Soaring and cratering

As you might have imagined, the Fair 'n' Balanced Network lost no time making sure we know who won the confrontation in the Persian Gulf -- and, of course, who got us there. (Hint: OBAMA!!!!1!11!1!!11!1!!!) But it's worth spending some time to tease out the different sorts of lies that Fox employs; more specifically, the proportion of lies to bullshit needed to achieve a properly balanced Fox page.

In the lead position, even though the president is (in the words of one critic) "lying relentlessly," the transitive property of journalism means Fox is telling the truth: it's passing along an authoritative figure says. Fox's job then is to show that it's done its due diligence in assessing the claim:

It’s unclear exactly how the missiles used in the attacks were funded. But other Republicans have connected the Iran settlement money to the attacks, with GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz saying on Fox News' "Hannity" on Tuesday night, “In a very real sense, the missiles that we saw fired at U.S. servicemen and women tonight were paid for by the billions that the Obama administration flooded the Ayatollah with."

 Well, that settles that. 
 
The second story also appears to be a reasonably faithful reproduction of what was said, though it runs into hat pesky maxim of relevance: Is this assertion relevant to the discourse in the way its positioning suggests? You make the call:

After President Trump declared that Iran “appears to be standing down” in the wake of Tuesday's missile strikes on Iraqi airbases, Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane said that Trump had executed a diplomatic strategy that could enable the U.S. to negotiate with Iran without further military action.

The story is as much Trump as Keane, but it least it allows for promoting another Fox personality without having to support his assertions:

“It changed from the strategy of appeasement under the Obama administration to confrontation using economic pressure to do that,” Keane told “The Daily Briefing” Wednesday.

But the pick of the litter is the No. 3 story, "Oil craters." If you're a sportsball fan,

you're probably comfortable with the idea that whether a 2-point difference means the winning team "squeaks" or "breezes" past its foe is largely a matter of Zip code. So it is here (timelines from CNN). Light crude seems to have cratered back to about a dollar below where it was at the beginning of the month and Trump's bumbling foray into global strategery, and over the past year, it's up more than 20 percent.


It's been a pretty busy few days at Fox, having to pivot from the Impeachment Hoax to the #RegimeOfTerror while still keeping an eye on the socialist menace and those pesky Democrats. Indeed, for a network that's basically been ignoring substate political violence since Trump vanquished ISIL in single combat, it must have taken some effort to dust off all the terror tropes. Good to see that the starting lineup is back in the game here.

Here's Fox, telling a lie

The Fair 'n' Balanced Network is usually careful to keep the pivot foot down when the ref is looking, so it's fun to see an out-and-out lie in the lead story:

President Trump highlighted a key moment during Wednesday’s impeachment hearing to suggest the case against him was decidedly undercut by the witnesses, despite claims to the contrary by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and fellow Democrats.

After reviewing the circumstances of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, asked the witnesses to state what impeachable offense Trump committed with the call. He did not get an answer. 

And it has to be true because there's a tweet, right?

Had you the good fortune to be reading the grownup press (even one with a bad case of local anesthesia), you might have noticed that he actually got a rather direct answer:

Taylor had said in his opening statement that he was not taking a position on impeachment. When Ratcliffe would not give Taylor time to respond, Schiff stepped in and said he could answer.

“Mr. Ratcliffe, I would just like to say that I’m not here to do anything having to do with the [decision] about impeachment,” Taylor said, “That is not what either of us are here to do. This is your job.”

In its own way, Fox does kinda-sorta admit to lying, but not very clearly:

“In this impeachment hearing today, where we impeach presidents for treason or bribery or other high crimes, where was the impeachable offense in that call? Are either of you here today to assert that there was an impeachable offense in that call? Shout it out. Anyone?”

Neither witness had an answer, but Taylor did say that he was not there to make that kind of decision.

It always bears repeating: The big gap in media coverage isn't between "conservative" and "liberal" outlets (especially since most of the notionally "liberal" ones are broadly center-right). The big gap is between organizations that make things up to please the party and ones that don't. If you've ever entertained any doubts about where Fox stands, you were misinformed.

Today in lying

The afternoon's top story at the Formerly Fair 'n' Balanced Network certainly rips the mask off one of the chief miscreants of the 0blamer administration, dunnit? I mean, daring to play the race and gender card when Unmaskinggate is closing in:

Susan Rice, the Obama national security adviser under fire over her alleged involvement in the “unmasking” of Trump associates during the 2016 presidential election, suggested in a fresh interview that race and gender might be playing a role in the scrutiny she’s faced.

