Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
The wayward press Archive
May 04, 2008
April 24, 2008
LAT hit piece on Obama tracks Clinton smears
Dan Moran must have been pretty hard up for a story.
April 23, 2008
The pundits and the rounding error
HRC is leading Obama by about 9.4 percentage points in Pennsylvania. But by rounding her 54.7% up to 55%, and his 45.3% down to 45%, the media transform a single-digit victory into a double-digit victory. (I estimate that the actual final margin will be 9.1%, which will STILL be rounded up to 10%.)
Always round after you calculate, not before.
April 18, 2008
A winner-takes-all market in infamy
Gibson and Stephanopoulos are the unlucky winners.
April 17, 2008
What Obama Should Have Said
Since he's going to keep getting the question: Q: Does Jeremiah Wright love America as much as you do? A: Well, Jeremiah Wright served his country as a United States Marine, and Dick Cheney made sure that he got out of serving in the military. So, I don't know whether he loves America as much as me, but he certainly...
April 16, 2008
Comment on the debate
Yechhhh!!!!!!
Call 818 460 7476 to complain.
Or go to:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/DemocraticDebate/comments?type=story&id;=4666956
to post a comment.
March 23, 2008
Just in the holiday spirit ...
... I'm defending Glenn Reynolds. He links to an Easter poem by one blogger on a site that also has a racist rant by a different blogger, and Glenn Greenwald attacks Reynolds for it.
March 20, 2008
Michael Scherer Fluffs McCain
Take that, NPR! Time Magazine's Michael Scherer can kiss up to McCain more than you can. Writes Scherer: The ongoing saga of the McCain Campaign’s effort to keep the political discourse respectful added another chapter today. As reported by Jon Martin, the campaign has suspended a junior staffer, Soren Dayton, a conservative blogger/consultant who worked in McCain’s political department. His...
Another NPR puff-piece on McCain
Their "news stories" sound like campaign radio spots.
March 15, 2008
Defining infamy down
"infamous" is the new "awesome."
March 11, 2008
Too late, the truth about NAFTAgate
Naturally, the lie about what Austan Goolsbee is supposed to have said to the Canadian government has gotten around the world seven times by now, but at last the truth has managed to lace its boots on. Neil Macdonald, the Washington correspondent for the CBC, has the entire timeline. The whole flap started with a political operative for Canada's Tory...
March 04, 2008
Does Cleveland rock?--let's go to the map
It's not a horse-race once they've stopped running. Why can't the racetrack announcers shut up?
March 03, 2008
Duplicity
The "smoking gun" memo from Canada shows Goolsbee saying in private what Obama has been saying in public: renegotiate NAFTA to strengthen labor and environmental protection rules.
March 01, 2008
Query
About Fox Business's journalistic ethics, if any.
February 28, 2008
Anatomy of a smear: Obama and NAFTA
No, a senior member of the Obama campaign did not call the Canadian Ambassador to say "never mind" about Obama's call to renegotiate NAFTA. Even CTV's original source has now backed away from that claim: "perhaps a miscommunication." To cover its journalistic butt, CTV is now hinting darkly about a phone call from Austan Goolsbee, not a staffer but an academic adviser to Obama, not to the Ambassador but to someone in the Canadian Consulate-General in Chicago. John McCain, having frankly said he had no idea whether the original story was true, now pretends to believe it, and uses it to question Obama's integrity. Taylor Marsh and Larry Johnson side with McCain. Feh.
February 25, 2008
"The real McCain"? I don't think so.
David Brooks is shocked -- shocked! that anyone could accuse John McCain, who has a lobbyist working out of his own campaign bus, of being too cozy with lobbyists.
Mark Halperin, enabler of bigotry
He could use a short trip to Shusterville. The time to put an end to this crap is right now.
February 24, 2008
All politics is domestic
MSM campaign coverage doesn't pay enough attention to foreign policy. Those stories on how much crappy food they have to eat in Iowa don't just write themselves.
February 21, 2008
McCain and the media barons
It doesn't pay, if you're running a media empire, to annoy the chair or the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, especially not one who has presided over the media consolidation that has made you richer and more powerful.
February 19, 2008
The Obama Backlash Proceeds Apace
The New York Times reports that Barack Obama might back away from indications he gave last year that he would agree to accept public financing in the general election if the Republican nominee did the same. The hesitation has given Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee whose advisers concede he would most likely fall far short of Mr. Obama’s fund-raising...
February 16, 2008
Nick Kristof Should Go Back to Darfur
...because he has done great work there. Oh yes--and he does such abysmal work here. His Sunday column is simply an absurdity. Entitled "The World's Worst Panderer," he tries to argue that John McCain is courageous and principled. Of course, this is difficult to claim with a straight face, and even a little research would demonstrate its absurdity. So Kristof...
