I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
AP Reviews Palin’s New Book
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James Taranto writes a great piece today in his “Best of the Web” on a recent review of Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, by a whole slew of AP reporters:
It’s said that Sarah Palin had help writing her new book, “Going Rogue.” Not nearly as much help, though, as the Associated Press’s Calvin Woodward had reading it. Woodward’s byline appears on a Friday dispatch titled “FACT CHECK: Palin’s Book Goes Rogue on Some Facts,” but at the bottom we find the following:
AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine contributed to this report.
Woodward, Apuzzo, Theimer, Raum, Beamish, Fouhy, Hebert, Pritchard, Burke, Joling and Shaine manage to find a grand total of six “errors,” but some of them aren’t errors at all. Example:
PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking “only” for reasonably priced rooms and not “often” going for the “high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.
THE FACTS: Although she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in New York in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000.
So they begin by conceding the point that “she usually opted for less-pricey hotels,” then come up with exactly one example to the contrary–which would have contradicted an assertion that she “never” stays in pricey hotels but is entirely consistent with the claim that she didn’t do so “often.”
Here’s another example of Woodward, Apuzzo, Theimer, Raum, Beamish, Fouhy, Hebert, Pritchard, Burke, Joling and Shaine’s work:
PALIN: Welcomes last year’s Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation’s largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory. As governor, she says, she’d had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court’s ruling went “in favor of the people.”
THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Palin said then she was “extremely disappointed” and it was “tragic” so many fishermen and families put their lives on hold waiting for the decision.
Again, what’s the contradiction? She was pleased that the decision finally came and that the plaintiffs got some relief but unhappy that it took so long and that the award wasn’t greater.
The only case in which Woodward, Apuzzo, Theimer, Raum, Beamish, Fouhy, Hebert, Pritchard, Burke, Joling and Shaine’s version of “THE FACTS” facially contradicts Palin’s is the one in which she claimed to have “ended all such arrangements” between lobbyists for an oil-pipeline deal and the governor’s office,” when according to Woodward, Apuzzo, Theimer, Raum, Beamish, Fouhy, Hebert, Pritchard, Burke, Joling and Shaine, “the leader of her own pipeline team was a former lobbyist for a subsidiary of TransCanada, the company that ended up winning the rights to build the pipeline.”
Our favorite, though, is this one:
PALIN: “Was it ambition? I didn’t think so. Ambition drives; purpose beckons.” Throughout the book, Palin cites altruistic reasons for running for office, and for leaving early as Alaska governor.
THE FACTS: Few politicians own up to wanting high office for the power and prestige of it, and in this respect, Palin fits the conventional mold. But “Going Rogue” has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto, the requisite autobiography of the future candidate.
To be sure, the suspicion that Palin is more ambitious than she admits is an entirely reasonable one. But it’s only a suspicion, not a FACT, unless the AP sent its reporters inside Palin’s brain. And if Palin’s brain is big enough to house Woodward, Apuzzo, Theimer, Raum, Beamish, Fouhy, Hebert, Pritchard, Burke, Joling and Shaine, she’s a lot smarter than anyone knew.
For a less partisan take on Palin’s book, see Melanie Kirkpatrick’s review in The Wall Street Journal.