Wolf Howling: WaPo

Showing posts with label WaPo. Show all posts

Monday, February 13, 2012

Media Matters, The White House & The MSM

The Daily Caller is running an expose on Media Matters. The lowlights from the first installment -

1. Media Matters coordinates weekly with the White House.

2. Media Matters is being run by David Brock, a paranoid manic depressive who supplements his meds with cocaine.

3. The Soros-funded Media Matters plans to spend $20 million influencing news coverage in 2012.

4. Media Matters targets reporters who do not report their spin, orchestrating massive negative e-mail campaigns to the reporter.

5. Media Matters targets company's that advertise on conservative programs. They have successfully gotten Imus and Lou Dobbs fired and may well have played a roll in Glen Beck's departure from Fox.

6. Media Matters has more than a few partners in the media:

“The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” says a Media Matters source, “from Daily Kos to Salon. Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”

“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge. . .

“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”

“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”

“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”

Smith, who refused to comment on the substance of these claims, later took to Twitter to say that he has been critical of Media Matters.

Why am I not surprised by any of this, including the fact that the White House and Media Matters are in bed together. Expect that to be studiously ignored by the news media. Regardless, if this is only Part I of the DC's expose, the follow-on stuff ought to be pretty juicy.

Friday, February 19, 2010

An Attempted Mass Murder In Austin Confuses WaPo Columnist About Tea Parties & Obama

Yesterday, 72 yr. old Joe Stack flew a single engine airplane into an IRS building in , killing himself and another individual and wounding a score of others. He left a suicide note on-line (see here) that emphasized his hatred of capitalism, George Bush, the IRS, organized religion generally and Catholicism in particular, in addition to giving a short paean to communism. Much like Bill Ayers long ago, Stack concluded in his note that violence was the only answer and he hoped that his act of attempted mass murder would ignite the rest of the "zombies" in America. Yet the first thing scurrilous partisan hacks in the MSM did was attempt to tie this individual to the Tea Party movement.

This from Jonathan Capehart writing in the Washington Post:

Joseph Stack was angry at the Internal Revenue Service, and he took his rage out on it by slamming his single-engine plane into the Echelon Building in Austin, Texas. We now know this thanks to the rather clear (as rants go) suicide note Stack left behind. There's no information yet on whether he was involved in any anti-government groups or whether he was a lone wolf. But after reading his 34-paragraph screed, I am struck by how his alienation is similar to that we're hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.

Where does that come from - besides from the quill of a partisan wholly lacking in integrity and masquerading as a journalist. There is not a single thing to tie Joe Stack to the Tea Party movement, and indeed, the suicide note of Stack - from hatred of Catholicism and organized religion to a high five to communism to a call for violent revolution - all are earmarks of left wing nut-jobs. All of those things are at complete odds with the Tea Party movement. So how does this slimeball Capehart justify his linkage - by quoting only those parts of Stack's suicide note that support his narrative and ignoring all that puts in context that this joker was as far from being in sync with the Tea Party movement as The Weather Underground. You can read it here.
The comments to Capeheart's article were pretty nearly unanimous in their denunciation of this partisan hackery. Today, Capehart attempted to justify his article:

When I wrote my last post on Joseph Stack, I was very careful not get ahead of what was already known, . . .

Except that . . . there was absolutely nothing to tie Stack to the Tea Party movement. So it would seem he got a bit ahead. Capehart is not off to a good start.

. . . and I was careful not to associate the entire Tea Party movement with his actions.

Right . . . he just left out all the parts of Stack's suicide note that contravened his narrative, thus allowing this horse's ass of a partisan hack to link it to some nebulous "fringe element" of the Tea Party movement that exists only in the fevered imagination of the far left. And of course, by only sliming a portion of the Tea Party movement, he had no intent of bringing the entire Tea Party movment into disrepute. Not at all . . .

Pity some didn't read the piece as carefully as I wrote it.

There you go. We to the right are simply too dumb to divine the nuances of sophisticated left wing partisan hackery. One of the hallmarks of the left is an arrogant belief in their own superior intelligence relative to we, the unwashed masses. This would seem to be a classic example. I daresay, however, that if this is the kind of journalism which Capehart displayed in whatever college he attended, it is amazing that he ever graduated.

The excerpts I chose from Stack's suicide note/manifesto illustrate [how Stack's "alienation is similar to that we're hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement"].

