Jumping To Conclusions

For all the complaints about American media bias, at least we don't see headlines like this one from the Guardian too often:Truce hopes ebb as Israeli tanks reply to attacks. Got that? Two attacks, by Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa, a bombing and a mass shooting. But it's the Israeli reply that's the problem. Apparently "truce" is defined as "Israel meekly accepts getting attacked." I don't even want to speculate on how the Guardian would define "peace."

The New York Times reports on the latest unemployment data in its usual unbiased way.

The Labor Department announced yesterday that 93,000 jobs were lost in August, countering expectations that employment would finally begin to expand. The economic recovery in the United States is now in its 22nd month, without reversing constant job losses.

The unemployment rate declined to 6.1 percent from 6.2 percent in July, but economists said that was apparently because of a surge in the number of people who, having lost jobs, listed themselves as self-employed rather than unemployed. The Bush administration, however, cited the drop as a positive sign.

Second, note the phrasing: they "listed themselves as self-employed." The Times is apparently accusing these people of lying. No evidence is presented to support this accusation, of course. Why shouldn't we believe that people who list themselves as self-employed really are?

By the way, the few people who bother to read to the end of a story like this will find, in paragraph twenty-four, the one economist the Times quotes in support of this theory of dishonest unemployed losers:

"Whenever you see a spike in self-employment in this kind of economy, you know that is involuntary entrepreneurship," said Jared Bernstein, a senior labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

1. One economist is not "economists."
   
2. The Times fails to identify the left-wing orientation of Jared Bernstein and the Economic Policy Institute.
   
3. It's yet another statement made without any backing.
   
4. Even if true, it doesn't support the Times' version of analysis. So what if the entrepeneurship is "involuntary"? Either the people have jobs or they don't. That they wish they had different jobs is in no way synonymous with them not having jobs at all.

A sentence from John Derbyshire today: "The most left-wing U.S. administration in living memory, securely in power for 8 years, with all the revenues of the post-Cold War 'peace dividend' and the internet boom to spend, couldn't give us universal health care."

The most left-wing U.S. administration in living memory? Huh? Derbyshire doesn't remember the Johnson Administration? The Great Society? The War on Poverty?

Securely in power for 8 years? Huh? He doesn't remember, uh, impeachment?

All the revenues of the post-Cold War? Huh? President Clinton, like, ended the deficit. Started paying down the debt.

Couldn't give us universal health care? Huh? He tried. Tried real hard. It was defeated. Not by President Clinton. By the Senate.

The Associated Press's version of the debate in Congress over proposed changes to overtime rules:

The 54-45 vote marked a rare defeat for business interests in the GOP-controlled Congress and left the fate of the emerging Labor Department regulations unclear. The House backed the new rules this summer, and congressional negotiators will have to resolve the issue.

Having failed to make any impact whatsoever on Bush administration policies, the left has come out strongly on the counterattack, with the biggest theme being that the whole administration is dishonest. That's to be expected in politics (both dishonesty and accusations thereof), but reasonable people need to learn the distinction between differences of opinion, mistakes, and actual lies. Most importantly, if you're going to accuse someone of lying, shouldn't you make sure your facts are correct first? It seems like a good rule of thumb. But if so, someone needs to explain it to The Nation. In a column entitled The Latest Bush Gang Whoppers, David Corn attempts to dissect Dick Cheney's weekend appearance on Meet The Press, where he cited the meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague as possible evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

Let's start with Dick Cheney. He appeared on Meet The Press and was asked by host Tim Russert if there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. He replied, "Of course, we've had the story that's been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack. But we've never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know." This was a deceptive answer.

Shortly after 9/11, Czech intelligence officials did say they had a report from a source--a single source--that Atta had met with this Iraqi intelligence official in April 2001. Subsequent media reports in the United States noted that the source was an Arab student who was not considered particularly reliable. The FBI investigated and found nothing to substantiate the report of the meeting. In fact, the FBI concluded that Atta was most likely in Florida at the time of the supposed meeting, and the CIA questioned the existence of this meeting. (Even if there had been a meeting, one could not tell what it meant unless it was known what was said--and no one, not even Cheney, has claimed to know what might have transpired.

