NewsTrust - Bad Journalism - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

The Whoppers of 2011

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson - Dec. 21 (Fact Check) - Despite what you may have heard in 2011: The new health care law won’t cost many jobs (and they’ll be poorly paying jobs at that). Republicans aren’t proposing to “end” Medicare (and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden has signed onto a modified version of the GOP plan). Most of the “millionaires” who would pay higher tax rates under a Democratic proposal aren’t job-creating small-business owners. President Obama’s mother didn’t really fight to get health insurance coverage as she was dying. And there was plenty more spin and deception in 2011. Obama claimed he pays a lower tax rate than a teacher. Michele Bachmann endorsed a claim that HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Joe Biden claimed rapes quadrupled in Flint, Mich., after police layoffs. And that’s just some of the nonsense we debunked.

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Columbia Spent U.S. Anti-Drug Aid on Hiding Government Ties to Drug Rings

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

yahoo.com - By Ujala Sehgal - Aug. 22 (News) - The U.S.-funded counterinsurgency campaign against a Marxist rebel group in Columbia was viewed as so successful that it has become a model for strategy in Afghanistan. But things were not what they seemed: the Washington Post reports that U.S. ally and former president Alvaro Uribe has been implicated in "egregious abuses of power and illegal actions," involving U.S. aid an "possibly U.S. officials" -- all under the cover of fighting drug trafficking. American cash, equipment, and training were sent to Columbia to help break up cocaine-smugglers, but were actually used "to carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices, Uribe’s political opponents and civil society groups."

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An environmental journalist's lament

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Breakthrough Journal - By Hannah Nordhaus - Jun. 25 (News Analysis) - Dying bees have become symbols of environmental sin, of faceless corporations out to ransack nature. Such is the story environmental journalism tells all too often. But it's not always the story that best helps us understand how we live in this world of nearly seven billion hungry people, or how we might square our ecological concerns and commitments with that reality. By engaging in simplistic and sometimes misleading environmental narratives -- by exaggerating the stakes and brushing over the inconvenient facts that stand in the way of foregone conclusions -- we do our field, and our subjects, a disservice.

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Casual Libel at ThinkProgress

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Power Line - By John Hinderaker - Jun. 14 (News Analysis) - This is, of course, the latest chapter in ThinkProgress's crazed attacks on the Koch brothers. The gist of TP's most recent accusation is that David Koch blocked the National Institutes of Health from classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen while he was a member of that agency's board. As usual with TP's attacks, not a word of it is true.

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Speculating About Oil

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Power Line - By John Hinderaker - Jun. 07 (News Analysis) - Again, what we are talking about here is a "risk premium" arising from events in the Middle East--events which presumably were not engineered by American oil companies. ThinkProgress's report on oil speculation is riddled with errors, many of them howlers. That web site's basic problem is that its writers are neither intelligent nor experienced in business. Therefore, they are utterly unqualified to write about topics like commodity pricing. In this instance, however, ThinkProgress's conduct is worse than incompetent: it released a report that tried to blame "speculators" for the current increase in oil prices. Its only support for that claim consisted of quotes that were falsely attributed to Goldman Sachs. The entire report, therefore, was premised on a lie.

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The Keystone Pipeline and the Keystone Kop Filmmaker

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Power Line - By John Hinderaker - May. 25 (News Analysis) - In fact, completion of the Keystone XL project likely would be detrimental to Koch Industries. Currently, the large quantity of crude oil produced from Alberta sands flows predominantly to the Midwest, where there is a surplus of supply. This allows Koch to buy crude at Clearbrook at favorable prices. If the new pipeline project is built, Canada will have more outlets for its crude oil and the Midwest will have to compete with refineries in Texas for the product. Thus, the Keystone XL project likely would result in Koch paying higher prices for crude oil for its Pine Bend refinery.

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Minnesota Congressman Paul Ryan Mulling Senate Bid

Sun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Power Line - By John Hinderaker - May. 15 (News Report) - Now, granted, depending on where you live, Minnesota and Wisconsin may seem more or less interchangeable.

