4. Issues and Bias

4.6 Accountability

If publishing or broadcasting dubious reports about a major Republican [think 60 Minutes and Bush TX-ANG "memos"] is an example of "liberal bias" (which it was not, as I showed here) and a firing offense (or requires resignation) then, clearly, publishing or broadcasting unending amounts of completely fraudulent or fabricated stories against prominent individuals on the Left (especially Democratic leaders) is an example of conservative bias and should be an automatic firing offense? One would think so, but it seems that accountability is a word that is largely unknown to the big shots in the media when the targets of the smear or fabrication happen to be on the Left.

I previously presented a limited list of the media malpractice against John Kerry in 2004 and against Al Gore in Campaign 2000. In this post, I am extending the targets of malpractice to cover more Democrats to show that the malpractice is not limited to specific individuals on the Left. To make my point, I present here a very small set (25) of more general examples illustrating cases of blatant fabrication or lying by mainstream media reporters/columnists against many prominent people on the Left. Let me repeat: this is just a small subset of columnists/reporters and incidents - a mere drop in the ocean of mendacity about Democrats (and liberals/progressives) that has pervaded the U.S. media for a long time now. When such behavior is rampant (a week spent reading the Daily Howler, Media Matters, Eric Alterman, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons - to name just a few references - will start to give you a better idea of how rampant it is; why, even conservatives occasionally, weakly acknowledge it) and it is met with an almost complete lack of accountability, it clearly demonstrates that on the issue of accountability for media malpractice there is clearly NO "liberal bias". Moreover, when journalists/columnists report or express personal views (factual or otherwise) against prominent targets on the Right in a negative way, this is usually met with stricter punishment (see Sec. 4.7), that tells you that the ICM is in fact conservatively biased when it comes to accountability and punishment.

EXAMPLES

4.6.1 William Safire (New York Times, now retd.) on Bill Clinton and the Wen Ho Lee affair

4.6.2 Richard Cohen (Washington Post) on Joe Lieberman

4.6.3 Sean Hannity (Fox News) on Al Gore and Ted Kennedy

4.6.4 Lisa Myers (NBC/MSNBC) on Hillary Clinton

4.6.5 Tim Russert (MSNBC) on Al Gore and John Kerry

4.6.6 Kellyanne Conway (C-SPAN Washington Journal) and Tucker Carlson (CNN) on Democrats

4.6.7 Joe Klein (Time) and Democrats

4.6.8 Numerous major media outlets in the U.S. and Howard Dean

4.6.9 Katharine Seelye (New York Times) and Al Gore

4.6.10 Maureen Dowd and Sheryl Gay Stolberg (New York Times) and John Kerry

4.6.11 David Brooks (New York Times) and Hillary Clinton

4.6.12 George Will (Washington Post) on Al Gore/Democrats

4.6.13 Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post) - on Howard Dean:

4.6.14 Ceci Connolly (Washington Post) and Al Gore

4.6.15 Carl Cameron (Fox News) and John Kerry

4.6.16 Brit Hume (Fox News) and John Kerry

4.6.17 Bill O'Reilly (Fox News) on Florida 2000/Paul Krugman and other topics

4.6.18 Chris Matthews (MSNBC) and Bill/Hillary Clinton

4.6.19 John Fund (Wall Street Journal) on Florida 2000/Gore/Democrats

4.6.20 Wolf Blitzer (CNN) on Richard Clarke/Paul Krugman

4.6.21 Robert "The-Traitor" Novak (CNN) on Howard Dean

4.6.22 Margaret Carlson (Time) on Bill/Hillary Clinton

4.6.23 Gloria Borger (CNBC) on Hillary Clinton

4.6.24 Rush Limbaugh on a variety of topics [included since he dominates talk radio]

4.6.25 Adam Nagourney (New York Times) and Wesley Clark

4.6.1 William Safire (New York Times, now retd.) on Bill Clinton and the Wen Ho Lee affair

Daily Howler:

Kondracke didn’t seem to know these things, but perhaps it isn’t all that surprising, given the way William Safire bungled the story back on April 29. Risen and Gerth had revealed the alleged downloading on page one of the Times the previous day, and Safire rushed into print on the subject. His column remains the most frequently cited writing on the Wen Ho Lee downloaded files.

Unfortunately, the column was grossly bungled. In paragraph 3, Safire said this:

SAFIRE: We are now informed by The New York Times’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative team that the codes--“legacy codes,” as they are known at Los Alamos--were allegedly downloaded by Wan [sic] Ho Lee in 1994. Our nuclear genie is out of the bottle. [Our emphasis]

What did he mean by that last remark? Safire immediately quoted Rep. Cox, whose committee had done no investigation of the alleged downloading:

SAFIRE: “The People’s Republic of China is the number one proliferator,” said Representative Chris Cox, chairman of the select committee on Chinagate. “Now the secrets are out there in the stream of commerce, and probably on to Iran and North Korea and Libya.”

We don’t know if Safire quoted Cox correctly, but he soon made the claim in his own words:

SAFIRE: [Former senator Warren] Rudman has hired nine new investigators and may come up with recommendations about locking the barn door now that the secrets of almost every nuclear test we have undertaken are on their way to Baghdad or Pyongyang via Beijing. [Our emphasis]

Indeed, Safire’s opening paragraph had made his claim:

SAFIRE: During President Clinton’s watch, America’s most vital nuclear secrets--guarded intensely for five decades--have been allowed to spill out all over the world.

Clearly, Safire’s readers were being told that the PRC had accessed Lee’s downloaded data. They also were told that the downloaded data had been passed on to several rogue states.

Unfortunately, this is not what Risen and Gerth had reported, right on page one of the Times. If Safire had read what the prize-winners wrote, in paragraph seven he would have read this:

RISEN AND GERTH (paragraph seven): The investigation is continuing, and officials do not know whether the data transferred by Mr. Lee was obtained by another country. [Our emphasis]

Later on, he would have read this:

RISEN AND GERTH: [A]n Energy Department official said that because it remained unclear whether China actually obtained the data, the case at this point “is serious but not of the scope of the W-88.” [Our emphasis]

Nothing in the Risen/Gerth article asserted that China had obtained the data. Safire stated no authority for this new claim, other than the words he attributed to Cox. (Again, the Cox Committee had not investigated the alleged downloading by Lee.)

Soon, excited talkers like Chris Matthews were telling viewers that Lee had “just given away the entire nuclear capacity of the United States” (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/27/99). It had just been a week since the talker’s false accusations against a journalist had led to a gun incident in the journalist’s garage.

In the weeks since Safire wrote his column, it has been reported, again and again, that no one knows if China obtained the downloaded data. It has been frequently reported that Lee’s reasons for the downloading are still not clear.

Kondracke should have known these facts when he questioned Richardson on FNS. But Safire’s bungling still takes the cake--and pointed the way for the bungling that would come.

Smile-a-while: We chuckled over Safire’s early construction (from above):

SAFIRE: We are now informed...that the codes...were allegedly downloaded by Wan [sic] Ho Lee.

We have been “informed”--of an allegation. In paragraph 3, Safire admits he doesn’t know if the downloading even occurred. A few paragraphs later, the crafty scribe has the data all over the world.

So we see the laughable intellectual standards of the world’s most important public discourse.

Does Safire have editors at the New York Times? Do they read the paper’s page one stories?

4.6.2 Richard Cohen (Washington Post) on Joe Lieberman

Daily Howler:

Gore nominated Joe Lieberman to be his VP—and Cohen trashed Lieberman up and down for “talking the language of religion.” Cohen luuvvs religion talk now. But here’s how he launched one giant attack, just two months before the election:

COHEN (9/6/00): My own continuing crisis of faith is beside the point. But the marriage of religion to politics is another matter. I thought it was in bad taste for Lieberman to go on and on about religion. But I thought it downright smug of him to suggest that God somehow favors America above all nations. The United States is a fortunate and exceptional nation, which I love dearly, but it is no more divine than any other.

"Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world," Lieberman told the annual convention of B'nai B'rith late last month.

Cohen went on and on (and on), trashing Lieberman for his vile statement. “Lieberman's statement is preposterously false and lacks humility,” the thundering columnist brilliantly said. Indeed, by the end of his piece, he was telling the world that Lieberman’s statement had been “downright repugnant.”

So, what made this column especially stupid? Stupid even by Cohen’s standards? Uh-oh! In fact, the statement made at the B’nai B’rith convention hadn’t been “repugnant” at all. In fact, Cohen had quoted quite selectively; given the norms of American politics, the fuller statement had been quite ordinary. But what made Cohen’s column especially stupid? Here we go: The offending statement wasn’t made by Joe Lieberman at all! In fact, it was George W. Bush, not Joseph Lieberman, who had gone before the B’nai B’rith convention and made the deeply-troubling remark. Incredibly, Cohen had spent an entire column trashing Lieberman for something Bush had said! (Again: There was nothing wrong with Bush’s statement.) But so it went as an addled press corps made a joke of your previous election. A small correction, sans explanation, graced the end of Cohen’s next column.

Today, Cohen luuvvs Gore’s old-fashioned religion—but he trashed Gore’s running-mate for it back then. He even trashed Gore for religious statements that came out of George Bush’s mouth! From what planet does this man type? He types from the far planet Washington Post—a planet whose exotic race of scribes continued to laugh hard, right in your face, as Cohen typed yesterday’s nonsense.

4.6.3 Sean Hannity (Fox News) on Al Gore and Ted Kennedy

Media Matters:

In an attempt to defend the Republican Party against a charge of race-baiting, FOX News Channel host Sean Hannity falsely claimed that former Vice President "Al Gore brought Willie Horton to the American people." Hannity's comment came on the November 9 edition of Hannity & Colmes, after a guest, Princeton University professor Cornel West, named Horton, who is black, as an example of the GOP's political exploitation of race.

In 1987, Horton assaulted a man and raped his fiancée after escaping a furlough from prison in Massachusetts. In 1988, then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush invoked Horton on the campaign trail to portray then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis as soft on crime. The Americans for Bush arm of the National Security Political Action Committee also used Horton in an anti-Dukakis attack ad that drew particular attention to Horton's race. The ad was produced by Larry McCarthy, a former employee of then-Bush campaign media consultant and current FOX News Channel President Roger Ailes.

Hannity's claim that it was Gore, and not the Bush-Quayle '88 campaign, who engaged in race-baiting by using the Horton case against Dukakis is false. During a 1988 Democratic primary debate, Gore did ask Dukakis about "weekend passes for convicted criminals." But as Slate "Chatterbox" columnist Timothy Noah noted on November 1, 1999, "Gore never mentioned that Horton was black; indeed, he never mentioned Horton by name."

Moreover, as Daily Howler editor Bob Somerby noted (in documenting a prior instance of Hannity making the same erroneous Horton claim on November 1, 2002), in questioning Dukakis's tacit support of the Massachusetts furlough program, Gore never mentioned Horton's crime. Instead, Gore specifically mentioned two criminals who committed murder after escaping from their prison furlough. Somerby also noted that besides never mentioning Horton, his race, or his crime, Gore also differed from the Bush-Quayle '88 campaign in that he "never ran any TV ads on the topic; and never used any visuals."

More Sean Hannity (Fox News) on Ted Kennedy:

Following Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA)'s September 27 speech criticizing President George W. Bush's policies in Iraq for "not ma[king] America safer," conservative pundits almost immediately began to distort the Massachusetts senator's words and smear him.

On the September 27 edition of FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity labeled Kennedy's speech "insane." He falsely claimed that Kennedy "call[ed] the soldiers failures" and said the senator placed himself amongst "those of us who would like to cut and run [in Iraq]." Earlier that day, on ABC Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show, Hannity said Kennedy's speech worked to "undermine the war effort, undermine our soldiers on the battlefield"; he also erroneously claimed that Kennedy "believes the U.S. military is an impediment to world peace."

Here is what Kennedy actually said at The George Washington University:

KENNEDY: No issue is more important today. The battle against terrorism is a battle we must win. Even those who opposed the war in Iraq understand that we cannot cut and run, that this is an American issue. But to remain silent in the face of mounting failures by this president and this White House is to weaken our security even further, and we cannot let that happen.

[...]

KENNEDY: Our soldiers were not adequately trained for the missions thrust upon them. Month after month, our courageous troops could not get even enough armored vests of their own or enough armor for their humvees to protect themselves on patrol.

Hannity was not the only pundit to smear Kennedy on the day of his George Washington University speech.

Michael Savage, on his nationally syndicated radio show, Savage Nation, declared: "Kennedy may as well be Osama bin Laden's p.r. [public relations] man." He later said: "[I]t's one thing to disagree with Bush; it's one thing to disagree with the war; it's one thing to say we shouldn't be there, but to go to the other side, as Kennedy has done, is astonishing."

Tucker Carlson, co-hosting CNN's Crossfire, dismissed Kennedy as "discredited" and a "screamer."

4.6.4 Lisa Myers (NBC/MSNBC) on Hillary Clinton

Daily Howler:

At issue is the phone call where the Hubbells are discussing whether Mrs. Clinton would be “vulnerable” to a probe of over-billing. Here is the transcript of one part of the call, with one statement set out in bold:

MRS. HUBBELL: You didn’t actually do that, did you, mark up time for the client?

HUBBELL: Yes, I did. So does every lawyer in the country.

MRS. HUBBELL: That would be one thing that you would look into the firm for [in a countersuit].

HUBBELL: Suzy, you are getting ahead.

MRS. HUBBELL: No, I am just thinking out loud. That’s an area where Hillary would be vulnerable. Not unless she overbilled by time, right?

