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Oct. 6, 2008

Rabbi Yitzchok R. Rubin: Mamma to the masses

Jonathan Tobin: Ahmadinejad Isn't Too Impressed

Oct. 3, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: The 'living dead' are all around us

Caroline B. Glick: Olmert's parting blows

Oct. 2, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: Often customers looking for our competitor accidentally enter our store. Can we just serve them without comment?

Jonathan Tobin: Jewish pundit quiz on next year's news

Sept. 29, 2008

Rabbi Eli Gewirtz: Lehman Brothers and the Day of Judgment

Rabbi Leiby Burnham: Apples, Honey and You

Sept. 26, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The shofar and the Echo of Sinai

Caroline B. Glick: A road paved on reality

Sept. 24, 2008

Greg Crosby: Home for the Holy Days

Ethel G. Hofman: Rosh Hashanah Favorites: Old-fashioned taste, reduced calories

Sept. 23, 2008

Caroline Glick: Liberalism or lives!?

Michael Ledeen: Dear President Ahmadinejad

Sept. 22, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: I gave a check to a local merchant, but it hasn't been cashed in months. Probably they lost it. Do I have to tell them?

Diana West: We are losing Europe to Islam

Sept. 19, 2008

Rabbi Berel Wein: On harvesting success

Caroline B. Glick: It is time to act

Sept. 18, 2008

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg: Is camping the panacea to save Jewry from self-destruction?

Craig Gordon: Was SNL hilarity too much for Hillary?

Sept. 17, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: The Whole World Is Watching

The Kosher Gourmet By Linda Gassenheimer: East meets Southwest in this quick meal: MEXICAN-ASIAN TOSTADOS

Sept. 16, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. : Into the fire

Everything's Relative : Your Official Jewish Guide to the 2008 USA Presidential Election

Sept. 15, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Enabling risky behavior

Diana West: A day that will live in ... accommodating Islam

Sept. 11, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The skeleton in my closet

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein: Persecution and systematic destruction of Christians in the Middle East must be stopped

Sept. 10, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: There's Something About Sarah

The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Manweiler: Who needs Chili's when you have these? Recipes for Mexican that taste great and are dietetic! Our commitment to freedom

Sept. 9, 2008

Daniel Pipes: Must counterinsurgency wars fail?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.:

Sept. 8, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: How far must one go to help somebody out of a contract?

Barry Rubin: Waiting For Something

Sept. 8, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : How far must one go to help somebody out of a contract?

Barry Rubin: Waiting For Something

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Nov. 1, 2007 / 20 Mar-Cheshvan 5768

Lies and deceits

By Bob Tyrrell


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The other day while laying down my thoughts on the 40 years of conservative journalism that I have undergone so painlessly since perpetrating my first published wisecrack in the autumn of 1967, I rang up El Rushbo for his collaboration. That would be Rush Limbaugh for the benighted; for the millions in his daily radio audience, he is El Rushbo. Rush recalled the liberal media monopoly that existed in the late 1960s and that now is sorely pressed by the emergence of talk radio, of various conservative journals and newspapers and by the rise of FOX News Channel. He noted how arrogant the liberal media always have been and mentioned their "lies and deceits."


Hang on, Rush. Whom do you think you are talking about, Dan Rather, the heir to Walter Cronkite's ermine robes? Are you referring to such revered institutions as The New York Times or The New Republic? Have you no respect for CNN, CBS, NBC or The Boston Globe? OK, OK, each of these revered institutions of the liberal orthodoxy has had its embarrassing pratfalls into plagiarism and bogus news stories, but how about us conservatives, El Rushbo?


Actually, in looking back over the past 40 years of conservative journalism, no similar scandals shimmy and strut before my mind's eye. In fact, conservatives have had no Jayson Blairs or Stephen Glasses. And now there is The New Republic's discredited "Baghdad Diarist," one Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who fabricated tales of American military misconduct in the Iraq war and whose fabrications the editors of The New Republic hope will disappear behind the smog of their pious pifflings. Let us call that a hoax heaped upon a hoax.


The fault of conservative journalists is, if you listen to our critics, that we have political opinions of a conservative nature. In fact, journalists of the liberal persuasion (or should I say faith) have informed me over the years that because of my conservative point of view, I cannot really be considered a journalist. Precisely what they mean by that I cannot tell you. Though now, after reviewing the comparative innocence of conservative journalism these past four decades as compared with the scores of blemishes on the mainstream media's record, I guess it could mean that I have not plagiarized or written bogus stories. Since the late 1980s, I have kept a file on the frauds committed by journalists at major media organizations, and it makes for grisly reading.


In fact, in reading over my files on plagiarism and fraud, both by journalists and by scholars, I felt a pang of sadness for some of the perpetrators — an unusual emotion for me, I admit, but there you have it. I shall not remind readers of the identity of one of my favorite plagiarists, a New York Times writer (a Pulitzer Prize winner) whose report on an alleged plagiarism in Boston contained … yes, you guessed it, plagiarism. And I do not want to identify the famed columnists who have been caught making up stories. They have moved on in life. That Washington Post writer from the early 1980s who copped a Pulitzer for a bogus story — let us forget his/her name, too.


Yet why not remind readers of Dan Rather's aspersions on President George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Guard? Rather's evidence obviously was faked, yet Rather is still claiming some sort of Higher Accuracy. Or how about the CNN-Time story from the late 1990s claiming on doubtful evidence that U.S. forces used nerve gas in Laos? A president of NBC News resigned after admitting in 1993 that his "Dateline" report of an exploding General Motors truck was a hoax, and four years later a Pulitzer was conferred on him for, of all things, editorial writing. Perhaps some journalist statute of limitations had passed.


The New York Times, however, deserves special mention for the likes of Jayson Blair, who both plagiarized and fabricated a whole string of stories before being fired in 2003 along with two editors. A year earlier, the paper had to fire a New York Times Magazine writer after the magazine published the writer's phony story. And just weeks after Blair's departure, the Times' Rick Bragg, another Pulitzer winner, left after being suspended for using another reporter's work as his own. In the summer of 2003, The Villager, a small newspaper in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan, charged the Times with basing stories for three years on Villager stories and even using the same people The Villager used in their stories.


All of which brings me back to El Rushbo and his observance of the passing liberal monopoly in media. Perhaps as conservatives continue to break the liberal monopoly, the liberals will raise their journalistic standards. Or maybe they will get worse; most of the aforementioned plagiarisms and hoked up stories took place in recent years.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Bob Tyrrell is editor in chief of The American Spectator. Comment by clicking here.

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