Watch the Comedians: The Daily Show

Interesting observation indeed. This is not the first time in history that the only real criticism is coming in the form of satire. But usually that was to circumvent state-censorship, which obviously is not the case in the US. I really wonder wether this is some strange type of self-censorhip, or wether too many journalists don’t think of asking the right questions. Talking about (not) asking the right questions, the Daily Howler covers a different, yet similar incident. A change in that respect would certainly benefit everyone…

posted by Sencer at June 20, 2004 06:08 PM #

I don’t understand your point. Are you implying the reason why they had the data reporting error is exceptionally meaningful? If so, why and how? When I heard it (before TDS mentioned it), I didn’t find it to be interesting, but only comical. And surprise, TDS made a big deal out of it.

Also, thanks for saying “Bushes” and not “Bushies.” The latter sounds so stupid and childish, like saying “preggers” instead of “pregnant.” It sounds like something Limbaugh would say if he were a liberal.

Also, s/new/knew/.

posted by pudge at June 21, 2004 12:51 AM #

Damn it’s a shame the torrent feeds of TDS are so unreliable.

No, make that “it’s a shame TDS is too damn good for the useless networks here in Oz to air.”

posted by Richard at June 21, 2004 02:09 AM #

Ooh! Found it!

posted by Richard at June 21, 2004 02:13 AM #

Except that this is almost a non-story since this great and amazing study had zero impact on anything either before or after these mistakes were discovered. Did you hear or know anyone who heard about this report before TDS covered it?

posted by Alon at June 21, 2004 03:32 AM #

A point of order: The uncorrected report is 199 pages long. Eight pages of corrections for a report nearly two hundred pages long. That doesn’t strike me as a very large correction. It’s only 4% of the report’s length.

I know that it’s easy to hate Bush; could we hate him for valid reasons, instead of clerical errors?

posted by crh at June 21, 2004 08:35 AM #

I know that it’s easy to hate Bush; could we hate him for valid reasons, instead of clerical errors?

One of us must have misunderstood something. I was under the impression the topic was how the media was handling a certain incident and that this was not directly related to the administration, let alone Bush himself. After re-reading the article with your interpretation in mind, I still failed to see how somebody hated on Bush.

posted by Sencer at June 21, 2004 08:46 AM #

wow, it really does make you think about stuff

posted by get crunk at June 21, 2004 10:08 AM #

pudge: Yes, I think the reason is especially meaningful. If someone releases an “annual report” that doesn’t cover an entire year, that fact should be prominently disclosed (preferably right on the cover next to “annual report”). If that someone goes on to compare it to last year’s annual report which did cover the whole year (as the administration did), then they’re incredibly blatant liars.

It’s one thing to be stupid, it’s another to be negligent, but to make such blatantly absurd claims raises serious questions about the government’s competence. And no one in the media asked these questions.

Alon: Yes, I did hear about this report. I don’t make any effort to get the news, yet I heard from at least two media outlets that the government said the terror rate was the lowest in many years. (I could be misremembering, but that is my recollection.)

crh: I don’t know where you get the idea that a 4% error rate is good. By my conservative back of the envelope calculations, the New York Times, which struggles to get things out daily and does not employ fact checkers, has a .3% error rate. The New Yorker, which comes out weekly, has a .01% error rate. This report comes out annually. I think they had time to get their facts straighter.

Further, as Sencer notes, the article was not about hating Bush. It was about the media. I’ve added these paragraphs:

My point is not that this specific news was extremely meaningful. Instead, it’s a case study. There was an extremely obvious failure by our government, yet the media didn’t trumpet it. There was a press conference to discuss it, yet nobody would question it. The head of the department that made the error appeared on several news shows for a one-on-one interview on the subject, yet he wasn’t asked any probing questions about it.

Instead, the media simply acted as megaphones for the government. (The New York Times went further, scuttling a story news that was embarrassing.) They abdicated their responsibility. And a comic had to do their job.