Oh, here it is:

Moreover, on October 21, 2002, The New York Times reported that Czech President Vaclav Havel "quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports" of the meeting. And it seemed that Atta had gone to Prague in June 2000, not April 2001. "Now," the paper noted, "some Czech and German officials say that their best explanation of why Mr. Atta came to Prague was to get a cheap airfare to the United States."

For some reason, Cheney did not share with the Meet the Press audience the information about Havel's denial.

"It is a fabrication. Nothing like this has occurred," [Havel spokesperson Ladislav] Spacek said about Havel's alleged phone conversation with the White House.

There is, of course, serious debate about whether this meeting took place, and what it would prove if it did. The evidence for the meeting is limited to a single source, and he provides no details about the substance of the meeting. But that in no way justifies calling Cheney a liar for citing this as possible evidence of a connection, and it in no way justifies citing a fabricated New York Times story as evidence that Cheney lied.

Once and future Oxblogger David Adesnik, guest-blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy, notes that the Washington Post and the (shocker) New York Times seriously distort the coverage of President Bush at the United Nations.

To begin with, there is a quick laugh to be had by comparing the NYT and WaPo ledes for the UN story. The WaPo informs us that

President Bush got an earful of complaints from world leaders today but responded with a mild defense of his actions in Iraq and an understated request for U.N. help.

In contrast, the NYT reports that

President Bush challenged the United Nations today to put aside its sharp differences over Iraq and to help the Iraqi people build a peaceful and democratic country on a timetable that made sense to them.

But he stoutly defended the United States' rationale for the war.

"Stout" vs. "mild". An "understated request" vs. a "challenge". In my role as armchair referee, I'm going to call this one a split decision: Bush's defense of the war was absolutely unaplogetic. But his request for help in Iraq was understated.

This article is not on the editorial page.

I'm not any more certain than Partha that two people constitute a backlash.... but on the other hand, I think that 1,000 people do. (Link requires free registration.)

I sometimes (okay, often) criticize the New York Times for the way it frames stories. But I don't know that I've ever seen bias from them quite as blatant as this Agence France-Press report about a Stars and Stripes survey, headlined "Morale of US troops suffers in Iraq."

A survey of US troops in Iraq by the military newspaper Stars and Stripes has found that nearly three-quarters of those questioned said unit morale was low or average, and that nearly half did not plan to re-enlist.

1. Statistics without context: "nearly half did not plan to re-enlist." What does that mean? How many people normally don't plan to re-enlist? The article doesn't say. We have no idea if this is above or below average. (The article does cite Donald Rumsfeld for the claim that recruitment and retention remain good, but by not providing actual data, the article makes it sound like a he-said-she-said debate.)
   
2. "Of those questioned." The phrase glosses over the fact that the survey was actually non-scientific; the article admits, lower down, that the survey "was taken among soldiers who were available to answer questions and so was not a random sampling of troops." Which soldiers are more likely to answer questions about their morale? Disgruntled ones or ones who are content? You can't draw valid conclusions from a self-selected sample.
   
3. Both of those are just typical bad reporting; they're excusable. The big flaw, though, the one that tips the meter from "useless" to "biased," is the heart of that sentence: "Nearly three-quarters... said unit morale was low or average."

   What did the survey actually find?

   Some 34 percent of those surveyed said morale was low or very low, 27 percent said it was high or very high, and the rest said it was average.

   Yes, that's right. Only one third said that morale was low, not the "nearly three quarters" implied by AFP. They simply added up the people who said it was low with people who didn't say it was low, and pretended that they all gave the same answer. An equally valid story -- except that it wouldn't have been a story then -- would have been, "Nearly two-thirds of troops said unit morale was average or high."

Moreover, the article provides no context: what percent of troops usually describe their morale as low? Presumably there are always some disgruntled people in the military, right? How much higher is this than normal? And wouldn't it be important to know whether their morale was low because they want better food or whether their morale is low because they think the mission is hopeless? It makes a big difference, don't you think?

