Category: CBS

#LennayKekuaFacts: What You Don’t Know About Manti Te’o’s Fake Girlfriend

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From the “Too Good to Check” file:

The Times was not among the most prominent offenders in taking at face value what turned out to be a hoax, as revealed by the Web site Deadspin.com on Wednesday.
But Times reporters still wrote about the Fighting Irish linebacker Manti Te’o’s girlfriend at least five times in recent months.
A Nov. 25 article said that  Te’o was “dealt a full deck of adversity when his grandmother and his girlfriend died within hours of each other.”
Another, on Oct. 14, noted, “His girlfriend, who lost a long fight with leukemia, was a Stanford alumnus.”

Five mentions! The non-existent girlfriend of Manti Te’o has actually gotten more New York Times coverage than the “Fast and Furious” scandal. Think what it means that Deadspin.com did more thorough fact-checking than the nation’s most prestigious newspaper:

Deadspin Editor-in-Chief Tommy Craggs says Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey were faced with a tough question when reporting their now famous Manti Te’o story: “What lengths do we go to to try and prove a negative?”
When asked about his reaction to The Boston Globe calling Deadspin “a website that has broken some high-profile stories but not an outlet regarded for journalistic standards,” Craggs says: “Whatever. Why should I care what a craven, slipshod outfit like the Boston Globe thinks of my ‘journalistic standards’?”
In an email Q&A, Craggs elaborates on Burke’s explanation of how Deadspin got the story that all other journalists missed . . .
From the start, Tim Burke and Jack Dickey kept a running notes file in Google Docs that acted as a skeleton for both their reporting and for the story itself. They asked themselves the obvious questions, Socratically: Who is the person in the photos? Where was Lennay Kekua born? When was Lennay Kekua born? Where did Lennay Kekua live? Did Lennay Kekua attend Stanford? When was Lennay Kekua’s car accident? When did Lennay Kekua die? . . .
We began reporting on Friday. By Monday, Burke had found and contacted the woman in the Lennay photos. Once we had her on the record, we knew we had enough for a story. . . .

She was a cyber-fiction, and yet she was mentioned five times in the New York Times and got quoted on the CBS Morning News.


 

(Hat-tip: MediaGazer.com.)

VIDEO: Paul Ryan on ‘Face the Nation’ — ‘Offering the Country a Better Choice’

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Interviewed by Norah O’Donnell on CBS, the Republican vice presidential candidate stays focused and slams home his point:

“You know, what we have learned in this presidency, [President Obama] says one thing and he does another. He gave us four budgets, Norah, each of which had trillion dollar deficits, none of which ever, ever proposed to actually balance the budget. His allies in the Senate haven’t even given us a budget for three years. [The Republican House] passed budgets. We’ve led. Mitt Romney and I have offered a specific plan to prevent a debt crisis, to save Medicare and Social Security, to create jobs, to get us growing again. It’s a five point plan for a stronger middle class which is aimed to get us out of this weak recovery we have and get us back to growing our economy like we ought to. We got a troubling jobs report on Friday, Norah, that said for everybody who got a job, nearly four people stopped looking for a job. This isn’t working and President Obama’s rhetoric to the side, it’s just not working. And that’s why we are offering the country a better choice.”

This shows Ryan’s extraordinary discipline in staying on-message, while resistng the urge to throw in a clever “pudding” reference.

Administration’s Counter-Terrorism Chief Does Three Network Sunday Shows

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Coming up on the first anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, it will be victory-lap time on Fox News Sunday, CNN’s State of the Union and ABC’s This Week, with counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan as the guest. Andrew Malcolm writes:

You remember Brennan as the one rushed out to the White House briefing room the next day to provide the hungry media with their cherished tick-tock account of the commandos’ penetration into Pakistan and the slaying of the instigator of 9/11.
Unfortunately, so eager was the administration to tell its story quickly, that Brennan’s premature enunciation of the event contained numerous details later adjusted or contradicted, detracting from the anticipated accolades.
By now, however, most of the raid confusion is cleared. And everyone knows that the successful killing was mainly the result of Obama’s brave decision, although the SEALs, the stealth helicopter pilots and the Air Force electronic cloaking crews probably helped a little.
Oh, look, it’s an election year!

Sarcastic much? Allahpundit says you should skip the three-network BrennanFest in favor of Bob Schieffer’s lineup on Face the Nation:

CBS looks like the better bet for OBL coverage, though. They’ve got David Ignatius, whose new column argues that the Islamist trend in the Arab Spring has given Bin Laden the last laugh, and Peter Bergen, who interviewed OBL four years before 9/11 and has a new book on the manhunt for him out on Tuesday.

