutiny. Would the New York Times, or any other major liberal paper have run such a story? Certainly not. But then the Post sent the story down the memory hole.

I also think that the Post is making a blunder. Just in terms of Hotelling’s law, the Post had a good position as the rightmost of the leftist newspapers. That is the best position to capture a lot of readers. Why would they want to move left, and give that position to another paper?

(Via Power Line.)

Peter Weiss says a recent CNN story on medical tourism is completely bogus:

CNN reports a man couldn’t find a better quote for his surgery than a price ten times higher than the going rate. This is bad enough to put all CNN health reporting in question.

I can’t verify the details, but one can’t help noticing that CNN didn’t actually report anything about the price of the service beyond what the man claimed. It’s anyone’s guess whether they didn’t bother to look, or suppressed what they found.

(Via Instapundit.)

CNN calls the Duke lacrosse affair a “sex scandal”. Wrong. As we well know now, the affair was not a sex scandal or a rape scandal, it was an official misconduct, media failure, and political correctness scandal.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: And not just CNN; also ABC, AP, and the Washington Post.

Power Line’s Scott Johnson asked James Asher, the “Investigative Editor” of McClatchy’s Washington bureau if he was going to investigate his service’s inaccurate coverage of four Democratic legislators’ unsupported allegations of racial slurs at the Tea Party protest of Obamacare. (No evidence has yet surfaced that supports their allegations, and several videos have surfaced that cast doubt on their allegations.)

Asher responded:

There is no reason to. The criticism is based on a video tape that depicted a different time and not the incident.

One of the many videos of the non-incident that have circulated depicts the wrong time (or so we’ve been told). Those who wish to ignore the evidence have used that video as an excuse to do so. Then he concludes:

And we feel confident that the congress members would not concoct their stories.

They feel confident that Congressmen would not lie. Wow.

UPDATE: The saga continues.

UPDATE: The following videos are really revealing. The first one includes two videos: the Congressmen entering the building (that’s the one that we’re told is the wrong video) and earlier leaving it. Interestingly, only the wrong video seems to fit the Congressmen’s description (i.e., with Rep. Cleaver part of the procession). In any case, neither video supports the allegation of racial slurs.

The second video follows the Congressmen from many angles on their way out the building. (That’s the “right” direction, we’re told.) Three weeks after the incident, Rep. Carson changed his story to say that the racial slurs were loudest when he crossed the street, so it includes video from across the street as well. Again, none of it supports the allegation.

Rep. Carson said the racial slurs came from “hundreds of people”, and Rep. Cleaver said it was a “chorus”, but no hint of it is discernible on any video. Andrew Breitbart has offered a $100k bounty to anyone who could produce evidence that this happened (or if Carson could pass a polygraph). The bounty remainds unclaimed.

Moreover, many people are unaware that there is an underground subway connecting the Congressional office buildings to the Capitol. (I’ve ridden it; it’s sweet. It must have cost a fortune.) There’s no reason why so many Congresspeople would have chosen to walk through hostile, supposedly violent crowds that day unless they were looking for an incident.

All of which leads to a conclusion that is unthinkable (to McClatchy), these Congressmen concocted the entire incident.

(Previous post.)

On Monday the NYT published a hyperbolic op-ed by Linda Greenhouse attacking Arizona’s new immigration law. The whole piece was based on an error:

And in case the phrase “lawful contact” makes it appear as if the police are authorized to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime, another section strips the statute of even that fig leaf of reassurance. “A person is guilty of trespassing,” the law provides, by being “present on any public or private land in this state” while lacking authorization to be in the United States — a new crime of breathing while undocumented.

This is false. The trespassing provision was stripped from the bill before it passed, as the NYT concedes in its correction:

An earlier version of this Op-Ed essay referred incorrectly to the provisions of the new Arizona immigration statute. The version of the bill signed by the governor no longer includes a section under which undocumented immigrants would be guilty of trespassing for being on Arizona soil.

Oops. Is it too much to expect that a “Distinguished Journalist in Residence” at Yale Law School might actually read the bill, or at least determine its provisions, before trashing it? Apparently so.