Update: Incidentally, most newspapers appear to have framed the story in the negative (sample headlines: US forces in Iraq admit morale is low, US soldiers losing fight to keep up morale, Iraq briefs: Troops say morale low, and Survey: US Troops Suffering Low Morale). But I was amused to see Fox News' spin: Stars and Stripes Survey: Iraq Morale Could Be Better. That cup is half full, dammit.)

The New York Times doesn't believe in enforcing immigration laws, which is fine. The New York Times makes that clear in its reporting, which is not fine. Illegal aliens are always treated in their pages as victims of the government. It's a point I make often in reading the paper. As such, I was amused to see Mosey's analysis of their reporting.

A sob story in the New York Times with their usual "not getting the point, but trying to tug at your heart strings, anyway" style about two of the people busted in the WalMart third-shift cleaners raid.

I certainly think we may want to rethink our immigration laws, and I do think there are occasional circumstances in which we may genuinely feel sorry for the way an illegal alien is treated -- but even assuming this is one of those instances, that doesn't justify using the news section of the paper to make that case.

Andrew Sullivan is asking for assistance:

If you find similar examples of headlines declaring things that the body of the piece denies, please send them in.

There's a mini-controversy in Seattle, where the Post-Intelligencer decided to rewrite one of Republican George Nethercutt's speeches.

"The story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable," Nethercutt, R-Wash., told an audience of 65 at a noon meeting at the University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.

"It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day."

It's a bigger and better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day, which, which, heaven forbid, is awful."

Now, read this rambling response from the editor of the Post-Intelligencer's editorial page.

For what it's worth: I thought the original news story did what it was supposed to do. It covered Nethercutt's speech and presented the news story in context.

Then reasonable people can disagree about that interpretation -- as did the congressman from Spokane.

A few days later our Editorial Board concluded that Nethercutt was part of a larger story, the coordinated effort by the Bush administration to change the story about Iraq. If the story is about progress in Iraq, then, we believed Nethercutt's view to be, the lesser story is about troops who have died or who face daily threats of death or injury. That was something our Editorial Board found unacceptable and said so. But then we erred because we allowed the discourse to slip into name-calling.

This just goes to show I can be callow and shallow, too. And, I've learned something from this debate, too. We need to provoke passionate opinions in a way that promotes respect for the other side of the argument.

Look, a whole article about the debate over media bias which doesn't mention the New York Times. I wonder where this article appeared?

In the course of using cutsey nicknames like "Rummy" and "Wolfie", and bringing up Vietnam references, Maureen Dowd includes this slight little fib:

But some fret that the Pentagon -- growing desperate as the Turks, the Indians, the Pakistanis and other allies refuse to send reinforcements -- has been turning out new Iraqi police officers and guards as swiftly and sloppily as Lucy and Ethel turned out chocolates on the assembly line.

The Turks "refuse to send reinforcements"? That isn't quite right, is it? The Turks agreed to send reinforcements; it was the Iraqis that didn't want the Turks there. Slight difference, that Dowd might have noticed, if she had stopped watching Nick At Nite long enough to read the newspaper. (And then she might have seen that South Korea has also agreed to send troops.)

Excellent deconstruction by Gregg Easterbrook of one of those absurdly overwrought environmental doomsday pieces that appear in the media so regularly. As is so often the case, a scientifically-illterate reporter credulously reports the scariest scaremongering he can find, barely pausing along the way to even get an opposing point of view -- and making sure, when doing so, to label the opposing point of view as "conservative" so that readers will know to dismiss it.

So here's a philosophical question for you: if an advocacy group tries to mislead us, should we be more insulted if it hides its dishonesty, or if it actually has the audacity to provide citations which prove its dishonesty, hoping we won't check?

