The Zombie Quote Lives On...And On...And On...
(February 2, 2008 -- 9:25 AM EDT // link // )

The original bogus ABCNews/Drudge quote of Bill Clinton allegedly saying he wants to "slow" our economy pops up yet again! And -- one more time, everybody -- it's not the blogosphere spreading it, but a traditional news org.

From Investor's Business Daily...

Slow The Economy? Chill, Bill

The Environment: As a touted effect of global warming melts under the glare of science, Bill Clinton says we must slow the economy to save the earth. How's that again? Hillary, call your husband...

In a typically verbose speech, he put forth his idea of what the U.S. and other industrialized nations need to do: "We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save our planet for our grandchildren."

Now Bill supposedly said we "must" slow the economy. Except, of course, that he didn't say this at all. The story just keeps on mutating into ever more grotesque and unrecognizable forms, with that absurd out-of-context quote as its life-force.

This pretty conclusively proves, as I said, that the inclusion of the full context and video far down in the original ABC piece just isn't a defense at all. Once that quote was torn out of context and placed high up in ABC's story, it was destined to live forever.

And with that, this blog is done with this topic.

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Newspaper Picks Up Bogus ABC Piece, Says Bill Wants "Economic Slowdown"
(February 1, 2008 -- 6:32 PM EDT // link // )

Okay, the zombie lie marches on. The bogus ABC/Drudge story saying Bill Clinton wants to "slow down our economy" gets picked up by a Philadelphia newspaper and mutates into grotesque parody:

Bill Clinton Wants An Economic Slowdown

Former President Bill Clinton was in Denver, Colo. yesterday campaigning for his wife, Hillary, and arguing that the government should put the brakes on the economy for the sake of the planet.

"We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren," Mr. Clinton told the crowd.

The former president blamed the overactive economic nature of industrialized nations for increased greenhouse gases. But Mr. Clinton understood his plan was not without problems.

Yep -- now Bill "wants an economic slowdown." And this is now "his plan." And of course the supporting evidence is the original absurd out-of-context quote, which is featured at the top of the story, just like in the ABC original.

Let's remember what happened here. The blogosphere prevented this story from gaining serious traction by swiftly knocking it down. Whatever dissemination this falsehood does get is the fault of more traditional outlets like ABC and the above paper. Just so we have that clear.

Special thanks to TPM Reader DOK for sending this in.

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New York Times Writer On Bogus Tapper Claim About Bill Clinton: It's The Blogosphere's Fault
(February 1, 2008 -- 2:19 PM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

This is worth a look, because you hear this argument time and again. New York Times writer Andrew Revkin has written a long dissection of yesterday's episode involving Jake Tapper and his piece's bogus claim that Bill Clinton said he wants to "slow down our economy" to combat global warming. Revkin's conclusion: It's the blogosphere's fault.

If you're not up to speed on this, you can read about the whole episode here. This is what Revkin has to say about it:

Further down in the post, Mr. Tapper included the full text and a link to the entire speech. The context makes it clear that Mr. Clinton was not recommending a slowdown to limit warming, and instead was saying that an economic slowdown and emissions cuts in the United States and other industrialized countries would have no effect because emerging economic powerhouses like China would not follow suit. But the blogosphere, for the most part, doesn’t seem to have time for full transcripts — only the portion that suits some preexisting stance.

Revkin says that this episode shows off the Web's "greatest failing." Look, you constantly hear this sort of blame heaped on "the blogosphere" for such episodes. But it's almost comically simplistic. Indeed, it's striking what an extraordinary misreading of the episode this is. After all, it was the blogosphere that quickly debunked this myth and thus prevented it from spreading farther and wider than it did.

Just to restate the obvious, this episode was the creation of three parties: Tapper, ABC News, and Drudge. Revkin uncritically points to Tapper's explanation that the piece put video and the context of the quote further down in the piece. But so what? The problem here, again, was the obviously misleading use of the quote out of context and high up in the piece. This simple act, when combined with ABC News' misleading headline and the willingness of Drudge to grab on to the falsehood and push it out there, created a story that wasn't true.

Let's not kid ourselves here. We all -- Tapper included -- know how the freak show works. If that quote hadn't been torn out of context like that, there wouldn't have been any story -- and no link on Drudge, either.

Obviously, the Internets do sometimes abet the spreading of falsehoods. But the "blogosphere" is the last party that deserves blame here. The point is, some folks use the Internet responsibly, and others don't -- and in this case, ABC and Drudge didn't. Those in the "blogosphere" who swiftly knocked the falsehood down, on the other hand, did. Let's be more precise when assigning blame, shall we?

Update: A newspaper has now picked up the ABC story and turned it into truly grotesque parody.

