"Fake News" by ABC News Note

The always alert and endlessly estimable Mickey Kaus discovers that there's a Jayson Blair wannabe working in the ABC News Note department inventing fake news to get Democrats pumped for the '06 Fall elections. Here is Mickey's hilarious exhumation of a buried bit of agitprop:

ABC Buries the Lede--For a Reason: Here's Point #4 from yesterday's ABC News Note summary of "key stories" that bear on whether the "Democratic Party [is] on the right track or the wrong track to break from recent electoral patterns ...." Emphasis added:

4. In a front page story, USA Today's Jill Lawrence reports on a resurgence in union membership across the nation and the two main umbrella organizations playing nicely together, which has allowed the House of Labor to move forward with plans to spend $40 million on voter turn out this fall. LINK

Is there "a resurgence in union membership across the nation"? That would be stunning news, since union membership has been in relentless long term decline for fifty years--"from more than 35 percent [in 1955] to 12.5 percent last year, including only 7.9 percent of the private-sector workforce," according to a Thomas Edsall WaPo piece from September, 2005. But I can't find any mention of this surprising resurgence in union membership in the Post, or the New York Times. I can't find it on Google (to the contrary). I can't find it on the website of the "strategic organizing" Change to Win unions--you'd think they'd boast about it. And there's no mention of it in the USA Today story ABC says reports it. (That's a story about unions raising political campaign money and cooperating with each other, which is different.) Tentative conclusion: It doesn't exist. There's no resurgence in union membership. The Note item is in error. [And "it reflects the subconscious liberal yearnings of whatever MSM summer intern wrote it unaware that the cumbersome legalistic mechanisms of Wagner Act unionism are incompatible with productive success in a fast-moving global high-tech economy"?--ed You said that.]
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The unaccountable exempt MSM just churns out the pro-Democrat/Hollyweird/leftist tripe and bashes the family/religion/traditional gender and family values. Occasionally their ideologies generate fantasies they regard as "truthiness," ala the NYT's egregious confabulator Frank Rich.

Or, their extremists like Molly Ivins just copy others' newscopy as their own. Molly is a Bush-basher from the very marrow of her osteoporosis-plagued, alcohol-soaked bones and joints---so Molly can fib and fake and pinch to her heart's content. No fault on the left---you could look it up in Comintern's Rules of the Road to Socialism.