[Dog Gone]

Julie Mason is the Chronicle's Washington correspondent where she dumps on Republicans for a living.

She apparently didn't read this.

Nuclear & Green

[weegee]

Tony Snow sold the public a false bill of goods when he insisted to Laura Ingraham that she was wrong about the border shooting incident and that she should "read the (unfinished and thus unreleased) transcript".

But it ended that line of questioning.

[weegee]

Houston Comical PING

[rod1]

Wait the NY Times reporter said that about Tony Snow!!?
This from a reporter whose body of work is viewed rimarily by the wrong end of a bird.

[tje]

Julie Mason is the Chronicle's Washington correspondent where she dumps on Republicans for a living. She apparently didn't read this. Nuclear & Green

I just sent her a copy.. Wonder who's useless now...

[fish hawk]

May I refer you all over to another thread running on FR as we speak that contradicts this thread. What's up, are they against nukes or not???? I believe not, personally , knowing those creeps.

[leilani]

WHOOPS! That's gonna hurt.

This is about as big a boo-boo as they come in journalism, lol! She wastes all those graphs trying to imply that Snow is clueless & in the process pulls a boner this big? Too funny - almost as good as it gets for the Houston Comical -and the suits upstairs keep scratching their heads trying to figure out why their national reputation is in the toilet.

Does the Houston Press still have that guy on the Chron's case documenting all their amateur-hour idiocy?

Great catch, Dog Gone.

[Logophile]

The former Fox News personality quickly established himself as a glib and energetic adversary for the press, sometimes short on information but strong with a comeback. He learned everyone's name and all their peccadillos.

Tony Snow must be doing something right.

[The Old Hoosier]

The most useless ever:

[dinasour]

     Tony Snow Ping

 

If you want on, or off, the Tony Snow ping list, please FReepMail dinasour.

---

Groan. 

Also, on a positive note:

Snow gives pep talk to Republicans here (Pittsburgh)

[OESY]

Bloopers of the century
Columbia Journalism Review, Jan/Feb 1999 by Leo, John


Blunders, hoaxes, goofs, flubs, boo-boos, screw-ups, fakes

The public seems to find TV and movie bloopers hilarious and endearing, but it's safe to say that no such enthusiasm is law ished on the gaffes of journalists. DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, a victory that was confined to page one of a single edition of a certain Chicago paper, is always good for a traditional chuckle. But who knows or cares that UP (father of UPI) once announced that World War I was over when it wasn't, or that Time Warner's Pathfinder site managed to declare O.J. Simpson "Guilty!" on the day the jury turned out to have a somewhat different opinion?

Why is it that the movie Titanic could find no room in its 194 minutes of screen time to discuss the most famous headline ever published by the Baltimore Evening Sun? ALL TITANIC PASSENGERS ARE SAFE; TRANSFERRED IN LIFEBOATS AT SEA said the paper's page one head of April 15, 1912. And it's heartwarming to know that the famous headline is still giving assurance to Sun readers. Certain editors have been known to send the headline to people who complain that the paper doesn't carry enough positive news.

The Sun's famous mistake, repeated by the Los Angeles Express, had many authors - a White Star spokesman who kept explaining that the Titanic was unsinkable, radiomen who garbled emergency messages and the usual mix of reporters eager to beat the competition with news almost certain to be correct, since everybody already knew the ship couldn't possibly sink.

One confident but verb-free deck of the Sun's erroneous headline said TOW ING GREAT DISABLED LINER INTO HALIFAX. This phrase had some basis in realworld confusion: a message sent from ship to ship in Morse code confused Titanic with a no-name oil tanker, which in fact was being towed to Halifax because of engine trouble. A few frantic radio operators who came upon the message in the middle of transmission assumed the report referred to Titanic and passed the word on. The moral for modern days: assume nothing.

All journalists know that it's never enough to get it wrong. Those who do are expected to cluck over those who don't, so the New York Evening Sun ran a sidebar chiding The New York Times for publishing a ridiculous story that Titanic had sunk. The Wall Street Journal chimed in on a positive note, congratulating the builders of the ship for averting what might have been a serious accident. "The gravity of the damage to the Titanic is apparent, but the important point is that she did not sink," wrote the Journal. The reason for this marvel was that "her watertight bulkheads were really watertight."

Garbled accident reports are hardly the worst reportorial sins. The worst always involve getting it wrong on purpose. The name of Walter Duranty comes up quickly. Duranty covered the Soviet Union for The New York Times in the Stalin era. He is perhaps the only Pulitzer winner that The Paper of Record would fervently like to forget.

