Lying NYT Scumbags Lead Stupid, Blind Media Lemmings

Too harsh? Naaaah.

Heather Mac Donald spells it out in The New York Post, yesterday:

Driven by a precipitate lust to discredit the Bush administration, The New York Times has misread a recent Justice Department report on alleged government abuse of terror suspects. More important, the front-page smear job set off a chain reaction of imitation news articles across the country, parroting the Times' error. Thus has the war on the war on terror been waged — with misrepresentation, group thinking and blinding biases.

The Times announced on July 21 that the Justice Department's inspector general had "received 34 complaints of civil rights violations by department employees that it considered credible." Lest the reader miss the significance of this purported scoop, reporter Philip Shenon editorialized: "The inspector general's report . . . is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants swept up in terrorism investigations under the [USA Patriot Act]."

The linchpin of the Times' purported expose is its statement that the inspector general "considered" those 34 complaints "credible." This phrasing suggests that the inspector general had investigated the complaints and reached a factual judgment about their truth.

But the office of the inspector general puts the matter differently. According to its July 17 report, the office received several hundred filings over the last six months that appeared to state a claim within its jurisdiction. Upon closer analysis, however, the vast majority of those several hundred complaints, as written, proved to be unrelated to the Patriot Act. That left 34 that, according to the report, "raised credible Patriot Act violations on their face."

The key phrase here is "on their face" — a lawyer's usage that means that a claim, as written, meets legal requirements of sufficiency.

The July 17 report drew no conclusions about the likely truth of those 34 facially valid complaints — nor could it, for it has opened investigations into only six of them. Yet the nation's press corps dutifully took the Times' bait. "Abuse of post-9/11 detainees detailed; 34 'credible' cases in follow-up report," trumpeted the Chicago Tribune the next day. "Report outlines rights violations in Sept. 11 Act," announced USA Today.

Only the Washington Post got the story right: "The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating six complaints from Muslims who have alleged that federal employees pursuing enforcement of the USA Patriot Act violated their civil rights or civil liberties," read its lead....

This is a case, actually, of "credible" not meaning "credible". I guess it does not occur to NYT staff that a word might have a different meaning in different contexts. Especially when you are gung-ho to make somebody look bad. See also Ignorance Breeds Arrogance.

(Thanks, Mickey.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/29/03 06:44:59 PM
Categorized as Media.

"The Sleepy Superpower Awakes"

So notices Charles Krauthammer in Time, dated Aug. 4:

.... The world talks in ominous terms about the new American empire. But the U.S. was far more of an empire in, say, 1949, when it sat behind its great wall of tank armies and nuclear bombers in static defense of large territories in Western Europe and the Pacific Rim. That empire we are in the process of dismantling. The Soviets are gone, and those places, having risen from the ashes, are quite capable of defending themselves. The threat from North Korea, for example, is no longer the spread of communism but of nuclear weapons. The response should be not a sitting-duck standing army but a quick and light air-sea reaction force....

Less plodding, less heavy, less static, less fixed. This is the new American strategy: Empire Lite. Its assembly, having been announced piecemeal, has largely been missed. Make no mistake, however. We are in the midst of a great redeployment that will not only redraw the map of the world but also mark the ground to which history itself has moved.

(Thanks, Charles.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/29/03 05:35:18 PM
Categorized as International.

"Entertainer Bob Hope Died a Catholic"

Vide.

(Thanks, Bill.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/29/03 11:00:46 AM
Categorized as Religious.

Dowd is Out in Mobile

Michael Marshall, editor of the Mobile Register, explains, July 27, why Maureen Dowd's columns will not appear in his publication until hell freezes over she retracts her misquotation of George W. Bush, quoting his letter to Gail Collins, editorial page editor at NYT:

.... I was aware that Ms. Dowd used the president's full quote in a subsequent column, but that column makes no reference to the earlier blunder. That would not qualify as a correction or clarification in any editor's book.

If there has been some other clarification that I have somehow missed, please let me know.

Absent any other clarification by Dowd, I need to know if The New York Times Wire Service is going to set the matter straight, or if the Times management has made a conscious decision to let the error stand.

I can believe that Ms. Dowd had no "intention to distort" the president's meaning. But when it comes to the need for a correction or clarification, intent is irrelevant. She goofed, and that goof must be corrected....

I can believe, too, that Dowd didn't do it on purpose: I think she has such livid hatred for Bush and his administration that her feverish mind caught a couple of phrases that (she thought) made Bush look bad, and she ran with them.

See Maureen Dowd No Longer Welcome in the "Crossroads of the Piney Woods" and More Deception From an NYT Columnist: Maureen Dowd, this time.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/29/03 08:35:01 AM
Categorized as Media.

Give and Take at NYT

Tom Sylvester shows at NRO yesterday how The New York Times likes to explain away the published results of studies that challenge PC dogma:

.... Exhibit A: On April 19, 2001, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported, "Researchers conducting the largest long-term study of child care in the United States…found that children who spend most of their time in child care are three times as likely to exhibit behavioral problems than those who are cared for primarily by their mothers."

Three days later, in a piece titled, "Science, Studies and Motherhood," Stolberg wrote that before working moms start feeling guilty, "they should stop and consider not only what science can reveal, but what it cannot." After all, correlation does not prove causation, there are potential selection effects (maybe moms are just more likely to dump bratty kids in day care), lots of factors influence child development, and most children don't display problems. In sum, the study doesn't prove that child care is harmful....

As you might expect, NYT is highly selective about which studies get explained away.

(Thanks, Tom.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/29/03 08:20:38 AM
Categorized as Media.