New York Times Tripped Up, Doesn’t Regain Balance

Here’s where the New York Times’ “public editor” admits that the Times published incorrect information, based on inuendo and unwarranted assumptions, in the story about how ACORN supposedly helped pimps and prostitutes break the law.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4047

If you remember, that’s the story that prompted Congress to withhold ACORN’s funding and led directly to the demise of ACORN’s national organization, although most of the state-level organizations continue to survive. Later, ACORN was cleared of all accusations of wrong-doing (at least in Brooklyn, NY) by Kings County, New York, District Attorney Joe Hynes, who stated: “On Sept. 15, 2009, my office began an investigation into possible criminality on the part of three ACORN employees. … That investigation is now concluded and no criminality has been found.”

But wait! I detect a curious lack of symmetry in the news.

When the New York Times reports that ACORN helps pimps and prostitutes, the story hurts ACORN. Even though the New York Times later admits it published as “facts” events that did not actually take place, the ACORN story remains whole and untarnished not only in the Halls of Congress, but in the minds of most Americans.

Now let’s flashback to revelations that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a few errors in its major report on global warming. For example, it got wrong the date that Himalayan glaciers are expected to disappear (they are still expected to disappear, but more slowly), and it misstated the ability of ocean wave-generated electricity to meet humanity’s needs for power, to name a couple of these errors. There was a separate flap about the emails of some Global Warming researchers.

Experts are vehemently proclaiming that these errors do little or no damage to the case for Global Warming. Other experts say that James O’Keefe’s wholesale editing of the video recordings he made in and around ACORN offices undermine the truth of that whole story. (Look into the facts yourself and make up your own mind.)

Yet the mainstream news media readily discard the overwhelming science in support of Global Warming, while continuing to embrace the now questionnable evidence in support of ACORN’s law-breaking.

It’s just not a level playing field, folks. And the New York Times, once a proud bastion of accuracy in news reporting, is now just another loudmouth source of information that may or may not be true.