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On December 3rd, 2007 at 12:16 pm, lgm said:

Old Tanker (#41) makes my point perfectly:

I mean Beauchamp only made American soldiers look bad, it’s not like he made…you know..TERRORISTS look bad.

In other words, false reporting is fine as long as it makes the people you don’t like look bad. That’s why conservative blogosphere went crazy over Beauchamp but still hasn’t proven his stuff false, while Smith’s reporting was known by experts to be false the day it was reported.

Do you unsuccessfully speed read or something? You totally missed the point of that statement, which was the sarcastic remark that Beauchamp was more interested in making up stories about U.S. soldiers than reporting about terrorists. We can only assume that he would lie about them as well, but didn’t seem to have an axe to grind with the enemy. I believe that there was a long rambling admission by the editors, and an effective pleading of the Fifth Amendment by Beauchamp, that proved the falsity of his claims.

Next question: why is Senator Craig’s marital infidelity worse than that of Senator Vitter or Mayor Giulaini? Answer: because at least Vitter and Giulaini are straigt. (sic)

Here is a better question: why was Trent Lott’s statement about Strom Thurmond (to a private audience) worse than Chris Dodd’s statement about Robert Byrd (publicly to the full Senate)?

Answer: Dodd is a liberal Democrat. And a fairly corrupt one at that. Dems reward their bad seeds, Republicans cast their’s out.

Incidently, have you ever bothered to read Smith’s original pieces and his explanation? After a little bit of thought I think I am more worried about his “200 armed men” bit, which is clearly an exaggeration (what he should have said was “we passed a lot of men, two of which were holding AK-47s, with probably more hidden away, according to my local sources.”), then the 4000-5000 men bit, in which he should have said “I say several groups of Hezbollah were they shouldn’t have been, and a number of local sources say that there were 4-5000 men in such groups spread out over the entire city.” 5000 men ARE easier to miss if they are in small groups and spread over a city, which is what Smith actually reported. All in all, I think Smith should go, but he looks more like a sloppy journalist who trusted his sources to far than a fabulist.

For all you conservatives, hanging a friend out to dry just because you wish to be seen as impartial is not honesty. Figure out what happened FIRST, then call for appropriate measures, OK?

Earlier this afternoon, Kathryn Jean Lopez joined me on Heading Right Radio to discuss the continuing controversy over reporting at The Tank by Thomas Smith. Smith wrote two posts at The Tank in September which got events spectacularly incorrect, as……

BTW, Andrew Sullivan has evidence in the form of an e-mail that the NRO knew Smith was full of it as early as October 5, so it’s more than a bit disingenuous of K-Lo to claim she disclosed the facts “immediately”, after learning of the errors “deep into the 2nd week of November.”

So much for the claiming the mantle of moral superiorty on this one. There are liars, propagandists, and flat-out jerks on BOTH sides of the “culture war.” Now can we please all acknowledge this simple fact and stop with the finger wagging and self-righteous preening at every possible step? It’s not helping anyone.

did you read the 1st part of what I wrote?? You claim that making terrorists look bad is WORSE than making American soldiers look bad. At worst we can claim that the two were EQUAL in bad journalism. THAT is the point I was making.

Next question: why is Senator Craig’s marital infidelity worse than that of Senator Vitter or Mayor Giulaini? Answer: because at least Vitter and Giulaini are straigt.

I’m going to make the assumption that you see the 2 as equal here, and I would agree. But you claim making false accusations against American troops is not as bad as making them against terrorists…..did I miss something?

I mean Beauchamp only made American soldiers look bad, it’s not like he made…you know..TERRORISTS look bad.

In other words, false reporting is fine as long as it makes the people you don’t like look bad. That’s why conservative blogosphere went crazy over Beauchamp but still hasn’t proven his stuff false, while Smith’s reporting was known by experts to be false the day it was reported.

Next question: why is Senator Craig’s marital infidelity worse than that of Senator Vitter or Mayor Giulaini? Answer: because at least Vitter and Giulaini are straigt.

I’d say that ex-Marine is due for a good blanket party.

Let’s not go off the deep end here, the question is did he completely make stuff up (Beauchamp) or did he get duped by what he believed to be reliable sources….’cuz we all know THAT never happens.

lgm

What he did was worse than Beauchamp??? Did I actually read this??? I mean Beauchamp only made American soldiers look bad, it’s not like he made…you know..TERRORISTS look bad.

I’m all for getting the facts about this but let’s not over-react.

More commentary here:

Frank Foer offers his take on the Scott Beauchamp mess. This whole doesn’t seem to me to reflect very well on Beauchamp, on TNR, or on the crazed hawks who went after this story with guns blazing. Whatever the magazine’s sins here may have been, though, one could hardly deem them especially significant in the broader scheme of things. More to the point, the magazine’s response to allegations that it had printed something false is emblematic of how serious journalists respond to such matters — seriously — with a real effort to the discern the truth and with the belief that it’s a seriously bad thing to publish something that wasn’t true.

This is a sense of conscience and responsibility that seems almost entirely absent from the journals of the conservative movement. One could point to the way W. Thomas Smith appears to have written a bunch of made-up stuff about Lebanon for National Review Online, but to be fair to Smith I can easily imagine a person coming to the conclusion that NRO doesn’t see inaccuracy as a bar to publication. Brad DeLong reminded us recently that National Review regularly publishes Donald Luskin included such pearls of wisdom as the following critique of studies showing rising inequality in the United States:

But none of this is reliable anyway: A footnote reveals that the statistics are derived from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics database, an ongoing survey that tracks only 8,000 families out of a U.S. population of 295 million individuals.

Yes, that’s right, Donald Luskin, contributing editor to NRO Financial, doesn’t believe in the validity of statistical sampling.

Let’s teach the left a lesson about how we police our own.

Too bad the left won’t do the same. But then again, we wouldn’t have any MSM media left if they did. No more ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, PBS, NY Times, Time Magazines, Newsweek, etc…

Just look how long it took for Dan Rather (Biased) to go away.