Wednesday, July 25, 2007

More MSM Misinformation...AND Liberal Nepotism!





Jack Kelly at RealClearPolitics.com has scooped two new major incidents of U.S. MSM misinformation, although today, in the wake of the AP using Hammas operative, “Green Helmet” for coverage of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict, the NY Times being found out using insurgents as war photographers, this is hardly news any more.

Kelly notes, “Jennifer Hunter (pictured above) is married to Chicago Sun-Times publisher John Cruickshank, which explains why Ms. Hunter writes a column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here is why she should not.

“On July 16, Ms. Hunter wrote a column which began: "After watching the top five Democratic candidates for president speak before a trial lawyers' group Sunday, attorney Jim Ronca of Philadelphia, a staunch Republican, became certain of one thing: He is not going to vote for a Republican in the 2008 presidential election."

“A suspicious reader checked out Mr. Ronca's political contributions. Mr. Ronca had made 14 since 1994 -- 12 to Democrats. The Democratic candidates received $7,000; the GOP candidates $750.”

Whoops! I guess Jenny Hunter goofed...Big Time!

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“Mr. Ronca's contribution record was posted on several Web sites, whose readers flooded Ms. Hunter with demands for a correction.

“If Ms. Hunter had fessed up, I wouldn't be writing about her. But she responded by attacking Web loggers for doing the research she should have done, and blaming her error on her editor.

"The grumbling arose partially because my editor took a small part of my story and made it into a headline: 'GOP lawyer sold on Dems,'" Ms. Hunter wrote in her July 19 column.

"But what her readers objected to was the description of Mr. Ronca as a "staunch Republican," which was Ms. Hunter's own, and which appeared in her lede. To blame the headline writer for the mistake is as dishonest as it is lame.”

Maybe Jenny Hunter should be writing for hate sites like D-Kos or Media Matters and not the Chicago Sun-Times.

Mr. Kelly also uncovered yet another atrocity against the truth at the New Republic. As he notes, “The New Republic was shamed when two high profile writers (Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass) were discovered to have made up stories. The venerable liberal magazine apparently has another scandal on its hands.

“In last week's issue the New Republic ran an article by "Scott Thomas," who -- the editors tell us -- is a pseudonym for a soldier currently serving in Iraq.

"Thomas" describes three instances of shocking behavior by U.S. troops. In the first, his buddies humiliate a woman in the chow hall who was disfigured by an IED. In the second, a soldier excavating a mass grave puts a portion of a child's skull on his head and wears it like a helmet for an entire day. In the third, the driver of a Bradley fighting vehicle deliberately runs over a dog in the street.

“The New Republic's editors told a skeptical Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard the chow hall incident took place at FOB Falcon near Baghdad, and the mass grave was uncovered in farmland south of the Baghdad airport.

“But soldiers currently serving at FOB Falcon say they've never seen a woman there fitting Scott Thomas' description. (There are only a handful of women, and just one small mess hall on the base.) They also find incredible Thomas' claim he couldn't tell whether the woman was a soldier or a civilian. (Soldiers in Iraq wear their uniforms -- and carry their weapons -- at all times.) "There was no mass grave found during the construction of our Coalition outposts at any time," Major Kirk “Luedeke, the public affairs officer at FOB Falcon, emailed milblogger Matt Sanchez.”

Why do Left-wing “journalists” continue to insist on disgracing themselves like this?

Interestingly enough, Jenny Hunter’s bio says nothing about being the “boss’s wife.”

“Jennifer Hunter is a political columnist for the Sun-Times. Previously she wrote editorials for the paper about foreign affairs public policy and she also penned a weekly column about women’s issues, ranging from the abortion debate to the perils of wearing stiletto heels. Hunter was the editor of North Shore magazine before she joined the Sun-Times in 2004. She spent much of her 31-year professional career in Canada before moving to Chicago six years ago — working as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette, the Toronto Globe and Mail and Maclean’s weekly news magazine. In the late 1980s she took time away from reporting to work as an associate professor in the Ryerson University School of Journalism in Toronto, where she stayed for six years until joining Maclean’s as Vancouver bureau chief. She was one of the first women in North America to cover sports: travelling on the road for part of a season with the Montreal Expos in 1981. She has written about business issues, sports, city news and politics and her stories range from the drama of the diamond rush in the Canadian Arctic, to an interview with wrestler Hulk Hogan (while she was four months pregnant), a profile of former Mets catcher Gary Carter, an afternoon at home with writer George Plimpton and the riots at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 2000. She intends to keep on writing until someone tells her to stop. And she will likely ignore them anyway.”

As Jack Kelly says, “The Web makes it harder for journalists to lie and get away with it. This is a lesson Jennifer Hunter and the editors of the New Republic evidently haven't learned.”




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