Conspiracy Theories

After reading Derek Kravitz's final report of the day at 4:45 p.m. on the housing market at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, I just had to check the other wires to see if they were sipping from the same housing-market-in-recovery koolaid. The answer is no. At Reuters, Jason Lange's 3:22 p.m. dispatch reported that "Output at U.S. factories slipped in March and builders…

Van Jones, "Lefty Dreamboat"? The New York Times assures us that yes, he is. Jones was the Obama administration's Advisor for Green Jobs until he was booted in September 2009 when his name showed up on a list of people who had signed a 9-11 Truther petition, suggesting he thought there was a Bush administration coverup of what really happened on September 11. In his new book "Rebuild the Dream…

Imagine if it were discovered that free-market think tanks were caught vetting scripts of Fox News programs, intervening to prevent free-market sceptics from receiving air time, and consulted with the network about how it should alter its programing in a free-market direction. The howls of outrage would be loud, long and unrelenting from other news networks, the wire services, and leading U.S.…

Now that Democratic mayors have turned on the Occupy Wall Street crowd, several media outlets have adopted a more critical tone, highlighting crime and squalor at such protests. A front-page Washington Post story on Wednesday wondered, "Is this an occupation or an infestation?" (Although the paper didn't get to the public defecation and rapes until A4.) On Tuesday's World News, reporter Dan…

Well, I guess it's getting serious now in the melodrama known as the Minnesota state government shutdown. If the Gopher State shutdown goes on much longer, hundreds of bars and restaurants will lose their ability to serve alcohol because they can't renew their liquor licenses. Worse, as reported by Eric Roper at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, MillerCoors, whose "brand license" somehow expired…

Via USA Today comes word of the splashy comics company Image putting out a 9/11 Truther comicbook titled "The Big Lie" (h/t to Four Color Media Monitor): In The Big Lie, the heroine is a woman named Sandra, who lost her husband, Carl, during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, she figures out a practical…

Bill Keller, the soon-to-be-former executive editor for the New York Times, writes a front-of-the-magazine column for the Times Sunday magazine. This week he had a relatively balanced take on conspiracy theories left and right, including a whopper from leftist feminist Naomi Wolf, in "Let Me Take Off My Tinfoil Hat For a Moment...to discuss why otherwise-smart people fall for crackpot…

Hollywood liberals consistently deny that they "blacklist" conservatives, or that center-right political views are routinely and overtly excluded from the entertainment industry's collective voice. But in a strong riposte, Ben Shapiro's new book, "Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV", provides extensive documentation on Hollywood's political clout,…

Is the right to blame for everything, even 9-11 Truthers? New York Times Metro reporter Colin Moynihan botched some basic politics in his Friday metro section tribute to a leftist journalist and radio host, "At an On-Air Haven for Dissent, a Voice Is Silenced." Text box: "Taking a stand against 9/11 conspiracy theories." Moynihan, who has made a cottage industry of issuing flattering…

A controversial article from Harper's Magazine, which won the National Magazine Awards' prize for reporting, what many consider the Pulitzer Prize for magazines, continues to be plagued by accusations of factual inaccuracy. A Monday article from AdWeek further suggested that the award had more to do with the issue's politics than the article's merits. The piece, which suggests a possible…

While reporting on the sexual assault case against International Monetary Fund Chairman Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Tuesday's Today, NBC correspondent Jeff Rossen noted how the would-be Socialist Party candidate for the French presidency had "worried his political opponent, current French President Nicolas Sarkozy, would try to frame him with a fake rape..." Rossen further added that Strauss-…

The lead story in Thursday’s National section of the New York Times treated with respect an anti-military temper tantrum from the left-wing town of Burlington, Vermont by Abby Goodnough, "In a Green Town, Activists See Red Over Lockheed Martin." While Times stories involving conservative complaints are invariably overloaded with "conservative" labels, Goodnough included only one mention of…

Most of the conspiracy theories about libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch have originated in the left-wing blogosphere. But a few media outlets, most notably MSNBC and the New York Times, have served to filter the anti-Koch campaigns into the mainstream political conversation. The Times, which has printed numerous factual inaccuracies relating to the Koch brothers of late,…

New York Times Tea Party reporter Kate Zernike made the front of the Sunday Week in Review with “Conspiracies Are Us – The endless debate over Obama’s birth certificate and the paranoid style in American politics.” While mentioning in passing the left-wing conspiracy theory that 9-11 was plotted by the Bush administration, Zernike used her selected sources to point toward historical…