Brendan Nyhan

Yesterday, the New York Times made the same silly error in describing John Kerry’s notorious botched joke about Iraq that it made back in November, even using the same exact language. In turn, the editors ran a correction that mirrors the last one almost word for word:

NYT article by Kate Zernike, 11/2 (now corrected online):

Mr. Kerry’s prepared remarks to California students on Monday called for him to say, “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.” In his delivery, he dropped the word “us.”

NYT Editor’s Note, 11/3:

A Political Memo article yesterday about the fallout for Senator John Kerry over what he called a “botched joke” referred incompletely to the differences between prepared remarks and what he actually said about the Iraq war to students at Pasadena City College in California on Monday. Mr. Kerry not only dropped the word “us,” but he also rephrased his opening sentence extensively and omitted a reference to President Bush. Mr. Kerry’s aides said that the prepared text read: “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.” What he said: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

NYT article by Adam Nagourney, 1/25 (now corrected online):

Mr. Kerry’s prepared remarks called for him to say, “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.” In his delivery, he dropped the word “us.”

NYT correction, 1/26:

An article yesterday about Senator John Kerry’s announcement that he would not seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 incorrectly described what he called “a botched joke” he told before the November midterm elections. In telling the joke, which was assailed as an attack on American troops fighting in Iraq, Mr. Kerry not only dropped a word from his prepared remarks, but he also rephrased his opening sentence extensively and omitted a reference to President Bush. Mr. Kerry’s aides said that the prepared text read: “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.” What he actually said: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

How did this happen? Zernike’s original article is corrected online, yet Nagourney somehow managed to cut and paste her original text, and no one on the editorial staff noticed the mistake. Time for some quality control.

Update 1/26 10:13 AM: Gawker just picked up this post.

Update 1/26 5:11 PM: Gawker updated their post with a clarification from Times senior editor Greg Brock:

Because I oversee corrections for The Times, I wanted to drop you a note and set the record straight on the Kerry “botched joke” correction this morning. Despite the item posted on Gawker, Adam Nagourney did not make the error. The quotation was added to the article by an editor — without Adam’s knowledge.

Had I known that, the correction would have begun with our standard phrase: “Because of an editing error.” The reason I did not know it was an editing error was because the editors preparing the correction did not talk to Adam or check with an editor to see if it had been an editing error — our standard policy. We are never supposed to publish a correction without first talking to the reporter or the editor who made the error. We have slipped a few times. But, in general, no staff member is supposed to be surprised to see a correction about their work in the paper — as Adam was this morning.

Just for the record, Adam covered the original “botched joke” story. His article on Nov. 1, 2006, had the correct quotation as spoken by Mr. Kerry. It was, as the Gawker item correctly points out, a subsequent Political Memo on Nov. 2 that carried the incorrect quotation. And we corrected that on Nov. 3.

David Folkenflik, a usually excellent media reporter, aired a story today on NPR about Rush Limbaugh that bizarrely juxtaposed Limbaugh’s rhetorical extremism with the putative moderation of Glenn Beck:

LIMBAUGH: There’s a whole psychology of doing a program the way I do it.

FOLKENFLIK: And that often involves barbs aimed directly at liberals. Some feminist leads become “feminazis.” Recently, Limbaugh joked that new House speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first woman speaker in US history, might well breast-feed a child sitting on her lap during official ceremonies. Limbaugh says he’s just using humor to make a point, but a rival conservative talk show host, Glenn Beck, says such severe rhetoric only drives people apart.

BECK: I truly believe it’s going to be the death of us — it is going to be the death of our industry, it is going to be the death of our country if we don’t stop dividing ourselves like this. It’s just not right.

FOLKENFLIK: Beck has TV gigs on CNN and ABC. Despite that criticism, he’s unabashed about his own beliefs, and he’s taken flak for them.

BECK: There’s nothing wrong with pointing out differences. There’s nothing wrong with having a heated debate. There’s nothing wrong with doing all of those things even in an entertaining way. But they cannot define you.

