Hot Air Redux
Some commenters – thus far, all of them, in fact – think I went to hard on Hot Air in my recent post, and in a subsequent comment thread at Patterico’s blog. Perhaps I was. My intent, however, was not to demonize the site or any of the people who post there, merely to point out that the site does have enough accuracy issues that it should be read defensively, and not relied upon as gospel truth. The discussion began surrounding Ian Schwartz’s hatchet job on Martin O’Malley, followed by a lengthy discussion over a post by Allah that helped give rise to the popular myth that Larry Sabato had either claimed or implied he had heard George Allen say the N-word in a recent interview with Chris Matthews. That myth, in turn, quickly mushroomed into an even bigger, nastier myth that Sabato’s subsequent clarification that he had not personally heard Allen say anything amounted to Sabato being “caught lying.”
These are not isolated cases. Nor are they the result of me going hunting through Hot Air looking for stuff to criticize. Quite the contrary, they are two pieces I decided to document after having stumbled across more than a few others with credibility problems of their own. Without belaboring the point, here are a few other examples, a few of which have been duly corrected, but most of which have not been:
- Last June, Democrat Francine Busby committed the cardinal sin of advising a foreigner, and likely illegal alien, that he didn’t need “papers for voting” to help out with her campaign. Two Hot Air posters, Ian and Michelle, were on it like white on rice. A little clipping here, a little highlighting there, and a little trademark outrage on the side, and voilà! Suddenly Busby wasn’t talking about prerequisites for volunteering on the campaign after all, she was advising the guy to vote illegally! These posts have never been corrected.
- More recently, in early October, Michelle pulled a boner, claiming “I told you so” when Mickey Kaus idly mused that gee whiz, for all we know, maybe President Bush will wake up one day, get bored, and veto the 700-mile fence just for fun. Michelle then proceeded to say she was planning to sit this election out – a great idea if you like liberal Supreme Court Justices, gun control, automatic tax hikes and a defunded war in Iraq, to say nothing of President Bush’s non-amnesty amnesty program which, but for a Republican House of Representatives, would likely be law today. To her credit, she corrected the “I told you so” part of her entry later that day. More recently, she finally got around to correcting her bit about sitting out the election.
- Not corrected, however, was Malkin’s drive-by smear on John Lott. I guess you can’t build street cred if you don’t throw a few fellow cons under the bus, whether they deserve it or not.
- Also uncorrected is Bryan Preston’s uncommonly silly screed on why Christians with no Islamic upbringing are competent to judge Islam but non-Christian secularists with Christian upbringings are not competent to judge Christianity. I’m not sure how one goes about correcting a goof as colossal as that, but Dean Esmay did as good a job as anyone.
None of this means you shouldn’t read Hot Air or Michelle Malkin’s personal blog. That would be a dumb suggestion, and as one who reads both on a daily basis and agrees with both at least 90% of the time myself, I’d be in a lousy position to make it. No, my point is that when you read sites like Hot Air, where speed in “getting the scoop” seems to be at least as big of a priority as getting the story right, read the site defensively. Don’t take anything at face value that you can’t corroborate from at least two other independent sources – and by independent, I mean independent – NOT two other bloggers who rely on that same entry to conclude the same thing. Come to think of it, that’s probably the best way to read every blog, including this one. Especially this one, for chrissakes.
I’ll close with a few thoughts for the Hot Air staff themselves, should any of them care to read this.
- To Allah – my apologies for accusing you of dowdifying a portion of the Sabato interview. That accusation depended on the accuracy of an MSNBC, which Patterico has since given me good reason to doubt.
- No apologies, however, for saying your comment system sucks. It really does suck, due in no small part to the echo chamber effect that inevitably results from requiring comment registration at specific, rare intervals that are unlikely to coincide with the time any particular reader, myself included, might have something (beyond “me too,” that is) to say. Either find a way to bring more diverse views into the mix, or consider getting rid of comments altogether. You don’t have to have comments, but if you do, then for chrissakes do it right.
- Someone needs to deal with Ian. I know, he’s a kid, maybe he doesn’t know better, blah blah blah. No excuses. If the NYT hired a 12-year-old to write their front page story, I wouldn’t blame the 12-year-old for the inevitable result, but I would question the judgment of the senior editors who thought it a good idea to put him in that position in the first place. Get him an editor for a while, or maybe have him edit other people’s posts until he gets better at distinguishing good ledes from wild goose chases – always harder when you commit early on in print to the theory that the story really is a story.
- Better still, get someone to edit everyone. Maybe that person should be from outside the tent. After all, it’s one thing to be a conservative news site, and another to make all the same ideological errors in reverse that make the liberal media (in-)famous. Patterico has made similar suggestions for liberal papers in the past – get at least one guy on board who has different ideological blind spots than you, and more errors will get caught as a result. It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea now.
Or, if you’d rather just take Hot Air or any other blog as gospel truth, that’s your prerogative. I’ve made the argument why I think you shouldn’t. I shan’t press the issue further.
November 1st, 2006 at 9:10 pm
I remember the Busby incident – it got lots of air play. She said, “You don’t need papers for voting, you don’t need to be a registered voter to help”.
