The trouble with Media Whores Online (8/15)

By Brendan Nyhan

With its sharply partisan attacks on conservatives and the media, Media Whores Online (MWO) has quickly established itself as the vanguard of liberal jargon. Since it was founded in 2000, the site has quickly won the loyalty of a large number of disgruntled Democratic partisans as well as praise from sympathetic liberal commentators like CNN "Crossfire" co-host Paul Begala, Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Joe Conason of Salon and the New York Observer. But perhaps the best indication of the site's increasing prominence are its growing list of citations in prominent media outlets (The Nation, Salon, Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times, among others).

Increasingly, MWO matters. That's why it's important to focus on what it actually publishes, rather than the identities of the editors (as Salon's June cover story did). As the editors openly admit, they use the worst tactics of their opponents: crude ad hominem attacks on the media, all-encompassing good guy/bad guy ideological dichotomies and inflammatory rhetorical attacks linking conservatives to dictatorship, Nazis, radical Islam and al Qaeda terrorists. This is simply not acceptable and the site's high-profile backers are wrong to indulge it; if MWO continues to gain strength, it will pull us further into the abyss of abusive and irrational rhetoric. (Click here to read the whole column.)

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8/14/2002 11:17:05 PM EST |

Ted Rall's faulty questions (8/14)

By Ben Fritz

Ted Rall has a number of questions about the attacks of September 11 and the war on terrorism, but he also got some of the facts lying behind those questions wrong in his latest syndicated column.

Asking “How many civilians died in Afghanistan?” Rall claims that, “[e]stimates begin at CNN’s conservative 3500.” A search of Lexis-Nexis, however, shows that no CNN reporter ever estimated that 3500 civilians died in Afghanistan. Rall is most likely referring to a study by University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold that was cited primarily by liberal media outlets. Far from being “conservative,” though, that study has been criticized by some experts for overestimating the actual number. A July 21 New York Times story based on "[o]n-site reviews of 11 locations" found that American airstrikes had "killed as many as 400 civilians".

Rall gets his facts wrong again when he asks “When did the US decide to invade Afghanistan?” There, he states the oft-repeated falsehood that, “As recently as April 2001, the Bush Administration funneled millions of dollars in aid to the Taliban in order to reward the hardline Islamic regime for virtually eliminating opium production.” He continues with the suggestion that “By June, however, relations had cooled noticeably and invasion plans were being prepared.” As Spinsanity has pointed out on numerous occasions, however, the US in fact gave $43 million to combat hunger in Afghanistan last April to the United Nations and non-governmental organizations, not to the Taliban. Rall uses this well-debunked myth, however, to suggest that the US was preparing to invade Afghanistan even before September 11.

Many of Rall’s questions are ones that one can very legitimately claim need answering. As is too often the case, though, Ted Rall, can’t keep his facts straight or his questioning fair.

Update 8/14 6:10 PM EST: Since it was published, this piece has been changed to correct an editing error and add an additional casualty estimate.

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8/14/2002 11:50:21 AM EST |

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