Anyway, the NYT has corrected the piece by deleting the offending paragraph, but without that paragraph the piece makes no sense. Greenhouse calls Arizona a police state, saying:

Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

Actually “distasteful” is far too mild a word. (But why limit your attention to bygone eras in the Soviet Union and South Africa? How about today’s UK? Oh, but the UK is run by progressives. Hmm.) However, if the law applies only to those who are arrested for a crime — as it does — that description really doesn’t apply. So now the piece is a hyperbolic expression of outrage (yes, it does compare the law to the Holocaust, if obliquely) without any hook to hang that outrage on.

POSTSCRIPT: I feel compelled to remind my readers that I’m a proponent of open borders. I’m not concerned about Latin American immigrants changing the nature of our society or whatever. Unfortunately, open borders are incompatible with the welfare state. If we cannot prevent immigrants from becoming a drain on public finances (as seems to be a political and/or legal impossibility), we have to restrict immigration to those who can earn their keep. Personally I would rather fix the government and open the borders, but it’s not up to me.

In any case, if we have immigration controls, Arizona is within its rights to turn over illegal immigrants that it arrests for other crimes to the federal government for deportation. As I understand it, that’s what the Arizona law does. Not being familiar with the debate, I’m not sure if I would support the bill. It certainly wouldn’t be a priority for me. But I also certainly don’t see it as some sort of Nazi-esque outrage.

UPDATE: This was probably an honest (if stupid) mistake. But Greenhouse’s errors aren’t always innocent.

Another blow to the vaunted fact-checking prowess of the New York Times:

Welcome to April 2nd. And that means a deconstruction of what happened on April Fool’s Day when I announced that I was going to become the official White House law blogger.

The basic idea was this: A bunch of law bloggers would try to punk the political bloggers, whose reputation is to grab any old rumor and run with it. Fact checking hasn’t always been the strong suit of this community.

But the political bloggers, to their collective credit, didn’t bite, despite wide dissemination of the story. Not on the right or the left. Instead it was the vaunted New York Times that ran with the story without bothering to check its facts.

To be fair, given the effort he put into the prank, I would have been fooled. I do my fact-checking using Google, not by contacting sources. So, it seems, does the New York Times.

(Via Instapundit.)

Byron York on the Chris Matthews’s curious inability to remember the left’s rhetoric during the last administration:

In the Bush years, we often heard the phrase “Bush regime” from some quarters of the left. So Limbaugh applied it to Obama.

Apparently some people didn’t get it. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews appeared deeply troubled by the word. “I’ve never seen language like this in the American press,” he said. . . The use of the word ‘regime’ in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus [Limbaugh] to stop using it.”

Matthews didn’t stop there. “I never heard the word ‘regime,’ before, have you?” he said to NBC’s Chuck Todd. “I don’t even think Joe McCarthy ever called this government a ‘regime.'”

It appears that Matthews has suffered a major memory loss. I don’t have the facilities to search for every utterance of Joe McCarthy, but a look at more recent times reveals many, many, many examples of the phrase “Bush regime.” In fact, a search of the Nexis database for “Bush regime” yields 6,769 examples from January 20, 2001 to the present.

It was used 16 times in the New York Times. . . [and] 24 times in the Washington Post. . . Perhaps Matthews missed all of those references. If he did, he still might have heard the phrase the many times it was uttered on his own network, MSNBC. For example, on January 8 of this year, Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak said that, “In George Bush’s regime, only one million jobs had been created…” . . .

Finally — you knew this was coming — on June 14, 2002, Chris Matthews himself introduced a panel discussion about a letter signed by many prominent leftists condemning the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror. “Let’s go to the Reverend Al Sharpton,” Matthews said. “Reverend Sharpton, what do you make of this letter and this panoply of the left condemning the Bush regime?”

Oops. Perhaps Joe McCarthy never called the U.S. government a regime, but Chris Matthews did. And a lot of other people did, too. So now we are supposed to believe him when he expresses disgust at Rush Limbaugh doing the same?

They don’t remember this stuff because it seemed reasonable to them when they were the ones saying it.

UPDATE: “Even Chris Matthews doesn’t listen to Chris Matthews.“

I’m not Catholic, but I’m also not particularly hostile to modern Catholicism, so I’m not very invested either way in the question of who is ultimately responsible for the Catholic church’s molestation scandal. However, I am very invested in the idea that the media ought to tell the truth.

I find compelling these two pieces (in National Review and the New York Daily News) arguing that efforts to pin the scandal on the Pope are false and indeed libelous.

But the MSNBC headline “Pope Describes Touching Boys: I Went Too Far” is an outright lie. (NBC has apologized.) I guess that’s MSNBC’s job: making other dishonest media look good by comparison.

