Fun With The New York Times

Just One Minute is having fun covering the Scooter Libby trial, but he seems to have the most fun pointing out the egregious errors about the most basic fundamentals of the case committed on a daily basis by the NYT's team of crack incompetents.

This is very basic stuff here, he sighs, after correcting, again, the Timesmen's J-school certified butchery of basic facts and background of the case.

Oh -- and I'm not talking about contentious stuff like whether Saddam Hussein had WMD's or ties to terrorists. I mean the basic chronology of the case that everyone, except the NYT's experts, seems to agree upon.

The Times super-duper experts do possess, however, the virtue of holding on to a child's magical capacity to be surprised by sheer wondrousness of the world, for example, confessing "surprise," as they say, at learning obscure facts known only by an eldritch elect who've mastered the arcane search device called "Google."

In fact, quite a few people in the media appear to be watching an Alternate Reality Trial according to Maguire, Murray Waas, for example, calling it curious that certain facts weren't asked about by lawyers when in fact those facts were asked about. Stuff like that.

A lot of the media seems to have been absent the day they taught journalism in journalism school.

What I like most about Maguire's coverage is that it tests my long-standing theory that just about any decent blogger (or any halfway bright American who can write a coherent sentence) could, with very little prep, step in and do the media's scary-hard job of writin' down shit that other people say as well as the media experts can.

So, we have here media experts and bloggers covering the exact same event at the exact same time.

Funny how it's the blogger who manages to not miss entire lines of questioning and at least is able to bluff a rough working knowlege of the prosecution's case.

Something Waas and the NYT's subatomic fissionists are having some difficulty with, despite those vaunted multiple layers of painstaking fact-checking editorial oversight.

Oh, PS: Libby probably walks.

posted by Ace at 05:18 AM

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