The left-wing advocacy group MoveOn, a group which ironically never takes its own advice, has been whining lately about "censorship" because CBS has rejected an ad MoveOn wanted to run during the Super Bowl. (It isn't, of course; a private organization making an editorial decision isn't "censoring" anybody when it chooses not to publish a particular message.) MoveOn is trying to claim that CBS's decision is politically motivated:

CBS will also claim that this decision isn't an indication of political bias. But given the facts, that's hard to believe. CBS overwhelmingly favored Republicans in its political giving, and the company spent millions courting the White House to stop FCC reform.(6)

6. OpenSecrets.org: "CBS Television Network Soft Money Donations"
http://www.moveon.org/r?482

Yes, in fact, it's true: a whopping 98% of CBS's "soft money" contributions went to Republicans in the election cycle cited. Millions of dollars, all to Republicans. Right? Uh, no. In fact, here's what we're talking about:

To Democrats:	$250	(2%)
To Republicans:	$13,505	(98%)
Total:	$13,755

But wait, there's more...CBS is no longer an independent entity; in May of 2000, it was purchased by Viacom. Even if one wasn't aware of the relationship between the two companies initially, OpenSecrets.org provides that information on the page linked to by MoveOn. If you click on that link, you see Viacom's contributions. And if you look at that, you see the numbers change substantially:

To Democrats:	$24,900	(60%)
To Republicans:	$16,505	(40%)
Total:	$41,405

Of course, this doesn't prove that the decision to reject MoveOn's ad wasn't partisan -- but it sure as heck refutes the limited evidence (*) provided by MoveOn that it was partisan. MoveOn couldn't have missed this data; as I said, the first set was linked to right on the page MoveOn cited.

(*) MoveOn and its Democratic supporters also claim that CBS's excuse -- that it doesn't accept advocacy ads -- is just a pretext, because it has run antismoking and antidrug ads. Uh, yeah. Whatever. Because a partisan political position ad is clearly equivalent to an antismoking ad. Both are likely to be equally controversial.

Let nobody say I've never agreed with lefty blogger Atrios -- because I've finally spotted a post of us that I agree with. He highlights an amazing bit of arrogance illustrated by ombudsman Dan Okrent's latest column in the New York Times. Written for some reason as an imaginary interview with Okrent on his brief experience as ombudsman:

Q. So tell me, Dan. How are they treating you at The Times?

A. I'm glad you asked. It has been both better and worse than I expected - better because a lot of people here believe that The Times should be as open to examination as those The Times itself examines each day; their welcome has been generous and heartening. What's worse than I expected is the overt hostility from some of those who don't want me here.

Q. Is it aimed at you, or at the job?

A. Both. One reporter ripped me up and down about how offensive it was that the staff had to endure public second-guessing, how it makes reporters vulnerable to further attack, how the hovering presence of an ombudsman can hinder aggressive reporting.

[...]

Others have complained that as a former magazine writer and editor, I don't know anything about newspapers; as a non-Timesman, I don't appreciate how The Times is different from all other media institutions...

Speaking of clueless, I happened to run across this story (via Crosblog) from a couple of weeks ago about a right-wing congressman who has attempted to use his political influence to help one of his cronies get leniency after raping a teenage girl.

In what one Marin prosecutor called a situation that raises questions of propriety, U.S. Rep. Lynn Woolsey intervened on behalf of an acquaintance who raped a Marin teenager.

Woolsey, D-San Rafael, used her official congressional stationery to tell a sentencing judge the sex felon had a "promising life ahead of him."

And Woolsey's explanation of her actions? Dodging and weaving:

Pressed by the Independent Journal on why she sent the letter, Woolsey was initially defensive and seemed to draw a blank.

"Obviously, in my eyes he is not a criminal," she said of the son of her office employee. But then she appeared to change her mind. "I knew nothing about the incidents. I had no idea what the courts had found out."

Woolsey, who wrote her letter after Pearson pleaded guilty on Sept. 11, 2003, to raping the Marin teen, said she was advocating for Pearson's family, not for him.

"What I said in that letter was that when deciding his sentence, he has a good support system - that was not based on what he did or didn't do. His family support system would be paying very close attention to what happened to him."

Leaving aside the twisting and turning over the letter, what about her use of official taxpayer-purchased government stationery to do it? Does that seem a little... improper to anyone else? A private citizen certainly has the right to provide input before sentencing; indeed, as I understand it, character witnesses are a normal part of the sentencing process. But a member of Congress has no right to officially intervene.