HUBBELL: No, you are talking and not listening. We are on a recorded phone. So I am trying to explain...

It’s not clear what Hubbell objects to in his wife’s characterization, or why she still doesn’t know even basic facts about why her husband is sitting in prison. But it is quite clear, in the segment printed in bold, that Mrs. Hubbell is not accusing Mrs. Clinton of over-billing. She states first that she is “just thinking out loud;” and it is clear to any listener, when she closes out with her question, that she doesn’t know whether or not Hillary has engaged in this conduct. (Hubbell tells her at length, later in the call, that Hillary has not over-billed.)

But that’s not the way NBC viewers heard the response on The Today Show on Friday, May 1, by the time Spin Doctor Lisa Myers got out her scissors and did a little surgical work on the tapes. Incredibly, this is the conversation that Myers’ viewers heard--a conversation in which Mrs. Hubbell makes a very different presentation altogether:

MYERS: At another point, Mrs. Hubbell talks about over-billing clients.

MRS. HUBBELL (on tape): That’s an area where Hillary would be vulnerable.

HUBBELL (on tape): No, you are talking and not listening. We are on a recorded phone.

And that is precisely the way the transcript was presented on the screen to NBC viewers as the tape rolls--with no ellipsis whatever to let viewers know that material has been left out. Not that this would have been an appropriate deletion even if an ellipsis had been used. Myers’ cut in the tape completely changes the meaning of the presentation by Mrs. Hubbell--changing it from a question about whether Mrs. Clinton would be vulnerable, to an assertion that she would be. The charade was even worse by that evening; in a tape played on MSNBC’s May 1 InterNight program (apparently taken from that evening’s NBC News), Myers doctors the conversation in a more egregious fashion:

MYERS: The Hubbells seem worried that Mrs. Clinton could be vulnerable on an issue that sent Hubbell to prison in the first place--overbilling clients.

MRS. HUBBELL: You didn’t actually do that, did you? Mark up time for the client? Did you?

HUBBELL: Yes, I did. So does every lawyer in the country.

MRS. HUBBELL: That’s an area that Hillary would be vulnerable.

HUBBELL: Suzy, you’re talking and you’re not listening. We are on a recorded phone, OK?

Again, there was absolutely no indication of any kind that the viewer was hearing an edited phone call. Viewer had every reason to think they were hearing the phone call just as it happened. And by the way, Myers’ opening statement is completely inaccurate, if you listen through to the end of this phone call. Hubbell makes it very clear, later on in this call, that Mrs. Clinton would not be vulnerable to charges of over-billing clients.

This is truly egregious, disgraceful misconduct--a grotesque deception of NBC viewers.

And yes, we’re especially amused because this is exactly what David Bossie bragged this week that even the Burton Committee didn’t do; Bossie stated on This Week, in his defense, that at least the Burton Committee never altered the tapes. As it turns out, the committee never had to make these deletions--they had enterprising journalists like Myers for that! NBC viewers heard badly doctored tapes, in which a question was changed into accusation. But the doctoring wasn’t done by GOP spinners--it was done by Dr. Myers herself!

4.6.5 Tim Russert (MSNBC) on Al Gore and John Kerry

Daily Howler:

We refer to Russert’s Meet the Press session with Gore on July 16, 2000, in which he performed one of the most awful turns in recent press corps history. As Russert neared the end of the session, he had already conducted an interview for which he’d be hailed as “prosecutorial.” But at the start of the show’s final segment, Russert unloaded the following attack—a presentation he ought to explain even now, some four years later:

RUSSERT (7/16/00): Mr. Vice President, when we talk to voters all across the country, they say they are looking for trustworthiness and a strong leader. A lot of comments made about your role in 1996 fund raising. And I'll give you a chance to talk about them. April 29, 1996, fund raiser at the temple, Hsi Lai—we can see it there on our screen—and following right behind you is one of your principal fund raisers, Maria Hsia, who was convicted of five felony counts. The essence of the debate or discussion seems to be that director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, and three other ranking Justice Department officials believe there should be an independent counsel, special counsel, to look into this matter, because they think you may have broken the law or lied under oath. And they point specifically to your denial that you knew that event was a fund raiser.

Yikes! According to Russert, the FBI chief and three other honchos thought Gore “may have broken the law or lied under oath.” And Russert was dropping this bomb on Gore just four months before a White House election, and just one month before he would go to L.A. to accept his party’s presidential nomination. But as of July 16, 2000, establishment Washington had already spent sixteen months dropping bombs on Candidate Gore, and most of their bombs, like Russert’s this day, were bombs they had simply invented. But no matter—Russert soon dropped his A-bomb again. “This is beating a dead horse,” Gore said, responding to Russert’s endless (and selective) charges. “No, no, it’s an open investigation,” Russert said. “When the director of the FBI and three Justice officials say it should be looked into, that’s why I’m asking. You deserve a chance to talk about it,” Gore’s host magnanimously said.

Russert’s overall performance this day was among the worst in Sunday talk history. We’ve discussed his outing in detail before (links below), but it’s hard to avoid recalling this session when reading his current self-impressed book—a memoir which tries to help readers see how balanced and fair Russert is.

What was so strange about Russert’s performance? According to Russert, four Justice officials—including the head of the FBI—thought Gore “may have broken the law or lied under oath” in connection with the Buddhist temple incident. They were “pointing specifically” to Gore’s denial that he knew the event was a fund-raiser. It’s hard to imagine a more serious charge, offered in the heat of a White House campaign. And excited scribes echoed the charge for weeks. Not much later, Bush took the White House after one of the closest elections in history.

But there was one major problem with Russert’s charge—a charge which produced so much heat. Did those officials actually think that Gore may have committed a crime? In fact, two of the four had repeatedly said something totally different. (The other two hadn’t discussed the matter.) On June 11, 2000, for example, one of the four, Robert Litt, had appeared on ABC’s This Week. “You have to remember that this is not a question really of whether the vice president committed a crime,” Litt said. “Nobody really thought that was the case.” Nobody thought that, he told Sam and Cokie! Appearing with Litt was Charles LaBella, another of the Justice officials to whom Russert would refer five weeks later. LaBella seemed to agree with Litt, and from April through June, he made similar statements on a string of major programs. On June 27, 2000, for example, he was asked about Gore and the Buddhist temple on Hannity & Colmes. “I have never said anything other than I thought an investigation was warranted,” he replied. “I also said I thought, at the end of the day, the investigation would wash out the allegations.” And LaBella specifically told Sean and Alan that Gore was unaware of Hsia’s illegal activities—the crimes which Russert suggestively cited. “The fact is, when I was there, there was no evidence that I was aware of that Vice President Gore was aware of any of the [illegal] contributions that went on at the temple,” the gumshoe debunkingly said.

Yikes! On show after show, LaBella said that he favored appointment of an independent counsel only as a “process matter;” he wanted the public to know that the charges had been investigated outside the Clinton Justice Department. Meanwhile, Litt had said the very same thing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It is important to remember that no one really thought that the Vice President ought to be prosecuted,” he told the committee on June 21. “The question was only whether the technical provisions of the Independent Counsel Act required that an independent counsel be appointed to make that decision.” In the weeks before Gore did Meet the Press, Litt and LaBella repeatedly made these statements in high-profile forums.

Yes, Labella and Litt repeatedly said it: “You have to remember that this is not a question really of whether the vice president committed a crime. Nobody really thought that was the case.” But here’s the most surprising part: Despite Russert’s damaging charge on July 16, LaBella had made similar statements to Russert himself, right on the April 2 Meet the Press! “We’ve got to put it in context for the American people because I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” he told the squire of Nantucket that day. “What we were saying was there should be an investigation…[We were] not suggesting in any way, shape, or form that charges were going to be brought, or that charges were even appropriate.” But alas! When Gore did Meet the Press three months later, Russert said that four officials—including LaBella and Litt—thought he “may have committed a crime.” In fact, LaBella had said something totally different. He had said it right to Russert’s face, right there on Russert’s own program.

If fairness plays any role in press culture, Russert’s performance this day was appalling.

Daily Howler:

When Russert says it, we swing into action, assuming that it’s most likely wrong. And on Sunday’s Meet the Press, it happened again! Russert hit Dem spokesman Bob Kerrey with a familiar charge from the late campaign. After the bin Laden tape appeared last Friday, John Kerry had criticized Bush again, saying he had allowed bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora. But was Kerry playing fair? Or was he just talkin’ smack? At the outset of his Meet the Press session with Bob Kerrey, Russert tossed his grenade:

RUSSERT (10/31/04): In December of '01, Senator, John Kerry was on CNN after Tora Bora. He was being asked about this [bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora]. He said, “I think our guys are doing a superb job. I think they've been smart. I think the administration leadership has done it well. We're on the right track.” Why the change? Politics?

Russert’s insinuation was obvious. John Kerry had appeared on CNN “after Tora Bora”—and he had praised the way the operation was run! Bob Kerrey gave a weak, evasive reply (text below). So Russert jumped him again:

RUSSERT: But it was after Tora Bora and he seemed to be praising them back then and now he’s—

Bob Kerrey interrupted and evaded again. Viewers had heard Russert say it two times: Even after Tora Bora, John Kerry had praised the operation—but now he was saying something different. And two separate times, they had seen Kerry’s spokesman interrupt, hem and haw, and evade.

But Russert was wrong on his facts, as usual—and as usual, Kerry’s spokesman showed no sign of knowing it. This incident offers Dems one way (out of many ways) to examine the 2004 race.

Is it true, this claim we heard again and again in the campaign’s closing weeks? Did John Kerry go on Larry King “after Tora Bora” and praise the way the campaign there had been conducted? Actually, no—Kerry did no such thing; Russert’s statement on Sunday was plainly inaccurate. John Kerry’s Larry King appearance was on December 14, 2001. But guess what? This was not “after Tora Bora”—the operation there was still underway. Indeed, on the front page of that morning’s New York Times, John Kifner discussed the ongoing manhunt. His story ran beneath a hopeful headline: ALLIED FORCES SAY THEY'VE CORNERED OSAMA BIN LADEN:

KIFNER (12/14/04): American-backed forces believe that they have surrounded Osama bin Laden and the last of his hard-core fighters in a complex of caves between two valleys just south of here, a senior American military official said tonight.

While American officials say they still do not know Mr. bin Laden's exact location and acknowledge that he could still slip out of the country, commanders are increasingly confident that a growing number of American, British and anti-Taliban Afghan ground forces have hemmed in the leader of Al Qaeda...

That was the Times front-page report on December 14. That night, Kerry made his appearance on Larry King, where he offered general statements in response to general questions about events in Afghanistan (text below). The following morning, Kifner continued his page-one reporting about the Tora Bora campaign:

KIFNER (12/15/01): American and British commandos, operating behind a screen of local Afghan fighters, had the last remnants of Osama bin Laden's followers—and perhaps the terrorist mastermind himself—cornered here this morning in a narrow stretch of a ridge line, canyons and caves high in the White Mountains.

"Al Qaeda is finished," Cmdr. Hazarat Ali, the ranking Afghan tribal military leader, proclaimed triumphantly this afternoon, referring to Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network. "They are surrounded."

In Washington, the regional commander of American forces, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, said 300 to 1,000 enemy fighters were caught between the hammer of Commander Ali's forces and the anvil of Pakistani border patrols.

Was bin Laden among the surrounded forces? Tommy Franks wasn’t sure, but was hopeful:

KIFNER (12/15/01): General Franks said the fierceness of the battle near Tora Bora provided one indication that Al Qaeda forces might be shielding Mr. bin Laden.

But General Franks cautioned Friday that the Pentagon has received clashing information from surveillance aircraft, opposition sources and Americans forces that had made it difficult to pinpoint Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts. He also declined to rule out the possibility that Mr. bin Laden had escaped into Pakistan.

“You see all sorts of conflicting information,” General Franks said. "So it's probably not a good idea to say with some certainty where he is. But we know where our current fight is, and that's in the Tora Bora area.”

That was the Times front page the morning after Kerry’s appearance. “American officials have gleaned other snippets of intelligence suggesting that Mr. bin Laden remains holed up in a steadily shrinking region south of Tora Bora,” Eric Schmitt wrote in a separate article that day. After listing three signs that bin Laden was present, Schmitt quoted a “senior military officer” about the likelihood that bin Laden was cornered. “No single one of these things would be enough, but put all three together and you pay close attention,” the unnamed honcho said.

So Russert was wrong on his facts, as usual, when he lectured Bob Kerrey this Sunday. Indeed, on December 16, 2001—two days after John Kerry’s appearance on Larry King—the New York Times continued reporting indications that bin Laden had been surrounded.

...

Readers may remember Big Russ & Me, Russert’s best-selling testimonial to his own remarkable character. In it, the Nantucket Squire was careful to note that—just like any Boy Scout from Buffalo—he is always prepared:

RUSSERT (page 147): [T]he key to success is preparation. In journalism, it’s absolutely critical. Like everyone else, I have days when things go well, and days when they don’t. But one mistake I have never made is to show up unprepared for an interview.

Huh! So Russert must have known the time-line of Kerry’s remarks. He simply pretended that he didn’t!

4.6.6 Kellyanne Conway (C-SPAN Washington Journal) and Tucker Carlson (CNN) on Democrats

Daily Howler:

But back in Washington, it didn’t take long for the lying to start about Tuesday night’s event. On Wednesday morning’s Washington Journal, for example, Kellyanne Conway (formerly Fitzpatrick)—one of our most disingenuous pundits—made the following ludicrous statement. Try to believe that she said it:

CONWAY: I would commend the viewers’ attention to this morning’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which I thought did a bang-up job of reporting on this memorial service. Among the excerpts, Steve and Celinda, you’ll note that the Star-Tribune covers the fact that the people who were in attendance were told by screen when to cheer and when to jeer, and they were told to cheer when the Clintons and Ted Kennedy were displayed and they were told to jeer when Trent Lott and Rod Grams, former senator of Minnesota who lost in 2000, were displayed.