The excerpts he chose were as cherry picked as the Yamal Tree Ring data. They were designed to support a narrative, not to mark reality. And again, who and what are the "extreme elements" of the Tea Party? There will be a nut or two anywhere, but in terms of an "element," that suggests an identifiable and entire class of individuals. Capehart still has yet to link to or show that any such entity exists - and I am not aware of one.

And I'm not the only one to make the connection between Stack's alienation from government and the anti-government extremists who have latched on to the broader Tea Party movement.

What utter bull. The link he provides is to a Fox News story that has nothing to do with Tea Party protests. It is about violent and extreme groups who contest the right of the IRS to collect any taxes. The Tea Party crowd are protesting against high taxes - that is a world apart from planning violence against the IRS because you don't want - or don't believe that you constitutionally have to - pay any taxes. That is like saying that edible mushrooms and mushrooms that will kill you in a few minutes are the same because they are both mushrooms. It is ludicrous.

Stack didn't like much of anything or anyone. He railed against President George W. Bush, Wall Street, insurance companies and capitalism, to name a few. That he ends his suicide note with an apparent nod to communism doesn't disprove the larger point. Stack was raging against a system he thought was unfair and contributed to his economic insecurity.

Hah. You can substitute "Obama" for "Stack" in the above paragraph and be pretty much dead on point. And thus we have it, a seriously confused WaPo columnist who knows nothing about the Tea Party movement, yet who is projecting the sins of the left onto them. What a horse's ass. If like I, you happen to think this joker should be among the ranks of the unemployed, feel free to let WaPo's managing editor know.

Actually, looking back through Capehart's prior work, I see now that he was sliming the Tea Party movement just before this latest event happened. Read here. He is able to find among the progenitors of the Tea Party movement such people and groups as Tim McVeigh, Randy Weaver, and Branch Davidian, Funny though, looking back through his work, I see nothing on Amy Bishop - the mass murdering Harvard grad and strong Obama supporter, nor any other mention of left wing radicals. What an intellectually dishonest hack. And WaPo wonders why its readership is dropping?

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Climategate Update 13: Hack Job Alert - Washington Post Leads With Climategate & A Complete Defense Of Global Warming

The Washington post leads with an article on Climategate that is nothing short of a one-sided defense of AGW, ignoring the core issues raised by Climategate. The authors, David A. Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin, spend their time assuring the reader that the earth is burning up while only grudgingly acknowledging that the hacked CRU e-mails and data exist. It is a hack job.

WaPo begins by telling us that the last decade has been the warmest decade ever.

I seem to recall having read that Greenland was once actually green and grapes were growing in sufficient quantity in Britain to fuel a substantial wine industry during the Medieval Warming Period. That would make that period the warmest in the past two millennium. (Plus see here) But who can argue with a graph based on peer reviewed, massaged data provided by the AGW scientists?

WaPo repeatedly emphasizes the vast amount of AGW supporting peer reviewed data while belittling those who still contest AGW theory in any form. They then pronounce on Climategate and downplay the major issues raised by the scandal:

Leaked just before international climate talks begin in Copenhagen -- the culmination of years of work by scientists to raise alarms about greenhouse-gas emissions -- the e-mails have cast those scientists in a political light and given new energy to others who think the issue of climate change is all overblown.

The e-mails don't say that: They don't provide proof that human-caused climate change is a lie or a swindle.

But they do raise hard questions. In an effort to control what the public hears, did prominent scientists who link climate change to human behavior try to squelch a back-and-forth that is central to the scientific method? Is the science of global warming messier than they have admitted?

What grossly understates the "hard" questions raised by the CRU e-mails.

- Was data manipulated inappropriately? That answer is clearly yes, a fact which would seem to belie WaPo's resounding pronouncement to the contrary.

- Did the AGW scientists operate in such a manner that the public has been provided with their conclusions, but other scientists were denied the ability to actually check and reproduce their experiments? Absolutely. They wholly corrupted their science, deliberately refusing to release their data, methodology and programs, not to mentioning conspiring to delete data subject to FOIA requests, such that it has been impossible through today to verify their experiments and conclusions. That holds true on this side of the pond also. And indeed, with the loss of the raw data from CRU that they claim to have destroyed in the 1980's, it is not even possible for the AGW scientists themselves to reproduce their work.

