Recently, TIME's Joe Klein wrote an article about the Democratic Party's FISA bill that was flat out factually false. What followed was the most clear-cut example (of many) of everything that's wrong with how the establishment media functions today.
He's written a lot of posts about it, as he obviously feels strongly on the issue (as well anyone should) - a good sum-up of the kerfuffle is Here
All his posts on the subject are listed here
Basically - TIME did eventually issue a "correction". What was the correction?
In other words, simply passing on the views of both parties, and not actually coming out and saying that one side, the Republicans, were lying, and the other side, the Democrats, were telling the truth.In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. The bill does not explicitly say that. Republicans believe it can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't.
This was a simple issue of reading the damn bill. Quite simply, it doesn't say what Joe Klein's Republican hack sources told him it said, and no honest person capable of reading a section in a statute could construe it that way.
As an aside, in Joe Klein's original half-assed "response" to Greenwald calling him out on passing on lies like the bad stenographer he is (as Greenwald noted, a good stenographer would at least write down everything he heard from everyone, not just the Republican hack) was this:-
Of course, he wrote an article accusing Democrats of being well beyond stupid for coddling terrorists on the basis of a bill he "had neither the time nor legal background" to actually fucking read and comprehend, and instead relied on some Republitard whisphering lies into his ear.I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right.
Another example of the media's corrupt practices in this regard just came up:-
Link
The Washington Post was called out for passing on outright Republican lies about Barack Obama ("is a Muslim, 'a 'Muslim plant' in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran") - without calling them lies.
How'd the idiot WaPost reporter justify this?
Greenwald:This discussion has reached a high pitch on the Internet and our editors decided it was in the readers interest to address it. I have heard people say that they won't support Sen. Obama because they read he doesn't put is hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. He has denied this -- so airing some of this and giving him a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight.
WaPost cartoonist took his own paper to task.That is self-evidently absurd. "Setting the record straight" would mean having the reporter report the facts and identify the false statements as false. But the Post did the opposite; it simply passed on each side's "views" without comment -- the factually true side and the factually false side -- as though they merited equal weight.
Here
When the fuck did this "he said, she said" school of "journalism" take root?