It’s absurd to quote Beck denouncing those who are “dividing” us without providing the necessary context that he spouts divisive rhetoric every night. Here are a few choice excerpts from the Media Matters hit parade:

• Beck warned that if
  “Muslims and Arabs” don't “act now” by
  “step[ping] to the plate” to condemn terrorism, they “will
  be looking through a razor wire fence at the West.”
• He described as
  “surprising” a letter criticizing Al Qaeda in Iraq because “the man who
  wrote it” — Islamic Society of Nevada director Aslam Abdullah
  – “is a Muslim.”
• He said that
  “[t]he Middle East is being overrun
  by 10th-century barbarians” and “[i]f they take over … we're
  going to have to nuke the whole place.”
• Beck aired a segment
  mocking the names of several missing Egyptian students in which the announcer said that one
  “may or may not be accompanied by his camel.” The segment showed
  pictures of crowds and pointed to random, unidentifiable people as the
  missing Egyptians. It ended with a reading of the students' names in
  quick succession followed by the announcer pretending to gag as he
  struggled to pronounce them.
• Beck claimed that there
  are three reasons that an illegal immigrant “comes across the border
  in the middle of the night”: “One, they're terrorists; two,
  they're escaping the law; or three, they're hungry. They can't make a
  living in their own dirtbag country.”
• Beck referred to
  “those who were left in New
  Orleans [during Hurricane Katrina], or who
  decided to stay” as “scumbags.”
• After airing a clip from the
  documentary film An Inconvenient Truth
  in which former Vice President Al Gore states that global warming could
  cause many highly populated coastal areas to be submerged by seawater —
  including the entire city of Shanghai —
  Beck responded:
  “This is what would happen to Shanghai.
  Does anybody really care? I mean, come on. Shanghai is under water. Oh, no! Who's
  gonna make those little umbrellas for those tropical drinks?”

But he hates people who divide us!

Update 1/26 12:18 PM: David Seagal has a long and awfully generous profile of Beck in today’s Washington Post. He does mention what he calls Beck’s “most embarrassing moment”:

Beck invited the country’s first Muslim congressman, newly elected Democrat Keith Ellison of Minnesota, on the show and led off by lobbing this stink bomb:

“I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’ And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.”

After a long discussion of Beck’s personal transition from alcoholism to Mormonism, Seagal asks:

But if Beck has left jerkdom for good, what explains that Keith Ellison question?

“If I could take back the wording of that question, I would,” he says, sounding genuinely contrite. He then says he was trying to make the point that moderates of every religion — his included — need to face down the extremists in their flock. How exactly his “prove to me” challenge was supposed to tease out that point is a mystery.
***

Of course, the no-he-didn’t interview style, as well as Beck’s strange confection of lectures, self-deprecation and one-liners, is what earned him a ticket to Headline News. The suits at the channel have long cast an envious eye on Fox’s superior ratings, and in 2004 they started tinkering with their all-news format for the first time in 23 years. The perpetually enraged Nancy Grace was one of the first acquisitions. Beck is the most recent.

So where are the rest of the quotes above? How will Seagal’s readers know what kind of things Beck actually says on the air?

Update 1/26 1:43 PM: Beck has denounced the NPR story as a “hatchet piece” that took his comments out of context. Also, this story was picked up on Jim Romenesko’s Media News page.

Update 1/27 2:42 PM: Late Friday, Media Matters posted an article criticizing the Folkenflik and Seagal reports.

Prof. Arthur C. Brooks of Sycracuse has an annoying op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today that frames different beliefs in social mobility as a matter of values:

While just about everybody — left and right — agrees that poverty is unacceptable … conservatives do not share liberals’ concern about income inequality. According to the 2005 Maxwell Poll on Civic Engagement and Inequality, self-described liberals are more than twice as likely as conservatives to say income inequality in America is a “serious problem.” And while 84% of liberals think the government should do more to reduce inequality, only 25% of conservatives agree.

