Media

NY Times Fact Checkers Take a Nap, Incident#23,436

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In an article on international productivity, the New York Times describes France’s reformist president Nicolas Sarkozy thusly:

France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy has pushed for a reduction in the workweek to an average of 35 hours…

Every other news story on the subject describes Sarkozy as a critic of the 35-hour work week who seeks to provide loopholes to allow workers to evade the work cap.

Even the NY Times’s own reports say so:

Although he provided few details, Mr. Sarkozy indicated that he would push for additional cuts in payroll taxes and ways to encourage people to work beyond the statutory 35-hour workweek.

This is a minor error. Yet, when you think of the sheer volume of the NYT’s reporting and its disproportionate impact on public debate, a minor error every story or two really adds up.

Blogs Keeping Check on Stupid Newspaper Tricks

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This happens a lot. Someone writes a letter to the editor of a MSM publication. The letter is published — but with so many edits and deletions as to change substantially its meaning.

The old excuse for this kind of tendentious editing was, “space considerations.” That was an obvious lie in some specific cases, but there was enough general truth in the phrase to maintain the plausible deniability of editorial bias.

But now, with zero-marginal-cost Internet publishing, there is no excuse for editing on-topic, clearly written, non-abusive reader comments or letters. Yet some MSM editors still do it.

Here’s a recent example (with additional commentary here).

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What We Love

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As it turns out, John Barnes had some of it right he applied the ethos and culture of MFA schools to the Scott Thomas columns. We can find on military blogs (and here) more substantive critiques of the specifics, while keeping in mind that soldiers, being human, can be assholes and that war is not the most positive experience. Still and all, the truth is important and much looks like these were, at best, tales embellished beyond recognition. The narrator seems quite confused about guns, Bradleys and life. TNR’s firing of the “whistleblower” is also not particularly attractive. It’s hard to take the youthful editor seriously.

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Tales That Should Not Be Told

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In one of the comments to my post Telling Stories, Veryretired said something very wise:

There are myths so entrenched in our national psyche that facts are simply insufficient to change the story that “everyone knows”.

As H. Beam Piper said in “Cosmic Computer“: “Well, always take a second look at these
things everybody knows. Ten to one they’re not so. ”

Over time that damage to the collective mental model of how the world works can be repaired, but in the short and intermediate timeframes, myths are dangerous. One of the great boons bequeathed to mankind by the scientific method is the creation of a class of people who question received wisdom all the time. One of the recurrent complaints on my blog is that many scientists don’t lead the way in this regard. Oh, sure, we question each other deeply about matters in our own fields, but we don’t carry this over to other areas in our own lives, to say nothing of trying to spread the method to laymen.

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Thanks to Gateway Pundit

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  • Update: Today, Gateway Pundit‘s concludes descriptions of various participants, heroics of Iraq’s Mithul al-Alusi and Garri Kasparov with the understated: “Certainly, Prague is not short on heroes this week.”

Countering the posts we’ve been doing on Cuba and Venezuela, across the ocean Sharansky, Havel & Aznar organized “Democracy and Security: Core Values and Sound Policies.” (In Prague, June 5-6, hosted by Prague Security Studies Institute, Jerusalem-Based Shalem Center’s Adelson Institute For Strategic Studies and Madrid’s Foundation for Social Analysis and Studies.) Gateway Pundit is covering it and includes a moving speech by Lieberman and a rather rousing one by Bush – described by Gateway Pundit as “Bush Rocks the Czernin Palace”. The conference is full of people who have taken great risks and lost much for the cause of democracy and liberty.

This doesn’t seem to be getting the coverage one would think it should. For instance, dissidents from seventeen countries sat in the front rows for Bush’s speech – these people are, by their presence, interesting. The stories need not really say that Bush met with them privately or that he got a standing ovation – we understand why that is not news.

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