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Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Feb. 10 (Opinion) - When I read things like this I'm simultaneously amazed by two things. The first is the unbelievable tone-deafness of people who would complain out loud, during a time when millions of people around the country are literally losing their homes, that their bonuses - not their total compensation, mind you, but just their cash bonuses, paid in addition to their salaries and their stock packages - are barely enough to cover the mortgage payments for their new condos, the taxis they take when walking is too burdensome, and their girlfriends with expensive tastes. The second thing that amazes me is that Sherman is buying all this.

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Keystone Pipeline Facts

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Robert Redford - Feb. 10 (News Analysis) - 'Joe Nocera's op-ed in the New York Times yesterday deserves a response and a reiteration of the facts surrounding the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. ...Let's put the rhetoric aside, and simply focus on the facts. Nocera wants us to believe that approving this pipeline is a matter of national security. ... The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would not make the United States of America safer. Why? It would not make us safer, because the majority of the processed oil was already scheduled for export to foreign countries. That's right, this Keystone XL pipeline's Canadian tar sands oil would have

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Maddow Explodes At PolitiFact

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Rachel Maddow - Jan. 26 (News Analysis) - Rachel Maddow lit into controversial fact-checking outfit PolitiFact with notable fury on her Wednesday show, hammering the organization for a series of statements it made...

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The State of Obama’s Facts

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson, D’Angelo Gore, Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, Ben Finley, Lori Robertson - Jan. 25 (Fact Check) - The president’s State of the Union address got the facts right — mostly. Obama said “the Taliban’s momentum has been broken” in Afghanistan. But targeted assassinations continue, and at least one independent foreign policy expert says the enemy may just be waiting until the U.S. leaves. The president said a get-tough tariff on tire imports from China has saved more than 1,000 U.S. jobs. But tire industry officials say Chinese imports have simply been replaced by imports from other countries. He took credit for putting “more boots on the border than ever before.” That’s true, but the big increase was under George W. Bush. And a decrease in illegal border crossings is due mainly to the lack of jobs in the U.S., experts say. Often the president’s facts and figures were accurate — but not the whole story. It’s true (barely) that Bush issued more new regulations than Obama at the same point in their presidencies — but Obama didn’t mention that his cost more. The president pointed proudly to increased oil drilling, increased U.S. oil production, and declining dependence on imports. But understandably he passed over any mention of chronically high gasoline prices, which hit a record of sorts last year. And he boasted of recent increases in jobs — which still number nearly 1.7 million fewer than when he took office.

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Occupy Wall Street Journalist Arrests Cost U.S. Dearly In Latest Survey

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jack Mirkinson - Jan. 25 (Special Report) - The targeting of journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street movement has caused the United States to drop precipitously in a leading survey of press freedom. Reporters Without Borders' latest Press Freedom Index was released on Wednesday, and the list reflected some of the tumult that took place in the world in 2011, as well as the impact that those events had on journalists across the globe.

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Politifact Backtracks After State Of The Union Fact Check Wreck

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jaon Linkins - Jan. 25 (News Analysis) - In his remarks, Obama described the damage to the economy, including losing millions of jobs "before our policies were in full effect." Then he describe [sic!] the subsequent job increases, essentially taking credit for the job growth. But labor economis

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Jon Stewart Loses It Over Newt Gingrich South Carolina Debate Hypocrisy (VIDEO)

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jon Stewart - Jan. 24 (Comedy News) - "All [King] has to do is point out the hypocrisy of a family values crusader who presided over Congress at the time of the Republicans' 'Clinton penis scavenger hunt' suddenly finding that kind of questioning of a Presidential candidate unseemly! Point out that [Gingrich] insists that gay people would sully the sanctity of marriage -- whilst being a career marriage sully-er!"

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GOP Debates Let Loose The Roar Of The Crowd

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Howard Fineman - Jan. 20 (News Analysis) - Candidates' attacks, gaffes and memory lapses have dominated coverage of the 21 Republican debates so far, but reporters are covering the wrong people. The real story isn't on the stage; it's in the audience.

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Journalist Chris Hedges Sues Obama Admin Over Indefinite Detention of U.S. Citizens Approved in NDAA

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jan. 17 (News Report) - Sections of the bill are written so broadly that critics say they could encompass journalists who report on terror-related issues, such as Hedges, for supporting enemy forces. "It’s clearly unconstitutional," Hedges says of the bill. "It is a huge and egregious assault against our democracy. It overturns over 200 years of law, which has kept the military out of domestic policing."

