The surprise is not that the Times got it so wrong…
The surprise is that it ever issued the correction:
On September 11, the Mark Landler article [in the NY Times] included this curious sentence: “Unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners.” Two days later, the Gray Lady issued a correction on a photo credit, but it took the layers of fact-checkers and editors another ten days to issue this correction:
“…[Our article] gave an incorrect comparison between efforts by the president to seek allies’ support for this plans and President George W. Bush’s efforts on such backing for the Iraq War. The approach Mr. Obama is taking is similar to the one Mr. Bush took; it is not the case that “Unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners.”
The Hot Air article I’m quoting points out that the Times is hardly alone in its egregious error (or was it a purposeful falsehood, otherwise known as a lie?). What’s more, what took the Times ten full days to figure it out, when the Times own contemporaneous coverage of the Iraq War easily refuted it?
It’s the old fool vs. knave question again. You might ask why we should care anymore, and I have to admit I care a lot less than I once did, because I have grown accustomed to their stupidity/ignorance, reckless disregard for the truth, propensity to lie, blatant bias, and intense and shameless arrogance about all of the preceding. But the process by which the Times and the rest of the MSM forms the opinions of the public (and it still is highly influential in doing so) remains one of the biggest problems of our time, and so I continue to think about it.
At first it occurred to me that perhaps the Times article had been written by a young person who might have even been a child or teen during the Iraq War. That’s one of the problems with the MSM these days: many of its correspondents are so young they don’t know what they don’t know, but can be somewhat forgiven their ignorance because of their youth. What can’t be forgiven is the decision their supposed superiors have made to give them so much responsibility before they’re ready for it.
But no; in this case, the article’s author Mark Landler is 48, not what I’d consider old but no spring chicken either. During the Iraq War he was well into adulthood, and was already working as a journalist (mostly in the business sphere, however), so he should have known better. And of course, there should be editors at the Times to catch the error and correct it before it ever saw print, but they failed as well.
Perhaps Landler (and/or the editors) did know better, and was purposely lying and hoping to not be caught. For them, perpetuating the myth of Bush the Cowboy and Obama the Thoughtful Internationalist could be far more important than telling the truth, and well worth risking criticism and even the need for a correction which, after all, most people don’t even read.
But it’s also possible they all really are that ignorant, and just were unaware of the truth. And perhaps that’s even worse than an outright lie would have been. Why do I say that? Because they should have known and should have remembered, and yet they didn’t, which illustrates how often ideology trumps facts. Way too many people believe what they want to believe, and have no trouble revising history and/or memory to fit what they would like to be the real version of things. This goes for journalists, too—maybe even more for journalists, because they have a big stake in the matter, and too much to lose if reality doesn’t fit their vision.
In a way, I’d rather Landler and the editors were actively lying instead of profoundly ignorant. If they’re lying, then there is hope—albeit slim—that they could reform and change their ways. But what chance is there if they are merely unconsciously constructing reality as they see fit, unaware that they’re even doing it?
NYT know exactly what they are doing. NYT stopped being the paper of record for America years ago. They are the paper of record for libs alone. The rest just read it to to expose their lies and distortions.
http://www.mrc.org/ is a good resource to track these lies and distortions.
“. . . what chance is there if they are merely unconsciously constructing reality as they see fit, unaware that they’re even doing it? ”
Sea monsters.
See my comment @2:45 pm in the next thread.
A long time ago i explained that the game is to hide your malfeasance in good intentions and AMBIGUITY…
the point is that you wont find a clear thing, you will only find preponderance…
kill your wife in a seeming innocent accident, and there is a good chance you will get away with it, do it to the four other wives and then there is a problem, even if only the first was on purpose and the other three were really accidents.
Didn’t Bush have more allies when he went into Iraq? Doesn’t Obama have just five Islamic states?
My journalism professor friend once gently lectured me not to confuse news with opinion, and to rely on unbiased sources, such as NPR and the NY Times, rather than biased, opinion-based news sources such as Fox. I love her dearly, but I laughed in her face. She’s highly educated, 54-years old, and she honestly believes what she told me.
once again, i find i am suddenly censored by the system
from 2009 neoneocon blog:
neoneocon.com/2009/10/30/finally-obama-gets-a-foreign-policy-success-unfortunately-its-in-honduras-not-iran/
see comment-132115
so if they never read things like this:
Using Ambiguity to Achieve Organizational Objectives
its a long post so i wont copy more forwards to here, but i posted quite a bit on the techniques of ambiguity, and its value and how its used knowingly in many places.
i list out a whole bunch of sources, and papers and things over the years and tie them to the techniques
Maskirovka
“Russia operates through networks of agents who don’t always know they are working for Russia.”