From that David Ignatius column:

Egypt is a case in point: This has been a year of mostly nonviolent democratic revolution. But it has brought to power some Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood groups that share common theological roots with bin Laden. And the al-Qaeda goal of driving the “apostate,” pro-American President Hosni Mubarak from power has been achieved. . . .
What we’re seeing now in Egypt is something that might be called electoral bin Ladenism. Take the group Gamaa Islamiya, which under its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, made the first unsuccessful attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Today, the organization has formed a Salafist political party with the benign name Building and Development Party. This organization, which like al-Qaeda traces its roots to the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, has 13 seats in the new Egyptian parliament.

You might also want to check William Jacobson’s argument: “Obama got Osama, but lost the Middle East.”

While you browse your local TV schedule for Sunday show times, a couple more points: CNN’s also has House Speaker John Boehner, while NBC’s Meet the Press goes straight to the presidential campaign, with Ed Gillespie for the Republicans and Robert Gibbs for the Democrats — plus Hilary Rosen and Rachel Maddow!

If any of these people make actual news, I’ll let you know.

Two Cheers for Katy Conrad!

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John Hindraker thought it was “insane” for Katy Conrad of CBS News to contact Koch Industries, inquiring about the claim by MSNBC and other liberals that the Koch brothers were paying for George Zimmerman’s legal defense in the Trayvon Martin case.

Pete Da Tech Guy comes to Katy Conrad’s defense, saying that at least she checked it out and didn’t run the story, and I agree.

Katy Conrad did her job. If Ed Schultz is going to permit Karen Finney and Van Jones to lie about the Koch brothers on MSNBC, other news organizations are obligated to check out the facts, which Conrad did, to her credit. While Koch Industries lawyer Mark Holden asked that CBS “not mention Koch in any way in your broadcast,” perhaps it would have been even better if CBS had re-focused its story on how MSNBC abets left-wing liars engaging in politically motivated slander against Koch.

Related: NPR employed a “reporter” who formerly worked for the liberal activist group Common Cause, and the reporter, Peter Overby, helped abet the left-wing demonization campaign against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Among the left-wingers pushing that demonization campaign is — surprise! — Van Jones.

Common Cause has also been part of the anti-Koch campaign.

It’s almost as if there were a vast conspiracy at work here . . .

‘I Believed at the Time That the Documents Were Genuine and I’ve Never Ceased Believing That They Are Genuine’

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Dan Rather still refuses to accept the truth that he was bamboozled by Bill Burkett and, with characteristic narcissism, offers his own belief in the authenticity of the Texas Air National Guard document as evidence of their actual authenticity, saying in effect: “If I, Dan Rather, believed they were authentic, therefore they must be authentic.”

No one that I know of ever accused Rather of being a conscious collaborator in Burkett’s hoax. Nobody said that CBS News published the phony documents knowing that they were phony.

Without having read the entirety of Joe Hagan’s Texas Monthly article, it would appear to be an effort to rescue the “fake but accurate” narrative of the RatherGate scandal, to say that — without regard for the authenticity of the Burkett papers — the crux of the CBS story was true: George W. Bush did indeed receive favorable treatment in the National Guard, so that he was, in effect, an overprivileged draft-dodger.

Let us stipulate the obvious: Membership in the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group was not allotted randomly, and it isn’t difficult to imagine what kind of string-pulling may have been involved in Dubya getting that coveted assignment. But (a) National Guard service is not dishonorable; (b) the alleged incidents of Dubya being AWOL from Guard duty occurred when the war was winding down, long after there was any danger of Bush being drafted and sent to Vietnam; and (c) suspecting favoritism toward the scion of an affluent family is not the same thing as proving such favoritism.

Nevertheless, liberals always believe the worst of Republicans and so are notoriously gullible in accepting anything as “proof” of their suspicions. Hence, we are hardly surprised to find discredited Dan piously confessing his continued credulity to Joe Hagan:

Rather says he remains “optimistic” that somebody, somewhere, will one day come forward and reveal the truth of what happened. “They’re out there,” he says. “Let’s set the record straight.”

Yeah, Dan: The truth is out there!

Turbo-Tax Tim Does 3 Sunday Shows UPDATE: Geithner Praises Obama’s ‘Incredibly Effective’ Economic Policies

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The Treasury Secretary is ubiquitous on Tax Day:

  • ABC This Week: Timothy Geithner.
  • NBC Meet the Press: Timothy Geithner; Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
  • CBS Face the Nation: Timothy Geithner; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
  • CNN State of the Union: Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee; Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.
  • Fox News Sunday: Ed Gillespie, adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; David Axelrod, adviser to President Obama’s re-election campaign.