This isn't a big deal (except to the victim); the only reason I'm blogging about it is because I was shocked to find out about it when it had gotten virtually no press coverage. As far as I can tell, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post, nor the AP nor Reuters has picked up this story. Not even as a brief mention. Why not?

So does anybody think there will be a media feeding frenzy over this presidential candidate's coverup of his mlitary past:

The day after John F. Kerry said he would make all of his military records available for inspection at his campaign headquarters, a spokesman said the senator would not release any new documents, leaving undisclosed many of Kerry's evaluations by his Navy commanding officers, some medical records, and possibly other material.

Kerry, in an interview Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press," was asked whether he would follow President Bush's example and release all of his military records. "I have," Kerry said. "I've shown them -- they're available for you to come and look at." He added that "people can come and see them at headquarters."

But when a reporter showed up yesterday morning to review the documents, the campaign staff declined, saying all requests must go through the press spokesman, Michael Meehan. Late yesterday, Meehan said the only records available would be those already released to this newspaper.

Oh, and what's with this?

Asked whether Kerry would release his evaluations, as Clark did during the primaries, Meehan responded: "We don't have Wesley Clark's evaluations." Asked directly whether Kerry would release all of his own evaluations, Meehan repeated that the campaign would release only the records already made available.

[Update: Mickey Kaus speculates that this is just a bait-and-switch by Kerry, that when the full records come out they'll make him look good. Nah. Kerry ain't that smart.]

Donald Luskin has been covering a spat lately in which liberals accuse conservatives of distorting the truth regarding the date when the most recent economic recession began. The underlying issue, of course, is whether to blame Bill Clinton or George Bush; as such, it's a debate mostly of interest to flag wavers on the campaign trail.

So what to make of gratuitous comments like this, from the New York Times' Arts section, on the occasion of "Friends" ending its ten year run:

But timing was also an important factor in the show's success. The best sitcoms echo the larger mood of the nation. "M*A*S*H," whose finale in 1983 drew the largest audience for a single episode of a television series, provided gallows humor in the gallows era of Vietnam and Watergate. "Friends" came along after the Reagan-Bush recession of the late 1980's and early 90's, a period that had fostered shows like "Married . . . With Children," "Roseanne" and "The Simpsons," caustic comedy centered around dysfunctional, financially strapped, families.

The Reagan-Bush recession? Huh? Reagan, of course, had been out of office for several years when the recession of the early 1990s happened. What makes this so egregious is that not only is the statement wrong, but it's so totally unnecessary; the sentence would have been just as clear if "Reagan-Bush" had been omitted. The Times just can't help itself from having its partisanship leak from the editorial pages into news sections, can it?

(I thought for a moment that perhaps this was common terminology that I had just missed, but a quick Google turned up just 43 hits on the phrase -- all, as far as I can tell, from partisan sources. Which, at least in theory, the Television column in the Arts section should not be.)

Incidentally, "Married... with Children" started in 1987, "Rosanne" started in 1988, and "The Simpsons" started in 1989. The "Reagan [sic]-Bush recession" started after all of those did, in July 1990, so I'm not sure what that leaves of the theory that the recession is what led to these shows. I suppose technically the reporter could say that article isn't wrong because it said that the recession "fostered" these shows -- that is, she could argue that the shows started before the recession but were only successful because of it. The problem is that this too is wrong; Roseanne was the number two-rated show for two seasons before the recession began.

Hmmm... maybe the TV columnist should stick to TV, and stop playing pop sociologist.

Mark Kleiman wonders why "right-wing bloggers" (his term) are upset that the murder of Nicholas Berg was not shown by the American media.

What am I missing here?

* Al Qaeda thugs murder an American on camera as a publicity stunt.

* The mass media mostly refuse to give them the free publicity they want, not showing the snuff clip the terrorists released.

* Right-wing bloggers object, thinking the media ought to do what the terrorists wanted them to do.

[UPDATE: I just want to add, in case it isn't obvious, that I'm not saying that the latter justifies the former. The two are unrelated. I'm talking only about the editorial decisions by the media, not about the incidents themselves.]