Amazing, isn’t it? Who on earth could really believe that attendees were “told by screen” when to jeer? The Star-Tribune, of course, had said no such thing; we provide the paper’s report below. But that didn’t keep the hatchet-heart Conway from lying to her host, Steve Scully. Nor was she kept from her favorite pastime—lying in the faces of viewers.

And Conway was hardly alone in her conduct. On Crossfire, Tucker Carlson quickly engaged in some pleasing embellishment. He offered this gonzo misstatement:

CARLSON: Walter Mondale. The political world is still reeling tonight from yesterday’s nauseating display in Minnesota, where a memorial service for the late Senator Paul Wellstone was hijacked by partisan zealots and turned into a political rally. Republican friends of Senator Wellstone were booed and shouted down as they tried to speak.

Clearly, Carlson knows a few things about “nauseating displays.” But were Republicans “booed and shouted down as they tried to speak?” To state the obvious, no, they were not. Maybe Carlson just didn’t know. Or maybe he was—yes—simply lying.

...

Steve and Celinda, “you’ll note” that nothing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said that attendees were directed, “by screen,” to engage in such conduct. That was just the latest example of Conway’s repetitive, gonzo dissembling. What does it mean when nonsense like this is larded all through our great discourse?

For the record, Conway went on to imply what many have said—that Lott left early because he was jeered. That turns out to be untrue too (and it wasn’t reported in the Star-Tribune). In today’s Star-Trib, Rochelle Olson reports:

OLSON: Daschle dismissed reports that Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., left because the memorial turned political. “It had nothing to do with it,” said Daschle. “He made a point of emphasizing that to me before he left.”

Daschle said Lott had a flight to catch, which was confirmed by a Lott aide Wednesday.

Final question: To what extent were Lott and Grams jeered? At THE HOWLER, we don’t have a clue. We watched almost all of Tuesday’s event, but we missed the very earliest segments, when the conduct would have occurred. But the Star-Tribune described the conduct on October 30, before it became a cause celebre. Lead writer: Chuck Haga:

HAGA: The biggest cheer was for Walter Mondale, the former senator and vice president who is expected to announce today that he will seek to take Wellstone’s place on the ticket. Moments later, scattered boos greeted Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., as he entered the arena. Lott smiled and waved.

In a crowd of 20,000, the Star-Tribune reported “scattered boos.” But don’t worry. Twenty-four hours later, Carlson had Republican speakers “shouted down” as CNN’s viewers were deceived once again. But this is how our discourse now works. Our question: Why are people who dissemble so freely hired to go on our air?

4.6.7 Joe Klein (Time) and Democrats

Thomas Lang at CJR Daily:

Already this week, Time's Joe Klein offers up a dubious revision (subscription required) of very recent history in his column about the Democrats and Social Security.

Klein writes:

Finally, there was the boorish and possibly unprecedented hooting of the President by Democrats during the [State of the Union] speech.

"No! No! No!" they shouted, inaccurately, when Bush asserted that the Social Security trust fund would, in a decade or so, start paying out more money than it takes in. If nothing is done, it surely will.

Beyond the fact that such "hooting" was far from unprecedented [eRiposte: Indeed, Republicans in Congress did it quite a lot against Clinton - evidence here], Klein's short-term memory must be playing tricks on him. Democrats did not start crying out "No! No! No!" when the president asserted that the trust fund would soon start paying out more money than it takes in. Rather, the Democrats accurately started calling out "No! No! No!" when the president inaccurately asserted that "By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt." You can hear for yourself on the White House video of the address (Real Media or Windows Media) -- the moment in question is about 15 minutes into the speech.

As we have pointed out (along with several other reporters and watchdog organizations), the Social Security system cannot go "bankrupt" in the legal sense of the word. What Social Security's trustees predict will happen in the year 2042 is that the program's trust fund will be empty. Nonetheless, the system will still take in enough money to pay out 73 percent of benefits due to recipients under current law. That is neither "exhausted" nor "bankrupt," to use the president's words. A more legitimate description would be a comparison with an individual who fritters away all his savings, and finds that he has only $73 of income for every $100 of bills coming due.

Unfortunately, inaccurate columns like Klein's are often catalysts for an echo chamber of misguided history. Fortunately, audio speaks louder than print.

As Bob Somerby says:

The biggest problems with Klein’s Time column remain the ones we cited last week. He trashed those “boorish” Dems for an innocuous statement by Ron Reagan—a TV pundit who isn’t a Democrat. He called Harry Reid a “demagogue” for daring to make an obvious observation about the outlines of Bush’s plan. Worst of all, he baldly misstated the part of Bush’s speech which provoked derision from congressional Dems, pretending that Dems had tried to reject a perfectly accurate statement by Bush. But will the real Joe Klein stand up? On The Daily Show, he trashed Bush’s “amazing” plan, calling it Even-Worse-Than-Hillary! Four days later, his column appeared. Assignment: Read the transcript, then read the column. Then try to stitch them together.

Oh yes—one last point. Note Klein’s statement to Stewart: “Well, they’re going to lower our benefits...and the president said he would last night.” Four days later, he called Reid a “demagogue” for making this same observation.

As he also says:

How easy is to disinform voters? With fallen life-forms like Klein on call, it’s amazingly easy to do so. What’s the state of our current discourse? It isn’t just that mainstream journalists fail to challenge Bush’s misstatements. No, it’s now much worse than that—when Bush deliberately misleads the public, men like Klein simply pretend that he said something else! How easy is it to disinform voters? Many voters will read Klein this week, and for their trouble, he’ll lie in their face about what his Dear Leader said. (To read Thomas Lang’s superb treatment of Klein’s piece, you know what to do—just click here.)

Of course, no one should be surprised to see Klein misbehave so inexcusably. Here at THE HOWLER, we’ve chronicled Klein’s descent from journalist to pundit plutocrat over the course of the past five years, and because Klein is a powerful “mainstream journalist,” it’s been fairly lonely duty. But Klein just presents an especially advanced form of the “mainstream” press corps’ moral squalor. How easy is it for Bush to disinform voters? Here’s the way Nicholas Kristof began his column in last Saturday’s New York Times:

KRISTOF (2/5/05): Liberals are making a historic mistake by lining up so adamantly against Social Security reform.

It's impolite to say so in a blue state, but President Bush has a point: there is a genuine problem with paying for Social Security, even if it isn't as dire as Mr. Bush suggests.

Only Kristof can work so much nonsense into a two-sentence opening. Liberals are “lining up adamantly against Social Security reform,” he says, an opening claim he never quite explains, and he includes an idiot jibe about “blue states” in the process. But just how easy is it for Bush? For the previous week, the president had been parading about, making a series of bald misstatements about the nature of his “reform” and about the actual problem itself. Kristof’s response is to criticize Democrats, while appending a mild disclaimer. The problem “isn’t as dire as Mr. Bush suggests,” he says, in a column whose headline screams—as Klein’s headline does—that the “liberals” are mainly at fault. George Bush can disinform you as much as he likes with pious tools like Nick Kristof around.

Klein exhibits moral squalor; Kristof is simply a serial coward, a man who always finds a way to say that it’s mainly the Democrats’ fault. But all around the Washington press corps, his approach has prevailed in the past few weeks. How easy is it to disinform voters? Just try to find the big-time pundit complaining about Bush’s relentless deceptions! More likely, you’ll find the outright misstatements of a Joe Klein, or the slacker, Dem-bashing standards of Kristof. More likely, you’ll find the slacker moral values of a recent Washington Post editorial:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (2/1/05): [A] bit of hyperbole in the cause of generating responsible action on Social Security isn't the worst sin that is apt to be committed in the course of the coming debate.

After noting Bush’s misstatements, that was the editors’ closing judgment. A bit of hyperbole isn’t that bad! Post to Bush: Just keep on misleading.

Today, nine days later, the Post and the Times both pen editorials about Bush’s endless dissembling. And what a surprise! The Post, on page one, prints a long piece about the way the voters are misinformed about Social Security! Tomorrow, we’ll offer more thoughts about the press corps’ recent conduct. But how easy is it for Bush to mislead you? George Stephanopoulos sings McCain’s praise when the famous straight-talker lies right in his face—and Joe Klein, plutocrat, is there to lie too. It’s amazingly easy to mislead the rubes with men of this type all around.

4.6.8 Numerous major media outlets in the U.S. and Howard Dean

Let's start this section off with a simple example of the mainstream media's egregious journalistic malpractice on the topic of Howard Dean:

Murder by media: The Dean Scream 

BY EDWARD WASSERMAN

...

Still, it's never clear why some media wrongs are made into a big deal while others slip by. Take the CBS 60 Minutes report on Bush's military non-service: The story itself was old, the dubious evidence was of dubious importance, and the broadcast had no discernible effect. It became a major scandal anyway.

On the other end of the scale is an instance of clear-cut media wrongdoing that involved unquestionably fraudulent evidence and had dramatic consequences. This one, however, has gone largely unremarked. It is the famous incident involving Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean that is known as The Dean Scream.

And with Dean's recent appointment as Democratic Party chairman it's being hauled out as constituting the ceiling on whatever political ambitions he might still have, proof that he's shaky, unstable, unfit to serve -- Howard Dean's Chappaquiddick.

You've seen the clip. After Janet Jackson's ''wardrobe malfunction'' at the Super Bowl, it's the most famous news video of 2004. Dean is addressing campaign supporters after he lost the Iowa party caucuses in January. He's screaming for no apparent reason, practically shrieking, ticking off the states where he's vowing to continue the race. His face is red, his voice breaking. He looks deranged. It's a portrait of a man out of control. It's documentary evidence that Dean lacks the temperament for high office.

In fact the Dean Scream was a fraud, probably the clearest instance of media assassination in recent U.S. political history.

Last year, a young cable news producer attended one of our twice-yearly Ethics Institutes at Washington and Lee University, in which students and journalists gather to discuss newsroom wrongdoing. He brought two clips.

• The first was the familiar pool footage of Dean in Iowa. The candidate filled the screen, no supporters were visible. Crowd noise was silenced by the microphone he held, which deadened ambient sounds. You saw only him and heard only his inexplicable screaming.

• The second clip was the same speech taped by a supporter on the floor of the hall. The difference was stunning. The place was packed. The noise was deafening. Dean was on the podium, but you couldn't hear him. The roar from his supporters was drowning him out.

Dean was no longer scary, unhinged, volcanic, over the top. He was like the coach of a would-be championship NCAA football team at a pre-game rally, trying to be heard over a gym full of determined, wildly enthusiastic fans. I saw energy, not lunacy.

The difference was context. As psychiatrist R.D. Laing once wrote: We see a woman on her knees, eyes closed, muttering to someone who isn't there. Of course, she's praying. But if we deny her that context, we naturally conclude she's insane.

The Dean Scream footage that was repeatedly aired rests on a similar falsehood. It takes a man who in context was acting reasonably, and by stripping away that context transforms him into a lunatic.

But that clip was aired an estimated 700 times on various cable and broadcast channels in the week after the Iowa caucus. The people who showed that clip are far more technically sophisticated than I and had to understand how tight visual framing and noise-suppression hardware can distort reality.

True, some network news executives commented afterward that perhaps the footage was overplayed and offered the bureaucrat's favorite bromide, that hindsight is 20/20. But the media establishment has never acknowledged this as a burning matter of ethical harm.

4.6.9 Katharine Seelye (New York Times) and Al Gore

Daily Howler:

Gore plainly had not said "I was the one that started it all" at the forum where he mentioned Love Canal. On Wednesday evening, a tabloid talker had said so, straight out, on his normally inventive cable program. He was discussing Wednesday morning's piece in the New York Times which had started the chain of misquoting:

MATTHEWS (12/1): But of course the Times—of course, this always happens—the Times went further than they should have and they misquoted him [Gore], this is the paper of record, misquoted him, said, quote, "But I was the one that started it all" when in fact he said "That was the one that started it all." [Talker's emphasis]

Indeed, the talker had played tape of Gore at the forum, and Gore quite plainly had not said "I was the one who started it all." But there was Connolly the next morning—even Matthews had corrected it!—still highlighting the baldly false quote, and telling her readers it was just like other things Gore has said in the past. Just for the record, here is the passage from the Wednesday morning Times which started this idiocy off:

SEELYE (12/1): Later in the day, Mr. Gore, who suffered some embarrassment this year when he took credit for the development of the Internet, said he was the one who had first drawn attention to the toxic contamination of Love Canal. [Seelye's paraphrase is highly tendentious.] He was telling a school audience that each person can make a difference in the world [the hapless Seelye is surely proving that] and he recalled a child writing to him when he was in Congress about a hazardous-waste site in Tennessee.

He then added [only after material which Seelye has edited], "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first issue on that issue and Toone, Tenn.," he said. [Seelye does more editing here.] "But I was the one that started it all. [More material is deleted without indication.] And it all happened because one high school student got involved."

...Oh yes—one other thing, just for the record. How did the two papers handle the corrections? You know—how did the Timesand the Post tell their readers that what they had written was false? To use a word from Michiko Kakutani's review, the answer to that question is predictable. There has been no correction, in either paper, of the baldly false quote they put into print.