UPDATE: Kool-Aid? Anybody want some Kool-Aid?

President Obama’s economic policies “were incredibly effective,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday, crediting the president with having prevented a depression.
While admitting it is “still a very tough economy out there,” Geithner said the administration is “making a lot of progress” and said “the broad indicators are pretty encouraging.”
Interviewed on ABC’s This Week, Geithner was asked by host George Stephanopoulos about the gloomy forecasts from economists such as New York University professor Nouriel Roubini, who called the current recovery “anemic, subpar, below trend, below potential.”
Geithner suggested Obama could not be blamed for that, saying “if he’d had more support from his opponents in Congress, then we could have got more things passed that would have put more people back to work more quickly.” . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator, which I hope citizen-journalists will study as a lesson in Neutral Objective Journalism. One of the basic jobs of a D.C. political reporter is the Sunday show round-up: What did the “newsmakers” (government officials, party leaders, candidates, etc.) say on the Sunday shows?

If you can do nothing else from the comfort of home, you can always report What People Say on TV. The key to doing that effectively, however, is to write it as straight news: “Joe Friday, Just-the-Facts-Ma’am” is a style that anyone can learn by study and practice. Repress your bloggerly temptation to snark it up, resist any urge you might have toward sensationalism, and just tell it straight. Identify the key quotes and facts and assemble them into the kind of basic reporting that wire services do.

When doing a Sunday show roundup, you generally want to work pretty quick: If your version isn’t online by noon or 1 p.m. Eastern, you might as well not bother. But on other occasions and with other kinds of What People Say on TV stories, you may have time — if you think nobody else saw the significance of the interview, news story or C-SPAN segment you saw — to fill in the background from other sources.

Some may ask, “Where’s the value-added? Anybody can see what people say on TV. Why should I do my own version of the story? Why not just link the Associated Press or Politico story and add my own caustic ideological sarcasm?” I reply that the way other sources assemble the quotes and facts — the way they do Neutral Objective Journalism — inevitably introduces a certain angle or bias to the story.

You will discover, if you try your hand at writing the What People Say on TV story, that there is no such thing as neutrality, no matter how straightforward and factual your account may be. Other than transcripts, every news story on a subject of political controversy (and what Tim Geithner said Sunday was obviously such a case) includes elements of selection and emphasis that amount to a slant. Continue reading Turbo-Tax Tim Does 3 Sunday Shows UPDATE: Geithner Praises Obama’s ‘Incredibly Effective’ Economic Policies →

Barack Obama’s ’60 Minutes’ Interview Has Me Screaming at My TV Again

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Today on Morning Joe, they were playing clips of Steve Kroft’s 60 Minutes interview with President Obama, and I literally started screaming. There is only so much of this bulls–t I can endure without talking back to my TV:

OBAMA: If I can’t get Republicans to move, partly because they’ve made a political, strategic decision that says, “Anything Obama’s for, we’re against, because that’s our best chance of winning an election,” I don’t think the American people would see that as a failure on my part. My preference is that they’d have a different attitude. You know, I’ve been joking with my staff lately that I think in my next speech, I am gonna say, “I am adamantly opposed to investing in education and putting teachers in the classroom. I’m adamantly opposed to rebuilding America and putting construction workers back to work.” And I’m thinking maybe suddenly Republicans might be for it. But, you know, keep in mind, I’m talking about Republican members of Congress. I’m not talking about Republicans around the country.
KROFT: They don’t like you much better. It’s only 7% approval rating.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah, no, I understand. But I think that they like the ideas that we put forward. I mean, the interesting thing is the majority of Republicans actually think we should have a balanced approach to deficit reduction, including tax increases for the wealthy. The majority of Republicans do think that we should make investments in roads and bridges and improving our airports and investing in basic research and medical research.
So if you take my name out of it and just look at the ideas that we’ve been presenting, these are common sense, mainstream ideas that …

THAT WE CAN’T AFFORD! YOU ALREADY BLEW A TRILLION DOLLARS ON THIS STIMULUS CRAP AND WHAT DID IT GET US, HUH? WHERE’S THE F–KING RECOVERY? THE DEFICIT’S OUT OF CONTROL! WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY TO PAY FOR THIS CRAP! SHUT THE HELL UP ABOUT ‘COMMON SENSE’!

