Last night on some news channel (I don't watch them and can't tell them apart) Pat Buchanan was arguing with a woman and a man over Terri Schiavo. Pat was yelling over them and spewing lies and ignoring him. The woman asked point blank "what about the hundreds of people whose feeding tubes are removed every day?" I'm not sure how accurate that number is. Pat yelled right over her about something else. Then she repeated the question and he got mad and told her he wasn't talking about ventilators but feeding tubes and she should know it's different. She looked like she was about to smack him and corrected him "I said feeding tubes, not life support, feeding tubes, what about those ---" and Pat cut her off and started yelling at her again. She tried to bring it up again but he yelled over her and never answered.

I flipped through the channels some and when I came back they were still arguing but about something different. Pat kept trying to say that he and she agreed on some point and she'd cut him off with "we do not agree. Don't speak for me, you can't speak for me." and then he'd try to put words in her mouth and she'd stop him again.

It was frustrating to watch. And yesterday I checked out the book "Attack Poodles" and tried to read some but it was just too depressingly real and it was written before the election so there was lots of "if the unthinkable happens and Bush is re-elected." to make it even more depressing.

Darth Maul was robbed.

I am blindingly exhausted, due to kravving until 10:30 yesterday night. Luckily the department bowling has been cancelled until further notice, so I don't have to spend the day braced against that.

Still, I'll be lucky to get home before 10 tonight.

From Susan's link:

Sports writers may inject into their stories a bit of personal opinion and local sympathy, but whatever biases they might have, the facts of the game are never in dispute.

This made me laugh, however, because I can think of 3 or 4 "news" stories in the last year which do just that think. Laura Vecsey in the Baltimore Sun and Jon Heyman in one of the NY rags -- the Daily News? -- both claimed that "it wasn't really blood" in the camera closeups of Curt Schilling's bloody ankle. Plenty of fans, and a couple of columnists, claimed that the A-Rod slap play wasn't interference. Dagger Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe is notorious for creating a story where there isn't one, by selectively quoting one person to another, and soliciting inflammed reactions (the "who's got the ball" controversy, which he manufactured out of thin air).

Now, none of these bias-or-outright-lies stories changed the outcome of a game, because one of the rules is that umpires are the ultimate judges and their rulings cannot be overturned. But they certainly change public perception about the games, and in some cases they can affect things like trades and contract talks.

And after all, baseball is riddled with accepted truths that turn out not to be true at all. That's what sabermetrics is all about.

I dunno about the mouse pad.

One full-color sublimated mouse pad

What precisely is a Sith mouse pad sublimating? The mind quails.

I don't think I'd go as far as to declaim the entire profession's laziness and/or timidity. Journalists are professionals, and, like most things, inadequacies or omissions are probably the result of money and time. It is difficult to investigate every claim made by every party, while it is still news people will read to just report on what each side says. So if you're a cash-strapped newspaper, what do you do?

On the other hand, I have had a relationship with a journalist who was covering something I was involved in. He was fairly shocked about what was going on, but when he would write stories that reflected the absurdity of the events, the paper's editors would change them to better fit in with the pre-conceived notions of their market.

Darth Maul was robbed.

He never got the Sith-style mousepad?

Oh, he's not even on the Sith-style mousepad. Everyone knows he was the most stylin' Sith....

The Wall Street Journal tends to have very good, fair investigative reporters

Heh. tell that to Don Imus.

Apparently Mitch Hedberg died: [link] He was a very good comedian. [link] Although with a very bad addiction.

I like the Sith-Style Mouse Pad. I wanna get one - then I can say, "I'm mousin' Sith-Style." Or is Sith-Style something that one can possess independent of mousing?

Psst, tommyrot does it Sith style - pass it on.

I don't think I'd go as far as to declaim the entire profession's laziness and/or timidity.

Well, me neither. One of the things I like a lot about the Columbia Journalism Review (link) is that they occasionally go into raptures over good reporting, too. But they're marvelously snarky at the bad reporting, and there's a lot of it.

I should say, sports journalism also has the problem where most columnists do not report news. By which I mean, they rely on interview quotes and news releases for their facts, but don't do much actual investigating of their own. Murray Chass of the Times is one of the few who does it, and as a result, he sometimes breaks stories cold. (He was the one who discovered that the Yankees had deleted steroid language from Jason Giambi's contract.)

So if you're a cash-strapped newspaper, what do you do?

Well, there is a cash-strapped newspaper, which probably relies a lot on wire feeds, and then there are the wire reporters, who I think mostly specialize by topic. If your words are going to grace 100 newspapers instead of just 1, and if you're a specialist anyway, it behooves you to actually do your homework.

Some of the AP reporters are awesome, but some of them are really, really not.