In his column today, the LA Times‘ Ron Brownstein nicely sums up what we discussed last week on the Republicans’ immigration bamboozle. The Republicans’ effort to blame the ‘felony provision’ on the Democrats is no more than a flat out lie. “Contrary to the description from Hastert and Frist, Democrats and immigrant groups opposed this [felony] proposal from the start.”
Actually, it’s worse than this. Republicans are floundering so badly now they can’t even keep their wedge issues straight from one week to the next. Their big issue one week is the one that they’re running against a bit later in the month. They even want to blame their ideas on the Democrats when anybody watching can see they’re lying through their teeth. They’re the desperate party.
Everybody can see it.
It’s the congress’s version of the president being too afraid to appear in front of non-hand-picked audiences.
I had meant to write about this this weekend. And in the intervening time a number of others have touched on several of the key points. So let me just touch on one point about Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell’s piece this week on the Post’s “good leak” editorial.
The point of Howell’s column, you’ll remember, was to explain the night and day contradiction between a post editorial and news article on the Libby leaks story, which appeared on the same day. Were Libby’s leaks ‘good leaks’ meant to inform the public about key facts leading up to the beginning of the Iraq war or were they intentionally misleading leaks intended to damage and silence a critic?
Much of Howell’s piece focused on the standard explanation that most legitimate papers keep a high wall of separation between their news and opinion pages. Neither side tries to force its head on the other, etc. That’s correct. Most everyone who’s familiar with the newspaper business knows that. And, in this case, it’s largely beside the point.
The issue with this startling juxtaposition of what appeared on the Post’s news and editorial pages was not that the two disagreed with each other. From different directions we’ve been seeing that on foreign policy in the Post and the Times for three or four years. The problem was that the Post’s editorial page seemed to be contradicting the facts as clearly as they can possibly be known. The fact that the Post’s news pages published the contradictory information on the very same day highlighted the problem — but it was not in itself the problem.
There’s one passage in Howell’s column which seems to highlight the flawed thinking.
“Editorials and news stories have different purposes,” she wrote. “News stories are to inform; editorials are to influence.”
Out of context we might figure this was just sloppiness of phrasing. But I think it demonstrates misunderstanding. The point of an editorial is to influence WITH FACTS. Connecting readers up with actual facts, what’s actually happening isn’t something the editorial pages leave in the hands of the news department. It’s their job too. This is what opinion journalism is about — whether on editorial pages or magazines of opinion or blogs. It’s what opinion journalists do. They argue for what the facts mean, how differents facts relate to each other, how some don’t.
This is all another way of saying that editorial writers come to the canvass with much of the paint already applied. They can’t make up their own facts just because they’re helpful to the storyline.
That of course is not to say that editorialists and opinion columnists don’t make up their own facts all the time. But that’s not how it’s supposed to work. And that’s why people were upset with what they saw.
Is partisanship destroying the House of Representatives? We’re discussing that this week in TPMCafe bookclub.
Okay, this demands some mention.
As you’ve probably already heard by now, former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois was convicted on all charges today in his long-running federal corruption case.
Ryan’s been out of office since 2003; and he’s become almost as well known for instituting a moratorium on the death penalty in his state as he is for these corruption charges. Some have even suggested that the former was a way to burnish a legacy tainted by the latter.
But in the piece out today from the AP (the source of most newspaper coverage of the story) you have to go all the way down to the bottom of the lengthy article to find out that Ryan is a Republican. And then it comes up only in reference to his declaring the moratorium.
The Times puts it in graf two; Bloomberg is graf three.
I’d say that’s about right. It’s a secondary aspect of the story, not the lede. But it’s also not a tenth order factoid, which is the billing the AP gives it.
I wouldn’t have mentioned this. But it seems like a habit with the AP. Dems get in trouble under their party ID; Republicans seem to do it all by their lonesome.
Needless to say, the data set of the latter is rather larger than the former. But that’s another matter entirely.
A possible bright side on Iran’s recent uranium enrichment announcement?
I’ve been waiting for some time for someone to give us a good, quote-rich run-down on just how little reason there is to put any credence in the administration’s claims that an attack on Iran is “fantasy” or “wild speculation.” Greg Djerejian gives us a good run-down.
Excellent: San Diego Union-Tribune (with special props for Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer) bags a Pulitzer for breaking and covering the Duke Cunningham scandal.
Wait!
Stop the presses!
Time magazine wins the Ryan-Republican ‘party affiliation that dare not speak its name’ award, knocking the AP back into a distant second.
As we mentioned earlier, the AP really, really didn’t seem to want to mention that George Ryan, the former Illinois governor convicted of corruption today, is a Republican. The AP waited until the very end of the article to note that Ryan is from the GOP.
Time never got around to mentioning it. But that alone didn’t get them so clearly into the winner’s circle.
While failing to mention the party affiliation of the guy who got indicted, they did manage to have this as the second sentence of the article …
On Monday, former Governor George Ryan, 72, became the third of the state’s last six governors to be convicted of political misdeeds, and the current administration of Democrat Rod Blagojevich is also being investigated.
It’s almost a tour de force of party ID bamboozlement. Time, we salute you!
(ed.note: Special note of thanks to TPM Reader SS for the tip.)
Did Rep. Doolittle lawyer up?
Late Update: Well, you heard here at TPMmuckraker first. Now the Sacramento Bee has followed with confirmation from Doolittle’s office and the name of the lawyer. It’s David G. Barger, the guy who prosecuted Web Hubbell.