Why don't Americans trust the media?

Stuff like this.

ABC stages live shot crime scene.

Another lesson in not believing something just because it has had three days of journalistic investigation, editorial overview and publication in the New York Times.

Debunking the myth of Kitty Genovese.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...or statements that could upset the liberal elites living in Manhattan.

Face the Nation edits Ted Cruz's answers to eliminate ungoodbadthink statements about Obama attacks on "filmmakers."

Media malpractice

After weeks of depicting Zimmerman as racist for calling the police about an abandoned 7 year old black child, the New Republic finally admits the call was made out of concern rather than as a matter of racial profiling.

Still, it did its job of slandering Zimmerman.

Trust in media skyrockets...

...the NTSB has confirmed the names of the Asiana pilots.

You'd have thought the anchor would have twigged to the joke when she read the names.



*Sheesh*

"Retconning" History.

"Retconning" is a term of art used in the comic book geek community as shorthand for "retroactive continuiity."  "Retroactive continuity" is the device used to keep a comic book character's current status consistent with his past. For example, Captain America is perennially 30 years old, which would impossible with his being defrosted from the polar ice in 1963, as was the case when Cap made his first appearance.  So, the pragmatic strategy is simply to ignore the original versions of the story, and "retcon" Cap's discovery as occurring later and later.

Here is a fascinating example of "retconning" by leftist journalists who need to make the modern story line that Republicans have always been southern racists consistent with, you know, historical facts.

MSNBC identifies George Wallace as a Republican.



The Ministry of Truth couldn't retcon any better than MSNBC.

There must be some way to attract attention to this story...

...Hey! Maybe Kermit Gosnell put his dog on the roof of his car or said something about "binders."

You know, important stuff.

Media malpractice...

..four years later, the media discovers that Obama lied about his position on infanticide.

*Yawn*

Global Warming...is there nothing it can't do?

Journalist asks if asteroid fly-by is an effect of global warming.

*Double Face-palm*

Our favorite socially autistic, delusional, narcissistic athiest chimes in with his typically socially autistic, tone-deaf, pimple on the ass of humanity, human toothache contribution to the faux-issue of the day.

Richard Dawkins: How dare you ask me to retract my tweet about ‘heckling’ incident?

It's not his fault that the media totally invented yet another story to make the enemies of people like Richard Dawkins look bad. (This time the fatuous lie that a father of a Newtown shooting victim was heckled by gun rights activists while testifying in a legislative proceeding.

It's just really convenient.

Who could possibly hate this pimple on the ass of humanity?

Timing and Scandal - The Gospel of Jesus' Wife and the Presidential Campaign.

I "flagged" a post on the "Jesus had a wife gospel" story earlier this month with the tag "Seasonal Anti-Christian Story."

Except its the wrong season; these kinds of stories usually hit in December or around Easter where the media can give a shot to Christians from their secularist positions.

So, why did this story - one that the media would usually hold for Easter or Christmas - come out in September?

The Anchoress has a theory:

But there is another side to the story that is interesting to me. When the fancifully nicknamed “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” first hit the headlines, Mollie Z. Hemingway and I were thinking along similar lines: we “questioned the timing.”

These meant-to-be-earthshattering “deconstruct and revise Christianity” announcements are the staples of Lent and Christmas. Why was this thing floating in September, and not December, when believers could really get a kick in the pants?

I have an idea why the story came to us in September, and why it was given unusually early coverage by the New York Times. The papyrus and its supposed revelation was a hand-to-glove fit for the era, and for the feminist narratives currently in-play: the “war on women” narrative; the “church hates women” trope. As Mollie wrote:

The discovery of this lost fragment, if interpreted in just the right way, matches the views of the New York Times editorial page! It’s another early Christmas miracle!

Pure speculation on my part, perhaps there was a hedging of bets: suppose those supporting King’s theories suspected that her case was weak, and realized that if the Theological review rejected her paper, there was simply no discussion to be had on the papyrus, and no opportunity to insert a tantalizing corkscrew into church-bashing feminist rhetoric that has begun to grow stale. So, to the press it went.

The news that NatGeo has already filmed, edited and scheduled a documentary on the fragment — how quick was that? — only solidifies my suspicion that academic validation was less important to this story than getting the idea of “Jesus’ wife” out into the public, whether it is true or not.

So, is it possible that an uncorroborated story about a forgery went to the press in September to help out the Democrat's narrative about a "war on women"?