 Obama thinks he can just rattle of a laundry list of spending projects, call them “common sense, mainstream ideas” and — POOF! — the money magically appears to pay for this stuff.

And something else: He loves to talk about infrastructure — “investments in road and bridges” — as if that was the majority of what he’s spending money on, when in fact, infrastructure projects were less than 5% of the stimulus bill. It’s like me sprinkling a turd with sugar and asking you to eat it and when you refuse, I accuse you of disliking sugar. Here’s another idiotic assertion:

KROFT: [Republicans] say it’s your insistence on raising the taxes to the wealthiest Americans, that you’re fixated on that. And that there are other ways to raise revenue.
OBAMA: Steve, the math is the math. You can’t lower rates and raise revenue, unless you’re getting revenue from someplace else. Now, either it’s coming from middle-class families or poor families or it’s coming from folks like you and me that can afford to pay a little more. I mean, I think the average American understands that.

ECONOMIC GROWTH, YOU F–KING IDIOT! EVER HEARD OF THE LAFFER CURVE? SUPPLY SIDE? ART LAFFER COULD EXPLAIN IT TO YOU IN 15 MINUTES WITH A COCKTAIL NAPKIN!

Obamanomics is simply ignorance as the basis of policy. The more you know, the less you like it, and his only hope of re-election is to promulgate counterfactual ideas and persuade voters that they must choose between two lies: His dishonest characterizations of his own policies and his dishonest characterizations of Republican policies.

I hope he fails, because my blood-pressure can’t take another four years of listening to this guy lie.

UPDATE: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!


It Ain’t ‘Whining’ If the Bias Is Real

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No, I’m not talking about the bias of Tabitha Hale in excluding me from the BlogCon agenda for the second consecutive year. The final word on that has not only been said, but also set to music. Rather, I’m talking about the evidence of bias by John Dickerson of CBS:

In a slip of the finger that quickly ignited a furor among Mrs. Bachmann’s supporters, Mr. Dickerson e-mailed his colleagues that he would prefer to “get someone else” other than the Minnesota congresswoman for an online show after the CBS News/National Journal debate on Saturday night. The e-mail said that Mrs. Bachmann was “not going to get many questions” in the debate and that “she’s nearly off the charts” — an apparent reference to her low standing in many polls.
The problem was that Mrs. Bachmann’s communications director was copied in on the e-mail, and Mr. Dickerson hit “reply to all.” Oops.

Smitty has said that it is “whining” to call attention to such vicious backstabbing dishonesty, as though no one — least of all Michele Bachmann herself — should call attention to Dickerson’s contemptuous disparagement of her candidacy, lest they be accused of irrational and unseemly self-pity. Bachmann’s campaign manager Keith Nahigan, by contrast, complained of the insult with the obvious goal of exacting retribution.

Now, imagine yourself in Dickerson’s place, while your bosses at CBS News are being deluged with e-mails demanding your immediate termination. Imagine the next 24 hours, as Dickerson is denounced on the radio airwaves by Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, et cetera.

Even if Dickerson doesn’t get fired by CBS, he is now marked for life — his name a despicable epithet, so that no Republican will ever trust him again — thanks to the success of Nahigan in calling attention to that 29-word e-mail.

But there are many more scoundrels like Dickerson in high places amongst the soi-disant elite of the media establishment, and the way they’ve stage-managed the GOP presidential debates this year is the subject of my American Spectator column today:

Whether they’re accused of trying to gin up rating-friendly “fireworks” or limiting questions to a candidate they deem to have dropped out of contention, suspicions toward debate moderators are part of an ongoing erosion of the media’s credibility. Perfect fairness and complete objectivity are perhaps an impossible ideal, but when a candidate claims to have discovered “concrete evidence” of bias, it is a serious charge that merits serious consideration. Republican voters will ultimately decide their party’s nominee, despite efforts by the media elite to decide for them. And Bachmann’s poll numbers are still higher than Huntsman’s.

Please read the whole thing, because among the many unintended consequences of Dickerson’s insult to Bachmann was the fact that I was compelled to spend three hours writing that column in a McDonald’s in Spartanburg, S.C.  The necessary delay in my departure meant that I was on the road driving 452 miles to arrive home at 3:15 a.m., utterly exhausted at the end of a grueling 19-hour day.

Journalism as an act of personal vengeance — seeking vindication against bullies, backstabbers and other such miscreants — is a topic worth at least an essay, if not an entire book, but I’m too tired to write it now.

And why write that story at all, when I’m living it every day of my life?