O'Reilly nails a CNN flub

Interviewer Drew Griffin blew it, and Bill O'Reilly nailed CNN on the mistake. Good work, O'Reilly. This is why Keith Olbermann wishes he was you.

Orson Scott Card calls out mainstream media

To my shame, Power Line beat me to highlighting an excellent essay by Democrat-with-a-mean-conservative-streak Orson Scott Card, ensconced at the top of my Sith blog roll.

The essay isn't even his latest, but it's certainly worth attention.

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

Card provides much more detail along with stinging criticism of the media. Though some news stories, such as one I reviewed from The St. Petersburg Times, do mention the role of relaxed lending standards in bringing on the subprime mortgage crisis, Card rightly points out that a great deal more news reporting could have and should have come out of the situation.

John Hinderaker might be interested to know that Card is a Mormon and a science fiction writer in addition to being a conservative Democrat and columnist.

The O'Reilly race kerfluffle

Ye Olde Tempeste in Teapot. CNN's coverage is horrible. Even the gloriously partisan Media Matters did a fairer job on the story than CNN. Compare:

During the September 19 edition of his nationally syndicated radio program, discussing his recent trip to have dinner with Rev. Al Sharpton at Sylvia's, a famous restaurant in Harlem, Bill O'Reilly reported that he "had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful," adding: "I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship." Later, during a discussion with National Public Radio senior correspondent and Fox News contributor Juan Williams about the effect of rap on culture, O'Reilly asserted: "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."
(Media Matters)

I have yet to see a full transcript of the radio show, but the Media Matters account should cue the fair-minded person that O'Reilly's comments were not a big deal at all. CNN, in the two clips shown, consistently treated them as if they were indeed a big deal.

The key point is that CNN took comments made "later, during a discussion with ... Juan Williams" and put then onscreen while playing the audio of the earlier comments. That's a textbook case of misrepresenting the context.

Media Matters is probably tickled pink that CNN was able to distort the story beyond a mere insinuated attack.

O'Reilly, I'll give you and Juan Williams the last word.




OK, one more thing. Brian Maloney at The Radio Equalizer did a bang-up job analyzing this story, making all the points I've made and more. I'd have gone on to something else if I'd known about the job Maloney did from the start.


*****

Reuters sticks foot in media mouth

Captain's Quarters has done a nice job with this story, but I can't pass up commentary because this type of media coverage is exactly what chiefly motivates me to blog.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader's death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.

"It's out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive," Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush's comments received worldwide coverage.
(Reuters)

Even without the background information provided by Cap'n Ed, isn't it perfectly obvious even in the immediate context what Bush meant?

"I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas," Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

They seriously thought that Bush believed that Hussein killed Nelson Mandela?

This serves as yet another example of the way a set pattern of thinking leads to editorializing in "objective" news stories. There is no faux pas here by Bush. It's a faux pas by the person who wrote the story for Reuters, and it's a black eye to every editor who passed the story on to its readership.

Why there's no correction or apology attached to the story already is beyond me (barring a brazen attitude in the press regarding such matters).

Compounding the problem, they couldn't even get the wrong punctuation right. There's a single quotation mark after the question mark with no mate to be found in the rest of the paragraph. They probably meant to have it this way:

"I heard somebody say, 'Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas," Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

But it should have been like this:

"I heard somebody say, 'Where's Mandela? Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,'" Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

Here's egg on your face, Reuters.

*****