----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Pensinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, January 07, 2006 7:16 PM Subject: Re: Technique
> Both the Times and the Post spouted Bush propaganda prior > to the invasion and buried contradictory stories in the neither regions > of their papers. Hmm, according to Capital Blue, most of what I read was the consensus view of the time (see below). >And so on and so forth. They're slow, timid and > unreliable, but you may see the "god damned piece of paper" there yet. > Give it a year or two. I did a bit of research on Capitol Hill Blue, and I got some interesting results. First of all, Doug Thomspon, the founder of this site is an equal opportunity hater of modern presidents...he had similar things to say about Bill Clinton as he now does about George Bush. From other writings, he is clearly not a typical partisan flack....my guess is that he's a libertarian now, but he could be a "none of the above". He certainly has a low opinion of politicians. I then looked at his other rants on that website ....and I find a bit of inconsistency. For example, he claimed that he was way ahead of the other news media on "no weapons of mass destruction." I looked through his earlier rants and found nothing consistent with that. I did find a rant about jailing the "traitors" who were Democratic congressmen who went to Iraq before the war and said that Hussein was not a danger to the United States. http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_603.shtml <quote> A couple of traitorous bastards were allowed back into the United States of America this week. As traitors to their country, they should have been arrested when they got off the plane, led away in shackles and sent to jail to rot. Instead, they were interviewed by the media, held press conferences and went about their daily lives, enjoying the freedom that allowed them to go to the country of a sworn enemy of the United States, bad-mouth their homeland and then say we should believe an evil man like Saddam Hussein and not trust the President of our own country. <end quote> If he believed they were telling the truth, that Iraq posed no threat to the United States, then a full blown rant against their saying this seems rather peculiar. So, I googled to find articles before the war that stated that Iraq had no WMD, and didn't find them. It is possible that they existed, of course, but I've yet to find them. I did find some recent articles that are rather interesting. At http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_511.shtml we find an article that, as far as I can tell, is put together from several sources. Part of it states: <quote> The President's main point is correct: the CIA and most other US intelligence agencies believed before the war that Saddam had stocks of biological and chemical weapons, was actively working on nuclear weapons and "probably" would have a nuclear weapon before the end of this decade. <end quote> I'm pretty sure they got this bit from factcheck.org, but it is part of one of their articles, and it is consistent with the rest of the article. This is not even 2 months old. It is also consistent with what my understanding has been from the beginning. It is at least marginally inconsistent with what Thompson claims later. I also saw a lot of references to what they wrote after the lack of WMD was well established, but I don't consider that much of a scoop. With respect to spying by the NSA...what I saw reported in the New York Times was monitoring of traffic that was thought to be from inside the US to outside the US that was suspected of being tied to AQ. I read that being on a list of phone numbers would be enough to generate suspicion. I saw at http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=32&num=4648 the capitol hill blue column on spying. It does not seem to be talking about the same thing. It was a general comment, there is spying going on, but the details given were far different from what was published in the NY Times. I would argue that they are describing two different systems. It is possible that both exist, but I think Thomson is making a false claim when he states that he broke the same story the NY Times did. One other question that I had was the number and type of false claims that they made. When Dan Rather made a false claim about Bush, it was a very big deal. When a website does, it can slide under the radar. I see once instance in which Thompson owned up to publishing a Rather-like story http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/943260/posts He seemed to violate his own "second source rule" here. From what he wrote, and it has verisimilitude with me, he was genuinely conned. He gets points with me for owning up to this instance...but it still indicates that his methodology is not totally rigorous. Let's go to his comment on Bush's "temper tantrums." At what point would you question them? For example, if someone on the list were to write that they personally talked to (a) staff member(s) and that they were told that Bush was actually very considerate of his staff, would you question the report? Finally, older columns indicate that Thomspon thinks Clinton did a lot of illegal things that he got away with. He also indicated his disgust with people who defend Bill. My question on technique would be. "If you accept what he writes as fact about Bush, would you also accept accusations about Clinton as fact?" In essence, this is at the heart of the technique question. Personally, I'd question the reliability of this source much more than a front page article at the Times or Post. It is probable that their carefulness/timidty will cause them to be slower at reporting true stories. But, it would also cause them to be less likely to report false stories. Further, a false story in the NY Times, the Washington Post, on CBS, etc. tends to be run to ground. I didn't even hear about the false story in CapitolBlue until I started doing leg work on my own. The falsity was overwhelming....the person who was the source had never been to the White House when he claimed to meet with the president. That leaves us to wonder how many false claims by CapitolBlue might exist that were not trivially falsifiable, as this one was. After the research I have arrived at a conclusion. Thompson has a bipartisan bias towards believing the worst of politicians. Stories that reflect poorly on both Democratic and Republican politicians are likely to be true. To some extent, I share the bias, but my cynicism is not as deep as his. I see my view as more nuance than his. So, I'd take his claims about both Bill and George with a large grain of salt. At the end, let me go back to technique again. If you say that you think that, if you see it in Capital Blue, it is a fact, then I should be able to quote articles in Capital Blue, and then expect you to treat those quotes as statements of fact. If you don't, then the question becomes how do we separate the true statements on Capitol Blue from the false ones. My argument on technique that is behind this thread is that we should not make the political beliefs of those getting skewered or those doing the skewering the basis for establishing truth. I'll accept that Capital Hill Blue is a bipartisan skewered, and I take skewering of both Republicans and Democrats with a grain of salt....trying to follow my own rule of thumb. If you accept both basically as written, then we would differ on technique, but agree on that particular principal. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