Why take so many risks when the Ukraine is easily recoverable? What country cannot be taken over from within given the Russian methods of infiltration, blackmail, subversion and disinformation? — ormer SBU general Alexa nder Sk ipa lski
old old old stuff…
but i guess the young and inexperienced who live in that river called da nile can be ‘forgiven’, eh?
there is a whole lot of information at that link
it was the generals name that was being censored
(and i found that my email was being used for a time to censor. that once i changed it, the posts went through. so we wonder what does the software behind the blog doing to negate conversation of certain things? )
Richard Stengel
an American editor, journalist and author. He is famed for being Time magazine’s 16th managing editor While best known for his work for Time, he has written a number of books including a collaboration with Nelson Mandela on Mandela’s autobiography Prior to taking up his role as managing editor of Time in 2006, Stengel was the president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center
On September 12, 2013 Stengel announced that he would be stepping down from his role as Time’s managing editor in order to serve as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs for President Barack Obama’s cabine
does THAT clue you in on things at TIME?
They know better but there is a narrative to protect: Bush is an ignorant cowboy and obama is genius/messiah; dems are angels, repubs are devils; Kochs’ money comes from greed and promotes all that is wrong with America, Soros’ money promotes the establishment of utopia. The narrative must be protected. And they know their targeted audience will readily drink the kool-aid.
Neo, I have a suggestion: Why don’t you refer to the mainstream media simply as the “Igor” media? Remember the old Frankenstein movies of Hollywood’s golden era? Igor was the stock toady character. Slovenly, stupid, and servile, Igor was without reservation or scruple dedicated to the enthralling vision of the great man he served. And Igor was prepared to do anything, ANYTHING, necessary to protect and advance that great man and that vision. I think that pretty well depicts today’s press and broadcast media and their collective efforts on behalf of the lightworker and his desire to transform America. Further, calling the mainstream media the Igor media both ridicules them and captures their malignancy.
Just a suggestion.
Tom Maguire at JustOneMinute found a 2013 piece by the same NY Times journalist that referred to Bush’s efforts to put together a “coalition of the willing” in2003. That would seem to put the Sept. 11 article’s error squarely in the knave camp, wouldn’t it?
Joe Torsella preceded him, and then replaced him..
and that should tell you what he is…
as there is no way to be head of the board of ed, which the teachers union of bella dodd has controlled since then and never cleared out
the National Constitution Center was created by reagan, but given its position in things, its a shell like liberalism became a shell of hollowed out classical liberalism and replaced by its opposite
Through its Annenberg Center for Education and Outreach, the center offers onsite and online civic education programs as well as a study center that develops and distributes teaching tools, lesson plans and resources. Thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation
Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB122212856075765367
Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
there is so much more one can find by looking
but i note that when these discussions come up, no one actually looks much stuff up. they just try to answer the question of fool, or knave or such the way the great karnak would… but wihtout holding the monitor up to their foreheads
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB122212856075765367
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) was a Chicago public school reform project from 1995 to 2001 that worked with half of Chicago’s public schools and was funded by a $49.2 million, 2-to-1 matching challenge grant over five years from the Annenberg Foundation. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was one of 18 locally designed Annenberg Challenge project sites that received $387 million over five years as part of Walter Annenberg’s gift of $500 million over five years to support public school reform. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge helped create a successor organization, the Chicago Public Education Fund (CPEF), committing $2 million in June 1998 as the first donor to Chicago’s first community foundation for education
Common Core ‘architect’ David Coleman’s history with Bill Ayers and Barack Obama
http://eagnews.org/common-core-architect-david-colemans-history-with-the-ayers-and-obama-led-chicago-annenberg-challenge/
Prior to Student Achiement Partners, Coleman and Zimba were co-founders of the Grow Network (now owned by McGraw-Hill Company). Grow Network began as a pilot program in New York in 2000. Less than a year later, the Chicago Public Education Fund began negotiating a contract with Grow Network on behalf of Chicago Public Schools
The Chicago Public Education Fund (‘The Fund’) was created in 1998 by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) board of directors, which included Barack Obama as board chairman and communist Bill Ayers, as co-chair.