Sounds serious! I wonder if it's true.

In an interview with journalist Michael Tomasky for New York Magazine, Rice reportedly questioned the criticism she’s faced dating back to the Benghazi controversy.

Funny, lots of adults do that. What's the problem here?

“Why me? Why not Jay Carney, for example, who was then our press secretary, who stood up more?” she asked.

Tomasky noted in the piece that Carney “isn’t an African-American woman, of course” and apparently asked Rice whether that is the key factor. Rice, in response, left the door open:

“I don’t know… I do not leap to the simple explanation that it’s only about race and gender. I’m trying to keep my theories to myself until I’m ready to come out with them. It’s not because I don’t have any.”

In other words, Susan Rice "links" race and gender to "the 'unmasking' backlash" by ... declining the opportunity to link them to BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can see why -- other than the marginally literate prose its staff produces -- Fox doesn't want you to read past the headline. It doesn't just lie about the evidence; it lies about what it's lying about.
Read more »

The other statements are inoperative

Why do you suppose it took the Fair 'n' Balanced Network a whole day to catch up with the tale of the Bowling Green massacre? (Still in the No. 2 position on the homepage, though the Penitent Conway image only lasted a few hours.) Finding the right tone apparently wasn't easy, even for a seasoned media critic like Howard Kurtz:

Kellyanne Conway admits she made a mistake in talking about a Kentucky massacre that never took place. But that’s not all she has to say about it.

In an interview airing Sunday on “Media Buzz,” President Trump’s counselor called some of her critics “haters” and said she corrected her error as soon as she learned about it. The misstatement has drawn substantial media attention, given Conway’s high profile.

And, not to put too fine a point on things, because it was a lie -- several of them, as it turns out:

... On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Conway was defending the president’s temporary ban on refugees and on any travel to the United States from seven countries, including Iraq. She said that after former President Obama greatly restricted the flow of refugees from that country, “two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre” -- which, she said, “didn’t get covered.”

We're eliding something important here. How does that last thought go, Washington Post Fact Checker?

"Two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. Most people didn’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”

So she didn't just make up a massacre that didn't happen or lie about the order of events (the perps of the non-massacre admitted involvement in attacks on American troops while they were still in Iraq, according to the Post's reconstruction). She wove the lie into a causal claim about the impact of liberal media failures, which she supported by tweeting a link to a 3-year-old liberal media story hedded "US May Have Let 'Dozens' of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees." That's some major-league lying, right there. But Fox, of course, has a mission:

“They’re masterminds, I had said that before,” Conway told me. “I should have said plot or I should have just called them terrorists. … I clarified immediately. I should have said terrorists and not massacre.” Still, she said, “I’m sure it will live on for a week.”
I'm still having trouble with the second paragraph: "as soon as she learned about it." How long does it generally take to "learn" that the thing you made up wasn't true? According to the Post, somewhere north of 90 minutes:

Conway was on her way to a Four-Pinocchio rating when, about an hour and a half after The Fact Checker sent her a query about her remarks, she tweeted that she meant to say “Bowling Green terrorists.” ... She added that this was an “honest mistake” of the type also made by journalists.

So "immediately" means "an hour and a half after somebody asked why I made something up"? Got it! Back to Fox:

She encouraged people to read a 2013 ABC News article on how the two Iraqis in Bowling Green were later convicted of sending weapons to al Qaeda in Iraq to kill American soldiers. She also said MSNBC and host Chris Matthews did not catch the error.

She could also, of course, have encouraged them to travel back in time and read their local newspapers -- which generally don't cover things that don't happen, but might after all have done a pretty good indexing job with the events that did happen.

Keeping track of the Trump people is a challenge; they lie so casually, and so consistently, about everything under the sun that you can see why nobody jumped in to correct her. When the whole statement is fabricated, how do you even start to prove the negative? Fox again:

Conway added: “I misspoke one word. The corrections in the newspapers that are attacking me are three paragraphs long every day.”

Which may or may not be another lie -- I mean, I'm sure there are days in which the corrections in the newspapers that are attacking her run to three paragraphs exactly, but a daily newspaper contains a lot of words, many of them not about Kellyanne Conway. If you screw up one hockey score, one former employer of the bride in a society wedding and one world despot in a caption from overseas, you're already at three paragraphs. Conway told three lies in the space of a moderate-sized lede, and she couldn't even correct one of them without -- how's that again, The Fact Checker?