February 15, 2008
Reason #147 why Chris Matthews is a Dolt
Although not as much of a groupie as Mark, I'm an Obama supporter. So theoretically, I should have no problem with the press attacks on Clinton. But I do. And Chris Matthews encapsulated why on Morning Joe: Asked why he believed Clinton had gone negative, Matthews again struck an antagonistic chord about the campaign's media operation. "The kneecapping hasn't worked....
February 14, 2008
Textual criticism
The NYT goes into the tank for John McCain on the torture bill. He "steadfastly opposes the use of torture," even as he votes against a bill forbidding torture.
February 03, 2008
Wagging the dog, again?
Were the Baghdad market bombers really developmentally disabled?
January 31, 2008
Two non-scandals
Jake Tapper is, as far as I've encountered him, both a nice guy and a competent reporter. But the pressure to produce one "gotcha" per day seems to be getting to him. He's stepped in it twice in the past two days, once on an Obama story and once on a Clinton story. In each case, he had to manufacture...
January 21, 2008
Do black votes for Obama count?
Racism is alive and well on ... NPR?
January 14, 2008
Biggest Gaffe of the Campaign So Far
David Brooks has a decent column today about how the tropes used by the Clinton and Obama campaigns don't really work all that well because their original targets--the white patriarchy--aren't really involved when they attack each other. Okay. But then he comes up with this doozy: All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of...
January 03, 2008
Bodacious Tata
AFP reports that India's Tata Group, its largest conglomerate, is set not only to buy out Ford's Land Rover and Jaguar divisions, but also to produce the world's cheapest car, which at $2,500 "could revolutionise car costs worldwide." Two points should be made here. The New York Times piece on the same subject,mentions the Jaguar buyout and Tata's CEO's taste...
January 02, 2008
Concerning mendacity
Yes, there are more black men under 35 behind bars than there are enrolled full-time in four-year colleges. Richard Cohen needs to retract his charge of "mendacity." I'm not holding my breath.
December 29, 2007
How not to criticize a football coach
My and Mark's employer has a new football coach--Rick Neuheisel, a former Bruin quarterback who also coached Colorado and Washington. And thereby hangs a tale that makes no one look good. Neuheisel was fired from his last two jobs in circumstances that did not speak well of him. At Colorado, he committed a series of recruiting violations, mostly in terms...
December 10, 2007
Dumond, Huckabee, and Clinton Derangement Syndrome
The Dumond case had less to do with born-again Christianity than with undying hatred for Bill Clinton.
December 06, 2007
Two More Filibusters
Senate Republicans have now decided to filibuster two MORE critical bills coming out of the House, as well as Senate committees. One bill would amend the Alternative Minimum Tax to give relief to middle-income taxpayers; the other is the energy bill, which would raise federal fuel efficiency standards for the first time in 30 years and set renewable energy portfolio...
December 05, 2007
Innumerate, and proud of it
Why does Howard Kurtz still have a job? I don't suppose being pig-ignorant of basic statistics is a firing offense, but "standing by" your false assertion when someone who knows what he's talking about tries to correct you ought to be.
November 29, 2007
More Justified Piling On Joe Klein
We now know the reason behind Joe Klein's embarrasingly bad and misleading piece on FISA in this week's Time, aside from Klein's laziness and inside-the-Beltway blinders: his central source was right-wing crazy Congressman Peter Hoekstra, last seen claiming that we actually had found WMDs in Iraq. This much in and of itself might be reason for Klein's temporary suspension from...
November 14, 2007
Woo hoo
Here's a Cat4 cyclone (called hurricanes in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico) drawing a bead on Kolkata and Bangla Desh. Satellite photo here. It reminds me of the days before Katrina, with some interesting differences: (1) The people in the path of Sidr are poor as churchmice. (2) They live in one of the largest, flattest, lowest, river...
November 13, 2007
Working the refs: Climate Change Edition
Andrew Revkin of the New York Times seems to be a conscientious, intelligent reporter. He has a good blog on environmental issues, and strives to be, well, fair and balanced. Which is the entire problem. Revkin has recently announced that there is a group of "environmental centrists" who have tried to take the climate change debate away from the "yelling...
September 24, 2007
More journalistic malpractice
Why give anonymity for routine campaign slander?
September 18, 2007
Uh, I hate to bring this up, but....
Thomas Frank's otherwise wonderful and insightful article on Bob Herbert ignores the 900-pound-gorilla in the room. Frank asks: why don't people read or talk about Bob Herbert's column more? He notes 1) that Herbert's judgments have been very accurate; 2) he's not a knee-jerk liberal; and 3) he writes about issues of poverty that most columnists ignore. Then he goes...