And perhaps what Mark is also missing is that his premise is likely wrong; showing it would not be "what the terrorists wanted them to do." Either the video was primarily intended by the terrorists for an Arab audience or for an American one. To the extent that the video was intended for an Arab audience, the American media showing it wouldn't be relevant to Al Qaeda's wishes. To the extent that it was intended for an American audience, it would be, I think, an attempt to demoralize or intimidate us. But I don't believe that showing it to us would have that effect; I would suspect that it would have the opposite effect. While widespread violence in Iraq might convince the U.S. to pull out, targeted violence such as that will only make us more determined to stay there and eliminate those responsible.

They just can't help themselves, over at the New York Times. They write that the Vatican cautioned Catholics against interfaith marriage, and (apparently) singled out marriages with Muslims for special concern. (I say "apparently" because I don't trust the Times to report the story accurately.) But then the Times throws this in:

The document, written by the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, sets these issues in a context of globalism and easy travel that encourages the mixing of religions. Although it makes no mention of the conflicts in the Middle East, its release comes during a time of heightened anger in the Muslim world.

Either way, does the comment really belong in the story?

Oh, That Liberal Media provides an example of one of those media code phrases used by journalists when they want to sneer at a colorful description of a particular group or practice:

OK. Good set up against a heinous, barbaric practice, right? Well, um, maybe not. 'Cause in the eighth paragraph we read the following (emphasis mine):

This was something her mother had done before her. She started as an apprentice while still an adolescent by holding down girls' legs for her mother to perform the rite, which opponents call genital mutilation. "I thought my mother would curse me from the grave if I didn't carry on the tradition," she said.

As James Taranto notes (to whom goes the hat tip for this entry), this is yet another example of "...the press's use of Orwellian language to promote an attitude of moral relativism--Reuters' policy that "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter" and the pervasive formulation "what opponents call 'partial-birth abortion'. "

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the director of health research for the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, said Dr. Rao and others like him should be disciplined. "The state medical boards should just yank the licenses of these people," Dr. Wolfe said.

It's bad enough that they pretend that Public Citizen is a neutral consumer advocacy group in articles about consumer advocacy. But Wolfe is conducting his anti-death penalty campaign not in an individual capacity, but in his role as a Public Citizen official. Whether one supports or opposes the death penalty, an honest person would have to admit that it has nothing to do with consumer advocacy. And yet the Times blithely goes on describing them as if they were an apolitical group with no hidden agenda.

Gotta love the difference in the July 2, 2004 front pages of Newsday and the New York Post:

(If the pictures are no longer available, both front pages show Saddam pointing his finger in his first day in court. Newsday's screaming headline reads "Defiant", while the Post's screaming headline reads "Nuts". No reason he can't be both, I suppose...)

The New York Times had a story this week on the effect of the Bush administration's new overtime rules.

Only two problems with the article. The first is that, due to either very sloppy writing and/or editing, or the reporter's lack of understanding, a key statement in the article is wrong:

But Mr. Ware fears that his inventiveness could cost him dearly, because under new federal labor rules it might cause him to be classified as a learned professional, making him ineligible for overtime pay. Since overtime is often one-third of his paycheck, Mr. Ware is fuming about the new rules, which the Bush administration put into effect last week.

The second problem with the article is that it doesn't say anything. True, the headline -- "Overtime Rules Dispute Is a Numbers Game" -- is, for a change, an accurate representation of the article. But is there really much point in writing an article which has as its theme "People disagree on the effects of these rules, and it's all politics and we don't know the answer"? Are the new rules good or bad? Are they going to cost six million people overtime or just half a million? After reading the article, one is no more informed about the issue than before one read it.

The truth, in fact, may be that the data just isn't there to provide a definitive answer. So what should the Times have said? Well, if it couldn't say what the answer is, it could have at least explained why there's such a wide discrepancy between one set of estimates and another. I've read numerous articles about the subject in the Times, and they've never managed to do that. But it's really not all that complicated, and this article explains better in a few paragraphs what the Times failed to do in several articles: the high estimate comes from counting everyone who potentially loses eligibility, regardless of whether those people actually ever got paid any overtime at all. There, that wasn't so hard, was it? So why couldn't the article say that, instead of throwing around numbers from lots of different people without any attempt to explain anything other than the politics of the issue?