At first a critic of the Soviet Union, Duranty soon evolved into an enthusiastic supporter and state-of-the-art propagandist. One of his favorite comments was, "I put my money on Stalin." When friends asked about Stalin's tactics, Duranty liked to say "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Not that he noticed many broken eggs in Russia. When Stalin engineered massive famine in the Ukraine to help break resistance to Soviet control, Duranty told Times readers that "any report of a famine in Russia today is an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." In 1933, at the height of the famine, he wrote of abundant grain, plump babies, fat calves, and "village markets flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk, and butter at prices far lower than in Moscow." He added that "a child can see this is not famine but abundance."

In fact, the death toll was enormous and Duranty knew it. He told colleagues privately it was in the range of 10 million. British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge said Duranty was "the biggest liar of any journalist I ever met." But the Pulitzer committee praised Duranty's reports for their "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and clarity." Four errors, arguably five, in a single phrase.

Eventually, Duranty's Soviet coverage provoked debate among his editors and readers. To its credit, the Times editorial page challenged his accounts. But in the genteel journalistic world of that era, his reporting was never odious enough to get him recalled or fired. The embarrassing Pulitzer has never been withdrawn or returned.

Fake stories live forever in journalism. Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes was sold in 1971 to McGraw-Hill for $750,000 and Time-Life for $250,000. The Hughes hoax was either unusually bold or unusually stupid, since Hughes was still alive and therefore in a good position to notice that he hadn't written an autobiography.

The fake diaries of Adolf Hitler could not be challenged by the alleged author, dead for almost forty years. In 1983 The German magazine Stern acquired rights to sixty-two volumes of the diaries, purportedly pulled from the wreckage of a cargo plane nine days before Hitler's suicide in 1945. Stern described the miraculous discovery of the diaries as "the journalistic scoop of the post World War II period."


Watch Julie Mason find the best dirt.

.

[Enchante]

"The former Fox News personality quickly established himself as a glib and energetic adversary for the press, sometimes short on information but strong with a comeback"

This sneering weasel is merely writing the usual lib hit-piece. GLIB?? This negative word connotes superficial insincerity. Many/most MSM types are glib, but Tony Snow is highly ARTICULATE, not glib. He is most definitely sincere and honest, whether or not you happen to agree with what he is saying.

[showme_the_Glory]

To Ms. Mason

HoustonChronicle.com>>> Have you ever heard of a man named Patrick Moore? He thinks nuclear power is good. He is a founding member of Greenpeace. What date will your retraction run?

From Ms. Mason

Thank you. Patrick Moore left Greenpeace in 1986. He now works for the nuclear power industry. Greenpeace is opposed to nuclear development.

[Frohickey]

Heh. I just wrote an email to Julie Mason. This is her reply.

Subject: RE: In defense of Tony Snow...
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:04:38 -0600
From: "Mason, Julie"

Yes -- thank you. Mr. Moore does not work for Greenpeace and is not a member. He is a paid spokesman for the nuclear power industry. Greenpeace says it does not support nuclear development.

Julie Mason
White House Correspondent
Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
202-263-6519
julie.mason@chron.com

Sent: Fri 2/23/2007 12:41 PM
To: Mason, Julie
Subject: In defense of Tony Snow...
http://www.nypost.com/seven/02232007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/nuclear__green_opedcolumnists_patrick_moore.htm

He was partially correct.

The co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore wrote an op-ed piece endorsing the use of nuclear power.

[prairiebreeze]

Any New York Slimes reporter should know the meaning of "useless" from personal experience. Many know the meaning of "treasonous" too.

[longtermmemmory]

What this article is really saying is that Snow has effectivly neutered the WH press corps.

They can't push him around because he does and CAN spank them with effective regularity.

I love watching his press conferences.

I love watching the MSM Divas squirm in their egos.

[Bommer]

During a briefing, Snow responded to a question about climate change by noting that, "We're talking about nuclear development, which is now championed by, among others, Greenpeace."

Beg your pardon?

"I think there's some Greenpeace people who are certainly advocates of nuclear power," Snow said.

She's right! He WAS a co-founder! He no longer represents Greenpeace, nor is a member of Greenpeace. So where does Tony get the idea that Greenpeace approves of nuke energy?

[DTogo]

Tony's one of the few smart decisions this White House has made, and I'm proud to be a FReeper who advocated Tony for this job far before it was open/offered for the taking!!

[caisson71]

I see Tony Snow has them on the ropes. Good, no amount of sanity is good enough for the press corps. I think Tony handles those idiots very well.

[colorado tanker]

She apparently didn't read this.

Yep. A co-founder of Greenpeace is a nuke advocate now. As usual, the MSM reporter is ignorant, did no research and is caught regurgitating Beltway CW and DNC talking points.

[Marine Inspector]

Is White House spokesman the 'most useless' one ever?

IMO, yes.