Evan Thomas and "Flooding the Zone"

Evan Thomas has written some very good books and I'm re-reading one right now called "The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared" about the early days of the CIA. And listening to Rush while shuttling between doctor's appointments today, Limbaugh mentioned John Leo's piece about Evan Thomas in which ET is quoted making the following incredible statement in Newsweak, which Rush read on-air:

"The narrative was right but the facts were wrong"

Leo goes on to say:

—[this] is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it."

This is exquisitely timely because it follows another grotesque skewing of journalistic "ethics," Scott Thomas Beauchamp and the New Republic's second recent being defrocked when a liberal spewing hateful lies about conservatives [in this case, military in Iraq] is uncovered as a hoax.

The first is when Stephan Glass gave an account of a group of brutally stupid young conservatives cavorting at a conference. This was later shown to be a fabrication and invention. Howell Raines' accelerated exit from the NYT occurred partly as a result of being gulled by a black reporter feeding the agitprop Masthead Chief just what he wanted to hear. And remember that Pulitzer yanked from a Washington Post reporter for faking a story about a three-year old heroin addict?

All this fits in very well with the Columbia School of Journalism having to cancel an OPEN-BOOK ETHICS EXAM last semester when its best & brightest students found a way to CHEAT at an open-book exam. Obviously very clever little journalistic sociopaths in the making---mimicking Dana Priest and Mr. Risen who used classified materials to gain Pulitzers [which of course are given out by the CSJ]. And the same holds true with Nobel Peace Prizes, as Mr. Leo notes:

When Rigoberta Menchu's account of class and ethnic warfare in Guatemala was revealed to be largely false, many professors and critics said this didn't matter much because her book contained emotional truth.

Let's segue to today's Pew Report which comes out with a study that href="http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070809222839.jzdcwmy8&show_article=1">"More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on."

Finally, when I had a nice hour with Evan Thomas in his Newsweak office about a decade ago, he was the model of charm and civility and intelligent interest in the Middle East. But it is apparent that Evan and his colleagues inside-the-left-closets are more concerned with the "appropriate" agitprop line than any search for journalistic truth. So the Duke rape story had to fit

"the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't. According to Duke's female lacrosse team and other women on campus, the male players are solid citizens who treat women well. Many players volunteer to tutor poor children in Durham. Some players are privileged, but most come from ordinary middle-class homes. There is no evidence of a racist team culture.

And that might be why The Pew Research Center finds that Evan Thomas, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and a lot of other print & electronic media to be biased, pure and simple.