And if Carlson, whom I used to parry with on CNN’s Crossfire, would care to debate this point, I’m game.The Daily Caller News Foundation was founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. We plan to be accurate, both in the facts we assert and in the conclusions we imply.” The original EPA article and the subsequent defense were neither straightforward nor accurate. We see our core job as straightforward: Find out what’s happening and tell you about it. In an opening message, he declared: “This is primarily a news site.
That’s not what Tucker Carlson promised when he launched the site in January 2010. The Daily Caller, caught committing a boneheaded error, is trying mighty hard to dance past this embarrassment by rejiggering its original bombshell claim and by deriding the messengers. In other words, the lead fact of the article was dead wrong. In fact, the EPA filed the court document in question in an effort to avoid these costs. The only shaky part of the story was the claim that “the agency is still asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden” of these regulations. He maintains that an article in the conservative Washington Examiner “agreed with ours.” Did he not read the Examiner piece? The Examiner article did endeavor to back up some of the Daily Caller‘s report, but it included this damning line: Martosko’s defense shows that the Daily Caller ought not be trusted. By the way, Jonathan Adler at National Review Online concluded that the Daily Caller “flubbed” the story: “The EPA is not ‘asking for taxpayers to shoulder’ this burden, as the Daily Caller story claims.” Is Adler a left-wing fringer?
But a far better retort is this: If Martosko and Carlson’s outfit had this OMG-story slam-dunk correct, it wouldn’t need to resort to name calling. Martosko then attacked Media Matters and Mothers Jones for reacting “rashly to our reporting,” dismissing both organizations as the “fringe of left-wing thought.” It would be tempting to respond in kind-say, to wonder aloud if the Daily Caller had misreported this story in order to serve its right-wing agenda. The initial story had not said “might.” It had reported that the EPA was seeking the money for this quarter-million new bureaucrats-not that it was trying to avoid retaining more workers. In an editor’s notebook written by executive editor David Martosko, the website maintains it was correct to report that the EPA “might hire as many as 230,000 new bureaucrats,” insisting that its story had been “well reported, carefully sourced, and solidly written.” Actually, this defense mischaracterized the original piece in slippery fashion. The Daily Caller responded with denial and attack. Greg Sargent at the Washington Post criticized the Daily Caller for revealing that it cared not a whit for facts. Media Matters slammed the Daily Caller, noting the EPA had “avoided” a scenario in which 230,000 new workers would be necessary. In other words, the reality was the opposite of what the Daily Caller had reported. The EPA was not asking taxpayers to pay for 230,000 new employees it was doing what it could to prevent this. As MoJo‘s Kate Sheppard pointed out, the Daily Caller had “managed to pull that number from a court filing about what the EPA is trying to avoid.” The EPA was defending a rule that would allow it to limit the number of pollution sources it must regulate, so the agency wouldn’t have to expand its workforce to such an absurd level. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a foe of climate change action, enthusiastically cited it.īut there was a problem: This was not true.
Naturally, this factoid whipped Fox News and conservative blogs into a frenzy they pointed to it as evidence that the Obama administration is ape-crazy out of control.
Given that the agency currently employs 17,000, this seemed like a rather shocking revelation. Įarlier this week, the Daily Caller reported that the Environmental Protection Agency was “asking taxpayers” to pay for “230,000 new bureaucrats,” at a cost of $21 billion, to implement new rules to control greenhouse gas emissions. Is there a pattern here? Also see Andrew Breitbart’s big blunder and farcical response.
0 kommentar(er)