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The New York Times public editor's very public utterance

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Clay Shirky - Jan. 13 (Opinion) - Thursday, Arthur Brisbane, the public editor of the New York Times, went to his readers with a question : "I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Brisbane (who, as public editor, speaks only for himself, not the Times) referred to two recent stories: the claim that Clarence Thomas had "misunderstood" a financial reporting form when he left out key information, and Mitt Romney's assertion that President Obama gives speeches "apologising" for America. Brisbane asked whether news reporters should have the freedom to investigate and respond to those comments. The reaction from readers was swift, voluminous, negative and incredulous. "Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB." "If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, ...

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Ex-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on Media Consolidation, Broadband Expansion, Threats to Journalism

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jan. 12 (Interview) - Michael Copps served two terms with the Federal Communications Commission. Now the staunch supporter of an open internet and opponent of media consolidation has retired. In a wide-ranging discussion, he examines the FCC's key accomplishments and failures of the past decade. Copps argues broadband is "the most opportunity-creating technology perhaps in the history of humankind," and laments that the United States still lacks a national broadband infrastructure. He says the FCC has yet to address a lack of diversity in media ownership, noting that "owning a station has a lot to do with the kind of programing that is going to be on that station." Regarding the future of journalism, Copps calls on the FCC to make access to quality journalism a "national priority," saying, "the future of our democracy hinges upon having an informed electorate."

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What the Fact-Checkers Get Wrong

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Greg Marx - Jan. 05 (News Analysis) - In the waning days of 2011, Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site, brought the wrath of the liberal blog world upon itself when it dubiously—though not unexpectedly—chose as its “Lie of the Year” Democratic claims that House Republicans had voted to “end Medicare.” The uproar was just the latest wave of recrimination against the “fact-checking” enterprise,...

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Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

shirky.com - By Clay Shirky - Jan. 04 (Opinion) - This may be the year where newspapers finally drop the idea of treating all news as a product, and all readers as customers. One early sign of this shift was the 2010 launch of paywalls for the London Times and Sunday Times. These involved no new strategy; however, the newspaper world was finally willing to regard them as real test of whether general-interest papers could induce a critical mass of readers to pay. (Nope.) Then, in March, the New York Times introduced a charge for readers who crossed a certain threshold of article views (a pattern copied from the financial press, and especially the Financial Times.) Finally, and most recently, were a pair of announcements last month: The Chicago Sun-Times was adopting a new threshold charge, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said that their existing one was working well. Taken together, these events are a blow to the idea that online news can be treated as a simple product for sale, as the physical newspaper was.

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Best of the Web Today: Bad-Faith Journalism

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By James Taranto - Jan. 04 (Opinion) - It's not as eagerly awaited as Time's "Man of the Year" was back when people paid attention to Time, but PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" nonetheless manages to generate a lot of chatter, aimed as it is at those who chatter for a living. This year almost all of the chatter was negative, as the St. Petersburg Times's self-styled "fact checking" operation, which usually leans left, tacked to the right, naming as its "Lie" the claim that "Republicans voted to end Medicare." The reference is to Rep. Paul Ryan's reform proposal, which passed the GOP-controlled House as part of a budget resolution before being rejected by the Democratic Senate.

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PolitiFact and the scam of neutral expertise

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jan. 01 (Opinion) - The fact-checking site PolitiFact serves a valuable purpose when it actually performs its stated function: to “help you find the truth in American politics” by “fact-check[íng] statements” from political and media figures. But it undermines its own credibility when it purports to resolve subjective disputes of political opinion under the guise of objective expertise. That’s precisely what it did yesterday in this incredibly sloppy and often factually false analysis of Ron Paul’s condemnation of the new AUMF and detention authorities embedded in the pending Levin/McCain bill. What matters here more than PolitiFact‘s obvious, specific errors is the reason they were led to such error: namely, reliance on supposedly neutral, ideology-free “experts” who are anything but that.

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Slip-Sliding to War with Iran

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - Dec. 29 (News Analysis) - With the typical backdrop of alarmist propaganda in place, the stage is now set for a new war, this time with Iran. The slightest miscalculation (or provocation) by the United States, Israel or Iran could touch off a violent scenario that will have devastating consequences.

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How will technology influence the news in 2012?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - Predicting the next year's news is a fool's errand, but looking at technological trends could give us a hint At the beginning of 2011, aging dictators ruled Egypt and Libya, and despotism was the nearly unquestioned reality in most of the Middle East. The eurozone was seeing trouble at its edges, but wasn't heading toward collapse. News International had successfully covered up most of its rampant bad acts, and Rupert Murdoch was on the verge of even greater control over British media and politics. Anyone who might have predicted how utterly and rapidly those realities would change might have been branded a lunatic. Which is one reason why the annual journalistic ritual of making predictions about the year ahead is a fool's errand. With that in mind, let me offer instead some observations about the technology and media trends we've seen in past months, and how they might play out in 2012. In many cases, the trajectory is deeply worrisome. But I remain an eternal optimist in the face of ...

