Bloggasm

I’m certainly not the first one to ask this question: If either Obama or Clinton had claimed — on four separate occasions — that Shiite-led Iran was taking in and training Sunni-led Al Qaeda, wouldn’t it be played out over and over on an endless loop in mainstream media outlets?

Yet when McCain does this, not only does the media barely cover it, the reporters start making excuses for him when they do mention it. This is absolutely sickening, especially as the press — who don’t even try to hide the fact that they’ve been courting McCain — paints him as a foreign policy expert.

He just can’t seem to catch a break:

His first column for The New York Times’ op-ed page last Monday held a major attribution “error”, and then the paper’s public editor called his hiring a “mistake.” Now a key claim in William Kristol’s second column for the paper has been undercut by a news article at the Times a few hours later.

Maybe three times a charm? If a clock can be right two times a day, then I’m sure he can get something right in his third column.

While the media slices and dices last night’s primary, let’s not forget the fact that the serious “intellectual conservative” Bill Kristol, in his very first column for The New York Times, has already been found to be wrong on two major points.

Firstly, he misattributed a quote to conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, when in fact the quote came from Michael Medved.

Also, in the very first paragraph, Kristol said this:

Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.

If someone had come up to me and said, “Simon, what’s the best possible way Kristol could embarrass himself and epitomize the degree of his wrongness on just about any matter of significance?” I wouldn’t have been able to devise such an outcome.

As I said, this is his very first column. What more will come from this train wreck of a pundit in future months?

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Most journalists are contacted by nutballs on a regular basis. You’ll be sitting at your desk working on an article when your phone rings and the person on the other end tries to feed you the most filthy slime available with the hopes that you’ll write a story about it. Just the other week, I received a bizarre call from a professional body builder who’s suing both Pat Robertson and Jon Stewart (don’t ask, long story). He also happened to be suing a political candidate I had written a story on (that’s how the guy knew to contact me). Naturally, he wanted me to write a scathing article on the candidate and use him (the bodybuilder) as the source.

I gave the crazy guy lip service and promised to look into it and then hung up the phone with no intention of doing so. Because that’s what most journalists do with nutballs: we ignore them.

But every now and then one of these people somehow rises through the ether and gets covered by journalists for pretty much the sole reason that he or she is a nutball. Ann Coulter is, to me, the most notable example of this. Coulter receives media coverage almost entirely because she says hateful, controversial things. It can be argued that nearly all her income is the result of the free media coverage she gets when she says something crazy.

I mean, can anyone argue that she adds anything meaningful to political discussion? Just look at the title of her books; they’re becoming increasingly unimaginative in their antagonism. If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, the title of her most recent book, is so bland that it could only cause the deepest apathy when I see it. She’s not even trying to pretend that she wants to be taken seriously anymore.

I’m not the first journalist to point out that Coulter thrives on free media coverage. And I’m not the first journalist to appreciate the irony that we give her free media coverage when we publish articles complaining about her free media coverage. It’s a win win situation for her.

This is why I have made it a New Year’s resolution to never mention Ann Coulter again. Starting on Jan. 1, 2008, you’ll will never see her name on this blog. Nor will I ever write about her in any future articles. I don’t care what batshit crazy thing she says — no matter how badly I want to take the time to easily debunk her, I’ll refrain from doing so.

I’m hoping other bloggers and journalists will join me in this endeavor. If we can cut down on her media coverage considerably, then she will receive less free promotion for her books and columns. She will just be another nutball starving for attention.

So will you join me?

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I think any objective person could make a strong argument that the neocon columnist William Kristol had been the most catastrophically wrong when it came to writing about weapons of mass destruction in pre-invasion Iraq and Iran’s nuclear weapon program. That’s why many were astonished that Time Magazine had hired him as a “star columnist” about a year ago to contribute regularly to the magazine. As some pointed out, Time was basically rewarding him for being one of the lead cheerleaders in a war that had by then gone terribly sour.