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Hopelessly Addicted To The Bill-Hurts-Hillary Narrative
(February 1, 2008 -- 9:21 AM EDT // link // )

Yesterday I noted that the exit polls from recent contests are inconclusive on the question of whether Bill's antics have damaged Hillary's candidacy to the extent pundits and commentators claim.

Today, The New York Times's Kit Seelye takes a look at the exit numbers and concludes the opposite -- that Bill did in fact damage her in the South Carolina primary:

But deploying him full time in South Carolina may have backfired after he began to dominate the news in an increasingly negative light. Fifty-eight percent of voters in South Carolina said Mr. Clinton’s campaigning was important to their vote — and almost half of them voted for Mr. Obama, who received 80 percent of the state’s black vote and beat Mrs. Clinton in a landslide.

See, I think the picture is far more complicated than this. Let's take a look at all the South Carolina exit poll numbers on this question:

The number Seelye cherry-picked out of here is accurate, but what does it really tell us? Nothing, I submit. After all, Hillary lost among voters who say Bill was "important" to their choice by a significantly smaller margin than she lost the overall vote by. Indeed, taken all together these numbers could also have produced a paragraph like this:

Many commentators say that Bill's outbursts damaged Hillary in South Carolina, but exit polls suggest that this may not be the case. Obama beat Clinton by a margin smaller than his overall victory among voters who said former President Clinton was "important" to their vote. What's more, Clinton did nearly three times better among voters who said he was "important" to their consideration than she did among voters who said he was "not important" to it. Among voters who said he was "very important," Clinton beat Obama. The size of Clinton's vote percentages were higher in direct proportion to the degree of importance voters accorded the former President.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying that my interpretation is right and that Seelye's is wrong. I'm just saying that the numbers plainly support both interpretations. Did Bill's escapades turn off some voters? Almost certainly, but clearly, the picture is much more complex than this simplistic narrative-of-the-moment has it. The point is, the exits are inconclusive on the question, but Seelye nonetheless made an editorial decision to use that number to tell the story her way.

Will Bill prove to have damaged Hillary among voters in the long term? Again: It's perfectly possible. But we simply don't know right now. What is obvious, though, is that this sort of interpretation tells us far more about the obvious desire some political reporters have for the story to be that Bill is destroying Hillary's candidacy than it does about what's actually happening here.

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ABC, Tapper Dig In On Piece Reporting Falsely That Bill Clinton Said He Wants To Slow Our Economy
(January 31, 2008 -- 6:19 PM EDT // link // )

I hate to pile on, but this is just unreal. As you all know by now, ABC News' Jake Tapper has been taking a pounding all over the place for this piece, which led by quoting Bill as follows...

"We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren."

Four minutes after it was posted, that piece produced this headline on Drudge, who is apparently a very close reader of Tapper's blog...

Bill Clinton: 'We Just Have to Slow Down Our Economy' to Fight Global Warming...

Pretty startling -- A leading Dem wants to "slow down" our economy? Well, as everyone else has shown by now, the full context of the quote showed that Bill was making the opposite point. This quote was cherry-picked in a startlingly questionable way to produce the story that Drudge seized on. Everyone has already done the work on this: Just go read Steve Benen's post to read the full quote.

Now Tapper has defended himself in a new post. He rightly points out that he himself produced the full context lower down in his original post and linked to video of Bill's speech. Tapper continues that he did this because he "wasn't sure" what Bill meant: "That's why I provided the video links, the full quote, and gave a number of options as to what he meant," Tapper says.

But come on. The problem here is the original cherry-picking of the quote and the printing of it high up and out of context, which was highly questionable and indeed created a story that simply isn't true.

Tapper knows full well how the freak show works. He had to know perfectly well that yanking that quote out of context and injecting it into the bloodstream in that form would make it true that Bill said that, no matter how much context and video he added later in the piece. But he did it anyway. Indeed, the Republican National Committee has already sent out a release attacking Bill for the cherry-picked quote.

What's more, ABC is still sticking to this bogus shading of the story to make news. This headline is still on the ABC News politics page:

Bill Clinton: Slow Economy To Save Planet

Yep -- Bill wants to slow our economy. Sorry -- he said those words, and because they were quoted in isolation, this will be true forever.

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Video Retrospective: Elizabeth And John Edwards Take On Media Stars
(January 30, 2008 -- 3:35 PM EDT // link // )

Now that John Edwards has dropped out of the race, it's worth pausing to reconsider the role John and his wife played in what I think is one of the most under-appreciated stories of Campaign 2008.