Just postulating the theory sounds like the height of conspiracy theories, but people with an axe to grind have the luxury and the motivation of looking at things from every angle. Nothing that the media has done in the last year, let alone the last decade, fills me with any reason to give the media the benefit of the doubt.

I love the "instant conventional wisdom" that forms in the media to support the media's candidate every single time.

For example, "the candidate who is ahead goes on to win," which is why we are seeing the end of John McCain's first term.

It isn't 1999 anymore, we have fargin' google to fact check the fargin' media now.

Either reporters are pushing an agenda supportive of abortion rights or they’re idiots.

But why rule out the possibility that they are both?

Mollie Hemingway nails the thing that bothered me the most when, within 24 hours of the Akin kerfuffle, it seemed that the words "forcible rape" had become entirely incomprehinsible to the media and leftists, notwithstanding the fact that the term "forcible rape" is used by the FBI in compiling crime statistics.

By Wednesday night, one reporter found that there were already 337 stories about this pro-choice talking point that requires reporters to pretend that they don’t actually understand the difference between statutory and forced rape. As I finish writing this, we see that the New York Times is now also pretending not to understand rape — as this comprehensive take-down of that story’s inaccurate and misleading reporting makes clear.

Either reporters are pushing an agenda supportive of abortion rights or they’re idiots. It’s one thing for pro-choice activists or the Democratic Party to advocate in support of those goals. But reporters playing games in service to that agenda is ridiculous. We’re all better than that, no matter what side of the issue we’re personally on.

Apparently, the New York Times spread the the false meme that Ryan was redefining rape when, in fact, he was using the FBI definition.

I'm not a journalist, but I managed to locate the FBI definition with a simple web search inside of five minutes.

Who "fact checks" the "fact checkers"?

Has it really always been this bad?

Or have these WTF? moments been going on forever?

Or is it just that journalists are in full-panic mode about their prospects come November of 2012?

I, obviously, have been a media hater for the last forty years. I know the media is biased and dishonest, but I never knew it was stupid and lazy and had such contempt for its consumers.

I've noted this week the apparent inability of the media to do basic research on a purported global warming "critic."

Now, Datech Guy points out the sheer incompetence/obvious malice/stupidity of the Washington Post's relating of sheer gossip and hearsay:

Can we stop calling the Washington Post a “newspaper” now?

by Datechguy | July 31st, 2012

…and officially declare it a propaganda organ?

The Washington Post✔
@washingtonpost

Citing unnamed Bain investor, Harry Reid claims Romney didn't pay taxes for 10 years: wapo.st/MZYUgF

31 Jul 12 Reply
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Mind you the Washington post isn’t citing an unnamed source that has talked to them, they are reporting that someone else (Harry Reid) claims that an unnamed source said something.

I don’t claim to have been in this business all that many years, but I know enough that I can’t report hearsay.

A simple example two years ago at CPAC when I brought up the name of a person who said something nice about me the person who I was talking to snorted and told me something about said person that raised an eyebrow.

The person who told me this was someone I liked, someone I normally would trust and said story would have been a hell of a story to break, but there was no proof provided, no details, just this is what he had been told.

I never followed up on the story, (still don’t plan to) it’s stuck in the back of my mind with a lot of rumors etc that I’ve heard since I’ve gotten in this business.

I don’t have an editor, I don’t have a handler, yet I know enough not to go with this. If the Washington Post doesn’t it tells me two things

1. They are dishonorable hacks.

2. They are in full panic mode concerning November

I may be just a blogger and radio host trying to make it on my own, Things may be so tight that I can’t afford a car these days, and I don’t pretend not to be biased in the upcoming election, but I hope and pray I never reach the point where I am willing to sell my integrity for the sake of a jab against Obama.

Simply Amazing.

Tolerate stupid, get more stupid.

James Geraghty notes the equivocation of the term "gaffe" in modern politics:

In that light, how should we assess President Obama's "the private sector is doing fine," "if you have a business, you didn't build that" and "our plan worked"? The argument from the president's defenders is that each one is literally true and only sounds odd to those who don't understand the context -- that the private sector is creating jobs while state and local governments cut back, the "that" refers to roads and bridges, not the business itself, and the plan refers to Bill Clinton's tax hikes, not Obama's enacted policies. The problem is that all of these explanations aren't as exculpatory as his fans think:

A) If 80,000 or so jobs per month -- not enough to keep up with workforce additions -- is your idea of "doing fine," you're setting the bar too low.

B) Even if President Obama was talking about "roads and bridges," business owners did indeed pay for that, through income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and business taxes.