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OBAMA: Get Used To High Gas Prices.

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Pajamas Media - By Glenn Reynolds - Apr. 06 (News Analysis) - “Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.” ... And a good thing, because the story’s been almost completely rewritten. But the “memory hole” doesn’t work very well any more. Here, for the sake of history, is the story as it used to be. And if anyone from the Associated Press would like to email me to explain this change, I’m all ears.

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LePage not the only threat target

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Morning Sentinel - By David Hench - Apr. 06 (News) - A Portland man charged with sending threatening letters to Gov. Paul LePage admitted to agents that he sent those and other threatening letters to national political figures, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, according to testimony Wednesday in U.S. District Court. Authorities also found a gun and an ammunition clip in Michael Thomas' desk drawer when he was arrested Friday, FBI Special Agent Pamela Flick testified; and Thomas told her that if they had showed up later, he would have launched a shootout with police.

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Fox News Discovers Nuclear Reactor In Japanese Disco

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Media Matters - By Simon Maloy - Mar. 15 (News Analysis) - A quick Googling of "shibuyaeggman" turned up no meaningful results. A Nexis search was also fruitless. However, further inquiries revealed that Eggman is the name of a dance club in a trendy neighborhood of Tokyo called... Shibuya. And, it just so happens, the Fox graphic appears to place the alleged reactor in Tokyo. Here's a photo of Eggman -- as you can see, it's right below The @ Super Suits Store. And Johnny Hi-Fi played there in 2006.

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Sorry, Charlie

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

truth-out.org - By William Rivers Pitt - Mar. 09 (News Analysis) - The "mainstream" news media is so mouth-frothingly desperate to gin up a distraction - any distraction - to avoid reporting real news that the entire industry has latched on to the downward spiral of a half-assed actor like it is the end of the world.

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85-Year-Old-Woman Arrested for Bank Protest

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Rose Aguilar - Jan. 17 (News Analysis) - instead, the media, even the alternative media, spent the better part of last year obsessing over the tea party and ..personalities like sarah palin, which ignoring people like 85-year old julia botello.

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Extremist Killing Is as American as Apple Pie: Murders Grow on the Far Right Four Decades After Martin Luther King - Truthout.com

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

truth-out.org - By Stephan Salusbury - Jan. 16 (News Analysis) - The landscape of America is littered with bodies. They've been gunned down in Tucson, shot to death at the Pentagon , and blown away at the Holocaust Museum , as well as in Wichita , Knoxville, Pittsburgh, Brockton, and Okaloosa County, Florida. Total body count for these incidents: 19 dead, 26 wounded. Not much, you might say, when taken in the context of about 30,000 gun-related deaths annually nationwide. As it happens, though, these murders over the past couple of years have some common threads...

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It's So Weird That You Think That

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Sensen No Sen - By Pbi - Jan. 15 (News Analysis) - Remember how important the "Ground Zero Mosque" issue was? No? Neither does anybody else, now that the mid-term elections are in our rear view mirror.

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The Media's Failure to Report on Pigford Hurts Black Farmers

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Lee Stranahan - Dec. 16 (News Analysis) - The dignity of the black farmers makes the mainstream media's blanket of silence about Pigford especially offensive. A black reporter I spoke with attributed some of that to the subtle systemic racism that exists in the mainstream media, with a bias towards covering stories that affect or are about white folks. Too often, the press is able to pat itself on the back by dealing with stories about race in a surface way. They pretend that by calling the Tea Party or a Republican politician a racist, they've done their job and scored a victory for minorities. In fact, though, all those reports end up doing is casting heat but not light. They stir up racial tensions and let the press give themselves a pass for not actually digging into a story like Pigford.

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Then & Now: NYT On Publishing Illegally Obtained WikiLeaks Reports and Illegally Obtained ClimateGate Data

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Ace of Spades HQ - By Ace - Nov. 29 (News Analysis) - Here's what the NYT had to say during ClimateGate: “The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.” Andrew Revkin, Environment Editor, New York Times Nov 20, 2009.

