Time Magazine: Errors, Mistakes and Political Shilling

Time's Greatest Mistakes of the Past Two Years



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


DBKP.com - Bigger, Better!.
Back to DBKP at Blogger Front Page

Mainstream Media: New Cutbacks in Jobs, Bureaus, Stock Prices, Advertising, Ratings

Cutbacks in Everything
--Except Left Wing Rhetoric



When you're Selling What No One's Buying

The big story of the Mainstream Media in the last week is cuts.

Cuts in jobs, in advertising revenue, in circulation, in ratings: in short, cuts in every meaningful indicator of how successful the Mainstream Media is.

Which is to say, they're not.

Not doing their job, not successful.

What the MSM is selling--liberal viewpoints, solutions, hand-wringing, harangues and advice--is the one area news consumers aren't buying.

Some news blurbs from the last week amplify this point.

NBC is closing their Chicago and Dallas bureaus.

NBC: Atlanta, which has managed Miami and New Orleans assignments, will add Dallas. Chicago will report in through the Northeast bureau.

The Liberal Lady, the New York Times is cutting newsroom jobs.

After years of resisting the newsroom cuts that have hit most of the industry, The New York Times will bow to growing financial strain and eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs this year, the executive editor said Thursday.

The Washington Post is closing a printing plant and offering buyouts to all employees.

Washington Post Co. will offer buyouts to employees at its flagship newspaper to cut costs as revenue and readership decline.

Buyouts will be offered to all newspaper employees. The newspaper employs 2,400 people, including 800 in news, she added. Revenue at the publishing division, which includes the newspaper, fell 8 percent to $657.2 million in the first nine months of 2007.

At the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, 100-150 jobs are being cut at each.

Tribune Co. employees were notified Wednesday that hundreds of jobs will be cut at the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other publications — the first cutbacks since billionaire Sam Zell took the media company private last year.

In separate memos, Tribune Publisher Scott Smith said 100 jobs would be cut and his counterpart at the Times, David Hiller, said 100-150 jobs would be eliminated.

Last fall, CNN dropped Reuters--but said the move wasn't about falling ratings and cutting costs.

Honest.

But in a twist, the cable news network CNN asserted that a decision to drop the Reuters news service after 27 years was not done to cut costs.

Newsweek is cutting the amount of copies it is guaranteeing advertisers by a half million.

Newsweek magazine plans to cut its guaranteed paid circulation by 500,000 copies, according to industry magazine Advertising Age.

The 16 percent reduction would lower the number of paid subscribers Newsweek promises advertisers from 3.1 million to 2.6 million, Advertising Age reported, citing people with knowledge of the move.

About a year ago, Time announced cuts in its news operations staff. It said at the time that there was no timetable as to future cuts.

As anyone who follows news closely, the nine MSM companies above are all flagship liberal operations. Whether it's big government, Blame America First, Global Warming, more taxes and regulations or endorsement of Democrat candidates and their programs, the MSM is all liberal, all the time.

In most cases, the MSM "news" shows and editorial staffs operate as a wing of the Democrat National Committee.

Don't expect the continuing MSM death spiral to change the outlook of either the reporting or the personnel responsible for the slide.

All nine of the above MSM mouthpieces staunchly maintain that they are unbiased "news" operations.

Their viewers and readers and in many cases, their stockholders, beg to differ.

And have been for some time now.

NBC denied that they were even scaling back their operations, labeling the cutbacks as streamlining in an "effort to achieve more journalism and less bureaucracy in the newsgathering operation."

They could achieve all of the above aims by simply requiring their newsrooms to drop their liberal viewpoints by hiring a few conservatives and losing the liberal herd mentality that infects their news operations.

When the National Enquirer reported on the John Edwards Love Child Scandal in November, not one--not a single, solitary, lonely--reporter from a MSM outlet asked Edwards one, single, solitary question about it.

NOT ONE ever asked the candidate if he had been in telephone contact with Rielle Hunter--the woman the Enquirer kept under tabs for months after the campaign spirited her out of sight within 5 miles of Edwards' campaign headquarters from New York--since Hunter had found out she was pregnant.

NOT ONE.

In the meantime, their viewers and readers were buying up Enquirers by the millions and Googling "Rielle Hunter" at such a pace that the woman's name became the most-searched for term on the Internet for awhile.

The news public was buying "Rielle Hunter"--and the Mainstream press wasn't selling any. They were selling anything and everything else that they were interested in, not their potential consumers.

[DBKP John Edwards Love Child Scandal Library of 25 stories on John Edwards, Rielle Hunter, the National Enquirer and the MSM news blackout on the story.]

The MSM tries to put the blame for their decline on the medium and hopes to counter it by creating blogs on the Internet. One suspects that they won't be selling anything different on their MSM blogs--and the public won't be doing any buying of their news there, either.

The Mainstream Media should borrow a page from the playbook of one of their heroes, Bill Clinton and have signs printed up:

ITMS

It's the message, stupid.



So, our advice to the Mainstream Media, as a member of the right wing blogosphere:

"Stay just the way you are, baby. Never change, we love you just the way you are!"

by Mondoreb
image: spittleandink
Sources:
* NBC News Streamlines News Bureaus
* New York Times Plans to Cut 100 NewsRoom Jobs
* Washington Post Cuts
* Post's Newsweek Cuts Circulation by 500,000
* CNN Cuts a Wire to invest in itself
* Tribune Company announces hundreds of jobs cut



Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.