Well, the news came recently that Time will not be renewing Kristol’s contract. It’s still unclear why this is happening, and it should be noted that it looks like Time will be bringing in an editor from the conservative magazine the National Review for a regular column.

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I have plenty of ideas for substantive posts but unfortunately little time on my hands this week. So instead I’ll point you to this scathing critique of the Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz.

Kurtz does sort of what I do here, only as a full time job and with a hell of a lot more readers. He critiques the media and specifically focuses on journalism. I’m not one of those people who obsesses over whether a journalist gives equal time to both conservatives and liberals, but Media Matters’s Eric Boehlert makes a good case that Kurtz ignores media stories that are harmful to conservatives while pumping up any minor media scandal reported by the conservative blogosphere.

I guess I should issue the caveat that I have read Kurtz’s book Spin Cycle and enjoyed it tremendously. Part of me wonders if this is his misguided attempt to battle the liberal-bias stereotype by giving undue weight to conservative bloggers (EDITORIALIZING: who are some of the worst fact-checkers on the internet). Either way, his credibility is certainly declining.

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Earlier this year, The New Republic published first-person accounts from an anonymous U.S. soldier in Iraq. The articles recounted gruesome — often crude — behavior from American service members, including the brutal killing of dogs and one instance of soldiers openly mocking a disfigured girl.

In July, a few media outlets — The Weekly Standard chief among them — began to doubt the veracity of the anonymous soldier’s claims. Editors from The New Republic, including Franklin Foer, initiated an aggressive investigation to test the accuracy of the stories. After several conservative bloggers raised doubts of the anonymous soldier’s existence, TNR managed to convince him to come out in the open, and he revealed himself to be Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a private in the United States Army and a member of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division.

After several months of investigating, TNR published a 14-page article detailing their findings. Many within the conservative blogosphere claimed immediately afterwards that the article admitted that Beauchamp had lied. “The maxi-mea culpa runs more than 10 pages and thousands and thousands of words (self-pitying, rationalizing, messenger-blaming),” wrote conservative Michelle Malkin, “but this is the belated bottom line: The Beauchamp stories are bullcrap.”

But is the article an admission of untruth? After reading it in its entirety, I can conclude that it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, Foer managed to find several soldiers to corroborate Beauchamp’s claims, and the editors only really unearthed one definite factual error.

This is not to say that all their questions were answered; there are several mysteries surrounding the soldier’s claims. But this is not because of TNR or Beauchamp — rather it’s the obfuscation by the U.S. Army that blocked the editors from fully investigating the articles.

While TNR tried continuously to get access to Beauchamp and others who could speak authoritatively on his situation, officials from the Army, many under the cloak of anonymity, began to leak carefully-selected information to highly partisan bloggers in order to smear the soldier’s character. The most notorious incidence of this was when excerpts of an interview transcript between TNR and Beauchamp were leaked to Matt Drudge. It was a very deliberate attempt to undermine the magazine’s investigation while at the same time defaming the soldier’s character.

Many bloggers — typically on the right — have accused TNR from stonewalling the public and not issuing an immediate retraction. But after reading that 14-page document, I can only wonder: “What choice did they have?” How can you release an immediate retraction if you have to go a full month just to speak to the writer in question? By pointing out how long it took TNR to publish this article from the time they were first alerted to the problem without at least acknowledging the magazine’s lack of access to information is engaging in intellectual dishonesty.

Did The New Republic make horrible editorial decisions in this matter? With the revelation that the person assigned to fact check Beauchamp’s work was his own wife, there’s no doubt in my mind that their was some shoddy journalism. But because of the questionable media tactics of the U.S. Army and the highly-partisan echo chamber of those rooting for TNR to be proven wrong, we may never know to what extent.

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SLIGHTLY RELATED: Compare TNR’s attempts to aggressively investigate Beauchamp’s articles to the terrible journalism practices of The National Review when they published outright falsehoods and then refused to investigate them after it was pointed out.

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