It is fine for journalists to have an opinion, but outside of FOX you usually do not expect them to make things up out of whole cloth. So why would CBS Radio keep an Obama-hating wingnut who pulls facts out of his ass as their White House correspondant?
Maybe someone should phone them and ask.
Professor
But but both sides do it!
BGinCHI
Lying is not an opinion.
Yutsano
@BGinCHI: But we can’t haz librul bias!
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
So called village liberals are busy as beavers trying to level out the horse race field with the mad hatter republicans, who keep trying to anoint Obama for another term with their rabid primary campaign.
CBS, has recently done polls showing Obama certain for defeat, according to way oversampled republican white males.
Others are joining in, like Chait, et al. WAPO. etc….
BGinCHI
@Yutsano: Get off the plumber and smell the coffee, Yuts. It’s a factual Morning in America.
Chet
Because they’ve run the numbers on their listener and/or advertiser demographics and found a heavy teabagger representation?
burnspbesq
If one were to be nit-picky, one might say that it’s inaccurate to characterize this guy as “pulling facts out of his ass,” because what he has “pulled out of his ass” is not at all factual. It would be more accurate to say he just makes shit up to suit his political agenda.
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
@Chet: Think about it. Elderly white people are just about the only consumers of old media left.
Wouldn’t shock me in the slightest.
brent
Well I would actually say that this was a case where Knoller was certainly being misleading but not exactly lying. His claim is factual. What he is saying is literally true just not really reasonable or fair.
Brachiator
Because Economics is hard. You have to use numbers and stuff. Ask McMegan.
Poopyman
@BGinCHI: Sadly for Yuts, if that had been the case we wouldn’t be hearing from him.
I LOLed, though. Good thing the office is mostly empty.
Poopyman
@brent: Right. So what you’re saying is that Knoller would like to lie, but doesn’t have the balls to do it.
Yutsano
@BGinCHI: @Poopyman: My Internet connection is being weird. Anyway I happen to be home dealing with the fallout (the leak persisted for two days but I just noticed it last night) and no I did not jump the plumber. Just waiting on contractors now. Fun stuff.
jl
the local CBS news station is my mainstay because it has best traffic and weather news.
So, I have complained so much about the CBS’ crew of wingnuts among their national news reporters, anchors and random hack pundits, that I doubt they listen to me anymore. But thanks for the tip, will call them again.
John Cole
Knoller is just a douchecanoe, period.
Valdivia
Isn’t this the guy who in 2008 wrote that the Obama campaign plane smelled?
brent
@Poopyman:
No. I think he is doing exactly what he wants which is to use a factual claim in a misleading way. He probably expects to be accused of lying but if it comes to that he can say, truthfully, that his facts are correct. I can’t read his mind but I bet that is exactly the way he thinks of it.
I don’t get into this to nitpick. I actually think there is an important distinction between the type of stuff Romney does where he just attributes statements to Obama that he never said and this kind of dishonest but much more common political spin job.
BGinCHI
@Yutsano: Bummer. We were rooting for you.
Poopyman
@brent: Don’t misunderstand – I completely agree with you. I just happen to think that using a factual claim in a misleading way is gutless and cowardly. Especially when your paycheck theoretically depends on you reporting, you know, facts.
Theoretically.
kindness
@brent: No it isn’t FACTUALLY TRUE. Damn. Here’s Crooks & Liars:
Poopyman
@John Cole: Right. Thanks for the reminder. Not sure if it was needed or not, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to get even more pissed off.
MattR
@kindness: C&L explains why it is misleading, but they don’t actually refute Knoller’s claim (shown below) or prove it is not true.
Calouste
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):
There’s an estimated $2 billion floating around in SuperPAC money. If the race appears to be close, that is going to be spend on advertising in media that are reporting on the race. If Obama leads by 10%, there is going to be a whole lot less money spend on advertising in media that are reporting on the race. So what are the media that are reporting on the race going to do? Make the race seem close or make the race seem like a forgone conclusion? Questions, questions.
replicnt6
@MattR:
Well, the figures they (C&L) use (I don’t know where they come from), suggest that the debt increased 5.3T during Bush’s two terms and has increased 4T so far during Obama’s term. (11T – 5.7T = 5.3T, 15T – 11T = 4T). They talk about attributing some of the debt to the predecessor, so I don’t know if they’re taking, say October 2001 and 2009 rather than January 2001 and 2009 as their basis for change of administration.
Ben Cisco
Hey, that latinum ain’t gonna earn itself.
__
Today’s media at its fluffiest – where the only thing worse than actually being to the left of Genghis Khan is being called liberal.
Gin & Tonic
Hey Tim, it turns out that Harpoon’s Rich & Dan’s Rye IPA was so popular that they’ve returned it as a year-round brew, available in 6-packs of 12 oz bottles.
Hill Dweller
A new President is sworn in nearly 4 months into the budget year. For example, FY09 started on Oct 1st, 2008. In January, a couple of weeks before Obama was sworn in, CBO’s projected deficit for FY09(Bush’s budget, by the way) was 1.2 trillion.
Knoller is shamelessly absolving Bush of any blame for squandering a surplus, and everything that came after Obama was sworn in, despite trillion dollars deficits all but guaranteed for FY09 and FY10(at least).
The truth is very little of the debt/deficit is the result of Obama spending. If he had sat on his hands for the last 3 years, the deficit/debt wouldn’t look all that different.
MattR
@replicnt6: I would not be shocked to discover that Knoller is cherry picking numbers to get the result he wants. But C&L doesn’t really address that because they used such rough numbers in their discussion (and using those rough numbers are sufficient to get their point across about the misleading nature of the claim). C&L doesn’t even point out that Knoller is using the inauguration date as the changeover point between Bush and Obama rather than take into account that the fiscal year for Bush’s final budget ended in October
20012009. But I also understand why C&L is focusing on why the numbers are misleading rather than trying to explain why they may be technically inaccuratebemused senior
Maddow blog points to this handy chart.
Danny
Absolutely. Thanks, Tim.
Joseph Nobles
The attacks on Knoller’s article right, which I do have great sympathy for, are basically the way that Politifact calls factual statements false. Knoller’s numbers are accurate. It’s his application that is full of shit.
For my money, the better context for those numbers is “What did we get?” Bush gave us two poorly prosecuted wars (one of those entirely unnecessary) and a trashed economy. Obama kept food on the table of unemployed families, got us out of Iraq, rebuilt the economy, began building the ACA, etc. In other words, money ill-spent vs. money well spent.
PLH in NYC
Using “facts” in a misleading way is not telling the “truth” which is what journalism is supposed to supply at some very basic level. The fact that the numbers are (more or less) the same yet have vastly different substantive causes means that Knoller’s use of them without explanation is intended to mislead and misinform. This is not journalism. But you knew that.
@Joseph Nobles: Nicely said!
OzoneR
Clearly, if Obama used the bully pulpit, the media would respect him.
Karen
@OzoneR:
Only if he did, the media would have all their right wing buddies talk about what a dictator Obama is.
TG Chicago
I wonder if Obama’s debt figure would be higher if you factored out the interest on the debt that Bush left.
Anyway, the easy answers to Knoller’s silliness:
http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms//6-21-11bud-test-f2.jpg
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6150/5974618229_81b7d3f9ce.jpg