The New Yorker Needs A Fact-Checking Department

The Wall Street Journal alertly calls out the increasingly disreputable fact-checkers at The New Yorker. It's a bit personal as I was admonished by one of the hacks working for this ultra-left National Inquirer wannabe named Hertzberg a while back. Then the same hack misspelled the oil kingdom as "Saudia Arabia" just to prove his illiteracy, at least on foreign policy. No Correction was issued, as TNY has become a shameless propaganda sheet with good cartoons. Here is what James Taranto said about the latest hiccup by this once-esteemed publication.

This is a bit embarrassing for us, but a lot more so for our counterparts over at The New Yorker. In an item yesterday on that magazine's cover story about Barack Obama, we failed to note a gross historical inaccuracy. The magazine quotes Obama as saying in 2002:

". . . My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's Army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow-troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. . . ."
In fact, Auschwitz was liberated not by Patton's army but by Zhukov's: Like all of Poland, the death camp was taken by the Soviets, not the Americans. As for Treblinka, also in Poland, it was never liberated. In 1943, after a failed uprising, the Germans closed Treblinka and forced the captives to destroy the facility.

Granted, the error here is Obama's, not The New Yorker's, which presumably quoted the candidate accurately. Still, it's hard to imagine the magazine quoting such a howler from, say, George W. Bush without correcting him. So either the magazine is deliberately withholding information harmful to its favored candidate or its renowned fact-checking department is not as much of a powerhouse as it used to be.

Evidence for the latter hypothesis can be found on the magazine's cover, which depicts Obama in Muslim garb giving a "terrorist fist jab" to his wife, Michelle. According to Slate's Juliet Lapidos, the terrorist fist jab is a myth:

How do terrorists really greet one another?

With a triple kiss. Members ofal-Qaida are likely to use a common Middle Eastern welcome consisting of a tight hug and three cheek-to-cheek embraces: right to right, then left to left, then right to right again. This greeting is accompanied by the Arabic phrase "as-salaamu aleikum" ("May peace be with you") and the response "wa aleikum salaam" ("And with you peace"). Adherents to Hamas and Islamic Jihad employ a similar hello; secular members of the Palestine Liberation Front might say "marhaba"or "ahlan usahalan"instead of"as-salaamu aleikum."

One former spy says in his pseudonymous book, , that he witnessed a more singular greeting at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan: Al-Qaida trainees would salute with a shoulder bump.
This leads us to doubt whether any factual assertions in The New Yorker can be trusted. In fact, we are beginning to suspect Obama is not Muslim at all.

I've noticed an ad on TV sponsored by MoveOn castigating McCain for factual errors in Q&A sessions. Of course, McCain does make mistakes, but Obama lies from his own written text.

Big difference between those two.