C) Even if Obama meant Clinton's tax hikes when he said our plan "worked," he's crediting the Clinton tax hikes as the cause of the 1990s economic boom -- not the rise of the Internet in American life, the dot-com bubble, etc. "Our plan worked" contends we're just one big tax hike away from restoring 4 percent annual GDP growth. Except that the tax hikes were enacted in 1993, and the boom didn't start until 1996--1997.

The argument from Obama's critics would be that the "gaffes" aren't misstatements but signals of what Obama really thinks -- that the private sector's current growth rate really is "fine," that he thinks businessmen smugly give themselves too much credit for their success and not enough credit to government, and that tax hikes are good for the economy. Perhaps Republicans read too much into these remarks . . . but perhaps not.

Anyway, carping that the press makes a big deal out of Republican gaffes and ignores Democrat ones is an old, well-founded, and tired complaint. But what's striking is that the result of this culture within the press corps is that at least three of the highest figures in the Democratic party today are among those most prone to making statements that range from the bizarre to the outrageous to the unhinged . . . and they pay no discernible price for these habits. No matter what they say, the labels "dumb" or "foolish" never seem to stick to them.

As I said with respect to Nancy Pelosi's amazing caricature of Jews as chiefly motivated by their concerned about "ducats":

There might be something to Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. When you think of the insensitive things said by ranking Democrats such as Pelosi, Biden and Reid, you can't help but conclude that the whole party would be helped by culling out the dumbest ones.

More on that Global Warming "Convert" and his paper proving Global Warming.

Like I noted yesterday, there is solid research that the temperature data for ground warming is systematically biased in favor of the "warmist" conclusion.

But - wait! - there's more:

I’ve reached Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, who was a co-author of the first four BEST papers but who declined to be listed as an author of this one. She was in an airport, and has promised me more tomorrow, but in the meantime she referred me to the New York Times Dot Earth blog and her quote:

The BEST team has produced the best land surface temperature data set that we currently have. It is best in the sense of including the most data and extending further back in time. The data quality control and processing use objective, statistically robust techniques. That said, the scientific analyses that the BEST team has done with the new data set are controversial, including the impact of station quality on interpreting temperature trends and the urban heat island effect.

Their latest paper on the 250-year record concludes that the best explanation for the observed warming is greenhouse gas emissions. Their analysis is way oversimplistic and not at all convincing in my opinion.

There is broad agreement that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming in the latter half of the 20th century; the big question is how much of this warming can we attribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don’t see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming. That said, I think there are two interesting results in this paper, regarding their analysis of 19th century volcanoes and the impact on climate, and also the changes to the diurnal temperature range.

As usual, you have to look carefully at this. Curry strongly disagreed with the conclusions of the paper, and needs to be taken seriously: she is, after all, a co-author of the previous studies. Her point is simply that:

(1) the paper does say there has been warming, but well, everyone knew that. The question is the magnitude of the warming, the part of that which is anthropogenic, i.e., human-caused, and then what part of that part is caused by CO2. They have done a lot to clean up the data set, but as Watts et. al. note, that dataset may be subject to a systematic error.

(2) the strength of the conclusion that essentially all of that is both anthropogenic and caused by CO2 is being overstated. (My own choice of words would be “wildly overstated.”)

Again, isn't it weird that journalists can't do this kind of background fact checking?

Blogs - doing the work that journalists refuse to do, and for free.

Answer: The media is a joke.
Question: Why can't the mainstream media use google?

The New York Times posts an op-ed entitled "The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic" by Richard Muller. Muller claims that he was a global warming skeptic until he recently headed a research group at Berkeley, called BEST, showing land temperature has risen. He concludes that global warming is real, significant and entirely human.

Muller's "conversion" is being touted as a klincher on the global warming debate, particularly since the conservative Koch Foundation allegedly funded the study.

The problem is that Muller was never a skeptic, and his study is old news.

The BEST study is old news. I blogged about it last October.

There are problems in the study, which I noted in my October post, and which apparently haven't been answered.

One new problem is that the BEST study is based on land temperature data, which is systematically biased in favor of warming.

In addition, Muller has never been a skeptic. In 2006, he was on record as offering 2 out of 3 odds that human activity was responsible for global warming. Back in 2001, he was touting human pollution as devastating the globe. And here is more evidence that Muller is exaggerating his conversion.

I located that within 10 minutes.

How come that kind of background research is beyond the New York Times?

Another serious question is, doesn't the media realize the game has changed with the internet? Where once we would stop at "Gee, that sounds familiar" or "I thought I read something different" - which was the genesis of this post - people can now locate data from the past and realize that the media is running a shell-game.

