Originally, this was to be a story on "Time magazine's greatest errors". After a little cursory research, it was determined that a book would have to be written to cover that subject.
Part of the reason is Time's been around since 1923. But a larger part of the problem can be traced to the moment when Time's management made the decision that liberal political shilling--whether for global warming, taxes, the latest Democrat "next big thing"--would be an acceptable substitute for objective news reporting.
So the subject was limited to the last couple of years, a more manageable topic.
NOVEMBER 2007: FISA Falsehoods by Joe Klein
Joe Klein tells outright falsehoods--we called them "lies" when I was a kid--about the FISA bill and misleads his readers about what the bill contains.
We don't often agree with Glenn Greenwald, but he does a pretty good job of calling Klein on it and then following up when Klein responds in typical MSM fashion.
On Wednesday, I documented that Joe Klein's column in this week's Time Magazine contained multiple false statements about the new FISA bill -- The RESTORE Act -- passed by House Democrats last week. The most obvious and harmful inaccuracy was his claim that that bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court" and that it therefore "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." Based on those outright falsehoods, Klein called the House Democrats' bill "well beyond stupid."
Greenwald documents the twists and turn that Klein embarks upon in order to avoid admitting he was wrong--or apologizing for it. Both concepts are foreign to most of the MSM: the substitution of faux facts to support the writer's viewpoint and apologies.
That day, Klein responded on his blog to what I wrote without acknowledging that he was doing so and without even telling his readers what the criticisms were. He insisted that everything he wrote was accurate ("as I reported, [the bill] obliquely gives foreign terrorists the same procedures as American citizens, if not the same rights"). He also said that the RESTORE Act was just "a partisan waste of time, fodder for lawyers and civil liberties extremists."
Yesterday -- Saturday night on Thanksgiving weekend -- Klein returned to the Time blog to write an extremely conditional, weaselly, self-justifying and partial "correction" to what he wrote in the print magazine.
This article also posted at DBKP.com: "Time: Little News, Plenty of Mistakes and Political Statements".
FEAR SELLS
DECEMBER 1979: The Cooling of America
Showing the same deep scientific understanding that Time exhibits in their many Global Warming articles of late, Time sounds the alarm for global cooling.
Charlotte Conservative assesses Time's climate change agenda--warming or cooling.
"Nothing says “liberal” like crowd control through paranoia."
Time obviously subscribes to the motto that "Nothing sells like a good climate panic".
Global Warming is the fear d'jour at Time; it one of Time's most popular cover stories: four in the last two years. Including this cover for the upcoming week.
WWII vets have already registered their outrage over another Time Photo Shop job.
When the oceans don't rise and the residents of coastal mega-cities have moved on to their next worry, Time's covers of the past two years will be reminders of what happens to a once-great magazine that replaces news with political activism.
Time has lost over half a million paid subscribers 1997-2007.
TIME's ASSESSMENT of REAGAN in 1987
Time breathlessly reports on Iran-Contra, asking the cover question about President Reagan, "Can He Recover?" Famously, and on cue, Time answered its own question then with a "NO!"
Reagan did just fine: Reagan is considered one of the Top Ten Greatest Presidents in almost every historian's list.
Time, on the other hand has watched it's subscription base and stock price go into steady decline since the Reagan years. It recovered briefly and it's high stock price (91.75 in 1999) has since tumbled. A share of Time stock can now be had for $14.70 today.
MARCH 2007: Reagan's PhotoShopped Tear
Time Photo Shopped a tear onto their cover picture of Ronald Reagan. It took the intrepid digger to find that the photo was a fake: the original picture of Reagan taken by one photographer; the tear added by another person at Time.
The March 2006 Time story about the U.S. Marines at Haditha was going to also be included, but Time was forced to make so many retractions and corrections to their original storyine of "evil U.S. soldiers massacring innocent civilians", that this particular subject would have made for a post of its own.
Atlas Shrugged asks a pertinent (rhetorical) question: "You think TIME will run another cover?"
The fact that the question is a rhetorical one helps explain why more and more people have abandoned Time as a reliable news source.
So these are our picks of Time's biggest mistakes of the past three years.
Impressive.
Were any stories left out that should have been included?
by Mondoreb
images/Sources:
* When a story goes terribly wrong
* amadeo
* Time magazine's FISA fiasco shows how Beltway reporters mislead the country
* Global Warming Strikes Back
* Time
* Time archives
* Timesonline
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