The lying left wing main stream media

The Washington Post's Darryl Fears, attributed a doozy of a statement to ACORN arch-nemesis James O'Keefe, claiming that "he said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans." http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/22/us/politics/AP-US-ACORNs-Troubles-CORRECTIVE.html?_r=2

This is simply too important an error, however, to forgive and forget.
Though huge numbers of Americans are no longer surprised when big media outlets botch facts or quotes, the Post's paraphrase ascribing to O'Keefe unsavory racial motives is no ordinary mistake.
Unsurprisingly, various left-wing blogs and people like Terry jump on it, using it to dirty O'Keefe up. But much more damaging is that the racial claim went viral when the AP repeated it on Saturday--meaning it likely made it to hundreds of newspapers across the country, as well as web sites like Yahoo and Google.

Even granting normal allowances, it's hard to see how this error was simply accidental. Fears has at least a decade of experience under his belt. People who have dealt with him in the past described him as "competent," "solid," and "knowledgeable."

Which raises the obvious question: How does such a capable veteran reporter attribute to someone words he never uttered? In fairness, paraphrases can be a little tricky, especially if establishing facts are added for clarity. But the plain reading--and only reasonable interpretation--of the paraphrase is that O'Keefe referenced ACORN's efforts to register minorities to vote.

While the Post correction was narrowly tailored to say that O'Keefe "did not specifically mention" ACORN's voter registration drives of minorities, Fears was much more blunt in the phone interview. "I think it was unfair to imply that James O'Keefe referenced Latinos and African-Americans in his statement to me," Fears explained. "He did not."

To his credit, Fears did not attempt to justify the mistake and readily admitted that O'Keefe never made any racial comment of any kind.

Even granting Fears the benefit of the doubt, how did his error get past his co-writer and one or more editors--especially for a front page story? Did no one else's eyebrow go up at someone citing racial motives for an investigation? Or were the people responsible for editing the piece so jaded that they believe conservatives are naturally racist?

This is not likely to be the last mainstream media mistake that unfairly smears O'Keefe. Because the enterprising 25-year-old has delivered absolutely devastating goods on ACORN, many on the left have decided to respond by destroying the messenger. How doing so changes the contents of the videos themselves is unclear, but it likely will bring some people perverse pleasure to vilify someone whose work they dislike.

The question now is whether the mainstream media plays along or actually takes a moment to verify information before (again) unfairly tainting O'Keefe's reputation.

Unfortunately we have come to the point in this country that papers like the Post and the NY Times, Pravda, are so biased all the way up the chain of command that they have become journalistic jokes. They have lost all credibility and will continue their slide into irrelevancy.

Now the left wing in Congress want to craft a bailout plan for the newspapers as well. It makes sense because there is a definite quid pro quo taking place. The once great Chicago Tribune has become a liberal rag since Sam Zell aquired it. The front page is now a joke and there is hardly ever an article that is critical of Barry. How can they be so clueless to see that the reason they are losing so many subscribers is because the only good use of the Tribune today is to wrap dead fish with it.