This is empirical substantiation for the old cliché that conservatives just don’t care about the poor, right? Wrong. In fact, the data do not tell us that conservatives are uncaring; they actually tell us that conservatives are optimists. Conservatives are relatively untroubled by inequality, and unsupportive of government income redistribution, because they believe the American economy provides private opportunities to succeed. Liberals are far more pessimistic than conservatives about the possibility of a better future for Americans of modest means.

Consider the evidence. While 92% of conservatives believe that hard work and perseverance can help a person overcome disadvantage, only 65% of liberals think so…

Naturally, well-to-do liberals must be amazed at the gullibility of the millions of poorer conservatives who still cling to the idea of America’s promise of a better future through hard work and perseverance. Sunny conservatives of all economic classes may very well prefer to see things their way about America. Are conservatives naïve, or are liberals unjustifiably dour? Reasonable people disagree on this question.

But this isn’t just a matter of faith or values. We have evidence to bring to bear on the question of whether “hard work and perseverance can help a person overcome disadvantage.” And the evidence, sadly, is grim. To take one example, The Economist reports that a recent study found “only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter [of the income distribution] had made it to the top quarter” nineteen years later.

Conventional wisdom is finally catching up with political reality — here’s today’s Hotline:

Dems (with the glaring exception of Jim Webb) appeared to sense they gained little ground by kicking the spectacularly weak president while he was already flat on his back.

Tell us what you really think!

Kerry isn’t running:

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democrats’ losing presidential candidate in 2004, does not intend to run again in 2008, a Democratic official said Wednesday.

This official said Kerry intends to seek a new six-year term in the Senate.

Kerry plans to disclose his political plans in remarks on the Senate floor later in the day, according to this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting a formal announcement.

You can only deny reality for so long when you have favorability numbers like Tom DeLay.

Shouldn’t critics listen to the president’s words? One of my fellow grad students here at Duke alerted me to Tom Shales’ column on the speech in the Washington Post, which states that Bush “congratulated ‘the Democratic majority’ that he was facing en masse for the first time.” But as Josh Marshall noted last night, Bush actually said “Democrat majority” — a ploy he and other Republicans
frequently use to get under Democrats’ skin.

The hammer comes down again on the Durham DA:

Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong has been charged with new ethics violations for his conduct on the Duke Lacrosse sex assault case.

The North Carolina Bar today filed an amended complaint accusing Nifong of withholding DNA evidence from the defense and making misrepresentations to the presiding judge in the case. The Bar has accused Nifong of conduct that involves “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.” Nifong also allegedly violated a rule that “prohibits an attorney from knowingly making false statements of material fact.”

Previously, Nifong had been charged with making inappropriate and potentially prejudicial comments about the sexual assault case against Duke Lacrosse players. Nifong’s comments were made in a series of public interviews early in the case.

Don’t miss my new post on coverage of Hillary Clinton, which got pushed down by my Webb posts last night…

What’s more tedious: the State of the Union, or SOTU blogging? I’ll pass.

The Democratic response is far more interesting — Jim Webb criticizes the Iraq war from first premises, implicitly indicting his colleagues who voted for the resolution authorizing force along with President Bush:

Many, including myself, warned even
before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy
and attention away from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading
and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most
violent and turbulent corner of the world.

… The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings
from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of
staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command,
whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long
experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held
hostage to the predictable — and predicted — disarray that has followed.

The war’s costs to our nation have been staggering.

Financially.

The damage to our reputation around the world.

The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism.

And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped
forward to serve.

How does he have the time? In addition to giving the Democratic response to the State of the Union, James Webb and his staff are keeping his Facebook page updated, including these amusing changes noted by William Beutler at Blog P.I.:

But my favorite is this change, which Beutler flagged back in October:

PS No matter how poorly Webb does tonight, he’ll still do better than Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, whose bizarre eyebrow distracted everyone last year (resulting in the Columbus Dispatch calling this blog “the site for chatter about ‘Tim Kaine’s crazy eyebrow’”).