Monday, April 16, 2012

Despite self-congratulatory declarations, Tampa Bay Times' PolitiFact's bias in analyzing "facts" over past few years is becoming increasingly apparent to everyone, and Breitbart's Big Journalism's Tony Lee points out some recent examples re Romney

Despite their rather self-congratulatory declarations, the Tampa Bay Times' PolitiFact's bias and rather loose standards for "experts" in analyzing "facts" over the past few years is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone paying close attention, and over the weekend, Tony Lee at Breitbart's Big Journalism was only too happy to point out some of those recent inconsistencies regarding their comments on Mitt Romney, and hammer them like nails.


Breitbart's Big Journalism

ROMNEY PUTS POLITIFACT ON ROPES
by Tony Lee 
In two separate instances, Politifact has contradicted itself with its rating of the accurate claim made by the Romney campaign that women account for 92.3 percent of the jobs lost under President Obama. 
The “fact checking” organization, which the mainstream media treats as an unbiased and neutral arbiter, showed how much it is willing to stretch the truth to support Obama and undermine Republicans.

Read the rest of the post at:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/04/13/romney-puts-politifact-on-ropes



Original article this references is at: 
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/apr/10/mitt-romney/romney-campaign-says-women-were-hit-hard-job-losse/



(And given how long his unconstitutional charade has been going on, what's the real reason that PolitiFactFlorida WON'T touch the issue of Florida State Rep.Joe Gibbons' illegal residency? His wife & kids live in Jacksonville, NOT Broward County. Period.)


In this respect, PolitiFactFlorida is very much like like their big brother covering national politics, and their business partner in crime, the Miami Herald.


Far more often than can possibly be explained by sheer coincidence or happenstance -but which can be explained by the Herald's much-lower journalism standards and worse editing than 20 years ago- in stories about politics, government, lobbying, and business in South Florida, the so-called experts that are cited in Miami Herald stories are often ones that either have an emotional or financial stake in the discussion or argument, and these are often NOT mentioned, even though they are known to people in the area who pay close attention to things.
People like, well, me.


This worsening of standards is particularly noticeable in Herald stories involving women entrepreneurs, residential and commercial real estate trends in downtown Miami, especially on Biscayne Blvd., or Hispanic media and businesses.


Articles on those subjects are almost uniformly boosterish in nature, sometimes to the extreme of appearing to be little more than paid ads or press releases, and there seems to be a clear disinclination to ask hard questions and instead accept facts and figures proffered by the parties themselves.
Plus, worst of all, the reporters involved routinely quote people who have a financial stake in what is going on in the industry generally, or, have an interest in it being portrayed as positively as possible, and thus can't be objective.


Unfortunately, the reporters involved often don't appear to be smart enough to understand that they are being used or played for chumps by the Usual Suspects.


Boosterish articles in the Miami Herald will be the subject of a future blog post here soon, and the problem is not which article to mention on these subjects so much as which ones to disregard, because they are actually written fairly and objectively.
They are the minority, esp. those about residential and commercial real estate in downtown Miami.
That has gotten completely out of control the past few months with so many self-serving front page stories.


I'll actually be at the Herald on Tuesday morning and in downtown Miami that afternoon, so I will try to take some photos of the properties mentioned in recent Herald articles that have gotten the wet kiss treatment so I can run them next to the links I use.

1 comment:

  1. Hah!
    Your issue is Hallandale Beach. Mine is PolitiFact itself.

    We'll both have our hands full for the foreseeable future.

    ReplyDelete