- Does the peer review process in the AGW field suffer inherent and systemic weakness that were compounded by the deliberate malfeasance of AGW scientists? Yes., to the point where it is fair to say that the process is irredeemably corrupt and provides no standard for judging the validity of any particular journal article on climate science.

Instead we get this from WaPo:

But recent debate -- some scientists say the Earth hasn't warmed as predicted over the past 10 years -- show that climate science is still science, with researchers drawing different lessons from the same data. The problem is that it plays out before an audience that won't wait for certainty.

Could that paragraph be any more outrageous. To restate the WaPo hacks, by using the word "some," they imply that many, if not a majority of scientists, apparently believe that the Earth has warmed over the past decade - an abject falsehood even contradicted by WaPo's own graph. Two, the WaPo authors decry the fact that the reality of a lack of consensus on AGW has now been made public because the unwashed masses simply have not the patience and intelligence to understand action to combat AGW must happen now regardless. In essence, the authors are arguing that it would have been better if the public continued to wrongly believe in the canard of a consensus. The hubris on display in that paragraph is breathtaking.

Wapo then, amazingly, tells us that this lack of scientific agreement doesn't matter because . . . there is a consensus, even if there are some unimportant distractions surrounding the consensus:

. . . But the climate establishment -- including the U.S. government's top scientists on the subject [That would include Michael Mann, directly implicated in the CRU scandal] -- say that nothing in the e-mails disproves their bedrock ideas. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are still gathering in the atmosphere and trapping more of the sun's heat, and the consequences of that will still be dire in the long run, they say.

"Our collective understanding of how the Earth is warming . . . rests on a wealth of scientific information that is very diverse and comes from multiple sources and multiple groups," said Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Regardless of what happened in one place, it doesn't undermine the totality of what we know."

Wapo then sets up the "few" skeptics as merely substandard scientists. Interestingly, they pick Roger Pielke, a renowned scientist whose work was discussed in the CRU e-mails by the conspirators who sought to keep it from the major journals. Instead of quoting from the e-mails, WaPo quotes an another individual who calls Pielke's work unsupported. You can find the links to Pielke's work here, as well as his explanation of the disagreement he has had with the AGW crowd. Given that his work is based on something that should be easily provable or disprovable - i.e., whether temperature stations used to support AGW conclusions are in fact untrustworthy - I find the dismissal of his work out of hand to be extremely questionable. Too bad, is it not, that WaPo did not see fit to give him an opportunity to respond to his accuser.

Wapo spends the remainder of the article telling us why Climategate makes no difference to the validity of AGW.

Top climate scientists say that in recent years most of the new, worthy research has only made the threat of climate change seem bigger and faster.

. . . These are the facts: After an increase in 1998, the world has been historically warm, but its average temperatures have not climbed steadily. Does that mean climate change has stopped?

Many mainstream scientists say no: This is just a tic of nature, as cycles of currents in the Pacific Ocean and a decrease in heat coming off the sun have temporarily dampened warming. Some researchers, though, have said the models -- and, by extension, the human researchers that built them -- could be missing something about how the climate works. That point was made in one stolen e-mail, in which climate researcher Kevin Trenberth wrote it was a "travesty" that models could not explain why the Earth hadn't warmed more.

. . . The diversity of opinion on this topic, however, wasn't evident late last month, when a group of 26 climate researchers issued a report called "The Copenhagen Diagnosis," summarizing scientific advances since the last major U.N. climate report in 2007.

"Has global warming recently slowed down or paused?" the report said. "No."

Thursday, July 2, 2009

WaPo & The Latest Prostitution Scandal

New York may have the gray lady, but in Washington, they have the Painted Lady.

You gotta love WaPo's new business model. It combines MSM reporting with our world's oldest profession. As one commentor at Michelle Malkin calls it, presstitution. They were organizing "a series of policy dinners" at the home of WaPo's publisher that were being marketed to lobbyists as a chance to "access to Obama administration officials, members of Congress and Post journalists in exchange for payments as high as $250,000." If you think about it, in the era of Obama, it certainly makes sense. I mean, we've been calling for the MSM and Obama to get a room for some time now.

Alas, it was not to last. With the news made public, WaPo has now cancelled its illicit assignations. There are a ton of disclaimers coming out of WaPo at the moment. I can't wait to see tomorrow's front page. Even Howard Kurtz is taking his paper to task over this one. As well he should. If there is any truth at all to this, WaPo's credibitily will utterly tank.