Patterico's Pontifications

9/15/2005

L.A. Times Fails to Correct the Record on Sen. Specter’s Statement

Filed under: Dog Trainer,Judiciary — Patterico @ 7:17 am



I tried giving the Los Angeles Times the benefit of the doubt yesterday.

Boy, was I naive!

The paper put out the suggestion yesterday that Sen. Specter thought Judge Roberts was being misleading. Yesterday, Sen. Specter clearly said that Judge Roberts was not.

I truly believed that the editors were going to set the record straight. As critical as I have been of this paper, I couldn’t really believe that the paper was simply going to let a false implication remain uncorrected in the readers’ minds.

How could I have been such a sucker?

Here’s the background:

In this post from yesterday, I noted that the paper pointedly quoted Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter’s comment on Tuesday that one of Judge John Roberts’s answers “may be misleading.” (Sen. Specter was in the process of telling Sen. Biden to let Judge Roberts finish his answer to a question, when Sen. Biden complained that the answer was misleading. Sen. Specter responded: “Wait a minute. They may be misleading, but they are his answers. You may finish, Judge Roberts.”)

As I noted last night, the only possible reason editors would have plucked this quote from over 10 hours of hearings on Tuesday was to highlight the possibility that Senator Specter believed Judge Roberts’s answers were misleading. Isn’t this perfectly obvious? Why else would the comment be worthy of inclusion in the story?

But yesterday, Senator Specter corrected the record — at the outset of yesterday’s hearings. Immediately after calling the session to order, Sen. Specter explained to Judge Roberts that he had indeed been simply trying to give Judge Roberts a chance to answer Sen. Biden’s question. Sen. Specter unequivocally told Judge Roberts: “I was not suggesting in any way, shape or form that [your answers] were misleading.”

And yesterday evening, I expressed my genuine belief that the editors would print this today. How could they not? Senator Specter could not possibly have made his clarification any more prominent. It was the very first thing he said yesterday. His clarification corrected the record on a quote that the paper had found important enough to select as newsworthy, out of an entire 10-hour day’s worth of yammering by Senators.

As I said yesterday, this is news. Failing to report it would be tremendously unfair to Judge Roberts. I concluded that even this newspaper couldn’t be that unfair.

I was wrong. It can be, and it is.

The paper has fully three stories today on yesterday’s hearings: Looking More Moderate Than His Early Writings, Roberts’ Values, Character Come In for Questions, and Roberts Appears Open to New Interpretations. The paper also has (apparently only online) a set of excerpts from yesterday.

Sen. Specter’s clarification appears nowhere in any of these stories.

I am beyond annoyed. I am appalled. The editors are apparently perfectly content to leave floating out there the completely false suggestion that the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee finds Judge Roberts to have been “misleading” the committee. And nothing that Sen. Specter can say — short of calling an entire press conference devoted specifically to this one statement (which would clearly have been overkill) — can get them to print his clarification.

This is just indefensible.

Why is this a big deal? Imagine if it were your reputation at stake here. How would you feel about this?

If you think this is unfair, let the Readers’ Representative know. You can reach her at readersrep@latimes.com.

9 Responses to “L.A. Times Fails to Correct the Record on Sen. Specter’s Statement”

  1. Boy, was I naive!

    I’m not the only one who’s been trying to tell you that. You keep giving the LAT the benefit of the doubt and they keep thumbing their collective nose. Someone recently said MSM has abandoned even the pretense of objectivity in pushing their Leftist agenda. It’s true. Deal with it.

    Black Jack (ee3eb6)

  2. I didn’t even see this as being on their radar as far as being a ‘correction’.

    Remember, their Sept. 3rd earthquake/Katrina editorial got every single fact in it dead wrong – and yet even after two news stories later in the week – in their very own paper – repudiated everything said in the editorial – they still have not corrected that.

    Brady Westwater (72f6df)

  3. Brady,

    I don’t see it as a “correction” either — just a matter of fairness. Personally, I’m not even going to bother writing the paper — it would be a waste of time.

    But I encourage all of you to do so!

    Patterico (302ce1)

  4. Well,Charlie Brown kept trying to kick that football.

    lincoln (dfaf29)

  5. Sorry, Patterico, but you’re wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

    Not even if Sen. Specter called an entire press conference devoted specifically to that one statement would the LAT publish a correction.

    Voice of Reason (766133)

  6. This is how badly these SOB’s have tamed us. Shit – do you actually think they published the words out of context in the first place by accident?!

    These people are liars and cheats, and they control a powerful resource they can use to lie and cheat. Playing nice with them won’t work – it’s like trying to negotiate with terrorists – and these people are not that far removed from the terrorist ethos, they just use words to work against us instead of guns and bombs.

    And they both take advantage of the lack of anger that has been conveniently bred out of us by exposure to years of their “America, loath-it-or-grieve-for-it” message. Raise the goddam black flag!

    Daver (abf261)

  7. The MSM can no longer nuance the truth without blogs giving the full story or contradicting perspective on the same events. They also can’t make conserveratives feel isolated or alone in their opinion on matters.

    In the past, with nuanced truth telling they may sway some moderates and even conservatives to a degree. But if they were caught in a lie or distortion, they lost those people. But since nuanced truth isn’t effective on those people anymore, they might as well just lie to get a stronger reaction in those that will blindly believe.

    jpm100 (e6d524)

  8. They figure the people who read you are probably pretty much done with the LA Times anyway, so why bother?
    Blackjack has it right, they (NYTIMESLATIMESWash PostCNNABCCBSNBSMSNBCetc.) aren’t even trying to be fair anymore.
    Although the Wash Post actually has a few good editorials and op-eds up today. The one on Afghanistan is actually interesting. They admit it’s not a failure. That’s progress.

    Veeshir (68e89d)

  9. Using your “Google Calculator”

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=LA+Times+lies&btnG=Search

    54,000,000 hits

    nuff said?

    Rovin (b348f4)


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