Specifically: Thanks largely to the Edwards couple, aggressive push-back against right-wing (and even traditional) media figures went mainstream in Dem primary politics in a big way. Indeed, the Dem candidates adopted this sort of push-back as almost a de rigeur tactic, a way of throwing wrenches into the wingnut slime machine while simultaneously appealing to Dem primary voters, who can't get enough of this sort of stuff.

Let's remember that Elizabeth and John Edwards led the way on this. It began with John Edwards' boycott of Fox News, a move that was soon duplicated by other candidates, much to Fox's chagrin. It continued with Elizabeth's surprise attack on Ann Coulter on Hardball and her spirited emergence as a tormentor of other wingnut media stars and a kind of all around media noodge on her husband's behalf.

Some dismissed this stuff as little more than an ongoing stunt designed to raise money and win John attention. But the Edwards' gripe was frequently legit, and not just about right wing media figures. Their beef with the traditional media, too, often seemed fair, particularly when it came to the big news orgs' over-emphasis on the Hillary-Obama showdown and their willingness to traffic in winger-style narratives (see Haircut, $400). What's more, the pair made some strong points about our discourse in general, amplifying the liberal media critique.

And it made for some great TV. So, without further ado, here's our video retrospective of Elizabeth (and John) taking on the media.

Elizabeth launches a surprise attack on Ann Coulter, takes her on for calling her husband a "faggot" and worse...

Elizabeth hits Coulter again brutally hard, accusing her of polluting our discourse...

Elizabeth takes on Rush over the "phony soldiers" flap, skewering him for being a chicken-hawk and worse...

Elizabeth goes after Chris Matthews, attacks the press for continuing to cover the Dem primary as a two-person race even after his Iowa second-place finish...

Fox's Neil Cavuto practically breaks down in tears and begs the Dems boycotting the network to come back...

Let's hope we hear lots more from these two.

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Big Question Of The Day
(January 30, 2008 -- 9:50 AM EDT // link // )

Now that John Edwards is dropping out of the presidential race, will it be permissible to say that his loss should be blamed both on Edwards himself and simultaneously on the undeniably unbalanced media coverage of the campaign?

After all, there can be more than one reason that things happen in politics, right?

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Bob Kerrey's Tame Response To Bob Herbert
(January 29, 2008 -- 4:08 PM EDT // link // )

The other day this blog took a whack at Bob Herbert's weekend column in The Times, which among other things used a single anonymous racist blog posting about Barack Obama to insinuate that the Clintons are "gleeful" about the rampant racism that's been uncorked by the dust-ups between the two leading Dem candidates.

Herbert's column, which relied on quotes from everyone but the Clintons to make its case, also hit Hillary supporter Bob Kerrey for wrongly saying that Obama attended a "secular madrassa," which Herbert held up as proof that Kerrey was trying to slime the Illinois Senator.

Now Kerrey has responded in a letter to The Times:

Re “Questions for the Clintons,” by Bob Herbert (column, Jan. 26): Mr. Herbert took a piece of a complimentary statement I made about Senator Barack Obama’s being qualified to be president, imputed that my motive was to “slime” the senator, sandwiched a few of my words between a statement by Andrew Young and a vile anonymous Internet posting, and rested his case.

Though I am generally not surprised by this technique, as a regular reader of Mr. Herbert, I was surprised by his use of the device. I attribute this to the passions this campaign has aroused.

Kerrey is "surprised" by Herbert's tactic and attributes it "to the passions this campaign has aroused"? I'm sorry, but this is pretty weak stuff.

Herbert's use of an anonymous blog posting to score points was straying deep into Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs territory; a tactic as rank as this is deeply unbecoming to the paper. And while Herbert did say that Kerrey subsequently apologized, he didn't tell readers that Kerrey also claimed that his reference to the madrassa was unintentional, a key detail given the insinuations, or that the Obama campaign accepted Kerrey's letter of explanation.

In short, the column resorted to some pretty questionable tricks indeed. Whichever candidate you support, such stuff really fouls up our discourse, whoever its target, and we shouldn't be afraid to say so a little more forcefully.

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A Note On Bill Clinton's Comparison Of Obama And Jackson
(January 29, 2008 -- 11:19 AM EDT // link // )

Let me try to offer up two thoughts which I think are not mutually exclusive and are both true at the same time:

(1) Bill Clinton's evocation of Jesse Jackson's South Carolina victories on the day of the primary vote between Obama and Hillary was dumb and reckless. The comparison of the two "black candidates" in this fashion was an unseemly injection of race into the discussion.

(2) At the same time, in the current toxic environment, it's also dumb and reckless for prominent columnists to seize on the most inflammatory possible interpretation of Bill's motives and adopt it as absolute fact.