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The Christmas War on Atheism: What's the Religious Right Whining About When It's Really Non-Believers Who Are Under Attack?

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Alex DiBranco - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - It’s that time of year when, if you tune into Fox News or right-wing talk radio, you’re sure to hear the phrase “war on Christmas” repeated ad infinitum. Perhaps you’ve also seen Rick Perry’s new war on Christmas ad, which gives the added gift of rabid homophobia, while absurdly accusing President Barack Obama of leading a war on religion. But in reality, this year, like most years, it's right-wing Christians who are waging a war on the right of non-believers to avoid having religion shoved down their throats. Say “Merry Christmas” -- or Else

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The Post-Truth Campaign

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - Mitt Romney is blazing new trails in politics, where not telling the truth doesn’t seem to have any consequences.

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As Bradley Manning Hearing Concludes, Military Prosecutors Say WikiLeaks Disclosures Aided al-Qaeda

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Dec. 23 (News Report) - the prosecution "linked Bradley Manning to aiding al-Qaeda... That essentially is criminalizing national security journalism... What they’re saying is anybody who puts this information on the internet—if you do a report on a drone strike, if you do a report on anything related to military operations, and then al-Qaeda reads it, then you could be accused of aiding the enemy."

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Professional fact-checking about as broken as professional journalism

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

Salon - By Alex Pareene - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - If I were to, say, swipe your grandfather’s copy of “See, I Told You So” by Rush Limbaugh from his den, and then mail him a gift card good for a portion of the price of an Amazon Kindle, I think your grandfather would be well within his rights to call me a thief and possibly a communist. Politifact disagrees, apparently, as Democrats have been accused of telling the “lie of the year” for arguing that a vote to replace Medicare with a private voucher system does not constitute voting to “end” the program. The government program that would be replaced with a private voucher system. Replacing a thing with something else no longer constitutes getting rid of that thing. FYI. Politifact’s decision, needless to say, frustrated a lot of people. They have been accused of naming this arguably true claim the year’s biggest lie because Rep. Paul Ryan, the man who came up with the Medicare-replacing plan, launched a big letter-writing campaign lobbying for it, complete with a badly lit YouTube video. Paul Krugman and others say that Politifact made this decision in the interest of achieving the illusion of “balance,” because the past couple “lies of the year” have all belonged to Republicans.

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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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The Hard Truth About Fact-Checking

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

New Republic - By Alec MacGillis - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - My colleague Jonathan Cohn and plenty of others have done yeoman's work today in challenging PolitiFact's awarding of its "lie of the year" award to the Democrats' claim that the Paul Ryan proposal approved by House Republican would "end Medicare." There's little more to say on the substance of the matter. But the moment does present a new opportunity to ask a larger question that has been nagging at me the past year or two: why do we need fact-checkers, anyway?

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Politifact Has Decided That A Totally True Thing Is The "Lie Of The Year," For Some Reason

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jason Linkins - Dec. 20 (News Analysis) - So, you know, go form an organization called WordTweaker and commit yourself to advocating for the most civil sounding adjectives, if that's what you want to do! But let's recall, Politifact, that your lie of the year is "Republicans voted to end Medicare." And end it, they did vote to do! Now, if the Democrats had said, "Republicans take Medicare out behind the Cannon Office Building and horsewhip it," that's a different story. But you've decided -- incorrectly -- that the most vanilla way of the describing what happened is a deception. And "privatizing" Medicare ends Medicare, as Medicare is a public entitlement program.

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Can Fact Checking be Politically “Neutral,” When Facts Are Not Equally Distributed Across the Political Spectrum?

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Think Progress - By Chris Mooney - Dec. 20 (Opinion) - Recently, I sat in on an off-the-record meeting about political fact-checking. I can’t report or quote from the event, but it spurred along some general thoughts that had already arisen in the context of writing The Republican Brain, which focuses a great deal on fact-checking—and thus, helped propel this post. Fact checking is a phenomenon that has really taken off over the last half decade or so as, more and more, media outlets as well as independent and/or partisan voices are busily pronouncing on the “truth” of political statements. The reason? Well, there are many, but I would place the growing divide over reality and what is factually true, between the left and the right, as perhaps the leading one.

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