In an email she wrote to The Fact Checker, she said: “Not exactly the paragraphs of corrections we see in WaPo but hopefully this helps.”

It's charitable, in a self-congratulatory way, of the Post to let her off easy:

Uncorrected, this would have been worth Four Pinocchios. But Conway says it’s an “honest mistake.” We appreciate that she sought to correct the record. Readers can judge for themselves, but as we don’t play gotcha, we will leave this unrated.

Well, good for you. She lied like a rug, backed out of a fraction of her lies when caught at it, and kneed the media in the fusebox when the ref wasn't looking. I'm still waiting for The Fact Checker to come to grips with its tortured intellectual gymnastics about BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!, but I suppose partial credit is better than no credit. Fox's media analysis, on the other hand, is exactly what you'd expect.

Well, not really. Not at all, actually

Let's skip all the stuff about context, framing and the social construction of reality and look at a chunk of nice, old-fashioned, entirely fabricated fake news. Given those conditions, we're less interested in the creation of meaning -- after all, there is no unframed condition of news -- than in how far toward the center an out-and-out lie can spread.

The Drudge Report, as usual, isn't the originator, but it's an important indicator, because outfits (say, the Times) that don't spend much time with the drooler media do look at Drudge. Here, the vaguely policy-oriented sites (Heat Street, Campus Reform, the Education Action Group), which often wipe most of the foam off before they go out in public, are on an equal footing with sites that dispense entirely with the bib, like InfoWars and -- have you guys met ZeroHedge yet?

In the month leading up to the election on November 8th, we repeatedly demonstrated how the mainstream media polls from the likes of ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Reuters repeatedly manipulated their poll samples to engineer their desired results, namely a large Hillary Clinton lead (see "New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through 'Oversamples'" and "ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering As Hillary's "Lead" Shrinks To 2-Points").

Sadly, no. As in no, you didn't "demonstrate" anything, and no, that's not how sampling works, unless you have access to cheap and reliable time travel, in which case -- for an operation touting "the news that moves the markets" -- you seem to be missing a major career opportunity. As even the morons of the "unskewed polls" movement acknowledged four years ago, a difference between party identification and voter intent is not evidence of playing around with the sample. If you know the former, you can go back in time and skew the latter. Do send a postcard.

The point, again, isn't whether another huckster is playing Duke-and-Dauphin with the rubes. It's how far up the beach any specific fiction is washed before someone picks it up. Not every made-up story leads the Drudge page; the one about the pizza parlor didn't make it, but the one about Podesta drinking the chicken blood did:

And, to reiterate, the intent doesn't have to be for every story to produce an armed attack on an innocent restaurant. All that has to happen is for the story to get close enough that someone has to spend time denying it.

This is going to be a tough habit to break for news organizations that still fear they might miss the next Hoovergate, but really -- if you can't ignore fake news, at least you can run a laugh track behind it. The polls weren't rigged, the employment data weren't cooked, and you should make sport of anyone who says otherwise.

Including the president-in waiting? Well, that would be an encouraging sign.

Who's gonna read the second paragraph?

Every now and then, the Fair 'n' Balanced Network just flat-out makes one up:

Top Hillary Clinton aides were upset a Muslim man was publicly named as the shooter in a 2015 massacre that left 14 people dead, and a longtime Clinton confidant even expressed regret that the terrorist wasn’t a white man, according to purported emails released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.

... The email chain began on Dec. 2, when digital operative Matt Ortega forwarded a tweet from MSNBC host Christopher Hayes that named one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., attack as Sayeed Farook. Consultant Karen Finney forwarded the email to Podesta, commenting, “Damn.”

It's a little bit of a stretch to assume "upset" from that sequence, but the pivot foot is still down.

Podesta responded: “Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk [sic] was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.”

It's hard to [sic] a hypothetical, but that's not the point. All he mentions here is a name: not whether a white Christopher Hayes was preferable to a black Christopher Hayes, or former Harvard student Christopher Hayes, or crazed Vietnam veteran Christopher Hayes, or the lot of them. It isn't there. Fox is -- what's that L-word? Right. Lying. Not exaggerating, or ignoring the context, or inferring a worldwide conspiracy from a stray Arabic number in an elementary school classroom. Just lying.