The internet as cultural memory.

Does the internet portend at least one hopeful development, namely, that it's harder to distort or forget the past.

Here is another list of occasions when the media blamed conservatives for some atrocity, which, in retrospect, turns out to have been committed by a leftist or by someone who was apolitically nuts.

Clearly, the media's knee-jerk reaction is to attempt to frame a narrative that frames conservatives. Equally clearly, that effort is failing, probably because of the devolution of information.

But that doesn't stop the "first strike" approach of the media. People believe what they hear first and remember what they hear last. The initial framing of an atrocity as the act of conservatives clearly smears conservatives as wackily unhinged. The counter-strategy is to dredge up these other incidents and broadcast them as the last thing said in the discussion.

It make for more honest discussions and may help the media get things right from the beginning.

If true, then ABC's credibility is even worse than we might have expected.

Politico writes:

Arlene Holmes, the mother of Colorado theater shooting suspect James Holmes, has suggested that ABC News mischaracterized her when it reported that her initial statement to the reporter, "you have the right person," was a reference to her son.

"This statement is to clarify a statement made by ABC media. I was awakened by a call from a reporter by ABC on July 20 about 5:45 in the morning. I did not know anything about a shooting in Aurora at that time," Holmes said in a statement this afternoon, read to the national press by attorney Lisa Damiani. "He asked if I was Arlene Holmes and if my son was James Holmes who lives in Aurora, Colorado. I answered yes, you have the right person. I was referring to myself."

(See also: Full coverage Colorado theater shooting)

"I asked him to tell me why he was calling and he told me about a shooting in Aurora," she continues. "He asked for a comment. I told him I could not comment because I did not know if the person he was talking about was my son, and I would need to find out."

In the first paragraph of its initial report on Friday, ABC News reported that it had identified the correct James Holmes because his mother "told ABC News her son was likely the alleged culprit, saying, 'You have the right person.'"

If Arlene Holmes' latest statement is true, it means that she did not tell ABC News her son was likely the alleged culprit, calling into question the reporting of a network that has already been marred by one inaccuracy.

On the other hand, even if Holmes' mother is not telling the truth, do we have the right to ask how sleazy ABC appears in any event?

Calling the mother at 5:45 in the morning, when it might be reasonably assumed she was asleep and hadn't heard the news, and telling her that her son was a mass murderer and then expecting to get anything reasonably coherent seems like a huge breach of common courtesy and simple humanity.

Yes, someone was going to do it. Yes, someone was being resourceful. Yes, the mother might offer something "newsworthy," but being ambushed like that seems inhuman and quite likely to give rise to confusion.

What are the odds that ABC would mis-identify the Aurora gunman as a Tea Partier?

What are the odds that ABC would mis-identify the Aurora gunman as a Muslim?

Well, naturally, the former happened.

It's weird how these mistakes always break that way.

The Tea Party guy fingered by ABC has had to shut off his phone because of the threats he's received.

Way to demonstrate professionalism, ABC.

The Anchoress provides some must-read observations:

How overly-enthralled we are becoming to our ideological tribes? Enough, perhaps, to wonder if our too-passionate engagement with ideas is poisoning our communal well, and robbing us of our humanity. At a moment when we should be united as a people responding to evil in our midst — and a mass murder is not a “tragedy”, it is evil on legs — it’s disheartening to realize that while the dead were not yet cold, the injured were still dying or being treated, the people who are charged with the public trust of telling the nation its stories, (and to do it factually, without passion or prejudice) were so quick to abandon that charge with a smiling possibility that political hay could be made.

On ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Friday morning, in a segment with host George Stephanopoulos, Ross said James Holmes, the man who allegedly murdered 12 people in the Aurora movie theater, appeared to be a member of the tea party movement based on information from Facebook, which Stephanopoulos said “might be significant.”

ABC News has since apologized for that. Some are calling for Brian Ross to be fired. I’m not sure about that; on one hand, he was likely only repeating what some producer told him. On the other, he’s an experienced journalist and he should have, perhaps, had the common sense, discretion and maturity to both wait for confirmation and — here’s a crazy idea — consider whether it was the moment to inject politics into the story, in any case.

And:

ABC News’ error has revealed to us, though, something of how the press operates in the 21st Century: violence and evil occur; people are dying; “quick, go check the registration rolls of political opponents and see if there is any way we can associate this shooter with them…”

We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

The expression, the smile, on Brian Ross’ face said it all. Enthrallment to ideological passions rules the day for the press, and it appears to be toxic.