(Via the Corner.)

The networks breathlessly covered the bogus stories of threats against Democrats for passing health care nationalization, but when it came to an actual threat (a man arrested for death threats against Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House minority whip) most of them skipped the story. NBC covered the story briefly, but withheld the detail that the man arrested was an Obama donor.

As Glenn Reynolds says, it’s all about the narrative.

I criticize Clark Hoyt (the New York Times ombudsman) a lot, so it seems only fair to note when he gets one right. It doesn’t change the pattern; he’s still defending his paper, this time from the left. But at least he has the facts on his side this time.

Paul Krugman, serial liar:

Here’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation. . .

I want you to consider the contrast: on one side, the closing argument was an appeal to our better angels, urging politicians to do what is right, even if it hurts their careers; on the other side, callous cynicism. Think about what it means to condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality? (Actually, we know who: the people at the Tea Party protest who hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote.)

So there you have it: opposing health care nationalization is racist. A little later, he actually comes out and says it: “It was racial hate-mongering.”

The attack on the tea party as racist is a standard rhetorical flourish. Some Democrats claim they heard racial epithets from the crowd. There’s no way to disprove it, and in a crowd of thousands, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few cranks. No one is taking that line of attack seriously, which is why Krugman only uses it as a throwaway line. The center of his attack is that Newt Gingrich is a racist, and by association, anyone else who opposes health care nationalization must be too.

But that attack is false, as the New York Times sheepishly admits:

This column quotes Newt Gingrich as saying that “Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation, a quotation that originally appeared in The Washington Post. After this column was published, The Post reported that Mr. Gingrich said his comment referred to Johnson’s Great Society policies, not to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

What a fool. Krugman poses as the expert commentator who can tell us what is really happening and why. He frequently attributes thoughts and motives to his enemies based on nothing more than speculation. In fact, this column makes clear that Krugman hasn’t a clue what motivates his opponents. If he actually knew anything about Newt Gingrich, he would know that Gingrich would never say that. Gingrich has a substantial record — if Krugman cared to look at it — and it makes clear that Gingrich believes the Civil Rights Act was right and has been vindicated by history. LBJ is vilified for many things in Republican circles, and justly so, but the Civil Rights Act is not one of them.

But Krugman doesn’t achieve his insights into his enemies’ character through studying their writings and speeches. He gets it all from his own fevered imagination, in which all are rendered as mere parodies of themselves. Paul Krugman is nothing more than a curiously respectable Keith Olbermann.

The New York Times gets credit, I guess, for having the honesty to run the correction. Usually they don’t correct errors and lies in columns. But then they give most of that credit back for refusing to take the blame. Trying to shift blame to the Washington Post? Lame. The New York Times purports to be a major newspaper, but they can’t even bother to check an obviously bogus quote on which an entire column is erected?

But the Washington Post gets a full helping of blame of its own. First, the story was obviously wrong. (Gingrich’s record aside, here’s another hint the story was wrong: the direct quotation includes no mention of civil rights legislation.) Worse, they never affixed a correction to the article, and instead relegated to a post on the Washington Post blog.

(Via Instapundit.)

The LA Times confuses the Army with the NRA. (Via Instapundit.)

How can you misreport the content of a 30-second Superbowl ad? The AP manages:

And a commercial by conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, perhaps the most anticipated ad of the night, hinted at a serious subject although it took a humorous tone too. Heisman winner Tim Tebow and his mother talk about her difficult pregnancy with him and how she was advised to end the pregnancy—implying an antiabortion message—but ended with Tebow tackling his mom and saying the family must be “tough.”

The ad didn’t say anything about how she was advised to end the pregnancy. The closest it came was “he almost didn’t make it into this world”.

Also, it wasn’t Tim but Pam that said the family must be tough. Aside from that, their reporting was spot on.

(Via Power Line.)

The mainstream media really doesn’t like James O’Keefe. When Salon runs a story alleging that he manned a literature table at a conference of white supremacists, that’s just too good to check. That last thing you want to do is look carefully into whether he really was manning a literature table there, or whether the event in question really was a conference of white supremacists. You might lose a perfectly good attack story if you checked the facts.

The answer, incidentally, seems to be no on both counts. I wasn’t going to bother to report this incident when it was just a Salon story picked up by the Village Voice. (In the Village Voice, O’Keefe had actually morphed into an organizer of the event.) But now the story is appearing in the supposedly respectable press, like the Newark Star-Ledger. Retracto is on the case.