Obama himself worked with The Fund for the next several years as a leadership council member, alongside Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas Ayers, and brother, John Ayers.
since my stuff is too long, i will just leave it at that and see if anyone bothers to complain. do note that maybe a percentage of complainers complain so that i dont connect these dots for the incurious…
Ann:
Perhaps. But not necessarily.
A person could write an article like that ten years earlier and actually forget the facts, if the will to revise history is powerful enough. The author may have wanted to remember it differently, and not even been conscious of the erasing of his own memory.
It happens sometimes.
But he didn’t write it 10 years earlier — he wrote the piece mentioning the coalition of the willing in 2013!
Artfldgr–Stanley Kurtz arrived in Chicago to look at all the CAC records (having already obtained permission to do so) and was turned away, as those records were sealed right before he got there. That was August 2008. I brought that up in every political conversation I was a part of leading up to the election, but no one was aware of it, including very actively involved conservatives.
From a Kurtz article in 2008:
“Unfortunately, I don’t yet have access to the documents. The Special Collections section of the Richard J. Daley Library agreed to let me read them, but just before I boarded my flight to Chicago, the top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access. Circumstances strongly suggest the likelihood that Bill Ayers himself may have played a pivotal role in this denial. Ayers has long taught at UIC, where the Chicago Annenberg Challenge offices were housed, rent-free. Ayers likely arranged for the files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to be housed in the UIC library, and may well have been consulted during my unsuccessful struggle to gain access to the documents. Let me, then, explain in greater detail what the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) records are, and how I have been blocked from seeing them.”
Orwell called it: True Believers absorb the Party line as Truth — even if it compels cognitive/ logical dissonance.
In extremis, they DO believe that 2 + 2 = 5.
I give you 0-care ‘economics’ as a case in point.
Ann:
That makes it even more likely he’s lying.
But truly, although it’s hard to believe, self-deception and willful forgetting is so powerful it can even explain a forgetting of a year’s length.
It can even explain a forgetting of an hour’s length. I wrote about the phenomenon here.
I could randomly pick 1000 students at America’s Jesuit colleges – starting with Creighton – and put out a better product than the NYT.
Sharon W i didnt know that… thanks!!!
neo… what you say may be true, but it sound like the more you know the less your able to commit to a choice, and that you have a humongous library of get out of X free cards that can be pulled… so there really is no sense to have a conversation about it, with a million outs, no way one can select the knave. even worse, these wonderful outs even extend to the point of the subject confessing. that even if he confessed there are a few out excuses to cover that as well.
no one is guilty until the powers assign guilt, then it dont matter if they are guilty… everyone is innocent, until they are not
I find it difficult to believe one can unconsciously forget. Imo it has to be a willful decision based on ideology. But then I am not someone who can patiently stand in line to drink the kool-aid. So what do I know about the thought process (should it exist) of leftists…. absolutely nothing.
Seems to me it’s a matter of levels: levels of consciousness — about which I admittedly know next to nothing, but that ofttimes doesn’t stop me from expounding [chuckles at self].
It does seem to me that on one level, Landler really thinks Obama partnered but Bush didn’t. After all, what Obama does is good and right, and what Bush did or didn’t, whichever, was eeevil, largely because Bush did it. A very powerful meme is the conviction that Obama was the anti-Bush. Anything Bush did or didn’t, Obama the Magnificent did the opposite.
At another level, however, Landler knows g#dd#m well what Bush did or didn’t do vis-a-vis partnering, and for that he richly earns my contempt, drawn from what has become a bottomless well of same.
We HAD somewhat better reporting that was not so flagrantly agenda driven in recent memory, Cronkite,
Peter Jennings reporters like Jim Mikalesewski @ the pentagon, (some others) why can t these people see
how like SOVIET style news they are ???
Are they THAT crazy ????
PS BTW, just shooed a 20 something from my door with bright orange tee shirt about to *clue* me into
Gen (eration) Climate Change, LOL. Googled them, funded by Tom Stryer ” We need to demand that politicians put Climate at the top of the agenda”!
My husband thinks I have dismissing door to door
peddlers down to a cruel science, “All you let them get out of their mouths is who they represent then it’s akin to *get lost*”. Heads up folks *bright orange tees*.
10-Days to retract something that was inexcusable to print in the first place. Mendacious. Lying Liars who Lie.
