NYT Editorial Takedown...

Every time – every time – I read a New York Times editorial on a subject I'm informed about, I end up getting angry about their ability to shovel pure bullshit down the maws of their less-informed readers.  They often don't even make a token effort to be truthful or objective – they just change the “facts” to suit the progressive narrative, and run with it as if it were true.

Most of their readers, presumably, swallow the lie whole without ever knowing they've been lied to.

Kent Scheidigger does what I wish I'd done: takes one of these propagandatorials apart, meticulously.  Kudos, Kent.

Jeff Bezos (who is openly libertarian) just bought the (quite liberal/progressive) Washington Post for $250M.  At the rate the NYT business is declining, he could buy them for the same price pretty soon.

That could be interesting...

Mark Steyn vs. Political Correctness...

Mr. Steyn is not happy with those who see the world through “Princess Fluffy Bunny” glasses.  A sample:

The politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of those near-parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing dweebs of the fin de civilisation West are prone. As the headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot of support for his general predisposition. “The thinking, as we have been reporting, is that this is a domestic extremist attack,” declared Dina Temple-Raston, NPR’s “counterterrorism correspondent.” “Officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary, there’s Hitler’s birthday, there’s the Oklahoma City bombing, the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.” Miss Temple-Raston was born in my mother’s homeland of Belgium, where, alas, there were more than a few fellows willing to wish the Führer happy birthday back when he was still around to thank you for it. But it was news to me it was such a red-letter day in the Bay State. Who knew? At NPR, “counterterrorism” seems to mean countering any suggestion that this might be terrorism from you know, the usual suspects.

But do go read the whole thing!

Such a Struggle!

The U.K.'s The Telegraph has been an uber-reliable warmist doom-monger.  If you want an article describing the nasty way that the human species will die (or kill everything else) because of our SUVs, The Telegraph is one of the first places you would look.

Recently the news from the weather and climate science folks, the ones who actually observe (instead of simply creating computer models), has not been supportive of the global warming hypothesis.  More specifically, the observed data isn't matching the computer model predictions.  This is a little awkward for folks like The Telegraph, and they're struggling to cope...

My prediction is that they will find a new topic on which they can hang their sensational doom-and-gloom forecasts.  I respectfully suggest the U.S. economic and political future as a likely alternative candidate...

Layers of Fact-Checkers...

ABC News mis-labels Iraq on the map in this broadcast – as Iran.  What exactly was your complaint with bloggers, again?

That Had to Hurt...

Update: The New York Times reverses itself, in a vindication for Tesla motors.  Kudos to Elon Musk for standing up to the bully!

Original post: John Broder is a New York Times reporter who recently penned a scathing review of a Tesla electric car.  Elon Musk, founder and chairman of Tesla Motors, knew that Broder was lying in his review – because Tesla carefully logged everything Broder did during his test drive.  What Broder actually did, and the results he actually got, don't match the data recorded.  He's lying.

And Elon Musk wants you to know every last detail.

Assuming this is not an elaborate hoax on Tesla's part (and that seems quite unlikely), it's good to see someone stand up to the lamestream media bullies.  I'm unsurprised to discover that the NYT is ok with fabricating a story to make it more sensational – but I suspect a lot of people will be surprised...

The Day the Progressive Narrative Died?

It's too soon to declare that happy day, but here's a development that is at least quite interesting, and possibly an indicator of a sea change.  Lara Logan is a reporter for CBS News (a conventionally biased charter member of the lamestream media), and has evinced a decidedly Progressive viewpoint in the past.  Here, Logan is being reported on by Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun-Times – itself a cherished member of the lamestream media:

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

As a journalist, I was queasy. Reporters should tell the story, not be the story. As an American, I was frightened.

Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

In the “good old days,” reporters did not advocate, crusade or call for revenge.

In these “new” days in a post-9/11 world, perhaps we need more reporters who are willing to break the rules.

What fascinates me the most about this story is that in two major media outlets, two reporters are drifting way off the Progressive narrative.  This is something not often seen.  Let's hope it's just the beginning...

If You're in the Newspaper Business...