Big Government is all over the many, many news outlets that have reported, inaccurately, that James O’Keefe’s arrest had something to do with attempted wiretapping. (It didn’t.) They have sixteen so far.

Salon:

The Jan. 25 article “Is the President Panicking” originally stated that Fox News led the charge against Bill Clinton in the ’94 midterm elections. Fox News did not come into being until 1996. The story has been corrected.

Awesome. Seriously, how do you make a mistake like this? Unless you’re just making stuff up.

Okay, I know it’s only Salon, but still.

(Via Instapundit.)

The mainstream media doesn’t like James O’Keefe. When O’Keefe and Helen Giles caught ACORN conspiring to assist with underage prostitution and human trafficking, the media ignored it as long as they could. But, when O’Keefe was arrested at the office of Sen. Landrieu (D-LA), the media rushed to press without getting the facts straight.

It’s not clear yet what exactly O’Keefe was up to, but one thing we do know is he wasn’t trying to bug anyone’s phone.

Many media outlets have retractions to issue. The Washington Post has issued its retraction already. CBS and the LA Times have yet to do so.

POSTSCRIPT: It seems as though O’Keefe was probably trying to show that Sen. Landrieu had rigged her phones to block incoming calls. He should have gotten legal advice before trying such a stunt.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: O’Keefe has a statement up now.

UPDATE: CBS retracts.

Dishonesty in the New York Times is not limited to politics and international affairs, we can also find it in the gossip/fashion pages. The NYT admits distorting a photograph of actress Christina Hendricks to make her look big. They claim it was an accident “during routine processing”. You can decide whether to believe that; I’ll just point out that the distortion happened to be exactly what the article needed to support its catty point, a point that the original photograph failed to support.

(Via Instapundit.)

At 12:46 am Eastern, the front page of Boston Globe’s web site still reads “All eyes on Bay State ballot”.

Politiken, Denmark’s second-largest newspaper (according to Wikipedia), editorializes:

He comes from humble beginnings and defends the weak and vulnerable, because he can identify himself with their conditions.

And no we are not thinking of Jesus Christ, whose birthday has just been celebrated – – but rather the President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama. . .

From the start, Obama’s critics have claimed that his supporters have idolised him as a saviour, thus attempting to dismantle the concrete hope that Obama has represented for most Americans.

The idea was naturally that the comparison between Jesus and Obama – which is something that the critics developed themselves – would be comical, blasphemous, or both.

If such a comparison were to be made, it would, of course, inevitably be to Obama’s advantage.

Evan Thomas must be glad for the company.

POSTSCRIPT: If the comparison weren’t bizarre (and, yes, blasphemous) enough, what’s this about how Obama’s critics are responsible for the comparison? That sort of outlandish claim would be better supported by a few examples. At least then I’d know what they are talking about.

Photo caption in the Washington Post:

Rep. Larry Kissell (D-N.C.) voted against health-care reform even though it is badly needed in the largely rural district he represents.

(Via Hot Air.)

CNN seems to have flunked reading comprehension:

An al Qaeda spokesman Saturday appeared to be trying to improve the group’s image in the region with a new audio message in English. . .

“We express our condolences to the families of the Muslim men, women and children killed in these criminal acts and we ask Allah to have mercy on those killed and accept them as shohadaa (martyrs),” he says in the video.

“We also express the same in regard to the unintended Muslim victims of the mujahedeen’s operations against the crusaders and their allies and puppets, and to the countless faceless and nameless Muslim victims of the murderous crusades” in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Waziristan regions and Swat Valley, and elsewhere, he said.

It is a rare example of al Qaeda offering condolences to the families of those killed in the group’s own attacks.

(Emphasis mine.)

Yes, rare indeed. So rare, in fact, that there are no instances of it, including this one. Despite what CNN seems to want to read into the statement, Al Qaeda isn’t offering condolences to those killed in their attacks. They make clear they are offering condolences to those Muslims who were accidentally killed in their attacks on the infidels. It’s right there in black and white; why can’t CNN read?

Also, it happens to be complete crap. Al Qaeda hates moderate Muslims nearly as much as they hate infidels. The only interesting thing here is they feel the need to hide it. They must be having recruiting difficulties.

(Via Althouse, via Instapundit.)