Newsweek Admits It Doesn’t Even Fact Check The News!
Newsweek is under fire after publishing its shameless hit-piece cover story about President Obama entitled Hit The Road Barack. Written by Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson, the piece has been shredded to pieces by the NY Times Paul Krugman and other economists for it’s many inaccuracies.
We wont bother to rehash the entire Newsweek article, you can read it here. Basically Ferguson blames everything bad that has happened to America over the past four years on President Obama. Everything except the Kardashians.
So is the Newsweek story true? The truth is Niall Ferguson’s article is so full of inaccuracies that even Newsweek had to admit they never fact-checked it!
Instead, they rely on their reporters to do all the fact checking since they dont even have a fact-checking department!
via Media Matters
Newsweek, Niall Ferguson, And The Conservative Echo Chamber
Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover story on President Obama exemplifies a deficiency in today’s media. As criticism of Ferguson’s shoddy work mounted — both from outside and inside of Newsweek/The Daily Beast — Newsweek explained to Politico’s Dylan Byers that Newsweek “relies on our writers to submit factually accurate material.” Indeed, Byers also noted that Newsweek does not even have a fact-checking department.
This admission is disturbing on face. Newsweek wants to sell you stories and news about the world but can’t even be bothered to check the claims it publishes. Even worse, they didn’t seem all that uncomfortable with the admission. Newsweek’s defense is that others are this lackadaisical at journalism, which is to say Newsweek has no defense. In a media environment without fact-checkers, it’s no wonder we have fabulists and problems with facts and the media. But there’s a more pernicious ramification of Newsweek’s abdication of journalistic practices: This is what the predatory conservative echo-chamber and Fox News count on.
The Atlantic offers A Full Fact-Check of Niall Ferguson’s Very Bad Argument Against Obama and basically rops him a new one, which he evidently needs since he is so very full of right-wing crap.
Paul Krugman says that Newsweek needs to issue a correction for columnist Niall Ferguson’s new cover story on why President Obama does not deserve reelection., via Huffington Post:
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economics professor, wrote in a Sunday New York Times blog post titled “Unethical Commentary” that Ferguson misrepresented the costs of health care reform. Krugman wrote:
There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:
“The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.”
Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.
Newsweek, Where Fact Checking Is Evidently Optional
The truth is Niall Ferguson’s article is so full of inaccuracies that even Newsweek had to admit they never fact-checked it! Newsweek/Daily Beast Editor “Downtown” Tina Brown evidently only wrote the cover title “Hit The Road Barack” (or at least signed off on it) which is another indicator that we really do now need a bunch of foreign journalists and editors interfering with our elections. Is it too late to put a “Deport All Brits” provision into the GOP platform since they want to deport everyone else?
via Huffington Post:
One noted economist has blasted Niall Ferguson for his cover story, this time going further than Krugman by calling for Ferguson to get fired. Brad DeLong, economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley ,wrote in a blog post on Monday:
Fire his ass. Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast. Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university. There is a limit, somewhere. And Ferguson has just gone beyond it.
Niall Ferguson’s ridiculous defense in Politico sums it up:
Niall Ferguson, author of this week’s Newsweek cover story calling for Obama’s ousting, has returned fire on Paul Krugman — albeit in a ridiculous, misleading, ethically questionable way that completely misses the mark. The Oxford-trained, Harvard-employed, Newsweek contributor Niall Ferguson just edited the CBO report to change its meaning. With all due lack of respect: What are you thinking?
