The headline on a story by Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi is "On Iraq, Journalists Didn't Fail. They Just Didn’t Succeed." To make that case, though, he has to redefine "failure" so far down that it's hardly possible to avoid failing.
Mar
22
2013
Washington Post Prints Iraq Lies, 2013 Edition
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Thanks to the Washington Post, we're still reading lies about the Iraq War ten years later.
Mar
18
2013
Two Sides to Every Drone Death
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The UN's special human rights envoy found that the CIA's drone strikes in Pakistan have "resulted in far more civilian casualties than the U.S. government has recognized." But that message was muddled by the Washington Post's he said-she said approach to the question of civilian deaths.
Mar
15
2013
Washington Post's Austerity Backer, Still Trying
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The Washington Post's Howard Schneider asks, "In Europe's grand battle over growth vs. austerity, has Ireland proved that austerity works?" If so, keeping unemployment more than 10 percentage points above pre-recession levels is an odd sort of "working."
Mar
01
2013
FAIR TV: Sequester Spin, Iranian vs. U.S. Propaganda, Stop & Frisk Factcheck
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This week we take a look at how the Washington Post challenges some sequester spin. And CBS pokes fun at Iranian claims about Argo–but are the Iranians right that Argo is fiction? Plus George Will has some thoughts about stop-and-frisk policing.
Feb
27
2013
Forget Objectivity–Can We Have a Fact-Based Media?
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There is no objective evidence that allowing two people of the same gender to marry will harm mixed-gender marriages. So you might think objective reporting would treat that assertion as a dubious claim.
Feb
26
2013
Heard the One About Lazy French Workers?
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The Washington Post brings us the story of a right-wing U.S. businessman who is in a very public fight over the work habits of the French. Yes, we all know the folklore about the lazy French. What would be helpful here is some dose of reality–that's what journalism can be good for.
Feb
25
2013
Hugo Chavez Keeps Showering the Poor
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The Chavez years, as best we can tell, have been enormously beneficial to the Venezuelan public as owners of public resources. But when corporate media write about Chavez's policies, they can barely disguise their real feelings–as if the natural order of things would mean that private companies managed the oil industry and captured the profits.
Feb
15
2013
Are Iranian Magnets the New Aluminum Tubes?
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In the run up to the Iraq War, the New York Times famously reported on an Iraqi scheme to procure special aluminum tubes that could only have one purpose: Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program. The claims were false–Iraq, as it turned out, had no nuclear program–but still hugely influential.
Feb
13
2013
The Pentagon's Budget Crunch: No Dissenting Views
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The Washington Post had a whole piece devoted to yet another round of complaints from military leaders–without a single comment from anyone who might take the view that cutting military spending would not be such a disaster.
Feb
11
2013
A Beltway Villager's Bad Advice for Obama
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The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza wrote a piece giving Barack Obama some advice on what to say in his State of the Union address. The article almost reads like a parody of Beltway punditry.