...it's time to be looking for another job.  The graph below shows the most abrupt decline of an entire major industry I've ever heard of:

The World She's A-Changing...

The newspaper business' traditional business model was a fairly simple one: you created a newspaper with content that people found compelling, and you sold advertising space in that newspaper to businesses who wanted to reach the people reading your newspaper.  In most cases, it didn't really matter if people actually bought your newspaper, as the revenue from advertising absolutely dwarfed the subscription revenue.  In fact, it was common for all the subscription revenue to go to third-party distribution services (e.g., the paperboy and his supply chain) and not to the newspaper at all.

The advent of online advertising (can you spell Google?) and the concurrent decline in newspaper readership has drastically changed all this.  Now comes word that in the first quarter of this year, the group of newspapers whose flagship is the New York Times has passed a significant milestone: they now make more money from subscriptions than they do from advertising.  This change is almost entirely due to declining advertising revenuel; subscription revenue (including online subscription revenue) has inched up but slightly.  This is the brave new business world the newspapers are trying – and largely failing – to navigate.  Much gnashing of teeth occurs amongst the progressivati over this.  Personally, I just take some satisfaction in the fact that the marketplace is working...

Mr. Watts is On a Roll!

Anthony Watts is a prominent anthropogenic global warming skeptic, and his web site Watts Up With That is a prime source of information for the larger community of skeptics.  Mr. Watts just released (on Sunday) a scientific study that brilliantly copies the style of another study just released on Saturday by a non-skeptic.  By using the same methods already widely accepted in the climate science community, Mr. Watts makes it impossible for them to simply dismiss his work as some amateur, funded-by-Koch “junk science”.  And indeed, Mr. Watts' study is already being widely reported in the lamestream media.  The climate community won't like his paper's results, though: he shows, very convincingly, that over half of the warming shown in the accepted studies comes from measurement error and not actual warming.  Once you remove the measurement error, the warming is solidly in the range of what's explainable by ordinary climatic variation.

Opinion polls have been showing a trend toward increasing skepticism of anthropogenic global warming amongst ordinary citizens worldwide.  In most countries the skeptics now outnumber the “believers” (though in most cases the “don't knows” outnumber skeptics and believers combined).  The wide press coverage of Mr. Watts' paper should help accelerate that trend – especially because it skewers one of the most often-cited foundations of the IPCC reports: the historical temperature records.  Nice work, Mr. Watts...

The World Isn't Ending...

Reading the lamestream media news reports about the recent East Coast heat wave, you'd think that the world was coming to an end.  Headlines trumpet things like “3,000+ Records Broken!”, and the text of the articles implies that nothing like this has ever been seen before.

Hogwash.

The graph below is courtesy of the indispensable Watts Up With That?.  It shows the number of heat records broken for each year since 1892.  This year isn't even going to be close to the top.  The early part of the last century (before all those carbon-emitting SUVs!) is clearly far “hotter” (at least in this limited sense) than the most recent decade.

Get a grip, folks...

Lamestream Media Hypocrisy...

This time from the lamestream leader (the New York Times), nicely caught and laid out by Mollie Hemingway...

The F-35 Figher Is Doing OK...

I don't know much about the F-35 fighter program, but most of what I've read about it are negative lamestream media stories wailing about its cost overruns.  This is an interesting counterpoint...

Trayvon Martin

I haven't been commenting about the Trayvon Martin (the black youth shot and killed by George Zimmerman) case mainly because I don't know what all the facts are (and I'm confident the lamestream media is not reporting them straight up in such a charged, sensational case).  I'm not going to comment on it now, for the same reason.

But I will note, with interest, that a growing number of prominent black voices are reacting in a way that I find refreshingly constructive.  They are wondering why the black community (and the news media) aren't outraged by the long-standing scourge of violence against blacks perpetrated by other blacks.

Juan Williams has just such a question in today's WSJ.  In it, he cites an old quote from Jesse Jackson that I remember well:

"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved... After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating."

Whatever the facts of the Trayvon Martin case are, these black voices are raising a most excellent question. Where is your outrage, Al Sharpton?  Why aren't you tweeting about that, Spike Lee?  And most of all, our first black President: why aren't you siccing Holder on a real problem, Mr. Obama?