...One other point—even when Seelye seems to quote, she does so in a spirit of license. At one point, she "quotes" Gore's statement as follows:

SEELYE: "But I was the one that started it all. And it all happened because one high school student got involved."

In Gore's actual statement, four sentences separate the two Seelye uses (one of which she rewrites, of course). But she uses no ellipsis to alert her readers that material from Gore has been left out. (The use of the ellipsis was invented, of course, to protect us from writers like Seelye.) Simply put, a high school senior can't pass in work like this. Welcome to the New York Times, a talker's sad "paper of record."

4.6.10 Maureen Dowd and Sheryl Gay Stolberg (New York Times) and John Kerry

This is about the quote "“Who among us doesn't like Nascar?" that Dowd attributed to Kerry.

Daily Howler:

We finally have the full information. Yes, Maureen Dowd invented that fake NASCAR quote—the comical “quote” from pretentious old Kerry (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/21/04). And once Dowd invented the phony quotation, it spread through the great New York Times. It was repeated by Tierney; repeated by Stolberg; repeated by Egan; repeated by Rich—and Kerry was mocked for his pompous (fake) statement every single time that they did it. Five separate times in the past several months, Kerry was mocked in the Times for his comment. And oh yes, let’s repeat this—the “quotation” in question was phony. Kerry never made the statement in question. Maureen Dowd simply made the “quote” up.

We discussed this matter on September 21, and last week, we finally got the full facts. Did pretentious Kerry really say, “Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?” According to Dowd, when Kerry made this laughable statement, it made him “come across like Mr. Collins, Elizabeth Bennet's pretentious cousin in ‘Pride and Prejudice.’” But wouldn’t you know it? Kerry never made the laughable statement! Writing in Slate, NPR’s Mike Pesca finally laid out the basic facts:

PESCA (9/28/04): Dowd wasn't at the event where Kerry supposedly said "Who among us ... " She learned about it in a casual conversation with Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who said Kerry said it on Feb. 17 at a union rally in Milwaukee.

What Kerry actually said at that rally was "There isn't one of us here who doesn't like NASCAR and who isn't a fan." Because of the roundabout way in which the quote got into print, it didn't get the normal vetting, i.e., playing back the tape. Stolberg now says it's possible that she made a mistake and that Kerry never said “who among us.”

Indeed, Pesca even provides a link to the tape of Kerry’s actual comment (you can still play it). Here’s the fuller transcript of what Kerry said at that union event:

KERRY (2/17/04): This president went to Florida just the other day to start the NASCAR races. There isn’t one of us here who doesn’t like NASCAR and who isn’t a fan, but I’ll tell you what—instead of just saying, “Gentlemen, start your engines” and during the race listening and looking at a race while 350 manufacturing jobs were lost and $171 million was—

Yes, that’s where Pesca’s tape shuts off. Fairly typically of the press corps, Pesca doesn’t even let us hear the end of Kerry’s substantive point. But one thing is perfectly clear from that tape. Kerry’s NASCAR reference was a trivial aside on his way to a larger point. And oh yes, one other thing. Kerry didn’t make the statement which made him seem like pretentious Mr. Collins. He didn’t make the statement Dowd put into quotes. As usual, Maureen Dowd made it up.

But oh, we’re sorry—Dowd didn’t make it up. No, let’s use pandering Pesca’s polite constructions, the constructions we see in the passage above, the constructions he employs as he fawns to authority. Actually, Dowd “leaned about” Kerry’s statement from Stolberg, “who said Kerry said it on Feb. 17 at a union rally in Milwaukee.” And you know what happened next! “Because of the roundabout way in which the quote got into print, it didn't get the normal vetting, i.e., playing back the tape.” Let’s put that into simple English. Dowd didn’t bother to check the quote—a “quote” which was simply too luscious to check. She simply put the “quote” into print, mocking Kerry for having said it, and four of her colleagues then followed suit. From July 25 through September 5, pompous Kerry was mocked four more times for having made this laughable statement. And you know how those Timesmen are! By August 22, the fake quote wasn’t funny enough any more, so Timothy Egan jacked it up just a tad. “Who among us doesn’t love NASCAR,” Kerry was now alleged to have said. Frank Rich also used the embellished version of the original fake in his September 5 column. The fake quote didn’t seem fake enough any more. The fake quote now needed improvement.

No, this latest fake quote didn’t have the effect of past Dowd-Rich inventions. One past and potent example: In December 1997, the highly inventive pair of scribes created the damaging Love Story incident; when Gore began his White House campaign in March 1999, the nonsensical story was widely adopted, and the press corps used it for the next twenty months as it waged its war against Clinton’s successor. But for some reason, the wider press corps showed restraint about the Times’ fake NASCAR quote. Although it ran five times in the Times, almost no one else picked the quote up. It never appeared in the Washington Post. The AP never ran the fake quote; neither did the Washington Times. In this case, as in so many others, our greatest paper was also our fakest. And by the way—just how fake are the stars at the Times? Drink in the irony—it’s just delish—as Stolberg, the person who attended the original event, recycled the fake, phony quote:

STOLBERG (7/30/04): To anyone who has listened to Mr. Kerry extemporize at length—who among us can forget his ''Who among us doesn't like Nascar?'' remark? —the thought of the Brahmin from Boston disdaining speechwriters and trying humor seemed odd, shall we say, for the most important address of his career.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Darlings, it was simply delish! “Who among us can forget Kerry’s remark,” Stolberg asked—the remark which Kerry never made! Indeed, Stolberg had been there to hear him not make it! Now, the phony reporter chose to pretend that she couldn’t get it out of her head. And yes—this is the way the fakes and the frauds work at the fake New York Times.

Question: Why do these people still work at the Times? More specifically, why isn’t someone like Maureen Dowd fired? Dowd has a long history of this kind of fakery—please don’t make us run through it here—but she just keeps making a joke of your lives with fake, phony stories about your leaders. And by the way—the Times has now known, for a good chunk of time, that Kerry never uttered this much-maligned “quote.” But so what? No correction has appeared. If you read these five articles on time, you’d still think that John Kerry said it. (Maybe that’s why the Hartford Courant ran a syndicated column by Steve Chapman mocking Kerry for the comment. When did the column run? Yesterday!)

...

And so, as he continues from the passage above, Pesca presents the eternal explanation. Dowd invented a quote about Kerry. But it’s OK. John Kerry asked for it!

PESCA (continuing directly): The Kerry campaign, though, can hardly cry foul, having helped create the intense competition over the "First Fan" title. Once you get the full context, Kerry seems to know more about sports than the Football Fans for Truth would have you believe, but less than a seasoned candidate should. For instance, Kerry's full NASCAR line might not have included "who among us," but it wasn't nearly as sharp as the president's cheesehead barb.

For entertainment purposes, you can read the rest of Pesca’s piece, as he explains that Kerry doesn’t speak quite as crisply as Bush does.

But just drink in that highlighted sentence. The Kerry campaign can hardly cry foul! Amazing, isn’t it? Dowd and her colleagues make up a fake quote. They’ve run the fake quote five times in their paper. Each and every time they run it, they mock Kerry for his pretentious, Brahmin-like ways. And yes—this is the way our White House hopefuls can lose in close elections. But get this—although Kerry never uttered the quote, the Kerry campaign can hardly cry foul! They can hardly complain about what the Times did!

4.6.11 David Brooks (New York Times) and Hillary Clinton

Daily Howler:

How reflexively fake is your Washington “press corps?” Let David Brooks of the NewsHour show you. Last Friday night, Jim Lehrer asked co-pundits Brooks and Mark Shields what they thought of Living History. The book had been in the stores all week. After some vague remarks by Shields, Brooks voiced a sad assessment:

BROOKS (6/13/03): The frustrating thing about the book to me is that like many politicians, including Ronald Reagan, she is incapable of having an interesting insight or an original thought. All these people who have these positions where they could really see something and say something interesting are just incapable of thinking in that way and the person who has the high power and also can write interestingly like a Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt is so rare. So the book is kind of frustrating because it is frankly a little dull.

Sadly, Brooks announced that the book was dull. But then, we think we’ve mentioned the Hard Pundit Law—pundits must say that this book is no good. Every pundit knows what to say. Mrs. Clinton is lying. Or the book is quite dull. Or she just blames all the mess on her enemies.

But now, Lehrer turned back to Shields, and the crafty host had a trick question. Of course, as Hard Pundit Law requires, he received a Belittling Group Reply:

LEHRER (continuing directly): Have you read it?

SHIELDS: I haven’t, Jim.

LEHRER: Are you going to?

SHIELDS: It’s right behind the—

BROOKS: The Spanish-English dictionary.

SHIELDS: The Spanish-English dictionary or “The Franco I Knew.” No, I don’t. Jim, I really don’t. I don’t plan to.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Left and right mean nothing here; Shields and Brooks amused the rubes with their witty putdown. But now a thought occurred to Lehrer. The host turned back to David Brooks. And he asked Brooks if he’d read the book:

LEHRER (continuing directly): Have you read it? You talk like you you’ve read it.

“You talk like you’ve read it,” Lehrer said. But guess what? David Brooks had been faking:

LEHRER: Have you read it? You talk like you you’ve read it.

BROOKS: I read parts. I stood in the bookstore for about an hour looking at it; I did not buy it.

LEHRER: You went into the bookstore and picked it up and, what, skimmed it?

BROOKS: Simon & Schuster is now canceling my book contract but I have to tell the truth.

“I have to tell the truth,” Brooks said, moments after delivering his phony review—a review which, like all pundit reviews, voiced the press corps’ Key Approved Scripts. Meanwhile, can we ask the obvious question? Does anyone believe, for even a minute, that David Brooks “stood in the bookstore for about an hour” thumbing through the new Clinton book? Let’s face it. When you bend the truth the way this gang does, pretty soon every word from your mouth is a slick confabulation. We sometimes wonder why a man like Lehrer lets these Jayson Blair types on his show.

But then, all over the “press corps” we saw the same thing; we saw fake, phony pundits smashing a book which they hadn’t quite managed to read. No, they hadn’t read the book—but they knew the corps’ talking-points. They told us how dull this tiring book was—so dull that they hadn’t yet read it.

4.6.12 George Will (Washington Post) on Al Gore/Democrats

Daily Howler:

When the going gets tough, George Will starts dissembling. On Sunday, his column complained about "the mendacity of Al Gore's pre-election campaign." It also slammed Gore's "serial mendacity." And it mentioned Gore's "corrupting hunger for power;" "he is, strictly speaking, unbelievable," Will said. He is also a "dangerous man," for whom aides "do their reckless work." That is remarkably overwrought rhetoric. But then the columnist tried to support it. Here was his sad first example:

WILL (paragraph 3): [Gore] staggered Bill Bradley in an Iowa debate by asking why Bradley voted against flood relief for Iowa. Bradley voted for $4.8 billion of relief, and opposed—as did the Clinton-Gore administration—only an amendment to add $900 million.

Slick, oh so slick. Unfortunately for Will's position, the Clinton administration did support the supplemental bill in the end, and Bradley did vote against the bill. As we have noted before, Gore's question to Bradley in the January Iowa debate explicitly referenced the second vote, on the $900 million. And Bradley had voted against it. But back in January, when the debate occurred, pundits began reciting the Bradley camp's spin. They said that Gore had somehow misled with his question, and that Bradley had merely forgotten how he voted on flood relief. In fact, Bradley did vote against the $900 million, and the premise of Gore's question was explicit and accurate. But spinners still distort this point, including, alas, the shameless Bradley, appearing on This Week last month (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/2/00).

Will was spinning about the flood relief query. But if you want to be spun in various ways, just read his entire column. Get spun on Palm Beach, for example:

WILL (6): The Democratic Party dotes on victims, but what, exactly, victimized those 19,000 Palm Beach County voters who, as almost 15,000 in the county did in 1996, botched their ballots by punching two candidates for president? It is absurd to say it is "unfair" to do what the law requires—disallow improperly marked ballots. And it is sinister when Democratic voters, after leaving polling places where they could have asked for guidance or fresh ballots, suddenly "remember" that they might have misread their "butterfly" ballots.

Start first with Will's numbers of spoiled ballots (15,000 in 1996 vs. 19,000 this year). It has been reported, again and again, that the 15,000 spoiled ballots in 1996 included ballots where two candidates were punched and ballots rejected for no punch at all. The corresponding number in this election is 29,000 spoiled ballots, not 19,000. The change in numbers make no real difference, but that doesn't seem to bother Will. Frankly, we're not sure he even knows who he is; he seems to embroider, embellish and exaggerate even where the real facts would be just as good! Meanwhile, he suggests that the Palm Beach problem was dreamed up after the fact; that is, of course, a complete affront to the well-established record. It has been widely documented—over and over—that confusion about the Palm Beach ballot was reported throughout Election Day. The fact that voters reported confusion doesn't mean they should get a revote. But Will's column misstates basic facts. This occurs, of course, in a furious piece asserting that Gore is a serial liar!

We don't have the time to hit all Will's misstatements. But here's one more worth noting:

WILL (8): The Palm Beach ballots were designed by a Democrat and approved by a process that included Democrats, and sample ballots were published in newspapers and mailed to voters—all without eliciting pre-election complaints.

It makes a wonderful story. Unfortunately, if you've seen the sample ballot from the Palm Beach Post, it looked nothing like the actual ballot. The presidential candidates were listed in one column, eliminating the source of the ballot confusion. But writers like Will "keep spin alive," telling readers the stories they like.

4.6.13 Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post) [who is perhaps the most pathological liar in the Washington Post payroll] - on Howard Dean:

Daily Howler:

When will the Washington Post fire its dissembling columnist, Charles Krauthammer? And one other question obtains: What are the paper’s obligations to its misled readers?

