Monday, January 16, 2012

Bad journalism, Good journalism - Updated

Major journalistic fail for Kevin Liptak at CNN. It's not that he doesn't get the stenography down correctly. This is true:
Americans for Prosperity said they spent $6 million to run the minute-long spot in the battleground states of Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia and Iowa. The ad began airing Monday.
And Kevin dutifully reports what the ad says. However, the fail is that he doesn't mention the ad is misleading, gets its "facts" wrong and distorts quotes from President Obama.

Contrast that to the journalistic excellence shown by Jake Tapper on the same ad. And we might mention Jake had this story covered days ago. Jake also takes the time to ask the Koch stooges at AFP some questions and reports the provable facts:
While it may be that White House officials wanted the announcement to be made after the November 2010 elections – the only proof of that is that one e-mail, and the White House denies the charge — the layoffs that were announced were not as AFP describes. What is true: the day after the 2010 elections, on November 3, Solyndra announced it would lay end its contracts with more than 100 contractors, lay off 40 employees, and close one of its factories.

It wasn’t until nine months later, in August 2011 that Solyndra filed for bankruptcy protection, laying off 1,100 full-time and part-time workers. [...]

The ad features George Stephanopoulos asking President Obama in an October 2011 ABC News/Yahoo interview if he regretted holding up Solyndra as a model for jobs and clean energy.

In the ad, the president replies, “No I don’t…overall it’s doing well.”

The full quote is: “No, I don’t, because if you look at the overall portfolio of loan guarantees that have been provided– overall, it’s doing well.”
Context informs. It makes all the difference. Read Jake's whole post. He did a great job on this one.

Update: Add Justin Sink at The Hill to the fail list. While he does at least mention it's a Koch funded smear, the rest is pure stenography.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

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4 Comments:

Blogger A Conservative Teacher said...

So, in summary-

There is only one email so far linking the White House to a private company, which the WH has denied even though there is one email, and it'll take a full-scale investigation to recover anything more.

There were many layoffs, although not as many as the advertisements make seem.

Obama has no regret for this one bad loan, because there have been lots of loans made by the government during his time, and he's proud of them all- even though recent investigation shows there are dozens of more companies on the verge of collapsing like Solyndra.

Nice post- you really did a great job of seeing the bark on the trees while avoiding the forest that Obama personally blew a lot of taxpayer money on bad investments and then tried to hide how badly he did.

Oh, and don't reply with calling me names or blaming it on Bush- those are getting boring and old and only show how stupid you are.

9:34:00 PM  
Blogger giantslor said...

Well, The Hill is a Republican hack rag, so it's no surprise that they'd take the GOP line.

1:00:00 AM  
Blogger Capt. Fogg said...

"Oh, and don't reply"

Wouldn't think of it, old chap. Being called stupid by opinionated morons has long since become boring, doncha know.

9:42:00 AM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

The Hill is usually just a steno for the RW, but it does occasionally post something worthwhile. Much like Politico. Not often enough that I miss them if they disappeared.

That was my reaction too Fogg. Toyed with deleting him on the grounds of tedious repetition, but left it up for future historians who might want to study the dreary disintegration of the conservative hive mind.

10:05:00 AM  

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