Another Fake Memo

Coming just a few days after an apparently fake memo about the Democrats and the healthcare reform bill made its way onto several major websites, including Politico, another bogus email  fooled some more news organizations today.

So is anyone checking anything or is the rush to have stories first  trumping commonsense and responsibility to readers? AKA good journalism.

From TPM:

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink tells TPMmuckraker that the left-wing activist group orchestrated the bogus AIPAC press release calling for a settlement freeze that got picked up by several major news organizations today.

Benjamin says she and a colleague stood outside the AIPAC conference hall today dressed in suits and handed out copies of the statement to confused attendees.

The Ayes of March

Headlines on political stories and columns are frequently bashed by one side or the other, so it's nice to see one referred to as "stellar." Column by Paul Krugman; kudos from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo; headline, surprise, unknown at this point.

Please. Tell Us More.

The Washington Post has an odd little bit in its lead story today. I wonder if anyone challenged this phrasing.

For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation's strong economic performance because of public discontent about the Iraq war. Today, the president is getting little credit for improved security in Iraq, as the public increasingly focuses on a struggling U.S. economy.
That is the problem Bush faces as he prepares to deliver his seventh and probably final State of the Union address tonight. …

"Probably final"? H/t, Talking Points Memo.

'Tis the Seasons

ha ha ha. or ho ho ho. I got to use the cliche.


Talking Points Memo thinks Christmas is over, but luckily, we have John McIntyre to remind us of the facts.

Opening Up the Pages

Greg Sargent at TalkingPointsMemo writes about Clark Hoyt's revelation that the NY Times has opened its stories and some opinion pieces to online comment. The Times has hired people to carefully scrutinize comments before they are posted (I guess we won't be seeing any "Heywood Jablomie" comments, soon, kind of like what CNN get through not long ago.) It's more than being hoity-toity--it's about class and politics. As Sargent points out, one of the issues is not allowing a nutjob's posting to be a.posted b.accidentally or otherwise confused with what the Times wrote. As Sargent writes:

The paper's editors have to know that right-wing bloggers and talk-show hosts will be relentlessly scouring the Times Web site for nutjob anti-troops or pro-assassination reader comments that they can use to depict the paper as a bastion of fifth columnists who are trying to destroy America from within, just as Bill O'Reilly did to DailyKos recently.

In other words, as goes on around the Internet a lot, Nutjob A, pro-Norwegian, pretends to be otherwise and posts a slur against Norwegians. This allows Nutjob B to proclaim on his TV/radio show/Web site or guest appearance on someone else's TV/radio show/Web site that the comment proves that the Times is anti-Norwegian, has always been anti-Norwegian, will always be anti-Norwegian and is no doubt actually Swedish or least in league with the Swedes. And something needs to be done about it. That's the kind of thing that leads to denunciations on the House floor.

Good forums that are reasonably policed bring out smart readers. It doesn't hurt us to have well-informed people commenting publicly on what we've produced. The good forums--Metafilter.com is a good example--are highly informative; the occasional dopey remark is disposed of, disproven pretty quickly and meantime, lots of good information and thought has been added. Metafilter, of course, is a little different from a newspaper site in that it consists of links to others' writings, followed by the aforementioned commentary, as opposed to the original reporting of newspapers.

Still, both kinds of forums could be useful. If little else than noise is produced, maybe not. But it's worth the try.