The question was, “I don’t have papers (i.e., I’m an illegal immigrant), how can I help?”
I guess you could say that was a “Kerry moment” (or maybe Kerry had a “Busby moment”), but still, that’s what she said. She could have said something like “If you don’t have papers” (a nice euphemism) “you can still talk to your friends.” Just don’t go out campaigning.
And how do you think the illegal prospective voter would have understood her comment?
November 1st, 2006 at 9:40 pm
I think he interpreted it as you suggested, i.e., that nonvoters and/or illegals may help with the campaign. That’s not a great thing to say, but it sure beats what Schwartz and Malkin had her saying, which was that illegals can *vote.*
November 1st, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Haven’t gotten an answer to the logical question I posed at my site. It’s appended to your latest comment.
November 1st, 2006 at 11:56 pm
“A little clipping here, a little highlighting there, and a little trademark outrage on the side, and voilà! Suddenly Busby wasn’t talking about prerequisites for volunteering on the campaign after all, she was advising the guy to vote illegally! These posts have never been corrected.”
This is like the Kerry comment. It’s ambiguous and clearly open to the interpretation that Malkin put on it. It took actus to explain the candidate’s defense, which I find plausible, but certainly not the only reasonable defense.
Not one attack on Allah in all of that.
And you *still* haven’t responded to my argument, phrased in symbolic logic, that Sabato did indeed imply at one point in his interview that he was “there” to hear the N-word spoken by Allen.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:50 am
OK, “symbolic logic” was sloppy terminology.
Anyway, I am posing the abstract question to anyone who will listen, and everyone hears an implication.
So far, 3 of 3 people have said yes.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:03 am
So what? You yanked it out of context. For your experiment to have any relation whatsoever to the exchange in question, you’ll need at least this much.
Someone says to you:
Before that person can finish or even drop so much as a hint what was coming after that “but,” you rudely cut him off. Later in the conversation you ask:
To which he responds:
Does that read to you as an implication that he was there for X?
Try that on the same 3 out of 3 people.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:17 am
Again, only if yanked out of context. In context, it’s clear what both the question and the answer were about:
Read in context, it’s neither ambiguous nor open to multiple interpretations. The guy asked a question about whether or not he could help despite not having papers. He didn’t ask whether he could vote or not. One reading of her response makes sense as an answer; the other just happened to be the only one either Malkin or Powerline, whom you cited at the time, either could or would see. Powerline at least had the decency to provide the full context so their readers could see what their authors did not. Malkin didn’t even do that:
That isn’t “the interpretation that Malkin put on” the quote. It was false quotation, complete with quotation marks and a period where the middle of the sentence should be.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:25 am
So in one place he implies he was there. In another place he says he knows it’s true. In another place he refuses to say whether he heard it himself.
Sounds to me like a guy who refuses to say how he knows — but it sure sounds like he heard it himself.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:26 am
And if someone characterized it that way, I think it would be the height of absurdity to harshly attack their reputation for that characterization.
November 2nd, 2006 at 4:14 am
Hey now, it wasn’t just actus (gulp) who brought up the alternative interpretation of the voting papers thing. I thought she meant the more innoccuous thing … when I actually listened to the audio … and said so at Pat’s. :)
I thought Sabato didn’t hear anything but tried hard to make it sound as though he did and that it wasn’t such a huge leap to believe he was implying that he did, but it was a leap I didn’t make. However, again, I obviously didn’t consider it a big enough deal to say anything, and as I’ve stated I thought Xrlq was too hard on Allah for it. This new post is more rational, methinks.
November 2nd, 2006 at 5:20 am
As to the Sabato comment, Xrlq, I’d say that he’s trying to make people think he’s saying that he was there without saying it. Given the ambiguity, I certainly don’t have a problem with someone who interpret him the way he wanted to be interpreted.
November 2nd, 2006 at 8:05 am
Please. The near-height of absurdity is to accuse someone else of lying because they flatly refuse to answer a question, you convince yourself you know the answer anyway, and the answer you convinced yourself of turns out to be wrong. The absolute height is to say that person was “caught” in a lie the next day when he tells you your inference was wrong after being confronted with … nothing. Allah himself didn’t reach these heights, but his strained interpretation of the interview, coupled with a lack of any clarifying or corrective updates, went a long way toward helping a lot of readers make this leap.
But See-Dubya’s right, this particular argument has gone way too long, and as you’ve already noted, this entry isn’t about Allah anyway. Nor was my other Hot Air post, for that matter.
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Hot Air is a short, peppy way to deliver conservative perspectives on the events of the day. They seem less error prone than CBS News or the NYT. Also, the point of picking a fight with invariably pretty Republican girls eludes me.
November 9th, 2006 at 3:12 am
[...] So the fight turned out not to be between Xrlq and Hot Air, but between Xrlq and Patterico, who wound up a ridiculous amount of comment thread going back and forth over whether Allah’s initial interpretation of a weasel’s remarks was a reasonable one. With that more or less put to rest in that same comment thread, this is old news, but I promised an answer to Xrlq’s calmer post taking Hot Air to task. [...]