THE POST’S LATEST LYING LIAR: Charles Krauthammer is deeply dishonest. In fact, the Washington Post should fire him, now. In a fire-breathing column in this morning’s Post, Krauthammer tells the world what a crackpot that Howard Dean is. To promote his point, Krauthammer presents a “transcript” from Monday’s night’s Hardball—a “transcript” he has artfully doctored. Here’s how the scribe presents one Q-and-A from Monday night’s Hardball program:

KRAUTHAMMER:
Chris Matthews: “Would you break up Fox?”
Howard Dean: “On ideological grounds, absolutely yes, but….I don’t want to answer whether I would break up Fox or not….What I’m going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one.”

Wow! “On ideological grounds,” Howard Dean wants to break up Fox! According to Krauthammer, this exchange shows that Dean “is now exhibiting symptoms of a related illness, Murdoch Derangement Syndrome (MDS), in which otherwise normal people believe that their minds are being controlled by a single, very clever Australian.”

Of course, Krauthammer was playing Post readers for fools. Because we’ve dealt with people like Krauthammer for years, our reaction to this “transcript” was virtually preordained; our eyes were drawn to those suspicious ellipses which broke up Krauthammer’s pleasing text. And so we did what we’ve done for years—we checked the official transcript. And yes, we found what we frequently do; Krauthammer was playing Post readers for fools. The key words in the transcript are [LAUGHTER], which Krauthammer deftly removed:

OFFICIAL MSNBC TRANSCRIPT:

MATTHEWS: Rupert Murdoch has the Weekly Standard. It has got a lot of other interests. It has got the New York Post. Would you break it up?

DEAN: On ideological grounds, absolutely yes, but—

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: No, seriously. As a public policy, would you bring industrial policy to bear and break up these conglomerations of power?

DEAN: I don’t want to answer whether I would break up Fox or not, because, obviously—

MATTHEWS: Well, how about large media enterprises?

DEAN: Let me—yes, let me get—

(LAUGHTER)

DEAN: The answer to that is yes. I would say that there is too much penetration by single corporations in media markets all over this country. We need locally-owned radio stations. There are only two or three radio stations left in the state of Vermont where you can get local news anymore. The rest of it is read and ripped from the AP.

MATTHEWS: So what are you going to do about it? You’re going to be president of the United States, what are you going to do?

DEAN: What I’m going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one.

So you see what Krauthammer’s ellipses removed—and you see how men like Krauthammer subvert your democracy. As anyone watching this program would know, Dean was joking when he made his statement about wanting to break up Fox. But then, anyone who read the transcript would know that too—the transcript records audience laughter two times, and shows Matthews asking Dean to “be serious.” But men like Krauthammer hate your democracy; they want to reduce you to the status of rubes. So the creative man began cutting-and-pasting, making you think that Dean had been serious. The Washington Post should do the right thing. They should fire Charles Krauthammer—now.

Of course, there’s little chance that the Post will do so. The Post established its very low standards back in March 1999, when Michael Kelly dissembled so hard about Al Gore and those troubling farm chores. As we pointed out at the time, it was clear that the Kelly had deliberately misled Post readers. But the mighty Post kept their man on the job. Why should they do different now?

How completely fraudulent is Krauthammer? If the media really was liberally biased and if there was any respect media outlets had for journalism, people like him would not exist on payroll. See some letters that Bob Somerby published about the vile column above.

Dallas Morning News, 12/14/03
Former psychiatrist, former Mondale speechwriter and current right-wing hawk Charles Krauthammer “diagnoses” a mental disorder in Howard Dean based on Dr. Dean’s speculation that the president may be hiding something by refusing to cooperate with the 9-11 investigation committee. In a puzzling tangent, he then claims Barbra Streisand wrote a memo linking the logging industry to “Iraq a country that is two-thirds desert.” You may see this memo at www.drudgereport.com/strei1.htm and note that Mr. Krauthammer is untruthful as to the authorship of the memo and the silly claim that it stated a logging interest in Iraq. Dr. K proceeds to identify Dr. Dean as having “no detectable sense of humor,” then alters a transcript of MSNBC Hardball by deleting “laughter” annotations, so that he can claim that humorous banter initiated by Chris Matthews was a serious comment on breaking up a news network. The public is clearly safer with Dr. Krauthammer as a right-wing columnist, but I would suggest to him that he dig out a copy of DSM-IV and read up on “narcissistic personality disorder.” This may be a case of psychiatrist, diagnose yourself.
Joe Budd, Big Spring

The Raleigh News & Observer, 12/14/04
A clear sign of a morally bankrupt political position is when its defenders stoop to “diagnosing” its critics with mental illness, as did Charles Krauthammer in his Dec. 5 column, “Shrink-rapping Dean.” This is an especially egregious approach by someone trained as a psychiatrist, as Krauthammer is.
On the one hand, under the guise of humor, he is nonetheless attempting to “medicalize” political criticism, which as he should very well know, is the same tactic used in Stalin-era Russia to imprison political dissidents in mental hospitals. On the other hand, he is doing a grave disservice to people with real mental illness, a physiologically based medical condition that causes great suffering and hardship. This trivializes a serious, and too often stigmatized health condition, again, as he should know as a former psychiatrist….
Janet R. Nelson, Raleigh

Newport News Daily Press, 12/12/03
As a columnist, Charles Krauthammer has the right to interpret events in whatever way he chooses. However, his Dec. 8 column (“The delusions of front-runner Howard Dean”) is an exercise in selective reporting, revealed by the ellipses he used to truncate Howard Dean's response to a question from MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews.
Looking at the transcript from the Dean interview, available at msnbc.com, it is plain that Dean’s initial response was a joke, as indicated by the laughter of the audience, the interviewer and Dean himself. Further, those ellipses erase several minutes of give and take in which Dean lays out his thoughtful position on concentrated media ownership.
This tactic reminds me of the promoters of dud movies, who can pull any complimentary adjective from a review and trumpet it in their ads, regardless of the overall negative review. By stringing elliptical phrases together and by placing them out of context, anyone can prove anything. And who among us has the time and resources to track down every original quote?
This is precisely the kind of abuse and manipulation that passes for national journalism these days. If the Daily Press continues to accept Krauthammer’s column knowing his practices, it casts doubt on the newspaper’s own standards for reporting.
Andrew Smith, Williamsburg

4.6.14 Ceci Connolly (Washington Post) and Al Gore

Daily Howler:

But this week, incredibly, Ceci Connolly (and the Post) and Katharine Seelye (and the Times) have managed to achieve that distinction. In the process, they've successfully ginned up the latest "scandal"—one the talker is blabbing all over the air. Here was Connolly, telling a story she likes, in the Washington Post Thursday morning:

CONNOLLY (12/2) (paragraph 1): Add Love Canal to the list of verbal missteps by Vice President Gore.

(2) The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie "Love Story" and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say that he discovered a toxic waste site when he said at a high school forum Tuesday in New Hampshire: "I found a little place in New York called Love Canal."

(3) Gore went on to brag about holding the "first hearing on that issue" and said "I was the one that started it all."

That short dispatch spills over with errors, as we will detail anon. But here's the newest one: Gore plainly had not said "I was the one that started it all" at the forum where he mentioned Love Canal. On Wednesday evening, a tabloid talker had said so, straight out, on his normally inventive cable program. He was discussing Wednesday morning's piece in the New York Times which had started the chain of misquoting:

MATTHEWS (12/1): But of course the Times—of course, this always happens—the Times went further than they should have and they misquoted him [Gore], this is the paper of record, misquoted him, said, quote, "But I was the one that started it all" when in fact he said "That was the one that started it all." [Talker's emphasis]

...

So that was Seelye, on Wednesday morning. Wednesday night, Matthews corrected the highlighted statement, playing tape that showed what Gore plainly said. But the next morning, Connolly continued to tell the story she liked, building a story around the bogus quote, and mixing it in with statements about Love Story that are baldly, demonstrably false.

Despite a talker's correction of the plain misquote, this incident has become a new pseudo-scandal; last night, for example, the talker came back to Love Story/Love Canal at least three separate times on his show. You will almost surely hear this incident characterized and spun repeatedly in coming weeks. As such, the sequence of events that unfolded this week are a perfect anatomy of a press pseudo-scandal, in which quotes are edited, spun, and invented to let journalists tell stories they like. The five paragraphs we've quoted from Seelye and Connolly are simply full of demonstrable error—plain, flat-out deceptions of readers that the hapless scribes happily recite.

More on Connolly and Al Gore:

The talker cited Love Story throughout his show. Two minutes after this comment, for example, he asked a guest: "What is it, this Zelig guy who keeps saying I was the main character in Love Story," and he mockingly asked, "[W]ho played Al Gore in the Love Canal story? We know Ryan O'Neal played him in Love Story [laughter]." Just past the halfway point of the show, he promo-ed the fact that he would soon ask two more guests about Love Canal and Love Story; sure enough, speaking with the guests about ten minutes later, he brought up Love Story again. In the discussion, Gore was accused of "delusion" and was said to be living in "fantasy land." On his program the night before, Matthews had said that, in the future, "We will have to talk about the psychological tendencies involved" in Gore's alleged conduct concerning Love Story and Love Canal. Clearly, serious conclusions are being drawn about Gore's alleged comments on Love Story. One might almost imagine that a serious press corps would feel obliged to get basic facts right.

But that is the lingering problem. Pundits have shown an undying love for Love Story—they have brought it up time and again, for two years. But there's one big problem with the Love Story tale—what has been repeatedly alleged is just false. In the Post, Connolly had described Gore as "[t]he man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie 'Love Story.'" But the two claims lodged in this statement are both false. For all the press corps' love for this story, the story has been simply wrong for two years. It represents one of the longest-running misstatements of fact in the sad gong show we now call our "public discourse."

The Love Story nonsense began in late 1997—invented by a Maureen Dowd column—and in the aftermath of that piece, Melinda Henneberger wrote a lengthy story on the topic for the Sunday New York Times (12/14/97). No one has ever disputed the facts she reported; pundits have simply preferred to ignore them. But what Henneberger reported, two years ago, contradicts both the things Connolly still says.

First question: Did Gore "inspire Love Story?" As part of her research, Henneberger interviewed Erich Segal, who had known Gore at Harvard while writing Love Story. And sorry, folks, we hate to upset you, but here's Henneberger, on what Segal said:

HENNEBERGER: The character of the preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was modeled on both Mr. Gore and his college roommate, the actor Tommy Lee Jones.

According to Segal, Jones had been the model for the "macho athlete with the heart of a poet" part of the character, and Gore had been the model for the young college student with a highly accomplished father to live up to.

So Gore had been a "model" for the part. Parsing pundits will doubtless note: none of this means that Gore "inspired" Love Story. But it also became clear in Henneberger's piece that Gore had made no such claim. Gore's meaningless remarks about Love Story had been made on a long, late-night plane ride, in a conversation with two respected reporters—Rick Berke of the New York Times, and Karen Tumulty of Time. Henneberger interviewed both reporters. Sorry, folks, we hate to disappoint you, but here's Tumulty's account of what Gore said:

HENNEBERGER: "[Gore] said Segal had told some reporters in Tennessee that it was based on him and Tipper," Ms. Tumulty said. "He said all I know is that's what he told reporters in Tennessee."

Berke agreed that Gore attributed the story to reporters in Tennessee. And sure enough, Segal confirmed that there had been such a story, in the Nashville Tennessean. Segal told Henneberger that the reporter "just exaggerated" a bit, playing "the local-hero angle;" for example, Segal said the reporter added Tipper Gore into the mix, though she had not been the model for Love Story's other lead character in the tale, Jenny Cavilleri.

Incredible, isn't it, that this sort of nonsense inspires our press two years later? That on the basis of absolute idiocy like this, a major public figure is called "delusional" on TV, and a reporter who can't even get simple quotes right calls his character into question? Two years later! Welcome to the riot of nonsense and spin we laughingly call our public discourse—and welcome to the world of Ceci Connolly, whose grisly work for the Washington Post has been on this level all year.

But the facts of this story, as reported two years ago, are, sad to say, all too simple. Gore told reporters that he had seen a newspaper story saying he and Tipper were the models for Love Story. That's "all I know," Gore had said. And everyone agrees such a story did exist. In a rational world, that would end the silly tale, but for the record, Segal said that Gore and Jones were the two models for the Ryan O'Neal part. Now read again what Connolly wrote—two years later—and raise a cup to our great public discourse:

CONNOLLY: [Gore] mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie "Love Story."

Say hello to our brilliant celebrity press corps, 1999 style.

Those are the facts about this story, a story the press corps has pimped around for two years. Again this week, Connolly misstates the basic facts, and unlicensed psychiatrists examine Gore's psyche. The facts of this story are simple to state—although they're embarrassing facts for the Washington press corps. But isn't it time that the press corps corrected its errors? Shouldn't these simple facts finally be told?

4.6.15 Carl Cameron (Fox News) and John Kerry

eRiposte (citing Josh Marshall):

It started here. 

If you go to the front page of the Fox News site, there's a link right there up front to "Trail Tales: What's that Face" [eRiposte note: this has since been removed - but read on].

Link through and you find this ...

Rallying supporters in Tampa Friday, Kerry played up his performance in Thursday night's debate, in which many observers agreed the Massachusetts senator outperformed the president.

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" Kerry said Friday.

With the foreign-policy debate in the history books, Kerry hopes to keep the pressure on and the sense of traction going.

