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 Caveat lector 24 March 2000 Our current howler (part III): Ol’ Reliable
Are pundits always wrong on the facts? Probably not, but sometimes it seems so. This past Wednesday, perpetually furious Michael Kelly was in a state of rage down at the Post. The previous week, in a furious column, he had penned this peculiar construction:
Was the money raised "by Gore himself?" No, and Kelly doesn't say so. But a casual reader might well have thought otherwise, given his strange formulation. When Lanny Davis wrote in to complain, the Furious One scribbled off a reply. He hadn't said that Gore raised the dough, Kelly noted, and what he had said was perfectly accurate:
Kelly's parsing would get him off in any court in the land. But then—Oops!—we ran into trouble:
But of course, anyone who had spent ten minutes on this story would know that statement is utterly false. The $55,000 was raised on April 30, the day after Gore appeared at the temple. If you followed Maria Hsiah's recent trial, you read the basic chronology there. If you read the 1997 Senate Committee Final Report, it was clearly explained there also. The chronology is completely clear and undisputed—except in Kelly's irate work. We doubt that Kelly was up to old tricks—making a dull story better. Our guess? Kelly doesn't know what he's talking about—doesn't know even the simplest facts about the Hsi Lai case. Which didn't keep him, of course, from his usual ranting in the furious column about which Davis complained. Kelly began with his usual insinuations, suggesting that various people were criminals (see postscript). One week later, we find the truth: Kelly—unencumbered by facts, but seeing Big Pictures—doesn't understand the simplest elements in the case about which he declaims. We don't know why the Post tolerates this, but in the press corps, this sort of thing barely registers. Factual buffoonism, high and low, runs all through the press corps' work on this case. Sometimes pundits monkey with facts that matter; sometimes they play with facts that don't. Perkins, for example, in his recent column, served up this entertaining old chestnut:
It makes no difference in this case, of course, but it was clearly explained in the 1997 Senate hearings: the Hsi Lai temple's religious acolytes do not take vows of poverty. Elimination of factual misstatement was once assumed as a basic goal of the press. Now, the tired old standard is tossed away if misstatements set up pleasing jokes. (For the record, this joke originated with the Dole campaign on 10/17/96, the day the Buddhist temple story came to light.) But let's get back to Michael Kelly, lambasting the "always-dependable" Lanny Davis. Davis' letter, Kelly writes, is "a splendid example of Clintonite defense tactics." But what are we to say of Kelly's reply, in which he baldly misstates basic facts of this case? Can we possibly see in Kelly's bluster a familiar example of press corps malfeasance? It doesn't necessarily make any difference when Hsiah gathered the $55,000. (For the record, she did not do so when Gore was present. And Hsiah's prosecutors asserted that neither Gore nor the DNC knew what Hsiah had done.) But Dear Readers: How much confidence do you have in Kelly's judgment, when you see he hasn't even familiarized himself with basic facts? Do you have any faith that he has read the record, and that he has ever so much as considered the explanations the DNC has advanced? If Kelly doesn't even know when Hsiah gathered the dough, do you have any confidence—any at all—that he has ever read the Sullivan/Strauss testimony? And how about another question: When pundits like Novak don't mention that testimony, could it possibly be for an obvious reason—because they haven't ever bothered to read it, and don't know what these principals have said? That's right, folks. Pundits too lazy to do their work are highly susceptible to partisan spinners. Recent case in point: "congressional sources" approached certain scribes, and sold them exciting "new records."
Monday: Presented with exciting "new records," some scribes knew just how to react. Kell's bells: Michael Kelly is unfamiliar with the basic facts in this three-year-old case. That doesn't keep him from his usual practice of portraying various people as criminals. Here, for example, is how he began his furious 3/15 column:
Kelly enjoys himself picturing McAuliffe engaged in some criminal conduct. Note, if you will, the scribe's choice of words here: McAuliffe was "implicated" in illegal conduct. ("Implicated" is a supple word, much more adaptable than "charged" or "convicted.") By the way, do you have any confidence that Kelly is better informed about McAuliffe than he is about Hsiah? (For Kelly's treatment of last year's "farm chores," see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/3/99.) Kelly also touched on Hsiah in this paragraph. Here he continues directly:
Are we supposed to picture "Big Mama" as black or as Asian? The Post, for some reason, is now perfectly comfortable with B-room prison race humor. (And Hsiah, of course, is not in prison, as Kelly later pointed out.) But how about the facts, Dear Post? Do you require your furious scribes to know them? In a follow-up column, responding to a complaint, Kelly comically swears that his facts are "uncontroverted." One last question: It's a given that Kelly doesn't know basic facts. Why don't his editors know them? Hume-an error: At THE HOWLER, we're fans of Special Report, but this week, the panel has been in a snit. On Wednesday, the scribes were wondering why McCain's attacks on Gore didn't get big coverage, the way his attacks on Bush had once done. Boys—boys! Any chance it's because he stopped running for president? Seen any stories about Malcolm Forbes lately? Last night, the grumbling panel was batting around that lost/stolen/strayed White House e-mail. Why was the Justice Department now looking into the case? It might be a cover-up to thwart Klayman, Mort said:
Fred was mad. He was crossing his arms:
Except that one person thinks the deletions were unintentional. Here's a passage from this morning's Post, but it's been in the papers all week:
On Report, nobody mentioned what trusting old Dan Burton said. So why do we bother with four-member panels, if none of them will state basic facts? |