And this:

What a huge blatant obvious deception. (How unethical do you have to be before you compare a semi-annual report with an annual one?)

(deception used to be error)

posted by Aaron Swartz at June 21, 2004 02:25 PM #

Oh, so your contention is that they are lying. If you thought that up front, I don’t think you expressed it. And I think that’s a silly notion.

I don’t the media isn’t doing its job, I think it simply isn’t as absurdly cynical and paranoid as you are. Look at the uncorrected report: the chronology ends on Nov. 11.

What’s amazing is not that the media just accepted the excuse, but that they didn’t notice the error beforehand. The whole year, barely a couple of weeks go by between attacks, and usually barely a few days, and then at the end of the year, two attacks in two months? Clearly, the end of the year was left out, and no one apparently noticed.

posted by pudge at June 21, 2004 02:46 PM #

An addition: The Guardian covered the cutoff on Jun 11:

‘State department spokesman Richard Boucher said the 2003 figures were likely to be higher than the report suggested, though the number of deaths may not exceed the 2002 figures. He explained that the writers of the report appeared to have made a series of mistakes including failing to count attacks for the full year and possibly misinterpreting the definition of such attacks.

One US official, who asked not to be named, told the Reuters news agency that the report failed to count “international terrorist attacks” after November 11, 2003.’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1236519,00.html

posted by Justin at June 21, 2004 02:53 PM #

I don’t think the media read the report, which would explain why they didn’t notice the error.

But I’m pretty sure Richard Armitage read the report. And in the unlikely case he didn’t, a colleague who watched him speak almost certainly did. And even if both those people thought the report they read was not cut off, which even you imply is unlikely, then it’s practically guaranteed that at least one employee who heard Armitage knew the report was cut off. Thus, it appears the State Department a) knew the report was cut off; and b) compared it to an un-cutoff report. That would be blatantly deceptive.

Why do you think it isn’t?

posted by Aaron Swartz at June 21, 2004 02:59 PM #

Why do you think it isn’t?

Because I am at least moderately familiar with how bureaucracies work.

posted by pudge at June 21, 2004 03:11 PM #

Its amazing to compare how docile the US press is compared with other countries. If you listen to the BBC you’ll hear reporters asking politicians tough questions in a way that you never see here. If a polilitician is being evasive or spouting nonsense the reporter calls them on it, I never hear that here in the US.

Moving on, I’m pretty baffled by the comments that portray this as a clerical error. The report says terrorism is down as the opening paragraph of the Year in Review section. They didn’t get numbers wrong buried in the report, they got their opening conclusion wrong.

I think people of both parties respected Powell, after his UN performance and this I think people look at him as a joke now.

posted by akb at June 21, 2004 03:17 PM #

Its amazing to compare how docile the US press is compared with other countries. If you listen to the BBC you’ll hear reporters asking politicians tough questions in a way that you never see here.

I hear this a lot, but it simply is not true, at all.

If a polilitician is being evasive or spouting nonsense the reporter calls them on it, I never hear that here in the US.

Listen more. Or to a different source.

Moving on, I’m pretty baffled by the comments that portray this as a clerical error. The report says terrorism is down as the opening paragraph of the Year in Review section. They didn’t get numbers wrong buried in the report, they got their opening conclusion wrong.

Yes, because of what you call the “clerical error.” This isn’t hard to understand. The people who come up with the conclusions are not the same people who compile the data. Somewhere there was a flaw in the communication, somewhere someone messed up.

I am baffled that anyone thinks this could have been intentional. To what end? There’s no way this could have been kept hidden. And as best I can tell, they announced the error before anyone reported on it.

I think people of both parties respected Powell, after his UN performance and this I think people look at him as a joke now.