Why lie? A couple of possible explanations. The emails have to be the lede, even if they aren't very interesting.* The story fits into the broad category of stories that ought to be true, even if they aren't. (Especially if most of the newsroom really does think white guys are an endangered species.) And -- OK, let's go to the newsreel on this one:

Hildy: Well, honey, I did that. Right there in the second paragraph.
Walter: Who's gonna read the second paragraph? 

On the off chance some loyal Fox reader gets all the way to the actual quote -- who's going to mind, anyway?

* As of this writing, the Iraqi offensive against Mosul is top of the page, and a different story is now the top pick for you emails fans:

Hillary Clinton’s aides and supporters expressed concern about public perception of the Clinton family’s charitable enterprise, with one left-leaning pundit writing that Clinton seemed unaware of the “danger” of her “money problem,” according to purported emails disclosed by Wikileaks on Sunday.

You can see why those things don't have much of a shelf life.

A trillion here, a billion there ...

Having told the candidate how to campaign, the Fair 'n' Balanced Network does its best to keep him in line:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday that Hillary Clinton’s latest attempt to explain her email scandal -- that her brain had a “short circuit” -- is a “very dangerous” excuse and a new way to “lie about lying.”

“She now has a fundamental way of saying, ‘I didn’t quite lie to you; I just short-circuited,' ” Gingrich, a Georgia Republican and top supporter of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, also told “Fox News Sunday.” "It’s one thing to lie, it’s another to lie about lying."

He was joined on the show by California Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra who, like other Clinton supporters, is trying to move past Clinton as secretary of state using a private email server and the related FBI investigation.

And how might the craven LIEberal do that?

Becerra repeated the argument that Trump’s plan would cost the U.S. economy a “breathtaking” 3.5 billion jobs. And he backed Clinton saying last week that Obama didn’t have enough time to fully execute is economic recovery plan, including a nearly $1 billion stimulus plan.

Part lie, part blindside hit, and part -- well, let's go to Fox's rush transcript of the same show:

GINGRICH:  ... Let me give you an example.  If you open up America's energy and mining opportunities, there's at least $7 trillion in potential additional revenue just from making it easier to develop our own energy and only mental resources.  There are a number of steps to take to dramatically accelerate the economy.  If you dramatically shrink to 600 new regulations Obama has imposed, you have an explosion of small business getting created.

In a period of economic growth such as the Reagan era, you in fact do raise a tremendous amount of revenue.

WALLACE:  Congressman Becerra, you can responsible, but I also --

BECERRA:  Breathtaking.  Breathtaking.

WALLACE:  Go ahead.

BECERRA:  The plan you just outlined, which sentence* money mostly to folks at the top has been scored to probably look about 3.5 million jobs by Senator McCain's former economist.  It's also very clear that in increasing debt, Donald Trump really meant he was the, quote, "king of debt".  This is a guy who thinks -- and his quote was wages are too high.

It's hard to say exactly which claim is addressed by the "breathtaking" comment, but it does seem to pretty clearly not be the one about the estimated toll of 3.5 (ahem) million jobs. Let's just score that as a lie. The million/billion might be accidental, given the bit about the size of the stimulus. Here's the story:

“He had a chance with $900 million and blew it,” Gingrich said. “You campaign on things being good enough. We’ll campaign on things should be better. And we’ll see who wins.”

And the transcript:

GINGRICH:  Notice what he had said thought.  We had the chance, we had $900 billion, we blew it, but now trust Secretary Clinton --

Fox, in short, is having a lot of trouble with the whole numbers thing today, making it hard to call any specific blunder the intentional one. But the Fox commenters certainly seem to have gotten the right message about Rep. Becerra:

Becerra repeated the argument that Trump’s plan would cost the U.S. economy a “breathtaking” 3.5 billion jobs------------------is that democrat math?

The ministry of the truth approves this message.

Yes, they think the WH Boy ADDING 16 million to Welfare is a good thing.

Becerra repeated the argument that Trump’s plan would cost the U.S. economy a “breathtaking” 3.5 billion jobs. Newt should have asked how does a country of 300 million people lose 3.5 billion jobs.

Lefties aren't known for being good at math and science. They tend to major in the subjects the math and science people take to pad their GPAs.