Aides say he will step up attacks on the president in the next few days, and pivot somewhat to the domestic agenda, with a focus on women and abortion rights.

"It's about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures," Kerry said.

Kerry still trails in actual horse-race polls, but aides say his performance was strong enough to rally his base and further appeal to voters ready for a change.

"I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy," the Democratic candidate said of himself and his opponent.

A "metrosexual" is defined as an urbane male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.

Did Kerry really say that stuff? Stuff that sounds like classic winger parody? I looked around on google and no other reporters seem to have gotten those choice quotes from Senator Kerry. A source on the Kerry campaign told me Kerry certainly didn't say anything remotely like that.

So what's the story from Fox? Are these quotes real? Made up? Unidentified parody? Straight-up fabrications?

Josh did some checking and found that the quotes mysteriously disappeared later.

Now Fox has pulled the article from the front page without explanation. And on the article itself the passages I quoted in the post below have all been removed -- again, without explanation.

Then he confirmed that the quotes were fabrications:

Late this afternoon I spoke to Fox spokesman Paul Schur who told me the following ...

“Carl [Cameron] made a stupid mistake which he regrets. And he has been reprimanded for his lapse in judgment. It was a poor attempt at humor.”

So the Fox reporter covering the Kerry campaign puts together this Kerry-bashing parody right out of the RNC playbook with phony quotes intended to peg him as girlish fool and somehow it found its way on the Fox website as a news item.

Imagine that.

Then Faux published a retraction:

Fox News has now posted a retraction and apology for the piece with the fabricated Kerry quotes ...

Earlier Friday, FOXNews.com posted an item purporting to contain quotations from Kerry. The item was based on a reporter’s partial script that had been written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast. We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice.

The only retraction doesn't name the reporter in question, Carl Cameron, which was noted in the statement Fox News gave TPM this afternoon.

Josh then pointed out something more about Carl Cameron and his coverage of Kerry in the past:

On Monday Kurtz discussed a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs that showed that Fox News coverage of Kerry was overwhelmingly negative.

Kurtz got these quotes from Cameron's boss Brit Hume ...

Brit Hume, Fox's Washington managing editor, whose "Special Report" was examined by the study, says he's surprised by the anti-Kerry findings. "Our day-in, day-out coverage by Carl Cameron has been extremely fair to Kerry, and the Kerry campaign has recognized this," he says.

"We did a lot on the Swift Boat Veterans. We thought it was a totally legitimate story and found it an appalling lapse by many of our competitive news organizations that were treating that story like it was cancerous." But even there, Hume says, "we were abundantly fair to John Kerry's side."

"Extremely fair" to Kerry? "Abundantly fair" about the Swift Boat stuff?

The same reporter who made up these 'Kerry quotes'?

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

Kurtz could do us all a favor and get Hume on the horn to see if he's still willing to call Cameron "extremely fair to Kerry."

And what happened to Cameron afterwards?

On President George W. Bush's second Inauguration Day, FOX News managing editor and chief Washington correspondent Brit Hume announced that FOX News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes had promoted Carl Cameron from chief political correspondent to chief White House correspondent and Jim Angle from senior White House correspondent to chief Washington correspondent. Media Matters for America has documented numerous instances of inaccurate, incomplete, and distorted reporting by both Cameron and Angle. For example:

Carl Cameron has:

• fabricated statements from Senator John Kerry during the 2004 presidential race as part of a "parody" of the Democratic candidate; he included them in an October 1 "Trail Tales" report on the FOX News website. The article was removed soon afterwards, but an archived version is available here;
• reported that Democrats favor a "stonewall strategy" on Social Security and applied various inaccurate labels to the candidates vying for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairmanship;
• inaccurately reported that Bush never said "mission accomplished";
• falsely claimed that in a September 20, 2004, speech, Kerry referred to Bush as a "warmonger who wants a perpetual state of war around the world"; and
• misstated facts about Democratic campaign rallies.

4.6.16 Brit Hume (Fox News) and John Kerry

Let's start by pointing out that Hume continued to pimp the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, despite incontrovertible proof that they were an out-and-out fraud operation comprising of a group of pathological liars. [Imagine what would have happened if Dan Rather had done the same thing to George Bush.] 

Let's offer another example about this paragon of fraud at Fox News.

Media Matters:

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and former Social Security associate commissioner James Roosevelt Jr. examined how FOX News Washington managing editor Brit Hume and other pundits distorted a quote by Roosevelt Jr.'s grandfather, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in order to claim that the former president would have supported privatizing Social Security.

During their discussion, Olbermann referenced the distortions by Hume, nationally syndicated radio host and former Reagan administration official William J. Bennett, and Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund -- which Media Matters for America has documented. Roosevelt Jr. echoed Air America Radio host Al Franken's call for Hume to resign, saying that "he rearranged those sentences in an outrageous distortion, one that really calls for a retraction, an apology, maybe even a resignation."

From the February 15 edition of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

OLBERMANN: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, at minimum, midwife to the Social Security system, would have endorsed President Bush's plan to partially privatize it. Our third story on the Countdown -- that is the claim, anyway, of at least three conservative commentators and several Republican congressmen. But it turns out those guys pretty much just made it up. In a moment, FDR's grandson, himself a former associate commissioner for Social Security, joins us to discuss the fraud.

First, the background. It began on television with Brit Hume of FOX News, taking quotes from the three principles of security for our old people that FDR expressed to Congress on January 17, 1935. Not all the quotes, mind you, just some of them, and out of context. I'm reading from the transcript on the FOX website of Mr. Hume's newscast of February 3rd. "It turns out," Hume said, "that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it. In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plan should include, 'Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age,' adding that government funding, 'ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.'"

As promised, I'm joined now by James Roosevelt Jr., now senior vice president of Tufts Health Plan, formerly associate commissioner for Social Security, and, of course, grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Great -- thanks for your time tonight, sir.

ROOSEVELT: Nice to be with you, Keith.

OLBERMANN: The argument is that Mr. Hume more or less twisted this entirely around. Can you explain it in layman's terms?

ROOSEVELT: I think I can. And it's really quite an amazing distortion. What they did was that they took a very simple statement that my grandfather made, which said that Social Security, when it was enacted almost 70 years ago, ought to first of all have a part that took care of people who didn't have time to build up a Social Security account. And the government should fund that out of general revenues.

Secondly, Social Security should have a self-sustaining portion that was funded by contributions from both employers and employees. That's what we know and have known for 70 successful years as Social Security.

And thirdly, those who wanted and who needed to, as many -- almost everybody -- did, to have a higher income and retirement, should have accounts where they could pay in voluntarily, in addition to the guaranteed Social Security benefit.

And then my grandfather said that eventually, the self-sustaining portion of the guaranteed insurance would phase out the government-paid portion. That's because we would have a fully functioning Social Security system as we do today.

What Brit Hume and others have done is take portions of that paragraph and rearrange it so that it says something entirely different from what he intended.

OLBERMANN: At the risk of doing a little too much reading, just to put it on the historical record, let me read the entire quote from which those quotes were pulled. The ones Mr. Hume pulled, only that he wanted to pull:

"In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles: First, noncontributory old-age pensions for those who are now to old build up their own insurance. It is, of course, clear that for perhaps 30 years to come fund will have to be provided by the states and the federal government to meet these pensions.

"Second, compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations.

"Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age." That's one of the Hume quotes there. "It is proposed that the federal government assume one-half of the cost of the old pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

So, where he raised the prospect of self-supporting annuity plans -- that was not to replace Social Security, it was to replace the money the government was contributing to Social Security for the people born in, say, 1870 and earlier. Is that about it?

ROOSEVELT: That is exactly it. And he rearranged those sentences in an outrageous distortion, one that really calls for a retraction, an apology, maybe even a resignation.

OLBERMANN: He may have been the only news reporter who did that. The other people who have made the comment on it were people like William Bennett, also in one of the live circus programs that they have over on FOX, and John Fund from The Wall Street Journal online political commentary Web site. Of course, the president referenced this vaguely in the State of the Union. What do you make, generally speaking, of what we might fairly call revisionist history?

4.6.17 Bill O'Reilly (Fox News) on Florida 2000/Paul Krugman and other topics

Media Matters:

After a familiar diatribe against The New York Times for alleged liberal bias and deception on the July 20 edition of FOX News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly threw down the gauntlet: "[E]nough's enough, and I am issuing this challenge directly to The New York Times. I will debate any Times editor or columnist on the Charlie Rose PBS program. ... So I'm calling these sleazy guys out. We'll let you know what happens. Do you think they'll show up? Yeah, sure." But despite his initial skepticism, O'Reilly announced on August 5 that "far-left columnist Paul Krugman" of The New York Times had accepted the challenge. The O'Reilly-Krugman debate aired on the August 7 edition of CNBC's Tim Russert.

During the show, O'Reilly repeated several lies and distortions familiar from his radio and FOX News Channel programs and added some new ones. The complete broadcast of the debate -- which was recorded earlier in the week -- also revealed that O'Reilly, on his August 4 radio show, mischaracterized the debate when he claimed, "[H]e's [Krugman] not strong enough to stand up to me. And I didn't take any mercy on him, I have to say."

Lie #1: "[H]e predicted the Bush tax cuts would lead to a deeper recession"

...

Lie #2: States are overwhelmed with federal education dollars

...

Lie #3: Bush won Florida "no matter what"

...

Lie #4: "We put more liberal voices on the air than conservatives"

...

Bonus Radio Factor Lie: "He's just -- he's not strong enough to stand up to me"
[eRiposte note: Click on the URL to see the details]

4.6.18 Chris Matthews (MSNBC) and Bill/Hillary Clinton

Daily Howler:

The Daily Howler
January 28, 1999

Chris Matthews
Hardball

Dear Chris:

I’m writing to ask that you correct certain statements you made on the January 7 Hardball.

On that program, Elizabeth Holtzman made the following statement, referring to Julie Hiatt Steele’s ongoing conflict with Kathleen Willey:

HOLTZMAN: Let me just make a point to you. Remember, Linda Tripp also contradicts Kathleen Willey.

Holtzman went on to address another point. But you broke in, saying this about her comment on Tripp:

MATTHEWS: Linda Tripp, by the way, before it sinks in any deeper with the viewing audience, Linda Tripp did not contradict the testimony of Kathleen Willey. She said she came from the president with her shirt half off--

HOLTZMAN: She sure did. She sure did. She said if you remember the conversation with Monica Lewinsky, she said Kathleen Willey was lying. So she did.

You and Bill Sammon went on to challenge what Holtzman had said about Tripp:

SAMMON: There was a contradiction, but it was more of a, what kind of an attitude did Kathleen Willey have when she came out of the office--

MATTHEWS: It was a subjective assessment of what Kathleen Willey’s subjective reaction was to the president’s, whatever he did to her that left her shirt half off. And you know that, that was the distinction. She was not impeaching her testimony. She was saying she may not have been as angry about it as she seemed to be later.

In closing the segment, you and Holtzman skirmished further about her statement on Tripp:

HOLTZMAN: ...I’m paraphrasing, but in essence [Tripp] said that if Kathleen Willey is saying this wasn’t voluntary, she wasn’t telling the truth. That’s the best of my memory about it.

MATTHEWS: That’s not good memory. That’s not good enough memory. Because I remember it clearly.

HOLTZMAN: Well, your memory isn’t necessarily better than anyone else’s, is it?

MATTHEWS: Well in this case, I’m an expert.

But the truth is, Elizabeth Holtzman was absolutely correct in what she said about Tripp. Holtzman referred to one of the taped telephone calls between Lewinsky and Tripp. But before the Starr grand jury, in detailed, sworn testimony, Tripp severely contradicted Kathleen Willey’s account of her Oval Office encounter with President Clinton. Tripp testified that Willey had pursued a flirtation with Clinton since the time she arrived at the White House. Tripp said that Willey had speculated about a house where she and Clinton could be alone without Secret Service interference. She said that Willey deliberately attended events where she would encounter Clinton, dressing in an appealing manner; she said that Willey had set up the Oval Office meeting in large part to see if her flirtation with Clinton could advance. And she told the grand jury that, by pre-arrangement, Willey came to Tripp’s office directly after the encounter, to tell Tripp what had occurred, and she said that Willey “smiled from ear to ear the entire time” in describing Clinton’s advances.

In short, Tripp’s detailed, sworn testimony severely contradicted Kathleen Willey’s Sixty Minutes presentation. If Linda Tripp’s account is accurate, then Willey almost surely was not being candid in her televised statements last March.

Tripp’s grand jury testimony was released to the public in Ken Starr’s “document dump” on October 2, and Tripp’s striking account of Willey’s conduct was reported in the Washington Post the next day. But the Post was alone, among major papers, in calling attention to Tripp’s account, and over the course of the past four months, Tripp’s testimony has been largely ignored by the mainstream press.

The press corps’ decision to ignore Tripp’s account is extremely difficult to justify. After all, Willey’s original charges against President Clinton received massive news coverage in March. And, in the weeks following her Sixty Minutes appearance, a phalanx of pundits rushed into print, saying they believed every word Willey said.

But when Tripp’s detailed testimony contradicted Willey’s charges, the press corps, almost uniformly, chose not to report it. In my view, this is merely the latest reflection of a troubling press culture, in which serious charges get widely reported, and contradictions of same get suppressed.

But on January 7, you didn’t just refuse to report the Tripp account; you actively misreported what Tripp had said. You and Sammon gave viewers an account that is plainly, demonstrably false. It seems to me that Hardball viewers have a right to be told when such errors have occurred. This is especially true in the Willey matter, since several issues concerning Willey linger on in the public debate. You yourself have continued to discuss Willey in recent programs, as is completely appropriate.