Where “people” is a small group of self-important partisans, sure. But most people respect Powell a lot, even those who are disappointed in his UN presentation. And almost no one cares about this because — while it does reflect on him because he runs the department — no one thinks he knew the conclusions and data didn’t match. He was probably more angry about this than anyone else.

posted by pudge at June 21, 2004 04:22 PM #

pudge writes:

And as best I can tell, they announced the error before anyone reported on it.

Actually, this and apparently more malicious errors were pointed out by two professors in early May.

According to the State Department’s press release, they only initiated their review after “learning of possible discrepancies in the first week of May”. And they only told the press on June 10.

So it seems like quite the opposite. Instead of telling the reporters of the error before others spotted it, others spotted it and forced them to tell reporters.

posted by Aaron Swartz at June 21, 2004 04:34 PM #

So it seems like quite the opposite. Instead of telling the reporters of the error before others spotted it, others spotted it and forced them to tell reporters.

You are quite unreasonably implying that they knew of the error and simply didn’t tell anyone.

I don’t know why some people — such as yourself — are so hell-bent on assuming as fact that which you can’t possibly know, when there are other reasonable possibilities.

posted by pudge at June 21, 2004 05:05 PM #

Well, they obviously did know in early May and they simply didn’t tell anyone. It appears it wasn’t until the Washington Post piece and the pressure from Rep. Waxman that they even took it seriously. But even then they waited almost a month to tell people there were errors.

Now I’m sure pudge will again protest that such delays are not malicious, but simply incompetent. And in this instance he is probably right. But at some point the incompetence gets to be so much that it’s almost even worse than being evil. (At least competent evil people don’t screw things up so badly that even their evil goals are affected.) I think we may be past that point.

posted by Aaron Swartz at June 21, 2004 05:15 PM #

I should know better than to post before I’ve had my coffee. I said "Bush" when I should have said "The Bush administration".

I took this posting to come in two parts:
1. The Bush administration is publishing blatant lies, and doing so on purpose.
2. The media (who are in bed with the Bush administration) are allowing this.

I take issue with item 1. This seems to be an honest mistake with a reasonable explanation.

I don’t know where you get the idea that a 4% error rate is good.

I don’t know where you get the idea that a 4% error rate is bad. As a student, I’m pleased when I get 96% of my exam questions correct. As a researcher I’m pleased when I can pin down a number to within ±4%.

However we’re not talking here about an error rate. We’re talking about the omission rate (yes, I should have said it that way before). You don’t seem to take issue with what they printed, but with what they did not.

By my conservative back of the envelope calculations, the New York Times, […] has a .3% error rate

How much of what was printed in that report was wrong? More than 0.3%?

How many crimes happen in NYC that never make the pages of the Times? Enough to fill more than 4% of the Times’ pages?

In any case, I’ve strayed from the topic. The point I was trying to make is that this seems to be an honest (if somewhat idiotic) mistake. Of late the Bush administration has made a number of dishonest idiotic mistakes. I think that it might be better to spend time decrying those mistakes.

posted by crh at June 21, 2004 05:30 PM #

Now I’m sure pudge will again protest that such delays are not malicious, but simply incompetent.

Huh? So they find out the first week of May, initiate an investigation. You actually think it is unreasonable to take a month to go over all the data again to make sure you got it right, before releasing it? How do you figure?

I suppose, since you assert it must be maliciousness or incompetence that it took a month, that you are intimately familiar with the processes the State Department used to review the data, recompile it, and doublecheck it for errors so you don’t get embarrassed a second time … not to mention the fact that they need to rewrite the entire conclusions portion of the report, which is a process that can, alone, take weeks.

A month seems just about right to me.

But at some point the incompetence gets to be so much that it’s almost even worse than being evil.

