Patterico's Pontifications

2/16/2005

The Correct Way to Avoid Mistakes

Filed under: Dog Trainer,General,Morons — Patterico @ 6:27 pm



Can I amend my “Outside the Tent” op-ed? I’d like to add one more idea for how the L.A. Times can avoid printing falsehoods: don’t print letters from Frank Ferrone of El Cajon. Here is Mr. Ferrone’s effort from today:

Re “The Correct Way to Fix Mistakes,” Opinion, Feb. 13: Patrick Frey is just another run-of-the-mill right-wing blogger who enjoys hunting squirrels while 500-pound gorillas bounce about the forest.

His credibility will increase a hundredfold when he directs his “let’s tell the truth column” toward President Bush and his neocon brigade.

They told us day after day that a war of choice against Iraq was necessary because Iraq was a) in possession of weapons of mass destruction, b) creating a nuclear capability, c) had links to Al Qaeda and d) was involved in the 9/11 attacks. All falsehoods!

Bush had his war — nearly 1,500 American military personnel have been killed, more than 10,000 have been wounded and only God knows how many innocent Iraqi men, women and children have been sacrificed by the president’s war.

Here is an entire buffet table set for Frey to pontificate on “The Correct Way to Fix Mistakes.”

Frank Ferrone
El Cajon

Ferrone calls it a “falsehood” that there were links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Wrong. As 9/11 Commissioner Lee Hamilton said on Hardball: “There are all kinds of ties. There are all kinds of connections.” (See here and here for similar statements from various members of the 9/11 Commission.)

Ferrone also claims that, “day after day,” the Bush Administration claimed that Iraq “was involved in the 9/11 attacks.” Wrong again! As 9/11 Commissioner Lehman said on “Meet the Press”: “The Bush administration has never said that [Iraq] participated in the 9/11 attack.”

Perhaps Ferrone was fooled by the faulty coverage of these stories by the L.A. Times, as described here and here.

It is ironic (to say the least) for The Times to print a letter that attacks my piece about false assertions in the L.A. Times — even as that same letter makes false assertions in the L.A. Times. It is even more ironic if those false assertions are based on factually inaccurate stories from the L.A. Times — the very same paper whose consistent ideological errors Ferrone appears to find so untroubling.

I knew it would take a thick skin to have an article published in a major newspaper. But it’s easy to have a thick skin when “criticism” is this far off the mark.

L.A. Times Issues Correction to Yesterday’s Correction on Eason Jordan

Filed under: Dog Trainer,General — Patterico @ 6:33 am



The L.A. Times corrects its correction from yesterday:

CNN resignation — An article in Saturday’s Section A about the resignation of CNN executive Eason Jordan said that in an April 2003 opinion piece in the New York Times, Jordan wrote that he did not allow his network to report all it had learned “during the intense early days of combat in Iraq, for fear that releasing certain confidential information would put lives in jeopardy.” Jordan’s essay was about his network’s coverage in the years and months preceding the war. A correction Tuesday erroneously said his essay referred also to his network’s coverage during the early days of the war.

I alluded to this possibility yesterday, based on a tip from alert reader Thomas B. In an update to this post, I noted: “If you look at Jordan’s op-ed itself, there is only one incident described there that even arguably could have occurred after the war began. The vast majority of the incidents he described occurred well before the beginning of the current war.”

It’s increasingly clear that The Times should have simply used the language suggested to them on Monday by Power Line reader Diana Magrann:

In April 2003, Jordan admitted in a New York Times opinion piece that CNN had withheld knowledge of numerous instances of Saddam’s brutality in order to maintain access.

Ms. Magrann specifically sent this proposed language to the L.A. Times‘s “Readers’ Representative” before yesterday’s correction ran. If L.A. Times editors had just used Ms. Magrann’s language, their correction yesterday would have been accurate — and they would not be in the position of correcting their correction from yesterday. Instead, the editors had to try to show that they knew better, and this is the embarrassing result.

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit and Michelle Malkin for the links. Readers wishing to read or bookmark my main page can go here.

Forged Documents Controversy Update

Filed under: General,Media Bias — Patterico @ 6:08 am



RatherBiased.com reports:

Josh Howard, the executive producer of “60 Minutes Wednesday” during Memogate and the only CBS employee who had the guts to suggest that the network admit to wrongdoing before Memogate became a mess is threatening CBS with a lawsuit if it does not sufficiently retract its explanation of the scandal and fully come clean about the role of upper management in the network’s stonewall defense.

And furthermore:

Howard is threatening to sue the network for wrongful termination and is said to be willing to testify under oath and subpoena secret internal documents and emails from his former employers.

It looks like this story is not over by a longshot.


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0686 secs.