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Fox Reporter on Florida Ballots: Burn Them or Shred Them?

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:32:15 -0800

FAIR - Nov. 16 (News Analysis) - Journalists are supposed to criticize government officials for suppressing information or destroying evidence-- not advocate such actions. If journalism is to contribute to a democratic society, it must frequently expose the country to unpleasant truths. But for Gibson, guest-hosting Fox's popular "The O'Reilly Factor" program, the point of journalism is to preserve the legitimacy of those in power: "George Bush is going to be president. And who needs to know that he's not a legitimate president? Al Gore? Jesse Jackson? His political opponents? How does it do any good for the country to find out that, by somebody's count, the wrong guy is president?"

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Cost of Obama's India trip misreported

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

MediaBugs - By Scott Rosenberg - Nov. 15 (News Analysis) - On November 3, 2010, Eric Bolling, host of the Fox Business cable TV show Follow The Money, asserted that President Obama's trip to India would "cost 200 million dollars per day." A Truthsquad at NewsTrust.net reviewed this statement and concluded that it's false. The original $200 million a day figure came in a report from the Press Trust of India based on an anonymous Indian government source. The Truthsquad "verdict" summary provides numerous other links to support the conclusion that this figure couldn't possibly be accurate.

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» CBS Affiliate KTVA’s Alleged ‘Context’ Doesn’t Match Content of Miller Recording

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

biggovernment.com - By Larry O'Connor - Oct. 31 (News Report) - FEMALE REPORTER: And the one thing we can do is ….we won’t know….we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the… ‘Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’ FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul…I like that.

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Merkel’s Message to the West: Be Not Afraid

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Pajamas Media - By Seth Cropsey - Oct. 25 (News Analysis) - Looking over a society divided between Muslim immigrants and native-born German citizens, Chancellor Merkel argued that government policy should seek to incorporate immigrants by teaching them how to speak German and by integrating them into the workforce and into society generally. Merkel’s speech is a profound break with the obeisance that Western societies have been paying to multiculturalism since the 1960s. It acknowledges that Western liberalism is sufficiently worthy of preservation to expect at a minimum that those who live in Western liberal society should understand its language, laws, and basic tenets.

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WaPo/AP Caught Revising the O’Donnell Story Without Issuing a Correction

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

patterico.com - By Aaron Worthing - Oct. 20 (Investigative Report) - Before: WILMINGTON, Del. — Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion. After: WILMINGTON, Del. — Republican Christine O’Donnell challenged her Democratic rival Tuesday to show where the Constitution requires separation of church and state, drawing swift criticism from her opponent, laughter from her law school audience and a quick defense from prominent conservatives.

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Just Admit it, Newspapers: You're Scared of Muslims

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Reason Magazine - By Matt Welch - Oct. 13 (News) - If the Post's new standard for comics is to make jokes "immediately clear," then it might be time to kill the comics page altogether. No, Martel/Brauchli, you pulled the cartoon because your fear of Muslims outweighs your commitment to free expression, period.

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WaPo/ABC poll: Dems coming back!

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Hot Air - By Ed Morrissey - Oct. 05 (News Analysis) - And how did the Democrats manage this rather remarkable comeback? Well, the WaPo/ABC pollster managed to find their usual sample gap. They went from a 31/25/39 D/R/I split in September in the general sample and 31/26/37 among registered voters, to 33/23/29 in the general sample and 34/25/37 among registered voters. That nine-point advantage to Democrats among RVs is almost twice what it was in the previous sample.

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Shirley Sherrod To Sue Andrew Breitbart

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jesse Washington - Jul. 29 (News) - Ousted Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod said Thursday she will sue a conservative blogger who posted a video edited in a way that made her appear racist.

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When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Caller - By Jonathan Strong - Jul. 22 (News Report) - The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.” Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. “Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?,” Stein asked hypothetically. “A: Well, she has much experience as the Democratic nominee.” “What a joke,” added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. “I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale.”

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