Greenwald: National Review reporter caught fabricating; where is the "liberal media"?

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National Review reporter caught fabricating; where is the "liberal media"?

Glenn Greenwald

Dec. 02, 2007 | (updated below)

National Review reporter Thomas Smith has been exposed as a fabulist for plainly fictitious claims he made in two separate NR posts in September regarding Hezbollah's alleged armed threat to the Lebanese Government. The most comprehensive report detailing Smith's fabrications is from Thomas Edsall in The Huffington Post, who examines some of the most factually dubious claims (including Smith's "report" that "between 4,000-5,000 Hezbollah gunmen had 'deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling 'show of force'" and his separate claim that "'some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen' occupied a 'sprawling Hezbollah tent city' near the Lebanese parliament") Smith's war-fueling conclusion: "Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here."

Edsall quotes four separate experts on Lebanon, who respectively labelled Smith's claims "insane," said his most grandiose stories simply "never happened," and stated that Smith is a "fabulist." As Edsall notes, Smith's melodramatic and highly suspicious claims about armed Hezbollah activities in Lebanon "appear to be designed to bolster support for the ongoing presence of U.S troops in the Mideast."

Rather than acknowledging any errors in a clear and straightforward way, National Review chose late Friday afternoon to raise this matter -- the favored time period of politicians to dump embarrassing stories, when as few people as possible will see it -- in the form of a mealy-mouthed, self-justifying "Editor's Note" from Kathryn Jean Lopez. Lopez apologizes to readers on the ground that "NRO should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall," but never says what those caveats should have been or what the missing context was.

Instead, Lopez just relies upon vague cliches that say nothing. She claims, for instance, that she reached these conclusions about Smith's posts "after doing a thorough investigation of some of the points made in some of those posts," but she never identifies a single specific fact which this supposed "investigation" revealed or what "some of those points" were that need correction, nor does she identify a single step which this supposed "investigation" entailed.

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This blinding (though unsurprising) double standard leads to the second point, one which is related to the first. The hysteria generated by Weekly Standard, NR and right-wing blogs led -- as always -- to extensive establishment media coverage of the Beauchamp affair. Howard Kurtz, who has turned into nothing more than a right-wing blogger -- using his Post column and CNN show to fuel every "scandal" they manufacture while steadfastly ignoring every one created by their own dishonest behavior -- provided endless coverage of the Beauchamp affair. Kurtz also reported on the matter on CNN.

<snip>

Completely fabricated accusations designed to fuel their war agenda and other political interests are not new for the world of right-wing punditry. It is par for the course. Last year, they lied in a swarm by claiming the Iranian parliament passed a new law requiring Iranian Jews to wear yellow stars. They falsely accused AP of inventing a non-existent source, Jamil Hussein, who existed exactly as AP said. They accused Democrats of ghost-writing the vile Terry Schiavo memo written by Mel Martinez (a false accusation Kurtz, of course, pumped). They repeatedly lied about Bilal Hussein's photography, falsely claiming that he photographed executions of hostages in Iraq and other insurgent actions. And that's just a small sample of their chronic fabrications and false claims.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/02/nro/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/greenwald
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[laststeamtrain]

1. FYI: Greenwald & Amato (of Crooks & Liars) were on Seder today.

Talking about this (& other) stuff. First half of second hour.