So there may be a good reason for overlooking this part of the exchange:

GINGRICH:  ... But the fact is, Hillary's got a run on the grounds that disrupting Libya, disrupting Syria, failing in Russia, failing in Iraq, failing in Afghanistan as a terrific strategy, and she will do more of the same failure, including, by the way, paying $400 billion in cash, which the president assures us was not in fact --

WALLACE:  Four hundred million, and we're going to be talking about that, which is a good way to get you two off the set. 

"No cheering in the pressbox" is another of the nice old rules of journalism that Fox often manages to stay just on the right side of. No blood, no foul: Plenty of guests are set to discuss the usurper's ransom payment, so there's nothing wrong with leaving the former speaker's blunder -- which, unlike Rep. Becerra's, appears to have actually happened -- out of the frontpage story.

So, no. Fox isn't cheering in the pressbox. Then again, when you're the coach, batboy and official scorekeeper, you don't have to.


* I'd probably guess "sends." Transcription is a tough sport.

Exclusive to this day

Have you ever wondered why so many of those massively important stories at Fox -- say, Saturday afternoon's top story, above -- don't end up leading the news the following day at the shamefaced librul media outlets that have ignored them? It could be the worldwide Marxist conspiracy, of course, but it also could be that lots of the stories that lead at Fox are simply made up.

Well, not technically made up. Here, Fox is relying on the Washington Free Beacon, which itself is rewriting the Washington Examiner, with this ultimate effect:

Secretary of State John Kerry said in Vienna on Friday that air conditioners and refrigerators are as big of a threat to life as the threat of terrorism posed by groups like the Islamic State.

The Washington Examiner reported that Kerry was in Vienna to amend the 1987 Montreal Protocol that would phase out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, from basic household and commercial appliances like air conditioners, refrigerators, and inhalers.

Oh, come on -- get to the crazy part!

“As we were working together on the challenge of [ISIS] and terrorism,” Kerry said. “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we–you–are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.”

Or, if you scrape through the Fox/Beacon prose: Some things are as important as the challenge of ISIS. Addressing a threat in a different sector can be important without being as likely to ... gee, that set-to in Munich sure fell off the screen in a hurry once someone decided it wasn't "terrorism" any more. Squirrel! Or, in technical journalistic terms: Made-up story!

If you're a regular visitor here, you might be wondering: Fox leads the page with a fabricated story, and that's news exactly why? Well, because if you haven't joined the neighborhood scrap metal drive yet, it's time to wake up. If you're at the gym and Fox News is on the screen, laugh out loud at it. Remind your fellow toilers that Fox runs made-up stories at the behest of the dishonest to bend the opinions of the inattentive. Ridicule might not be the highest form of discourse, but it's a place to start.

Where the stupid starts

Wondering why The Stupid seems to be succeeding so well on the national stage? Let's ask the Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reports that 73% of the electorate believes the United States is on the wrong track, a level normally associated with national crises, such as the 2008 financial meltdown.

Reminding us, should we need reminding, that you don't have to lie about the numbers themselves to lie about public opinion. A 73% score on the bad side of the "right direction/wrong track" question is high but hardly unusual. It's not as extreme as the 79% that AP recorded at about the same time, nor is it as sunny as the 67% that Reuters found in a survey in the field July 16-20. If 73% represents the population value and neither of the other results is an outlier,* one thing that could tell you is that public opinion bounces around a lot on this question.

It can also bounce around pretty quickly, with a fairly rosy 58% saying "right direction" at the end of February 1991 (late stages of the first US-Iraq war) but "wrong track" reaching 72% in November, 78% in January 1992 and 83% in June 1992. "Wrong track" also reached 73% in June 2007 (per the Post, again) 76% in a CNN poll in August 2007 -- some months before the 2007-09 recession began. Being a grumpy lot, we were also at 79% "wrong track" in October 1990,** 77% in January 1996, 71% in June 1993 and just about equal in October 1974 (75%) and October 1973 (74%).

Well, surprise. People who are interested in public opinion try to find the stories that explain the numbers; WSJ editorial writers look for numbers to go with the stories they want to tell. So what story is being told here?

Amid the GOP convention in Cleveland and with the Democratic mother ship landing next week in Philadelphia, one has to wonder: Are the campaigns of  Donald Trump and  Hillary Clinton also on the wrong track?

As recently as a week ago, the election’s narrative was set: ... Then, just days before the GOP convention, the world snapped.

Got an idea of what comes next?
Read more »

Today in overtly racist lying

Well, this one didn't take long to get from the Teenage Mutant Ninja press to the glorious mainstream, did it? Here's the Daily Caller:

Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, announced Monday that “body shaming” advertisements will no longer be allowed in London’s public transport.