With that in mind, I’m writing to suggest that you correct the record on some upcoming program. Hardball viewers have been flatly misinformed about a matter of substantial importance. I’m hoping you’ll set the record straight for Hardball’s regular audience.

Daily Howler:

On last Thursday’s Hardball, he asked John Fund and Margaret Carlson to help him sort things out:

BARNICLE: I mean, John, help me out here. And Margaret, help me out here. I realize I’m stupid, but I’m not dumb. I just don’t get this whole thing about conservative media hammering liberals and liberals have no place to vent or no place to go. What’s the deal?

Barnicle said he just didn’t get the complaints about conservative punditry. And then, he did the thing he does best. He engaged in a numbingly stupid discussion—with all three pundits taking turns mocking slow-talkin’ Gore (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/20/03).

Fakers like Barnicle will always pretend they don’t understand what they’re doing. But if Barnicle wants to see what the fuss is about, he should review an embarrassing Charlie Rose program from only a few nights before. On Monday evening, June 9, the “liberal” Rose invited two “liberal” pundits to discuss Hillary’s Clinton’s new book, Living History. The mockery of Clinton was long and loud. Indeed, it showed the prevailing contours of America’s deeply dysfunctional—and thoroughly store-bought—gang of celebrity pundits.

For reasons best known to him and his staff, Rose asked two loud Clinton-bashers to help him discuss the new book. Quickly, the talk started:

ROSE: Chris [Matthews], tell me what you think of the book.

MATTHEWS: Well, I think the book is evidence of why the police always want to interview the suspects as quickly as possible. You don’t want to leave them a lot of time to rehearse their answers…

On the tape, Rose chuckles audibly as his guest compares Senator Clinton to a police suspect. But let’s face it. When you book

like Matthews onto your show, you pretty much get what you paid for:

MATTHEWS (continuing directly): …and in this case, you’re dealing with the Menendez Brothers of American politics, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and although each is in separate cells, politically speaking, they do communicate, obviously.

On the tape, Rose can be heard laughing hard as Matthews compares the Clintons to murderers. Trust us. If you want to lose every last shred of respect for Rose, we suggest that you check out this program.

As you listen, all three pundits make a standard admission—they haven’t read Clinton’s book. Perhaps that explains something else that you’ll hear—a wide range of misstatements about that volume [eRiposte emphasis]. (Warning: Don’t believe a thing you hear if you review this tape.) Raucous laughter greets mocking misstatements as Rose and his guests play the fool for the rubes. And of course, Standard Press Spin-Points are deftly delivered. The dumbness reaches its high-water mark when Margaret Carlson recites this key script:

CARLSON: Hillary has long been a victim. She always says she doesn’t want to be, and she’s very proud. But remember, she was a victim of the tabloid press during Gennifer Flowers. She was a victim of the New York Times during Whitewater. She was a victim of a governor who only made $35,000 a year so she had to engage in cattle futures. There’s just this sense that people, you know, are always unfairly characterizing the Clintons and then they’re having to fight back against their politically-motivated accusers without ever a sense that some of it they brought on themselves.

Don’t forget: This assessment is offered by a pundit who makes it clear, early on in the session, that she has only “knifed through” the book “for the good parts.” But why should total, complete, screaming ignorance stop Carlson from reciting Prime Spin? In this bite, Carlson expresses a Standard Press Spin-Point: Hillary blames it all on her enemies. But in the seventeen minutes they spend with Rose, Carlson and Matthews make no attempt to evaluate Clinton’s actual charges. For example, here’s something she says about Whitewater:

CLINTON (page 194): Whitewater never seemed real because it wasn’t.

Wow! Could that be true? “The name Whitewater came to represent a limitless investigation of our lives that cost the taxpayers over $70 million for the Independent Counsel investigation alone and never turned up any wrongdoing on our part,” Clinton writes. “The purpose of the investigations was to discredit the President and the Administration and slow down its momentum. It didn’t matter what the investigations were about; it only mattered that there were investigations.” On Charlie Rose, Carlson complains that Clinton won’t acknowledge that “in a sense they brought [Whitewater] on themselves.” But how exactly did the Clintons do that? Carlson forgets to tell us. And by the way, could it be true? Did the New York Times bungle Whitewater? Having raised the point, Carlson makes no attempt to address that matter, either. In fact, Hillary Clinton was “a victim of the New York Times during Whitewater” (although those are Carlson’s words, not Clinton’s). But a servant to power like Margaret Carlson will never say something like that on the air. Carlson enjoys a well-paid career. She has no plan to attack press corps power.

The rancid program comes to an end with more open mockery by Matthews. The pundits enjoy a few last laughs as Hardball’s harlequin caps his performance:

MATTHEWS: Don’t you get the feeling that sooner or later they’re going to be doing Love Letters on Broadway? Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Now, on their final tour of America, you know, they’ll be doing the Triple-A cities in, say, the year 2040. The last tour of the Clintons!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Rose—his program now a joke—laughs and laughs at his guest’s lively wit. Meanwhile, Barnicle has no earthly idea what all the fuss could be about. “Help me out here,” he says to his guests. “I just don’t get this whole thing about conservative media hammering liberals.”

4.6.19 John Fund (Wall Street Journal) on Florida 2000/Gore/Democrats

Media Matters:

John Fund's book on voter fraud is a fraud

In his recent book Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Democracy (Encounter Books, September 2004), Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist and author John Fund uses distortions and half-truths to impugn Democrats who, he states in his introduction, "figure prominently in the vast majority of examples of election fraud described in this [Fund's] book."

Fund has made numerous media appearances to promote his book. In October alone, he appeared on FOX News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume, CNN Daybreak, twice on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, twice on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, and on National Public Radio's The Tavis Smiley Show. Numerous conservative columnists have promoted the book, including George F. Will, Michelle Malkin, Jonah Goldberg, and R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

Following are some of the false or unfounded claims in their order of appearance in Stealing Elections.

CLAIM: "[E]very single recount of the votes in Florida determined that George W. Bush had won the state's twenty-five electoral votes and therefore the presidency." (p. 28)

FACT: A post-election study revealed several plausible scenarios in which then-Vice President Al Gore would have won Florida.

As Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted (here, here, and here), the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) studied Florida's disputed ballots and concluded that Gore emerged the winner in at least four recount scenarios. The NORC study was sponsored by news organizations including The Associated Press, The New York Times, and CNN, as well as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post Co., and Tribune Publishing (which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel). According to a November 12, 2001, Washington Post article on the NORC's findings: "[I]f Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins."

CLAIM: The Palm Beach Post found "no more than 108 'law-abiding' citizens of all races who 'were purged from the voter rolls as suspected criminals, only to be cleared after the election." (p. 32)

FACT: The Palm Bach Post reported that "at least 1,100 eligible voters [were] wrongly purged from the rolls before last year's election."

In making this claim, Fund selectively quoted from a May 27, 2001, article in the Palm Beach Post. While the article did state that "[a]t least 108 law-abiding people were purged from the voter rolls as suspected criminals, only to be cleared after the election," it also stated that an additional 996 people who had been convicted of crimes in other states but were now eligible to vote were also cut from the rolls.

Fund then compared what he called the "trivial number" of 108 voters with the 1,420 military ballots that were rejected statewide, ignoring the other 996 who were eligible but were denied the right to vote.

...

CLAIM: Overvotes were fraudulent and helped Gore: "It appears that as many as 15,000 votes may have been altered and subtracted from the Bush total in Palm Beach County." (p. 35)

FACT: Overvotes hurt Gore more than Bush.

Fund claimed that "overvotes should concern us more than undervotes" and some overvotes "may have a less benign explanation." Citing "two former law enforcement officers and a poll worker [who told him] that they believe ballot tampering affected some Bush ballots," Fund made the otherwise unsupported charge that "using a nail, pencil, or other sharp device, they [Gore favoring precinct officials] would take a ballot and punch out Al Gore's name for president... Every Bush ballot would have been double-punched with Gore votes too, and possibly even straight-Republican ballots would have been punched with straight- Democratic holes too." Fund echoed the unfounded claims advanced at the right-wing online forum Free Republic that "[t]he news media is focused on the Democratic Party spin that voters were 'confused' in Palm Beach County. They are ignoring the 15,000 BUSH and 3,400 Buchanan votes [sic] were stolen by fraud in these 19,000 ballots."

But, according to a January 27, 2001, Washington Post report, it was Gore who had far more ballots invalidated because of overvoting. The Washington Post report stated: "[T]he biggest problem for Gore was in 'overvotes,' ballots invalidated because voters indicated multiple choices for president. ... Gore was by far most likely to be selected on invalid overvoted ballots, with his name punched as one of the choices on 46,000 of them. Bush, by comparison, was punched on 17,000." The St. Petersburg Times agreed in a November 12, 2001, report:

Badly designed ballots, such as the now notorious "butterfly" in Palm Beach County, cost thousands of Floridians their votes.

On about 66,000 ballots, in areas where voters complained about being confused, voters cast votes for two candidates. Who did they mean to choose? It's impossible to say. But consider: about 40,000 of the double votes included a mark for Gore; about 15,000 included a mark for Bush.

The St. Petersburg Times review included a computer analysis of five other recount scenarios using a statewide standard for counting votes. Bush wins every time a strict standard for counting votes is employed; Gore wins whenever overvotes also are included.

CLAIM: Democratic campaign workers in Wisconsin were caught on film in 2002 "handing out food and small sums of money to residents of a home for the mentally ill in Kenosha, after which the patients were shepherded into a separate room and given absentee ballots." (p. 47)

FACT: News reports directly contradict Fund's account.

As MMFA has documented, Fund's only citation for this example of voter fraud was "Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2002." The article Fund cited, titled "Chicago, Wisconsin," was a Journal editorial published while Fund was a member of the Journal's editorial board. MMFA could not verify Fund's and the Journal's description of the television broadcast, but several news articles contradict their account.

From an article in the November 1, 2002, edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

[Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jim] Doyle volunteer Frank Santapoalo provided kringle to [Dayton Residential Care Facility] residents and a maximum of three quarters to the bingo winners. The television report also shows the facility's activity director reminding the residents that there were absentee ballots available "upstairs" if they wished to vote.

[...]

Kenosha City Clerk Jean Morgan said Thursday that about half the 33 ballots delivered to the facility had been returned to her office. Morgan said the ballots are not dated, making it impossible to figure out from the form whether any residents filled out the ballots the day of the party.

Other Milwaukee Journal Sentinel articles in 2002, on October 24, October 25, October 30, and November 2, also address the issue.

CLAIM: Democrats engaged in fraudulent activities in South Dakota during the 2002 election that led to Democrat Tim Johnson's win. (Chapter 6, pp. 77-94)

FACT: South Dakota's Republican attorney general dismissed the allegations, called affidavits supporting Republican charges "flat false."

Fund accused Democrats of a long list of wrongful activities during the 2002 election in South Dakota in which Democratic Senate incumbent Tim Johnson narrowly defeated Republican challenger Representative John Thune, including: fraudulent voter registration, keeping polling places open late, "improper counting of ballots," "interference with the election process" by "distributing campaign literature and organizing voter-hauling efforts in the polling places," and "inducements to vote" of cash and merchandise. 
...
But as blogger and journalist Joshua Micah Marshall pointed out in his Talking Points Memo weblog on December 16, 2002, South Dakota's Republican attorney general, Mark Barnett, stated in a December 10, 2002, article in the Rapid City Journal that "[m]any of the things alleged [in the affidavits collected by Republicans in South Dakota] simply are not crimes. ...Those affidavits simply do not give me cause to think there was an election rip-off." Barnett went on to say, "A fair number [of the allegations] could be read as complaints about how effective the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort was." As for the charge that Democrats' misconduct altered the election's outcome in favor of Johnson, Barnett stated, "None of the allegations in the affidavits would change the election outcome." Barnett did state that he would open investigations into "two or three affidavits out of 50," including allegations of vote buying. After the investigations, according to a December 13 Associated Press report, Barnett "dismissed allegations in three affidavits" and called them "perjury or forgery ... just flat false."
...
Since the release of Fund's book, The Rapid City Journal noted on October 10 of this year that "then-Attorney General Mark Barnett, a Republican, dismissed the majority of election irregularity complaints from his fellow Republicans as sour grapes." The paper also pointed out: "In his 2004 book, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, Wall Street Journal editorial page writer John Fund devotes an entire chapter to South Dakota's 2002 Senate race. Fund recounts a series of improprieties -- many of which Barnett dismissed."

4.6.20 Wolf Blitzer (CNN) on Richard Clarke/Paul Krugman

Daily Howler:

DOWN IN THE MIRE: Wolf Blitzer has offered an explanation for his comment about Clarke’s personal life (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/30/04). He spoke on yesterday’s Blitzer Reports. As he did, he misled viewers about Paul Krugman:

BLITZER (3/30/04): Last Wednesday, while I was debriefing our senior White House correspondent, John King, I asked him if White House officials were suggesting there were some weird aspects to Richard Clarke’s life. Clarke, of course, is the former counter-terrorism adviser who has sharply criticized the president’s handling of the war on terror. I was not referring to anything charged by so-called unnamed White House officials as alleged today by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. I was simply seeking to flesh out what Bush National Security Council spokesman Jim Wilkinson had said on this program two days earlier.

WILKINSON (videotape): Let me also point something. If you look in this book, you find interesting things such as reported in the Washington Post this morning. He’s talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and how bin Laden has some sort of mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of X-Files stuff. And what I’d say is, this is a man who was in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who was supposed to be focused on that. And he was focused on meetings.