Disturbing, Not Particularly Surprising...

James O'Keefe did it again, catching another set of liberals in the act of being arrogant snobs who are absolutely positive they know better than the rest of us.  They are the elites, after all.  On the video below, they actually call themselves that.

What is most disturbing to me in this video is the confirmation of what I have long believed to be true: that the liberal media (in this case, the New York Times) has a deliberate agenda of promoting progressive/liberal causes and politicians.  Insiders in this video, unaware that they are being recorded, are quite frank and open about exactly such an active and deliberate agenda.  It's clear that they see themselves as having a duty to pull the wool over the eyes of all us mouth-breathers...

See for yourself – and remember when you vote a year from now...

The Flake...

Here's a compilation of OBlunders, most of them things I'm sure you've seen before.  The point of this is to demonstrate the remarkable degree to which the lamestream media is carrying water for Obama.  Remember how the lamestreamers jumped all over every last verbal misstep of George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, and Ronald Reagan?  Not much evidence of that here – even though the current President has arguably produced more (and better!) targets for media mocking than any of his predecessors...

The War in Mexico...

It continues to amaze me how little impact the violence in Mexico seems to have on people (citizens or not) in America.  Even the awareness of the violence is low – I've spoken with any number of people here who had no idea how bad things are just a few miles south of here.  From Strategy Page today:

Mexico’s most violent city, Ciudad Juarez, suffered over 3,100 murders last year. That's 238 per 100,000 population. That's far higher than Baghdad during the height of the terrorism violence a few years ago. In New York City, the rate is 6.5. The most violent American city, Camden, New Jersey, has a rate of 40. Meanwhile, Ciudad Juarez has a new police chief, who cleaned up the violence in Tijuana, a city with the same population (1.3 million), and the same problem (out-of-control drug gang violence.)

Ciudad Juarez' new mayor is famous for “cleaning up” Tijuana.  But that is a very, er, flexible term: last year Tijuana had almost 1,000 murders (including dozens of Americans).  More Americans were murdered last year in Tijuana than in all of San Diego County, by a large margin.

And yet very few people seem to even know about this, much less be concerned about it.  Partly this must be the relative inattention paid by the lamestream media.  Thousands of news clips play every year about American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan; very few on American casualties in Mexico.  But the lamestream media is driven by what they believe people are interested in.  Are they correct on this one?  Are Americans completely disinterested in the chaos and lawlessness just south of the border?  Sadly, my own experience supports that notion...

Gray Lady Hypocrisy...

Via reader Cliff F.:

New York Times editors, as cited in James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column at WSJ.com, Nov. 29:

"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."—New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009.

"The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . 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."—New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010.

The original Best of the Web Today article.

It's been over 20 years since I last read the New York Times regularly.  This is a good example of why.

New Black Panthers Incident Finally Hits Lamestream Media...

The Washington Post (of all places!) “broke” the story.  The scare quotes are there because of course this story has been all over the blogosphere for two years, and outlets like the Wall Street Journal covered it as well – but the mainstream media has studiously ignored the story, giving cover to the Obama administration generally, and Eric Holder in particular.  At best, it's a shameful story of a crime covered up.  At worst, it's a first step toward a Russian-style thugocracy.

I don't have many kind words for the likes of the Washington Post, but this time they deserve credit for airing this disturbing story.  Probably this is less a reflection of their good intentions, and more a reflection of Obama's fall from grace in their eyes...but that's ok, too.

Klavan Rips Apart the Lamestream Media...

An easy job, I know, but Andrew Klavan does it very convincingly in his inimitable (and very entertaining) style. Via my sister-in-law Gina P.:

Warning Labels...

Oh, yes.  If only the lamestream media really did use these warning labels...

Makes me wonder how hard it would be to do something like this automatically on the web.  For instance, one could imagine a plugin for Firefox that looked on the web to see if there were blog posts related to a news story you were reading, and warn you if the content were disputed.  Or something that tried to find Snopes articles related to what you were reading about.  Hmmm...