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"[Y]ou can have a president you love, but if you don’t have a Congress that’s willing to work, you know, you wind up stalled in so many ways,” First Lady Michelle Obama said Wednesday on Tom Joyner’s radio program. “And I think that Barack has done a phenomenal job working around a Congress that has never been willing to help move the country forward on so many different issues,” she said. “But I think he’s done everything humanly possible to get things passed around the margins. But, you know, just imagine where this country will be when we have Barack...

The scientific community is atwitter about recent reports documenting the sharp rise in retractions of articles published in scientific journals. To wit, The New York Times published a chart this week showing that such retractions have increased from a mere three instances in 2000 to a whopping 180 in 2009. The chart indicated that 235 of the articles retracted over that ten-year span were attributable to “scientific mistake.” Another 196 were attributable to “fraud or fabrication.” And the remaining 311 to “other.” That brings to mind what arguably is history’s most glaring example of scientific mistake, fraud and fabrication all...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has provided Congress with 1,364 pages of documents detailing how the department gave inaccurate information to a U.S. senator in the controversy surrounding Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling major arms trafficking networks on the Southwest border. In a letter last February to Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had not knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser

LONDON, Jan 29 (Reuters) - The BBC apologised on Saturday for erroneously reporting that U.S.-led and Iraqi forces may be responsible for the deaths of 60 percent of Iraqi civilians killed in conflict over the last six months. The British broadcaster said on Friday in broadcasts and a news statement that its Panorama investigative show would air a report on Sunday citing "confidential" records from Iraq's health ministry to support the contention. Iraq's health minister said the BBC misinterpreted the statistics it had received and had ignored statements from the ministry clarifying the figures. "Today, the Iraqi Ministry of Health...

The Washington Post yesterday said a quotation used in its lead Page One headline in Thursday's paper -- that the United States got it "almost all wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- was not new and was incorrectly attributed to the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. In an article on Thursday, The Post identified Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration picked to complete a U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, as the source of that remark. The dispatch by Dana Priest and Walter Pincus reported that Mr. Duelfer, chairman of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group,...

Can there be such a thing as a conspiracy in the media? There was a lot of talk about that last week. We prefer, however, to call it coordination, rather than conspiracy. Liberal groups have already spent nearly $70-million on anti-Bush TV ads. Little is mentioned about that by the liberal national media corps. But, let one relatively small group of citizens run a couple 30 second spots against Kerry and all hell breaks loose in the media. The reason was that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had spent about a half-million bucks in TV spots describing Kerry's lies...

JOHN Pilger was far from the only journalist to believe -- incredibly -- it was our fault that Iraqi children were dying in their hundreds of thousands. Oh, no. Time magazine in 1998 even reported on the parade of children's corpses that Saddam Hussein staged through Baghdad's streets to persuade Western journalists of our guilt, and warned of the "anger and despair of Iraq's people". But I mention Pilger because you may have seen his documentary, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, which screened on SBS in 2000 and is perhaps the best example of the wicked myth...

A week after The New York Times' two top editors resigned amid fallout from the Jayson Blair reporting scandal, the paper identified 10 more articles by the ex-staffer that required corrections. An editors' note published yesterday said the 10 stories included "misstatements or possibly borrowed passages, or quotations that have been denied by the speaker to whom they were attributed." The latest tally raised to 46 the number of Blair articles in which The Times has uncovered problems, including a case of plagiarism in April that forced his resignation on May 1. The new total does not take into account...

<p>June 13, 2003 -- The New York Times yesterday identified 10 more articles in which disgraced reporter Jayson Blair plagiarized, invented quotes and flubbed facts.</p> <p>The new corrections of articles, which were published from 2000 until this year, come a month after the Times published an exposé of dozens of Blair's deceptions, and a week after top editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd quit amid the scandal.</p>

The New York Times has found mistakes and journalistic fraud in 11 additional articles by former reporter Jayson Blair, the newspaper announced yesterday, a week after its top two editors resigned in part because they had promoted Blair. < SNIP > The Times announced the corrections in an editors' note but did not publish them in yesterday's newspaper. Readers instead were directed to an Internet address, www.nytimes.com/corrections.html, where there is a link to a separate Web page with the corrections. This page will be accessible for one week, and the paper's archives will be updated to reflect the corrections, the...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"/> May 11, 2003 Witnesses and Documents Unveil Deceptions in a Reporter's WorkBy THE NEW YORK TIMES ollowing is an accounting of the articles in which falsification, plagiarism and similar problems were discovered in a review of articles written by Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned May 1. The review, conducted by a team of Times reporters and researchers, concentrated on the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since late October, when he was given roving national assignments and began covering major news events including the Washington-area sniper attacks and...