BLITZER: Other than that, John Kerry [sic] reported White House officials were not talking about Clarke’s personal life in any way. Lou Dobbs Tonight starts right now.

Presumably, Blitzer meant to say “John King,” not “John Kerry.” But when it comes to Wolf Blitzer, who knows?

Was Blitzer referring to Wilkinson in last week’s comment? Here at THE HOWLER, we don’t really know (more below). For the record, Wilkinson’s comments were a stupid, fake account of what Clarke actually says in his book—the kind of fakery men like Wilkinson know they can offer to Blitzer. Simply put, Wilkinson lied, right in Blitzer’s face. But was that what Blitzer had in mind when he spoke to King last week? Here, again, is what he said when he posed his question:

BLITZER (question to King, Wednesday, 3/24/04): What administration officials have been saying since the weekend, basically that Richard Clarke from their vantage point was a disgruntled former government official, angry because he didn’t get a certain promotion. He’s got a hot new book out now that he wants to promote. He wants to make a few bucks, and that his own personal life, they’re also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well, that they don’t know what made this guy come forward and make these accusations against the president. Is that the sense that you’re getting, speaking to a wide range of officials?

Let’s state the obvious. Blitzer did refer to unnamed “administration officials,” the claim he mocked on yesterday’s program. If you watched him yesterday, you would have thought that Krugman invented the part about “unnamed officials.” CNN’s viewers were baldly misled. Sadly, they were misled by Blitzer.

So Blitzer dissembled about Paul Krugman. Beyond that, it’s conceivable that Blitzer was referring to Wilkinson in his question to King. In truth, it seems like a bit of a stretch. But yes, it’s always conceivable.

4.6.21 Robert "The-Traitor" Novak (CNN) on Howard Dean

Media Matters:

From the February 26 edition of CNN's The Capital Gang:

NOVAK: The Democratic line that this isn't a problem -- Howard Dean gave a speech at Cornell on Thursday of this week in which he said that 80 percent -- over the years, 80 percent of the Social Security benefits will be lost. There is a problem. So, Howard sometimes tells the truth. He doesn't get the exact line.

In fact, Dean did not say "80 percent of the Social Security benefits will be lost," as Novak claimed, but rather that "if Social Security were left alone for 30 years, benefits would be reduced to 80 percent of what it is now," as The Cornell Daily Sun reported in its coverage of Dean's February 23 speech at the university. The article further noted that Dean "would not endorse" privatizing of Social Security, adding that "[h]e acknowledged that while there were indeed problems with the program, turning to Wall Street was not the answer."

More on Novak from Atrios:

Nofacts

So, Bob Novak totally lied about what Howard Dean said. And, to prove he didn't just misspeak, he lied about it again today.

NOVAK: Since he was elected Democratic national chairman, he has been -- they've been keeping him out of the national spotlight. No major television interviews on national networks are scheduled for the next couple weeks, I'm told, and maybe the reason is that they've got to really get Howard under control.

He spoke at Cornell University last week, and the only paper that covered this was "The Cornell Daily" student paper, and he said, yes, Social Security has a big problem. Over the years it's going to lose about 80 percent of the benefits. That, Judy, is not the Democratic line. The Democratic line is there is no problem.

So Howard Dean says what he thinks is the truth. Often it is the truth. He's going to be a lot of fun as national chairman.

Shouldn't we, you know, have a conference on journalistic ethics or something?

[This happens to be one of those extremely rare instances where the pathological Novak actually apologized for his lie after a few days under considerable pressure from Media Matters and left-leaning blogs - see here and here.]

4.6.22 Margaret Carlson (Time) on Bill/Hillary Clinton

Daily Howler:

Carlson’s new volume—Anyone Can Grow Up—is really a collection of columns from Time, stitched together with a few short original chapters.
...
But as we’ll see in the next few days, her book’s Clinton/Gore-bashing is truly clown-like—and there are other occasions when well-known facts give way to create pleasing tales. For example, is President Clinton a Great Big Liar? Carlson is eager to say that he is. So eager, in fact, that she plays Jayson Blair, doctoring a thoroughly well-known quote from the start of the Monica Madness:

CARLSON (page 153): During this period, [President Clinton] was alone in his lie, unless you count Dick Morris, who had some inkling that the worst was true. Clinton asked him to poll the public on how they would feel if it turned out that he had indeed had an affair. When Morris told Clinton that he would be run out of town, Clinton, according to Morris, said, “Well, we’ll just have to lie then.”

“And lie he did,” Carlson triumphantly adds. The story creates perfect Bill Clinton Spin; unfortunately, the story is simply untrue. Here at THE HOWLER, we have no idea what Clinton said to Morris. But according to Morris’ famous account, Clinton actually said this: “Well, we just have to win, then.” The quote has been reprinted a thousand times; it’s right there in the Starr Report. But Carlson’s memory played a few tricks. She “Jaysoned” the quote—serving spin.

But then, Carlson displays a rare ability to rearrange well-known facts. In one of the ugliest parts of her reprehensible “book,” she struggles and strains to help us see how disgraceful those Clintons really are:

CARLSON (page 157): With the Clintons, transactions trump relationships. Forget that and you end up in prison (Hillary’s law partner and deputy attorney general, Webster Hubbell, whom the two never called once he went off to jail), [or] dead (Hillary law partner Vince Foster, who committed suicide because he couldn’t play the “blood sport” of the White House)…

It’s hard find words for such ugly, evil writing. Did the Clintons ever call Webster Hubbell? We don’t know, but it was hardly their fault that he wound up in jail. As you know—as Carlson’s readers don’t—Hubbell pleaded guilty to defrauding the Rose Law Firm of at least $390,000. Since Mrs. Clinton was a partner at the firm, some of that money belonged to the Clintons! Carlson leaves that out of her piece; instead, she makes it sound like it was the Clintons’ fault that Hubbell landed in jail. Then they cruelly abandoned him. Regarding the Foster matter, no words can suffice. Foster didn’t use the term “blood sport;” that is another of Carlson’s embellishments. And he hardly attributed the ugly conduct described in his suicide note to Bill and Hillary Clinton. With apologies for revisiting this tragedy—and with apologies to anyone wrongly accused in his note—here’s what this despairing man actually wrote in the note Carlson viciously toys with:

No one in the White House, to my knowledge, violated any law or standard of conduct, including any action in the travel office. There was no intent to benefit any individual or specific group

The FBI lied in their report to the AG

The press is covering up the illegal benefits they received from the travel staff

The GOP has lied and misrepresented its knowledge and role and covered up a prior investigation

The Ushers Office plotted to have excessive costs incurred, taking advantage of Kaki and HRC

The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.

“Here, ruining people is considered sport,” Foster wrote. Ten years later, Carlson shows what he meant. And, as we’ll help you see in the next four days, we think that Carlson’s ugly book traces back to a key decision. We’ll give it a name: “Margaret’s choice.”

4.6.23 Gloria Borger (CNBC) on Hillary Clinton

Daily Howler:

To all appearances, Gloria Borger hadn’t read the book either. Last Tuesday, she hosted Howard Fineman and (who else?) Margaret Carlson on her CNBC spinfest, Capital Report. During the discussion, descriptions of the Clinton book were almost pathologically inaccurate. But at one point, Borger wandered so far afield that even Carlson and Fineman spoke up. Carlson had already voiced a key point: Hillary blames it all on her enemies:

CARLSON (6/10/03): Hillary Clinton still doesn’t accept responsibility for many of the things that happened during the Clinton administration in which she played a part—cattle futures, billing records, Whitewater and on and on—because it was always due to her political enemies. And the same thing with her husband and the accusations against him. It’s always someone else’s fault.

Amazing, isn’t it? For example, the Clintons were exonerated of wrongdoing in the Whitewater hoax. But to Carlson, Hillary still shouldn’t say it. She should go ahead and “accept responsibility” for things she hasn’t done. Where on earth do they find human beings prepared to recite such strange statements? (Oh, that’s right. We forgot. At Kay Graham’s.)

But so it goes when fake, phony pundits repeat their Official Approved Points. Hillary blames it all on her enemies is a message all pundits must deliver. But later in the segment, Borger went a howler too far. Let’s watch as she bends it like Borger:

BORGER: Margaret, what about health-care reform, for example? This was a great disaster for Hillary Clinton and she still couldn’t admit that it was a terrible, terrible mistake. I mean, she—

At this point, Carlson interrupted. Crafty pundits will step in when others take the hate speech too far. Clinton “still couldn’t admit that it was a terrible mistake?” In fact, Clinton does discuss her mistakes in the health care fight, and laments the fact that her miscalculations played a role in losing the Congress. Indeed, she describes a meeting with members of her staff after those disastrous 1994 midterms:

CLINTON (page 261): The women were already seated around a large square table when I walked in. Until that moment, I had been able to conceal my distress and discouragement from everyone on my staff except Maggie [Williams], who seemed to know exactly how I felt, whether I showed it or not. Now it all came out. Fighting back tears, my voice cracking, I poured out my apologies. I was sorry if I had let everyone down and contributed to our losses.

But alas! Clinton didn’t rend her garments or emit keening wails. So to Borger, this just doesn’t count.

Indeed, Borger’s statement was so absurdly false that even Carlson and Fineman stepped in.

4.6.24 Rush Limbaugh on a variety of topics

Media Matters:

On February 15, the same day that FOX News host Bill O'Reilly claimed that "[n]o lies have been told about anyone" on his show, nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh boasted: "We don't retract anything we do here because we never lie and make things up on this program." Limbaugh also defended the accuracy of FOX News, stating: "You know, at FOX News, I have to tell you this, they haven't had to retract one story, major story that I can recall since they've been on the air."

Media Matters for America has documented frequent instances of smears, falsehoods and distortions from FOX News' "hard news" reporters and commentators.

And here are some examples of misstatements, lies, and distortions from The Rush Limbaugh Show:

• Limbaugh lied about 9-11 Commission report
  

• Limbaugh falsely claimed "Nobody ever said there was" a connection between Iraq, 9-11 attacks
  

• Limbaugh misrepresented Duelfer report on Iraqi WMDs
  

• Limbaugh lied about AIDS
  

• Limbaugh overstated the minimum wage
  

• Limbaugh made false claims about the Democratic National Convention
  

• Limbaugh distorted the Kyoto Protocol
  

• Limbaugh falsely accused Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA)
  

• Limbaugh claimed Clintons are funding Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
  

• Limbaugh lied to defend Swift Boat Vets
  

• Limbaugh misstated Pew report on journalists
  

• Limbaugh mischaracterized the federal deficit
  

• Limbaugh misstated federal education spending
  

• Limbaugh lied about Bush's false uranium claim

[eRiposte note: It is no surprise that neither he nor Fox News ever "retract anything". That is one of the points this page is making and I'm glad he indirectly acknowledges that they are both enterprises that make their millions through systematic fraud.] 

4.6.25 Adam Nagourney (New York Times) and Wesley Clark

Daily Howler:

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF READING, PART 2: How lightweight is today’s press elite? Adam Nagourney floats through the air—and lies in your face—in this morning’s Times:

NAGOURNEY: At several points, General Clark appeared to struggle as he explained his views on the war in response to a challenge from a questioner.

The questioner, Carl Cameron of Fox News, asked, “Are we to understand that what you’re saying now is that those things you have said that were positive about the war was not what you meant?”

Mr. Clark responded: “No, I always—I’m a fair person. And when this administration’s done something right, well, if they were Russians doing something right, Chinese doing something right, French doing something right or even Republicans doing something right, I’m going to praise them.

“Right after 9/11, this administration determined to do bait and switch on the American public,” he said. “President Bush said he was going to get Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. Instead, he went after Saddam Hussein. He doesn’t have either one of them today.”

But why did Clark “appear to struggle?” Because Nagourney baldly misstated what he actually said. Here is the actual Federal Document Clearing House transcript of what was actually said:

CAMERON: General, there is a long litany of comments from you, both in your time as a former television analyst and then over the course of the last several months. Are we to understand that what you’re saying now is that those things you have said that were positive about the war was not what you meant?

CLARK: No, I always—I’m a fair person, Carl. And when this administration's done something right, well, if they were Russians doing something right, Chinese doing something right, French doing something right or even Republicans doing something right—

(LAUGHTER)

I’m going to praise them.

Now, this country was attacked on 9/11, and it was right that this administration went into Afghanistan. And I supported that war; so did 90 percent of the American people. That Taliban government should have been taken out.

But the failure of this administration was not to put the troops in to finish the job against Osama bin Laden. And you know why they didn’t do it? They didn’t do it because, all along, their plan was to save those troops to go after Saddam Hussein.

So I support them for what they did right, and I condemn them for what they did wrong.

IFILL: Thank you, General.

(APPLAUSE)

You’d never know it from reading Nagourney’s report, but that’s what was actually said. In fact, Clark “struggled” so hard to convey his meaning that it was greeted with laughter and applause! But it isn’t hard to make out Nagourney’s meaning. He meant to spread a scripted message—Wesley Clark is a big, f****** mess [edited by eRiposte]. And how did Nagourney create this impression? By baldly misstating what Clark really said! Instead of presenting Clark’s actual statement, Nagourney spliced in something Clark said to another question, earlier in the debate. And he said the resulting pseudo-reply was an example of Clark’s hopeless bungling!

Amazing, isn’t it? But then, Americans put up with this type of fraud all through Campaign 2000. No high school kid could offer such work. Why in the world is Nagourney still working? And how long do we, as American citizens, plan to put up with this conduct?

I could go on and on and on with a lot more names. But I don't have the time.