I suppose now that CBS has admitted they screwed up, Rathergate will die down as a story and the media feeding frenzy will turn elsewhere. But before it does, I thought this excellent USA Today post (?) mortem deserved to be highlighted, with a few points emphasized.

CBS's source, Bill Burkett, insists he didn't do anything wrong:

"I didn't forge anything," Burkett said. "I didn't fake any documents. The only thing I've done here is to transfer documents from people I thought were real to people I thought were real. And that has been the limitation of my role. I may have been a patsy."

In earlier conversations with USA TODAY, Burkett had identified the source of the documents as George Conn, a former Texas National Guard colleague who works for the U.S. Army in Europe. Burkett now says he made up the story about Conn's involvement to divert attention from himself and the woman he now says provided him with the documents. He told USA TODAY that he also lied to CBS.

And leaving Conn aside, whose name is Burkett giving now?

Burkett now maintains that the source of the papers was Lucy Ramirez, who he says phoned him from Houston in March to offer the documents. USA TODAY has been unable to locate Ramirez.

[...]

By Monday, USA TODAY had not been able to locate Ramirez or verify other details of Burkett's account. Three people who worked with Killian in the early 1970s said they don't recognize her name. Burkett promised to provide telephone records that would verify his calls to Ramirez, but he had not done so by Monday night.

But Burkett's story gets stranger than merely describing a mysterious woman who made him a "patsy."

Burkett said Ramirez told him she had seen him the previous month in an appearance on the MSNBC program Hardball, discussing the controversy over whether Bush fulfilled all his obligations for service in the Texas Air Guard during the early 1970s. "There is something I have that I want to make sure gets out," he quoted her as saying.

He said Ramirez claimed to possess Killian's "correspondence file," which would prove Burkett's allegations that Bush had problems as a Guard fighter pilot.
Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.

"I didn't even ask any questions," Burkett said. "Should I have? Yes. Maybe I was duped. I never really even considered that."

By Monday, USA TODAY had not been able to locate Ramirez or verify other details of Burkett's account. Three people who worked with Killian in the early 1970s said they don't recognize her name. Burkett promised to provide telephone records that would verify his calls to Ramirez, but he had not done so by Monday night.

An acquaintance of Burkett, who he said could corroborate his story, said he was at the livestock show on March 3. The woman, who asked that her name not be used, said Burkett asked if he could put papers inside a box she had at the livestock show. Often, she said, friends ask to store papers in her box that verify their purchases at the livestock auction. She said she did not know the nature of the papers Burkett gave her, and he did not say anything about them.

After he received the documents in Houston, Burkett said, he drove home, stopping on the way at a Kinko's shop in Waco to copy the six memos. In the parking lot outside, he said, he burned the ones he had been given and the envelope they were in. Ramirez was worried about leaving forensic evidence on them that might lead back to her, Burkett said, acknowledging that the story sounded fantastic. "This is going to sound like some damn sci-fi movie," he said.

After keeping the copies for a couple of days, he said he drove to a location he would not specify, about 100 miles from his ranch, to put them "in cold storage." Burkett said he took the action because he believed the papers were politically explosive and made him nervous. "I treated them like absolute TNT," he said. "They looked to me like they were devastating."

In other words, if you believe Burkett's story, he received a mysterious phone call from a woman he had never met and didn't know, who claimed that she had the personal papers of a senior officer in the National Guard which would prove problems in Bush's past. Rather than going to the press with these papers, she decided to call some guest who she happened to see on Hardball. They rushed to arrange a clandestine meeting at a livestock show, but the woman didn't show up; instead, a mysterious man handed him an envelope and left. Then, rather than taking care to preserve this damning evidence, Burkett made a couple of photocopies at Kinkos, burned all evidence of the originals (or were they copies also?) and of his source, hid them in an undisclosed location, and even though they were "devastating," ignored them. Then, five months later -- rather than right when the AWOL story was in the news -- Burkett decided the time was right to release these documents. So he shopped them around to media outlets that would guarantee him anonymity, lied about where he got them, and walked away.