Did you check your sense of perspective at the door this morning? It’s one stupid error that caused a lot of embarassment, but at the end of the day, doesn’t really mean much of anything at all. It’s one thing to talk about evil when people’s lives are on the line, but it’s just some data mistakenly left out of a report, for crying out loud.

posted by pudge at June 21, 2004 05:53 PM #

I am quite amused that nobody in this lively exchange seems to have bothered to consider the effects of first putting either wrong or misleading information out into the public domain – that’s a lie for you and me – and then backtrack as soon as the pressure mounts. A classic technique used by countless politicians around the world. It’s called propaganda.

It’s the very same technique that is responsible for large swathes of the American public apparently still believing in the current administration’s big lie #10346 - about the allaged connection between Al-Quaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Just look at how difficult it seems to be to get people to join the dots with the help of the 9/11 staff reports and you begin to understand why deceit, dis-information campaigns and outright lying are part and parcel of what’s going on in politics. It just happens to be going on with breathtaking blatancy this time round. It’s called the big lie.

Will people ever become more senstive to the basic techniques of propaganda employed by the politicians they did, or much worse, did not even elect to run their country ?

I agree with pudge’s disagreement w/r/t the allegedely docile nature of the American media. I think that there are many highly critical voices embedded within the American media landscape. Problem is, you will need to be extremely well informed about a very wide range of issues in order to appreciate that fact. And if you’re not that well informed yourself, it will be much harder to spot the quality of some of the reporting.

posted by thorolf smør at June 22, 2004 03:28 AM #

I agree that the errors in the report were egregious, and I don’t put anything past this administration, from the incredible stupidity and incompetence that would be necessary to make these errors innocently, all the way to the malice and dishonesty necessary to make them deliberately for propaganda purposes.

However, since I read about the errors in the New York Times, which is my primary news source, your critique of the media coverage is also in error, at least in the one case that I personally know of. A quick search at the Times shows the article, which I can testify from memory was featured prominently on the website’s front page, since I read it from there:

June 11: U.S. Wrongly Reported Drop In World Terrorism in 2003

In addition, the Times has followed up with two more recent articles, not letting the story die despite the intervening hoopla over Reagan’s funeral, although in fairness these were after you posted this review:

June 21: State Dept. to Issue Correct Terror Data

June 21: U.S. Count of Terrorism Deaths Off by Hundreds

(I searched for “error report colin powell” in the front page search engine to get these results.)

How did you obtain your information about the coverage? Did you get physical copies of every paper/watch the channels all day/search their websites? I’m all for watching the media with a jaundiced eye, but accuracy is never more important than when you’re criticizing someone else’s.

posted by shalott at June 22, 2004 07:25 AM #

I am amazed and frustrated on multiple levels. Some of the people that have commented on this have noted that we shouldn’t hate Bush for clerical errors….. WHAT THE F@#$ don’t they get. This is his entire administration: smoke and mirrors. The tell lies and leave the impression that they want. His administration is one huge clerical error!! I’m very mad at the “mainstream” media for not doing their job, but I’m more than angry at the public at large for letting this happen and blindly following along.

posted by DrB at June 23, 2004 10:20 AM #

Thanks for a great post. As a loyal Daily Show watcher, I continue to be amazed at both the quality of the guests and the depth of the analysis on the show.

The fact that a self-proclaimed “fake news show” is doing more in-depth reporting than many real news shows is disturbing.

Last night, he had a guest on who wrote a book claiming that there was a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Stewart is usual fairly nice to guests even if he differs in what they believe in, but this was no holds barred, and he basically asked, “how stupid do you think we are?”

posted by Eric Gunnerson at June 23, 2004 06:03 PM #

The only thing to stop Bush…is this guy

Jon Stewart For President!

www.misswit.net/stewart.html

posted by misswit at July 20, 2004 11:18 PM #

Dear Mr. Stewart,

Are you available for interviews? I wasn’t able to see Crossfire, but have heard you commentary numerous times before and appreciate your courage.

Suzanne Russ Managing Editor, Palestine Chronicle Fellow American from Washington State

posted by suzanne russ at December 30, 2004 10:30 AM #