You couldn’t pay me to go to journalism school, but I imagine they spend considerable time talking about the importance of headlines. Most readers, myself included, simply don’t read much past the headline unless they have a personal interest in a story… or are stuck in a doctor’s office. So, often, the headline is the story or, at least, the story the news outfit wants you to take away.

So, I was struck today to see different news agencies, within minutes of each other, reporting very conflicting news on the same set of facts. First the AP headline:

October durable goods orders fell 0.7 percent

Now, check out the Reuters headline for the very same report:

Durable goods orders ex-transportation up in October

Of course, the Reuters headline is no doubt completely true, but how is excluding a major sector of the economy remotely helpful to readers? Is Reuters now just going to report the bits of the news it likes and ignore the inconvenient bits. It reminds me of the classic Marion Barry line addressing rampant crime in DC:

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.

(more…)

I guess it was only a matter of time, but I’m still a little surprised at how quickly the left connected the dots. Always on guard against elaborate right-wing conspiracies, the brain trust over at Crooks and Liars needed just a few hours to uncover the truth: that Breitbart organized the elaborate sting featuring actors posing as doctors to hand out fake ‘medical excuses’ for union protesters.

Even more impressive; they didn’t even get a copy of our internal memo on the operation. They just noted that Breitbart was in Madison and noted that conservative news outlets did the reporting of the ‘fake notes’ scandal. It was a brilliant piece of deduction.

So, it is probably only a matter of time before they learn the full truth. The doctor sting, in fact, was only an afterthought, dreamed up by our research lemur after a tequila binge with Retracto. It was profoundly simple too. The lemur pulled the whole thing off after only about 15 minutes on Gchat.

I’m coming clean: Breitbart staged the entire union protest in Madison. All of it. The Walker proposal, the union protest and the counter protest. Everything. Let me explain.

(more…)

Admittedly, Media Matters doesn’t have a deep well of credibility, but even I was shocked by the sloppiness of this hack-attack yesterday. Their headline:

Nate Silver takes the Hot Air out of Cato’s stimulus attack

And opening line:

Right-wing blogger Allahpundit put some Hot Air behind a piece of Cato Institute research that sought to attack stimulus spending as unfairly tilted in favor of Democratic congressional districts.

Except, you know, it wasn’t a Cato study. It was a Mercatus Center study. If Media Matters had even bothered to look at the actual study, pausing just a few moments from launching their attack, they would have seen that. Here is the study, technically a ‘working paper,’ but the title page is very clear, Mercatus Center: George Mason University.

Media Matters also identifies the study’s author, Big Government Contributor Veronique de Rugy, as a “Cato Scholar.” But, their own link for de Rugy makes it clear that she is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and used to work at Cato. AKA, in the past. Does Media Matters even follow their own links?

Sure, these may seem like minor points, but getting obvious facts so completely wrong is indicative of the drive-by, hit-and-run style of analysis employed by Media Matters.

There is, actually, a much more substantial error on their part.

(more…)