Yeah. Oh, how would you like to buy a bridge? Got one for you, cheap. Oh, sorry; I don't. Dan Rather already bought it.

By the way, you've got to love journalistic circumlocution:

Burkett's own doubts about the authenticity of the memos and his inability to supply evidence to show that Ramirez exists also raise questions about his credibility. Burkett has strong anti-Bush views. He has posted comments on Internet Web sites critical of Bush and has chastised Sen. John Kerry's organization for what he called its inept campaign.

Eugene Volokh laments that Rathergate teaches us that we can't trust the media.

That's what's so sad: Surely the aggregate of Rathergate, the Jayson Blair scandal, the chronic misreporting about assault weapons, or any other individual incident, and everything else we've seen over the last several years — often thanks to the media criticism of blogging (a medium that thrives on media criticism) — has opened our eyes to just how little one can trust what one sees in the news media.

And yet no matter how skeptical one tries to be, one can't double-check everything. We have to trust outside sources. But the same sources that claim to be so trustworthy are, it turns out, often untrustworthy, sometimes in huge ways (falling for outright frauds) but also often in many small ways (media bias, whether political, social, or personal, that repeatedly leads to erroneous and misleading information).

I suspect this has been true all along — it's just that we can't ignore it any more. We have to learn to live with a world of extraordinarily imperfect information. And that's a lot more work than assuming that the media (or at least certain media) is highly accurate.

Still, it's not quite as bleak as Eugene portrays it; there may be con men who are so slick that we never detect them, but most of the time there are warning signs. Here's a good rule of thumb -- for both news reporters and news consumers -- which can help us avoid the sorts of problems revealed by Rathergate: anonymity is a bad idea.

This entire Rathergate story turned into such a mess because it was based unnecessarily on an anonymous source. I don't suggest there are never reasons for anonymity. Sometimes a valuable source would be too afraid of losing his job or even his life if he came forward publicly. There are legitimate whistleblowers out there; there are people who testify against mafia defendants. There are alleged CIA agents whose husbands are lying ambassadors. But Bill Burkett was none of those. There was no rational reason why Bill Burkett should have been granted anonymity by CBS. The only reason he needed it was if he wanted to lie with impunity. (Oh, there could be innocent reasons why someone would want anonymity-- perhaps the simple desire to avoid being in the media spotlight, which admittedly can be overwhelming. But (a) that's just not a good enough reason, and (b) that doesn't apply to Bill Burkett, who has been all over the news in his campaign against Bush.)

If CBS had refused to grant Burkett anonymity, one of three things could have happened:

1. He could have agreed to go public, in which case we have the ability to judge for ourselves whether he has any credibility, and CBS is off the hook even if the documents are forged. (Not that it absolves them of their responsibility to vet a story before putting it on the air, but they're no longer covering anything up.)
   
2. He could have refused, and the phony documents never get publicized.
   
3. He could have shopped the story to some other, less scrupulous, news outlet. In which case CBS is again off the hook.
   

End anonymity. It's not a panacea for all that ails journalism -- Jayson Blair, media bias, dumb reporters who don't understand guns will all still be issues -- but it will eliminate at least one type of problem.

From an article in the New York Times purporting to fact-check the presidential campaigns:

In his critique of Mr. Kerry's record, Mr. Bush has often left out facts that might make some of the Democrat's positions look different.

In one speech, Mr. Bush said in quick succession that Mr. Kerry had voted for higher taxes on Social Security benefits and voted for a formula that "helped cause the increase in Medicare premiums."

Mr. Bush's statements were technically correct. But the tax on Social Security benefits, adopted in 1993 over Republican opposition, helps to pay for Medicare, and without it the government would have to raise other taxes or add to the budget deficit. In voting for the Medicare formula in 1997, Mr. Kerry was joined by 43 Republicans.