September 05, 2007
How it's done
Andrew Ward reports on Fred Thompson: he's campaigning as an outsider, but in fact was a Capitol Hill lawyer who morphed into a corporate lobbyist.
August 27, 2007
What does Sheryl Stolberg do for a living?
Sometimes I really wonder what goes on inside reporters' heads--particularly if they cover national politics for the New York Times. In what passes for "news analysis," Sheryl Gay Stolberg informs us that Gonzales' resignation could be good news for the President. Along with Karl Rove's departure, it gives him a chance for a "fresh start" because he can go into...
What's news about Sen. Craig's arrest?
Men's room pick-ups: not news.
Abuse of power: news.
The Drudgified press stresses the prurient over the significant.
August 12, 2007
"Objectivity" in political reporting
Is it "objective" to call a bigoted remark a bigoted remark?
August 09, 2007
Fox News: Hit them again--harder
The Horse' Mouth has a nice clip of Neil Cavuto practically begging Democrats to appear on his show. As Greg Sargent accurately notes, this demonstrates the wisdom of the blogosphere's strategy to aggressively attack the right-wing noise machine, which has now moved mainstream in Democratic circles. But since the only thing that terrorists understand is force, the next step should...
August 08, 2007
Very bad news, stop cheering.
The New York Times appears to be about to stop charging for its opinion articles and archive searches (I only have unsourced assertions and suspicions to support this, but the noise is consistent). Several bloggers are cheering. I am not, and they are wrong. I'm happy to get anything I can for free, but this development, however nice in the...
August 07, 2007
If it's broke, don't fix it.
Rupert Murdoch has promised not to interfere with the *editorial page* of the Wall Street Journal.
August 03, 2007
Obama, nukes, and idiot-elite opinion
Any ignoramus knows that, if we have to attack al-Qaeda bases in Pakistan, we shouldn't use nukes. And any sophisticated strategic analyst agrees. But a little learning is a dangerous thing, and reporters and politicians who know just enough strategic theory to get it completely wrong are ganging up on Barack Obama for saying something that's obviously correct.
July 29, 2007
Is Rudy "pro-choice"? Not hardly.
No, but that's the way he'd spin it in a general election, and the "liberal media" will go along with being spun.
July 26, 2007
O'Reilly O'Reilly'ed
No, no one on Bill O'Reilly's site called for burning down the Capital.
July 23, 2007
Just as we all suspected
To CNN, politics is just another spectator sport.
July 14, 2007
Seeing-what-you-want-to-see Dep't
By a 45-39 margin, the public thinks the major networks are either unbiased or tilted toward conservatives, rather than exhibiting the famous "liberal media bias" the right wing has been screaming about since the Nixon years. But Rasmussen Reports and Instapundit simply refuse to do the arithmetic, and report the 39% minority view as if it were the prevailing view, simply because it's more common than the view that there's a conservative bias (not surprising, given that the "liberal bias" charge gets lots of mainstream media attention, while a mass audience virtually never hears the "conservative bias" charge.
July 13, 2007
Laffer curve follies
Brad DeLong points us, with entirely appropriate added snark, at Mark Thoma's destructo job on the WSJ's lead editorial today and the truly historically nonsensical graphish thingy in it. It might be a good time to recall what the Laffer Curve is about, and its use to argue for tax cuts long ago and in another universe. The curve relates...
July 03, 2007
I give up
Ken Silverstein's tricking Washington lobbyists into revealing to him their deep sleaziness isn't be ethically troubling. The journalistic establishment's disapproval of Silverstein's investigative enterprise, on the other hand, says very bad things about which side the mainstream media is on in the battle between the abusers of public trust and the voters.
June 11, 2007
More on hot gas
The author of the LA Times piece I linked to in this earlier post about gasoline thermal expansion, Elizabeth Douglass, was nice enough to send some comments and useful links (for example, NIST discussion of point-of-sale fluid measurement). For a working reporter with deadlines, I consider this pretty classy behavior. I think her piece was a good roundup of the...
June 06, 2007
Wrong question
Mitt Romney doesn't know what the null set is, or what a non sequitur is. Fortunately for him, neither do the reporters covering the campaign.
June 05, 2007
Bad reporting: bias, or post-literacy?
A candidate who makes a subtle speech can count on being misreported. That's a bad thing.
May 30, 2007
"A somewhat flexible relationship with reality"
In other words, Lou Dobbs is a pathological liar.
Spinning much?
One poll, two different stories. Looks as if the on-line version of the Wall Street Journal is all ready to be a stablemate of Fox News.
May 25, 2007