... Khan was not clear in what would determine which ads would be banned, as it doesn’t include all images of people in underwear or swimming clothes. Most underwear and bikini models though can be assumed to have non-average bodies.

Because why -- even when "go online and Google it" is a thing stupid candidates say in actual debates -- would anyone bother to look up TfL's advertising policy? Large amounts of it will look familiar if you've worked in a shop that sold enough advertising* to have advertising standards. When might a ban come into play, you ask?

The advertisement refers to or portrays (or gives the impression of portraying) a living person unless the written consent of that person is obtained and is produced to TfL.
 
Indeed, lots of societies that aren't run by Muslims -- say, the society that spent eight years trying to fine a TV network a thousand dollars per breast-millisecond over a Super Bowl halftime event -- regulate public portrayals of the body. It's hard to imagine an adult being surprised at the idea, as the source paper isn't:
Read more »

Today in making stuff up

You can draw your own conclusions about why this was the fourth most important story of the morning at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, but wouldn't you really like to know where the hed came from?

The couple have stayed strong in their Christian faith throughout their ordeal, but Rory admits that they are heartbroken and scared.

“I’m not going to tell you that I’m okay with this because ‘God has a bigger plan’. Or that ‘we’ll understand His bigger purpose somewhere down the line’. That logic doesn’t really work for me right now,” he writes.

Granted, journalism doesn't do very well with the idea of context -- mostly, I think, because we tend to confuse "out of context" with "embarrassing," as in this example from July:
Read more »

Pronouns: George F. Will are not amused

The pronouns are back, and George F. Will's got 'em! But first, of course, the obligatory sideswipe at the Kenyan usurper:

Trump, who uses the first-person singular pronoun even more than the previous world-record holder (Obama), promises that constitutional arrangements need be no impediment to the leader’s savvy, “management” brilliance and iron will.

In case you've been holed up in the survival bunker hoping the freeze-dried food lasts until January 2017: No. Obama doesn't even crack the presidential Top 10 in first-person-singular use, and if he did, the derpmongers who've been most assiduous in spreading that particular fable -- mostly Will and Charles Krauthammer -- would be no closer to proving him the narcissistic, arrogant fraud of their nightmares, because that's not even enough of a correlation to be a bogus correlation. But this column is about a different candidate from a different party, so let's have a quick look at Trump's presidential announcement, as reported by the New York Daily News.

There are always going to be challenges in getting an exact ratio of FPS pronouns to words. When the same paragraph (or the transcriber's best guess at it) contains "the $5 billion website" and "a $5 billion dollar website," how many words were spoken each time? (And, if don't set your watch by AP style, what happens if we make it "Web site," two words, as God ordained?) But letting MS Word do the overall word-counting, and tallying "I," "me," "my," etc. by hand, Trump comes in around 4.4%, which -- going by the MSNBC chart reproduced at Language Log* -- puts him about even with Ike and Bush Sr. but behind the notoriously uppity taciturn Harry Truman.
Read more »

Lying with other people's work

This seems about as close to lying as you can get and still have your pants on. Not the "won't stop Iran" part; that's an opinion and thus not falsifiable -- the part about what the Kenyan did or didn't admit. Here's Fox's version:

The president was attempting to answer the charge that the deal framework agreed upon by the U.S., Iran, and five other nations last week fails to eliminate the risk of Iran getting a nuclear weapon because it allows Tehran to keep enriching uranium.

Obama said that Iran would be capped for a decade at 300 kilograms of uranium -- not enough to convert to a stockpile of weapons-grade material.

"What is a more relevant fear would be that in Year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point, the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero," Obama said.

Correctly quoted; Fox doesn't do a lot of original reporting on international issues, but when it transcribes other people's work, it's usually pretty accurate. Of course (you first-language speakers might have noticed this), that means it also transcribed the bit about what a relevant fear "would be." Which kind of sets up the next few sentences, from the NPR transcript:

Keep in mind, though, currently, the breakout times are only about two to three months by our intelligence estimates. So essentially, we're purchasing for 13, 14, 15 years assurances that the breakout is at least a year ... that — that if they decided to break the deal, kick out all the inspectors, break the seals and go for a bomb, we'd have over a year to respond. And we have those assurances for at least well over a decade.
 
