Fact-Check Free Journalism For Sale Near You!

I was,  for thirty-odd years, a regular subscriber to a New York based magazine called "Newsweek".  In the days before the Internet, it was one magazine I read throughly every week, along with newspapers and whatever magazines I could snap up or read in the library.    Sort of a "platform" periodical as it were. 

I could pretty much account for any  slants of all the commentators like George Will,  the late Meg Goodman and Robert Samuelson and the good upfront reportage of writers like Eleanor Clift, Mark Starr, Michael Isakoff,  and Gloria Borger. Back then, there was something called "investigative journalism" and no one in power in Washington or Wall Street  was immune from getting their bad behavior blown up in the pages of this magazine.  

It's true that time passes,  but it's also true that many institutions like the media do not just slide down the chute in terms of value. But Newsweek certainly has done it. In fact, it can slide no longer I would say thanks to the efforts of ex-glamour magazine editor Tina Brown and her staff of fact-check free hacks who now fill what is left of that periodical with lies and half-truths and other muck. 

  I refer to the latest issue as  exhibit "A" of bad journalism--a hit piece against Barack Obama.   Reading this I was struck by how unusually close Mr. Niall  Freguson's column  was to the speakers at the Republican National Convention.  If only this snotty Tory intellectual had actually made his case based on facts and evidence.  But that was not to be.  Apparently Ferguson feels he can say anything and his work will not get spiked or reviewed.  Or if it is reviewed he will just weasel out of the argument by backtracking and quoting Margaret Thatcher to justify his inaccuracies.  Makes you wonder what he's up to?   

 That such a story made it to the cover of the magazine shows just how sensationalistic  this former news publication turned rag has become. 

Gene Lyons, who formally wrote for the magazine did the best commentary on the Ferguson piece.

Ferguson’s surely entitled to his opinions (although not his vote, as he’s a British subject, not an American citizen) but to paraphrase the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he’s not entitled to his own facts. Riddled with ludicrous errors and manifest deceptions, the article’s publication on the cover of a major news magazine at first struck me as ominous.

That Ferguson’s a professor made things worse. Academics theoretically hold themselves to more strenuous standards than journalists. I even found myself rummaging around in the University of Virginia honor code, where I went to school, for definitions of academic fraud.

And yes, it’s that bad. Vote for whomever you like. But if you make your choice based upon the following howler, then you’ve been had: “The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit,” Ferguson charged. “But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.”

In fact, as New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman pointed out, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that Obamacare will actually reduce the yearly budget deficit by an estimated $210 billion over the decade. There’s a chart documenting that non-obscure fact on page two of the CBO report.

Krugman demanded a correction by Newsweek.

Instead, editor Tina Brown’s latest plaything allowed Ferguson to double-down. Rather than apologize, he posted an online rejoinder calling Krugman’s objection “truly feeble,” and boasting that he’d “very deliberately” written “‘the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,’ not ‘the ACA.’”

In short, Ferguson very deliberately misled his readers to the tune of $1.4 trillion–considering only the debit half of Obamacare’s balance sheet, but not its revenues and savings. Then he falsely cited the CBO to cover his tracks.

Even his alibi quoted the CBO report out of context. Internet sleuths quickly caught him out. 

http://www.nationalmemo.com/23853/

And it wasn't just Lyons or the New York Times'  Paul Krugman who went after Ferguson.  John Cassidy of "The New Yorker" and others did as well. 

What is pretty remarkable about the latest dustup is the weakness of the arguments presented by Ferguson, a streetwise public intellectual who, according to his Web site, now holds positions at four different élite academic institutions. If called upon three months before an election to pen a provocative cover story in a national newsmagazine clamoring for the President to be chucked out, most writers would make every effort to avoid giving the other side easy opportunities to tear down their arguments. And yet, here comes Ferguson blatantly twisting a report from the Congressional Budget Office and presenting numerous other distortions and half-truths that anybody with access to Google could discredit in a few hours.--

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/08/niall-ferguson-vs-paul-krugman.html#ixzz25RmnE9Gg 

(John Cassidy in The New Yorker")

 

Of course, conservatives might remember this recent cover of the magazine where Mitt Romney was derided as a "Wimp" (See below)  and say "See, Newsweek goes after Mitt Romney, too. So both sides are being judged with vitriol and distortions. So its all fair!" 

 That isn't the point.    

 The point is that such covers would not have even made the final cut at the old magazine   under editors like Richard Smith or Jon Meacham.  These editors knew the difference between their magazines and trash tabloids that appeal to the lowest common denominator crowd with its thirst for the name-calling and the sensational.

  Tina Brown isn't in business to sell information backed up with accuracy--she is in this to sell magazines apparently, period, and do so with apparently little reliable and verifiable  facts on the table.     Journalism without any respect for facts is just bias on a rampage.