Truth hurts in 'Standard' cover story
7/14/2008 - 7:37am
If it wasn't for the honor of it, I'd rather have walked. Lincoln's account of the man's reaction to being ridden out of town on a rail is exactly my reaction to seeing the woes of our state's GOP proclaimed on the front of a national magazine.
Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and Fox News, one of the best political reporters out there, takes a hard look at Colorado Democrats' recent successes and their national implications in this week's Standard cover story, "The Colorado Model." What he sees won't cheer up my fellow Republicans, but it's a picture we need to face unblinkingly.
I talked to Barnes for an hour on July 1 during his time on the ground here, and the story quotes me a couple of times. This one appears at the end...
"Colorado is being used as a test bed for a swarm offense by Democrats and liberals to put conservatives and Republicans on defense as much as possible," says Andrews. The initial results of that test are favorable.
And this one a bit earlier...
"The bitterness of Coors-Schaffer in '04 still exists," says John Andrews. "The bitterness of Referendum C persists. And the bitterness of Marc Holtzman versus Bob Beauprez in 2006 persists." Moreover, Andrews says, "I'm not sure our party has learned the lessons it needed to learn. Republicans and conservatives missed our moment to be the next wave of the Reagan revolution at the state level. We didn't seize the center, and we didn't seize the imagination of Colorado voters."
Such reality is tough medicine for my side to swallow -- but if we're to regain our competitiveness against the opposition juggernaut this year and into 2010, we need to choke it down the sooner the better.
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Andrews omits Barnes' history of misinformation
Not surprisingly, given his own frequent use of falsehoods and other misinformation to support his opinions, Andrews here omits Fred Barnes' regular use of the same tactic. Read more here about how the man Andrews calls "one of the best political reporters out there" typically will resort to the use of poor journalism practices -- that is, blatant misinformation -- to support his points of view.
http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/tags/fred_barnes
Bill Menezes
Editorial Director
Colorado Media Matters
Barnes displayed misinformation tactic again in Colorado piece
John Andrews needs to read some of Fred Barnes' material more carefully...the use of factually inaccurate statements and other misinformation in Barnes' "Colorado Model" article is quite pervasive. Read more here:
http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200807150001
Bill Menezes
Editorial Director
Colorado Media Matters
Menezes: The pot or the kettle?
Mr. Menezes,
Your criticism of Fred Barnes' article contains far more sleight of hand than anything you're claiming to correct.
First, you spend a ridiculous amount of time talking about whether or not Dan Kopelman did something wrong...an issue which is all but irrelevant to the discussion at hand about the Democrats' strategy for the state. (I'm not saying he did nothing wrong. I'm saying that as usual you spend a huge amount of time talking about something other than the real issue, trying to distract people from thinking about the real issue.)
Second, you imply that leaving out the use to which the tax hike on energy companies will be put somehow makes it untrue that Ritter is proposing a giant tax hike on energy companies. It's not particularly relevant that Ritter wants to use the money for scholarships...it's relevant that he's proposing something which will do great damage to the Colorado economy when he could be doing something to work towards alleviating higher energy costs. He could be using the money for any purpose, but the fact of where the money comes from doesn't change.
And third, while you are correct that Mark Udall's wife, Maggie Fox, is not "the State Director of the Sierra Club", you would think that an organization like yours which claims to be a media watchdog (though I know better) would, for the sake of honesty, note that she used to be a Deputy Executive Director of the Sierra Club. In fact, one of your own articles (from before Mark Udall was running for the Senate, so you felt less need to dissemble for him) notes that "she did work previously for the Sierra Club for more than 20 years."
The last paragraph of your critique of Barnes quotes Udall's web site for a description of Maggie Fox and says that the Sieraa Club does not list her among its "current leadership". If that's not an intentionally misleading assertion, I don't know what is. And you can't claim that you didn't know that she was with them for 20 years because your own site says so. I'd say you should be ashamed of yourself if I didn't know that that sort of lie is what you're paid to write.
News flash: Kaminsky OKs Barnes' use of misinformation
You took an awful lot of words to rationalize Fred Barnes's use of factually inaccurate or misleading material in his article. For your sake, I hope your diet doesn't include as much fat as that response did.
The "real issue" actually is whether a reader can trust that a purported journalist is providing facts, or is providing misinformation purveyed as fact. Barnes has shown that the latter is his frequent tactic. Knowing that, a reader therefore can make a better informed judgment about whether Barnes' assertions hold water, or whether they're ideas that need the crutch of misinformation because they can't stand on their own.
The same goes for the misinformation you provide on this site, on your own obscure blog and, no doubt, for your masters at the Heartland Institute. Once the misinformation is identified, the reader is better equipped to plow through your tendentious verbosity, knowing where you've used facts and where you have not.
It's a pity you'd rather that readers go unarmed into that swamp. We'd rather they know the truth.
Bill Menezes
Editorial Director
Colorado Media Matters
Jawbone and Ruse Kaminsky. Master deceivers.
So true Mr. Menezes. Ruse Kaminsky and the Jawbone are experts in disception and misinformation.