Thank you for your email, I appreciate your comments.

TIME Columnist Joe Klein made a reporting error, which he swiftly addressed in his blog postings on TIME.com. In addition, TIME will run a correction in his column in this week's issue of the magazine.

Thank you very much,

Richard Stengel

Managing Editor

TIME

Klein's latest swampland post, on permanent bases in Iraq, has a nice anti-imperial words that he presumably wrote himself. He's against permanent bases - and his post has no apparent factual errors or mysterious anonymous sources!

Still, the readers are HAMMERING him about the FISA lies. See http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2007/11/bush_administration_news_and_n.html

The name of the course Priscilla Painton taught at Mount Holyoke:

Can You Trust a Journalist?

[shotgunfreude, that was a masterful essay.]

Time needs to post that correction to their website now.

Honestly, I don't think the editors in question even understand what we're talking about or what's going on (or why we're so angry). These are very nice people paying Manhattan mortgages and summering in the Hamptons, telling their impressed relatives they're at Time Magazine. They're just "doing their jobs." There's nobody left at Time who was working there in the seventies or even the eighties. Most of them were probably "communications majors" in college (whatever that means); I don't think they even are aware of how they're being played by their "sources" or the spin machine. They're just innocent lambs.

Klein is a little different, but only a little different. I think he corresponds to Greenwald's excellent characterization of David Broder. It's all about lunches and dinners and cocktail parties and "the mood on the hill" etc. When challenged, he's like a bad teacher forced to back up an egregious assertion when a smart student challenges it: affronted, surprised, confused; confessing not to understand the details but insisting it doesn't matter.

Apparently, Time has a limited amount of patience. If a person commenting at FDL reported accurately, Time not only blocked her from commenting at Swampland, they blocked her access to Time online altogether. I wouldn't recommend those taking Klein to task overdo it. 'Course, someone else would have to tell me whether it's possible to deny someone access to a site. Easy enough to block comments, I imagine. But block the site?

"Thank you for your email, I appreciate your comments.

TIME Columnist Joe Klein made a reporting error, which he swiftly addressed in his blog postings on TIME.com. In addition, TIME will run a correction in his column in this week's issue of the magazine.

Thank you very much,

Richard Stengel

Managing Editor

TIME"

I'll be crafting a suitable reply, which will probably contain the phrase "No, he didn't address it," and possible cursing.

It (Charlie Savage's narrative on Bush/Cheney/Addington's accruing of presidential power) might have been useful during the past five or six years, if it could have been implemented sooner, but I don't think it really sings right now.

We're ginning/gunning up for a presidential election, and wouldn't it make more sense to re-member how that process failed us the last two times? How the media completely fell down on the job? For example, that incident (that received almost no reporting) when the traveling press corpse hooted and hollered during Gore's speech/debate (I don't remember which) at Dartmouth, but gave Bush (unbelievably!) all the respect due an incumbent, if not a candidate. There are lots of bloggers who have documented the free pass received by Bush vs. the (not only unreasonable grilling, but) made-up lies that Gore was subjected to. And how they swallowed, hook-line-and-sinker, the swiftboat lies about Kerry.

For my money, the narrative, if only there was a way to get it out there, should be what a lousy, stinking job the press did then... and why should we trust them to do a better job now, or even as good a job? [Good Grief! We don't even have Molly Ivins, among others, this time around.]

Blogs and YouTube, and maybe HuffPo's "Off the Bus" may be ways to write a new narrative.

I'd love to see a video virally circulating the internets with a bunch of voters (all ages) sitting around reading news stories from 2000 and 2004, slapping their knees, and hooting and hollering at the absurdity of the (actual) reporting just as those reporters did to (their invented) Gore. And that would be just the beginning. MoDo would be high on my list, too.

[Pedinska, bystander, ondelette et al, it could be a way of using some pieces of that lexicon we came up with on that earlier thread.]

Honestly, I don't think the editors in question even understand what we're talking about or what's going on (or why we're so angry). These are very nice people paying Manhattan mortgages and summering in the Hamptons, telling their impressed relatives they're at Time Magazine. They're just "doing their jobs."

I think that is the nail on the head. I don't think they are even capable of understanding the larger issues involved in this. I think they are blinking at each other right now wondering- "what's the big deal?"

I suspect that my follow-up may end up unread. In any event, I responded thusly:

I appreciate your reply. I probably don’t need to mention that many of the people unhappy with the original reporting are also dissatisfied with the manner it has been addressed to date at Swampland. I sincerely hope that the print edition doesn’t leave a similar cold feeling. As I said in my original letter, this is indeed a serious issue and this incident is only a more egregious example of an ongoing pattern. I could spend several exciting hours documenting instances where the desired story-structure has guided the fact-seeking of Time reporters rather than the reverse. It is a practice which leaves one particularly open to this sort of error.

Have we seen in the last decade or more our media use the word "lie" or "liar" toward anyone in the federal government? Gonzales lie? Nope. Even when the record clearly showed he lied. They won't call it a lie. Everything is relative- the truth is unknowable to our MSM. Even when Clinton said he didn't know the meaning of "is" the word "lie" wasn't used by the media. Have we seen one headline about any major Federal official or politician in which the word "lie" is used and not merely as a quote as in "Demcrats call GOP liars". Have we seen a headline like "Congressman lies before panel of inquiry" or "PResident lies about what he knew when". No- we would never see such headlines because our media refuses to call obvous lies- lies. They don't do it. Won't do it. And as a result our politicians can pretty much mouth any patently false absurdity and it would recieve the same amount of respect as the truth.

Look at the propaganda about Iran recently. A report comes out- again- from the IAEA - that again- gives Iran a clean bill of health- and the US government characterizes a clearly positive report toward Iran as being critical of Iran and as just another example of Iran "defying the international community". Now this is false. It is a falsehood. But our media just passes along the accussation without the slightest attempt to examine it themselves for veracity.