Political Games - Where the fuck’s the reset button?

A 3 act play is our tale today!

ACT 1: Joe Klein [aka Joke Line], Time Magazine’s “liberal” columnist, publishes an article in the print edition bashing Democrats over their FISA legislation.

ACT 2: Glenn Greenwald takes apart Klein’s article and shows that it is false; the bill has specific provisions allowing the actions that Klein claimed were prohibited.

ACT 3: Klein offers several weak defenses on Time’s blog, ultimately culminating in the following: “I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right.”

This is exactly what’s wrong with our modern media. The journalists for our nation’s leading news magazines do not care “who’s right” or what the truth is. They don’t have the “time” or the “expertise” to find it out. Quite frankly, anyone who doesn’t have the time or experience needed to do their job should be fired, on the spot. This is especially true when we consider that this is our Forth Estate, composed of the Very Serious Experts whose [somewhat self-appointed] job it is to inform the American public and keep our politicians in check.

We have had to make the time to inform ourselves on all these issues because our media refuses to do it. We’ve had to teach ourselves about election law and surveillance law and rendition and outing CIA agents and perjury trials and WMDs and torture and habeas corpus, etc etc etc ad naseum, because we certainly weren’t going to learn it from our media elites.

Here’s an example whose two sides I have no stake in. Romney and Rudy recently got into a spat over Romney’s crime-fighting record in Massachusetts. Rudy claimed crime and murder went up under Romney’s watch, and Romney said “nuh-uh!” Here’s the New York Times and the Washington Post on the spat. Guess what neither our country’s top two newspapers failed to include in their reports? the facts:

If I were an editor at one of these fine papers, and my reporters turned in one of these stories, I’d tell them to figure out whether Romney or Giuliani is telling the truth. You won’t find it in either story. So which is it?

My curiosity piqued, I did something crazy: I typed “Massachusetts crime statistics” into Google. And you know what I found? This! A page on the state’s web site with their crime reports!

So what’s the answer? Statistics aren’t yet available (at least not there) for 2006, so what we have are data from 2002, the year Romney got elected (which should serve as the baseline), plus 2003 through 2005. And what do we find? In 2003, total crime declined 3.1% from the previous year, and violent crime declined 1.7%. In 2004, total crime declined by 4.5%, and violent crime declined by 3.2%. In 2005, total crime declined by 2.9%, but violent crime increased by 4.75%.

As for the murders Giuliani mentioned, in 2002, before Romney took office, there were 171 murders in Massachusetts. Then there were 139 in 2003, back up to 167 in 2004, and 175 in 2005. Without knowing what happened in 2006, it appears, then, that on the whole we can say that Mitt Romney’s tenure saw some decreases in overall crime, but the murder rate was about the same when he left as when he came in.

We have a seriously broken media, and I don’t know what to do about it.

Edit: Wow, it just got worse. Time has posted a correction!

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.

“Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted this way, but Democrats don’t.” Dear Fucking Spaghetti Monster. I despise this kind of journamalism with all my might. “Flat-earthers believe the world is flat, but scientists don’t.” I mean, where does it end? “Geocentrists believe the sun revolves around the earth, but scientists don’t.” How absurd can we get? “Conservatives believe the sky is red, but liberals don’t.” I’m going to have an aneurysm if I keep thinking about this!!! “Some believe Time’s editors have goat orgies, but others don’t.”

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