And then in years 13 and 14, it is possible that those breakout times would have been much shorter, but at that point we have much better ideas about what it is that their program involves. We have much more insight into their capabilities. And the option of a future president to take action if in fact they try to obtain a nuclear weapon is undiminished.

You can make your own decisions about the Kenyan's gullibility, but I find it hard to see it as an admission that anyone's going to have anything. If Chelsea Clinton manages to hold off Amy Carter in the Democratic primaries and thwart President Cruz's third-term ambitions, she's  going to have about the same decision-making window for launching a preemptive war as the current president. Unless there's something in the transcript I'm missing?

Foxwise, the only thing I find surprising is the play. The story spent most of Tuesday morning at the top of the homepage (that's the lower inserts, with the hed above the art). Why move it downpage when you've finally tweaked the hed into its own blissful state of deranged paranoia? I mean, at this point, you're not expecting people to actually read the story, are you?

Let not the right hand ...

Why are Rupert Murdoch's flying monkeys so angry about a comedy show on cable TV? Apparently, the fake news isn't fake enough:

Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.

... Stewart is a journalist: an irresponsible and unprofessional one.

Odd. The Post is usually more careful about who gets to call whom a journalist. But don't let the Kenyan conspiracy distract you from the real offense against freedom here:

... Stewart uses his funnyman status as a license to dispense with even the most minimal journalistic standards. Get both sides of the story?

Hey, I’m just a comedian, man. Try to be responsible about what the real issues are? Dude, that’s too heavy, we just want to set up the next d- -k joke.

Well, that seems unusually pr---sh for the paper that ... who was that failed politician again, Post hed writers?

Weiner's poll rising (4/13/2013)
Weiner to seek erection, will announce bid for mayor (5/15/2013)
Cuomo Beats Weiner ... then goes limp (5/24/2013*)
Who's screwed by Weiner entry (5/26/2013)
Weiner beat goes on -- and on! (7/31/2013)
Weiner pulls another Twitter boner (6/13/2014)

Sounds like the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. Indeed, here's the lede from a 2013 column by -- could it be the same Kyle Smith?
Read more »

Imagine that

Of all the Foxtastic news to comment on in the past few days (and yes, kids, the Fair 'n' Balanced Network has been busy), pause a moment to ponder this one:

As conflicts and civil wars rage across the Middle East and North Africa, a shadowy covert cell operating under the Iranian government is fueling the bloodshed.

"Smuggling arms to Mideast," of course, isn't that much of a challenge for Iran -- which, being in "the Mideast" itself, doesn't have to do much more than walk to the mailbox. More to the point, perhaps, is the idea that somehow smuggling "illicit arms to the Mideast," thereby "fueling the bloodshed" in all sorts of grisly ways, is a uniquely Iranian proposition. Given Fox's unique expertise in deliberately fueling Middle Eastern bloodshed through illicit arms transfers, we could perhaps be forgiven for expecting a deeper level of insight.

Lead stories never happen by accident. That's as true of the grownup press as it is of the party press. Iran is the top story on Wednesday evening because Fox is done for the moment with spreading random fear of brown people and dancing on Brian Williams's grave; it has more important things to turn your attention to. That's not to suggest that any form of fabrication is appropriate for journalism, but to ask whether we might want to consider habitual lying in the interest of shaping public policy as somehow different from habitual lying in the interest of self-aggrandizement.

Today in making things up

Well -- not exactly. Actually, not at all. But with a little head-fakery on an otherwise innocent AP report, the Fair 'n' Balanced Network manages to push a made-up story. And once you've made the Drudge homepage, your work is done.

Here's what the AP reported Friday:

The U.N. nuclear agency said Friday that its attempts to probe allegations that Tehran worked on nuclear weapons were deadlocked — a finding that all but rules out hopes of full nuclear deal between six world powers and Iran by the Nov. 24 target date.

And the version that was Fox's No. 3 tale this morning, under the "Agency claims Iran still working toward nukes" hed shown above:

Hours after the UN’s nuclear agency said that its attempts to investigate allegations that Iran worked on nuclear weapons, an Iranian opposition group claimed to have information showing the country is still working toward nuclear weapons.

See the pivot foot move? Clumsy grammar aside, Fox is grafting one set of claims onto another, allowing a for the bogus hed (after the story fell downpage, the switch was even clearer: "UN agency claims Iran still working toward nukes"). Fox is simply having a little more fun with the opposition press conference, which AP discusses in its 11th graf:
Read more »