Richard Bennett

Jeff Jarvis’ exercise in peace-making with the Times seems to be bearing fruit. Is this a testament to Jeff’s mediating skill or to Keller’s realizing it’s not smart to pick fights with people who buy pixels by the trainload?

Some of the former, clearly, but more of the latter would be my guess.

After the Eason Jordan purge, LA Times bureaucrat David Shaw fears bloggers are after his scalp:

…bloggers appear to have achieved almost mythical power these days.

Bloggers can be useful. They did a good job, for example, in bringing the Rather/CBS screw-up to public attention. But some bloggers are just self-important ranters who seem to wake up every morning convinced that the entire Free World awaits their opinions on any subject that’s popped into their heads since their last fevered post.

Unfortunately, when these bloggers rise up in arms, grown men weep — and news executives cave in. That’s much more alarming than anything Jordan said.

Yes, it’s alarming that the MSM can’t get away with its traditional shenanigans any more, but I’m sure they’ll invent some new ones. Currently, it seems they’re having a hard time getting the script right about bloggers — a couple of months ago, we were a few nuts in pajamas, and now we’re still overheated ranters, but nevertheless a threat to the free press. That’s a pretty major promotion, isn’t it?

The controversy our leftist colleagues have been trying to stir up over Brit Hume’s use of some remarks made by FDR on social security is pretty pathetic. The charge, in case you live under a rock and don’t get exposed to this sort of nonsense, is that Hume distorted FDR’s letter to Congress on social security by selective quotation. Unfortunately (and quite predictably), those making the charge actually distorted Hume’s remarks by selective quotation.

Here’s the part of Hume’s story that you won’t see on Media Matters, Oliver Willis, Al Franken, Paul Krugman, or any of the other hate sites, courtesy of Villainous Company. Hume began the story by putting FDR’s quote into this this context:

Senate Democrats gathered at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial today to invoke the image of FDR in calling on President Bush to remove private accounts from his Social Security proposal. But it turns out that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it.

The scurrilous ones in question have claimed that Hume said FDR planned to replace social security with private investment. Here’s David Brock’s spin on Media Matters:

In an attempt to promote President Bush’s plan to partially privatize Social Security, nationally syndicated radio host and former Reagan administration official William J. Bennett and FOX News managing editor and anchor Brit Hume falsely claimed that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated replacing Social Security with private accounts.

and here’s Al Franken’s bit on his blog:

Hume?s claim is that FDR wanted to replace Social Security with private accounts. Hume is lying.

Brock and Franken are clearly lying, substituting Hume’s accurate quote on supplementing mandatory social security taxes with voluntary contributions to a personal annuity with a fabrication about the wholesale replacement of social security as we know it.

The lying seems to me especially damning given that Franken and Brock stake close to 100% of their claim to relevance on their alleged respect for facts and contempt for lying on the other side.

I’m not saying Franken should resign from Air America, because I think his style of deception is uniquely suited for it, just that nobody should take him seriously because he’s, well, a big fat lying liar. And David Brock’s a serial slanderer who works for the highest bidder, a man without principle, and he may as well work for Soros (as he does now) as for Scaife (as he used to do.)

Wonderful company they have on the left these days.

UPDATE: There is an argument to be made that Hume misstated the intent of the FDR letter by muddling private accounts with voluntary annuities drawn from a common fund, and we could well argue whether that’s significant. But Franken and Brock didn’t make that argument, preferring to simply twist Hume’s statement from its clear meaning about a supplementary system to a replacement of the mandatory system. So even if you believe that Hume “lied” by comparing two similar but not identical plans, Franken and Brock’s lies are more egregious by an order of magnitude because they equated two dissimilar things.