Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch begins a critique of Beck’s “The Puppet Master” series from last week with a sentence that captures the general approach of many other critics of the series: “I didn’t watch Glenn Beck’s three-part series on […] George Soros, but…”  He goes on to clarify that he had read at least parts of the transcript, but that’s never a promising way to begin an evaluation of anything.  The rest of his piece confirms that no, he definitely did not watch it and generally doesn’t know what he is talking about in evaluating it.

Welch doesn’t bother to address the main points of Beck’s argument, but he is confident he has caught Beck making embarrassing mistakes he can use to ruin Beck’s credibility.  He counters Beck’s evaluation of  Soros’ intentions regarding American sovereignty and independence from international governance with a non-sequitur about the original meaning of Karl Popper’s term “open society” – as though that proves Soros’ Open Society Institute couldn’t possibly be used for anything else.   But more amusing is Welch’s mocking this quote from Beck as evidence of Beck getting a “whole bunch of other stuff about Soros dead wrong:”

Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes with his Open Society fund. He helped to fund the Velvet Revolution in Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, he also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us, America.

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Recently, Matt Welch and I utterly destroyed Eric Boehlert’s ridiculous claim that nobody at the L.A. Times was ever allowed to casually denigrate President Bush:

And I don’t even have to do a Google search to know for a fact that when President Bush was in office, there was nobody on staff at the Times, and certainly nobody writing off the opinion pages, who was allowed to so casually insult the office of the presidency on a regular basis.

Hahahahahahaha! Read Welch’s post and mine for the destruction of that singularly clueless claim.

I also observed that Boehlert’s whine about The Times’s terrible lack of respect for the office of the presidency was considerably undermined by the fact that he cross-posted his whinge at a site called The Smirking Chimp.

Boehlert has now responded — not with any undermining of Welch’s evidence, or mine, concerning his central complaint, but with this:

Fact: I did not “cross-publish” my column at The Smirking Chimp. Patterico might not now [sic] this, but in the wonderful world of the Internets, sometimes sites independently reproduce other writers’ work, which is exactly what The Smirking Chimp did with my column about the LA Times. As it does with many of my columns.

But Patterico makes a patently false claim about me in an attempt to portray me as a hypocrite; that I specifically cross-published my LA Times column at The Smirking Chimp. I did not.

Interesting, that word “specifically.” Almost like it’s a weasel word.

Let’s take a look at this claim that The Smirking Chimp “independently” republished Boehlert’s work, with no input from Boehlert. My conclusion: Boehlert is dissembling at a minimum, and more likely just flat-out lying.

Boehlert’s post appeared at something called “Eric Boehlert’s blog” at The Smirking Chimp: (more…)

If you’re like me, you’re tired of being lied to.

That’s what got me started in media criticism.  I would read the Los Angeles Times every day and shout at the newspaper’s reporters and editors over my cornflakes.  “This isn’t true and you know it!” I’d yell.

Of course, nobody over there was listening.  But they listen to me now… sometimes.

Back in February 2003, I started writing my blog, primarily as an outlet for my frustration at the bias, omissions, and distortions I found in the L.A. Times on an almost daily basis.

Since then, I’ve managed to get the editors’ attention a few times.

During the Iraq war, I questioned an L.A. Times report that a U.S. airstrike in Ramadi had “pulverized” 15 homes and killed 30 civilians.  My military and other local sources denied the report.  Based on my post, the editors backed off their initial claims.

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