I believe right down to my toesie-woesies that the MSM-Obama Lapdog Chorus will soon be dubbing this shallow Limp Wristed “War” on ISIS as the Most Successful (ne-Brilliant, Gifted, Inspired) Operation since the GWOT began. Blather, Snake Oil, Mendacity all for the greater glory of Obam-Bam.
Can’t wait. They make me very, VERY tired.
It is an involuntary reflex for the MSM to trash Republicans, Fox News, etc. Hence the term “knee-jerk” liberals!
Franken has gone pretty much silent since cheating his way into office. I wonder if he has been blown away by all he has discovered that goes on, or if he has just been told to shut up and play the game.
I think liberals, including liberal reporters, actually believe all those myths. They aren’t much informed by facts.
Mind control, where the subject deletes and reforms their own memories to suit the Group and Good Think.
Also seen in psychotherapist human experiments where false memories of child rape were implanted and projected upon fathers and family members, by various working therapists on vulnerable and captive patients. Regressive memory therapy doesn’t just access the subconscious memory storage, it can alter it just as easily. So that the deception becomes the truth, and the truth becomes the lie, and the lie becomes the lawsuited reality of Law.
There’s also this rationalization superimposed upon the incidence of witnesses either forgetting what they saw when they initially gave their testimony to the police or down right fabricating new and erroneous memories afterwards. It’s why eye witness testimony decays in logarithmic fashion as time continues on, to the point where once beneficial police leads become unusable in court. Literally unusable as the false and reconfigured memories are inconsistent to external cross examination, but perfectly consistent to the witness itself.
Most people do not have perfect memory, complete recall, or eidetic copying. Thus, for any number of reasons, there are gaps in their recall and the human brain organically regrows, reconnects, and reconfigures “gaps” in the brain’s neuron system. So what was just a blank “I don’t know” turns into “I know what I saw”. What they saw wasn’t what they knew, though.
Willful deception takes this to a different level, comparable to Good and Bad Think, where the brain regrows and deletes its own memories based upon internal guidelines. This is different from merely refusing to speak about something or controlling body language to prevent giving away internal thoughts. This is literally reconfiguring the brain’s own memories via internal thinking and habits.
The brain does this naturally in a human as they live life, people call it nostalgia. Psychotherapists like to study it as hypnosis and regressive therapy. The police like to talk about witness memory and the lawyers like to talk about coaching and cross examining.
Propagandists like to think of it as a kind of WMD or Weapon of Mass Deception. Far more useful and untraceable than those other WMDs people worry about.
Date rape drug side effects seem to be memory loss. High adrenaline or traumatic experiences may also provide temporary memory loss or “gaps”. Amnesia is also another form of short or long, complete or partial, memory reconfiguration.
Brainwashing consists of reconfiguring a person’s memories so that their allegiances shift. The emotion suffered from their enemies’ actions are projected or displaced upon a different target, such as the target’s former allies. They can’t remember what they don’t remember, after all. Used against women in the sex slave trade and empire, it produces loyalty, fear, or obedience. Used against hostages, people call it Stockholme Syndrome. Meaningless compartmentalization, really. It’s only a single thing being used, WMDs.
It was conscious lying . These people gargle with organic fertilizer.
I read quite a bit about Project Annenberg back in 2008. The record stated that Project Annenberg-funded schools did not have different academic achievement results from non-Project Annenberg-funded schools. IOW, Obama didn’t have a good track record as a CEO- he was unable to pick research winners that would result in better academic achievement.
Just like the Stimulus- dole out money, not for any results, but to find one’s friends.
Correction:
Just like the Stimulus- dole out money, not for any results, but to FUND one’s friends.
br549
I wonder if he [Al Franken]has been blown away by all he has discovered that goes on, or if he has just been told to shut up and play the game.
You are assuming Al Franken has the intelligence and the knowledge base to figure out what is going on.
Why should he have known better? He was working as a business journalist. He listened to his cohort, the leftigentsia, which said Bush was a unilateralist, go-it-aloner, who failed to get support from the international community. No need to check that further, is there? Authoritative source, hating on someone he reflexively hated–what more did he need? He probably had no idea when he wrote his recent story that there was the least bit of falsity or error. He wasn’t lying. He was telling the truth. How would he know any better? He wouldn’t, he didn’t.
My first thought was not that they had written something easily refuted by their own paper, but, “Ah, they don’t want to read their own paper, aware that it’s less interesting than it pretends.”