Take a look at how Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson characterized Bill's comments today:

The only possible reason for invoking Jackson's name was to telegraph the following message: Barack Obama is black, so if a lot of black people decide to vote for him -- doubtless out of racial solidarity -- it doesn't really mean squat.

And the reasons to send that message would be to devalue an Obama victory in South Carolina; to inoculate the Clinton campaign against potential losses next Tuesday in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee -- Southern states with large African American populations; and, most important, to pigeonhole Obama as "a black candidate" as opposed to a candidate who, among other characteristics, is black.

That would help Hillary Clinton in other states, because the more prominent race becomes in this campaign, the more likely it is that she will win the nomination.

Robinson tells us that the "only possible reason" Bill could have had for bringing up Jackson was the most controversial one: He was saying Obama's black support "doesn't really mean squat" and was trying to pigeonhole Obama as the "black candidate" to provoke a white backlash nationally. Other writers, such as Christopher Hitchens, have grabbed on to this as the only conceivable explanation for Bill's motives.

But here's the thing: The plain fact is that this is not the "only possible reason" Bill could have had for bringing this up.

The original exchange is here. Any fair reading of it suggests two possible interpretations. The first is that Bill -- having been asked why it takes two Clintons to take on Obama -- was talking specifically about South Carolina. By this reading he was simply saying Obama's appeal to blacks makes him formidable in South Carolina -- and explains why it takes two Clintons to challenge him there. This interpretation is as least plausible, since the comments came on the day of voting in that state. And if it's correct, Bill's comments, while unseemly and historically reductive, aren't anywhere near as cynical or controversial as suggested by pundits like Robinson.

The second, far less charitable interpretation is that Bill was talking not just about South Carolina, but about the overall contest. In this reading he was saying that Jesse Jackson's strength in the state -- and Obama's -- were mainly due to his black support and didn't speak to any general election strength. So maybe Bill meant that any South Carolina victory for Obama -- and hence the black support that it was built on -- "didn't mean squat" in the long run. Did Bill also intend to pigeonhole Obama as the "black candidate" and provoke a white backlash? It's perfectly possible. But it's just not possible to conclude this unequivocally based on what Bill actually said.

Which of these ways did Bill mean his comments? Guess what: I don't know -- and neither does Robinson. I do know, however, that Robinson's claim that the "only possible reason" for Bill's remarks was that he was implementing a cynical long-term racial strategy is plainly false. Any of the above interpretations is "possible."

Bottom line: While we do know that Bill was making a dumb and unseemly racial comment, we simply don't know precisely what Bill's motives for saying these things were. When prominent columnists pretend that they do, they're just polluting the discussion further when what we really need are reasoned and measured responses, such as those offered by Jesse Jackson and even Barack Obama himself.

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John Solomon Sighting! Takes Shot At Liberal Blogospheric Critics
(January 28, 2008 -- 11:07 AM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

Via Romenesko, our old pal John Solomon starts today as editor of The Washington Times. He kicked things off with a shot at the liberal blogs and a rather questionable defense of his record in an interview with The Connecticut Post:

"All the stories the liberal blogs have attacked have never been questioned by my own editors. They stood by them," Solomon says. "The blogs point to no factual errors but complain that I highlighted something they didn't care for or preferred that I would have focused on something else."

That's a pretty convenient way to recount things. What Solomon neglects to tell you is that Washington Post editor Deborah Howell actually sided with the liberal blogospheric critique on not just one, but both of the Washington Post stories by Solomon that attracted the most criticism. Howell, obviously, is a more impartial observer than Solomon's own editors, since they worked on the stories in question.

Here's Howell on Solomon's story front-paging the bogus insinuation that there was something wrong with Edwards' house sale:

I kept waiting to read about the connection between the Klaassens and Edwards that would make this sale unseemly; it wasn't there... The story was interesting, but it was more of an item for the Reliable Source or In the Loop -- and not worth Page 1. It seemed like a "gotcha" without the gotcha.

Meanwhile, Howell also lambasted Solomon's piece insinuating that Edwards' work for a hedge fund rendered his anti-poverty work hypocritical. Her column attacked the tone of the story for "falling short on fairness."

Solomon's claim that "the blogs point to no factual errors" is also a dodge. The issue with Solomon isn't so much the botching of individual facts, but his artful arrangement of them to insinuate all sorts of wrongdoing that just never happened.

Indeed, it seems obvious that this is precisely why the Washington Times hired him -- because he's very skilled at taking available facts, arranging them into hit pieces, and passing them off as real news.

At any rate, it's kind of appropriate that Solomon kicked off his new gig with yet another excursion into bamboozlement -- this time about his own record.

Update: It's actually worse than I thought. Solomon's claim that the blogs didn't question him on the facts is just false. See TPM's own Paul Kiel here and Media Matters here for more details.

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