BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, September 20, 2004
ACCURATE BUT FAKE. I think
the description applies to this
item (scroll down) in John
Tierney's "Political Points" column in yesterday's New York
Times:
Web's Most Popular New
Slogan for CBS News: "Fake but Accurate." (As determined on
Google, which gives priority billing to kausfiles.com.)
Where oh where would Mickey Kaus
and other bloggers come up with such an odd formulation?
Hmmm ... maybe from this headline, from last Wednesday: "Memos on
Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says." Who would have published
such a headline? Would you believe the New York Times?
Click
here and see for
yourself.
In fact, when Kaus
first used the phrase last
Wednesday, he was linking to the Times story.
For those of you who've been
following this story, "fake but accurate" isn't a bad description:
the late Jerry Killian, the alleged author of the four memos cited by
CBS to support its case that George W. Bush blew off some of his
National Guard obligations, did indeed write memos similar to the
ones CBS obtained, according to Killian's former secretary, Marian
Carr Knox. However, she says, the actual documents used by CBS are
fake.
As for Tierney, it's accurate to
say that "Fake but Accurate" has become a popular Web catchphrase -
but fake to omit the fact that it was coined by his own newspaper,
and that many sites are making
fun of that
formulation.
WHAT COMES AFTER THE LETTER "F"? Here's
something I haven't seen before: a
Boston Globe story
that forthrightly refers to N.W.A's infamous song "Fuck
Tha Police" without any
hyphens, asterisks, or other censorious squibbles. Good job! Of
course, they'd have had a little more street cred if they'd gotten
the same of the song right - it's not "Fuck the Police."
posted at 10:14 AM |
2 comments
|
link
2 Comments:
I don't think "fake but accurate" cuts it anymore. It's just fake. I don't buy the accurate part until somebody can back it up.
Solid evidence that the Democrats have yet to develop the skills of the brass knuckle Republicans, as Maureen Dowd vividly refers to them, is how little mention, much less repetitive re-cycling, in the mainstream media there has been since the CBS News fake documents brouhaha erupted about the striking similarities with Karl Rove's alleged dirty tricks involvemnt in the campaign of Bill Clemments for governor of Texas in 1986. That Dowd's column on Sept. 16th (available here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/opinion/16dowd.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fMaureen%20Dowd) remains the only direct mention I've seen or heard is fairly astounding given the tsunami of coverage and commentary on this subject in the last 48 hours. Like the surprisingly effective Swift Boat smear campaign, further proof of how one-sided the powerful media rumor echo-chamber apparently is these days.
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
