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By shading your eyes from the glare of the Westside overcast, you will notice that I am shlepping a shovel in one hand, a broom in the other on this holiday weekend morning.
My turn to play zookeeper.
I am holding firmly onto my favorite fire-engine red scooper as I walk behind the elephant-like Los Angeles Times to clean up the sad newspaper’s daily messes, starting with today’s dishonestly crafted lead story.
As the only significant print reading choice in Los Angeles for 40 years, the Times long ago became sloppily obese, lazier even than most academics and blatantly dishonest — without a single cop nearby to cite their egregious distortions.
Reading the Times over breakfast each morning is like walking into a hospital full of drug addicts, trying to decide which is the worst case. So many juicy choices.
Meet a Careless Reporter
The boobette journalist on this morning’s lead story is Cathleen Decker.
She is an intellectually tipsy journalist who has survived waves of firings over the years. Like many of her colleagues who have gone stale because of a lack of competition and serious copyediting, Ms. Decker has grown — fatter and more arrogant.
She did what liberals do when lacking favorable facts. She twisted and she obfuscated.
At the least, she was dishonest in reporting the story headlined:
Californians
barely reject
gay marriage
The reader may decide whether the old girl, an unabashed far-left’r in real life, lied.
She acts more like a prestidigitator than a journalist. She made the facts disappear beneath a pile of liberals’ favorite weapon, arm-flailing, tear-jerking emotion.
Cathleen, Baby, Baby. Are you smoking something that smells funny?
Emphatically, Californians do not “barely reject” gay marriage in the wake of last week’s state Supreme Court ruling.
Hear this: The proposed constitutional amendment for the November ballot shows opponents of gay marriage leading 54 to 35 percent.
19 points — even a liberal knows that does not qualify as “barely reject.”
But when you are the only print source, the Times proves you can say darned near anything and get away with it.
If I were leading by 19 points, I would be giddy. Were I trailing by 19, I would be depressed.
Cathleen, Baby. Here’s the mop. You do the floors today. My knees are tired.
54 to 35 — a “bare” majority?
Demonstrably sloppy even for a girl reporter, Cathleen, Baby, amazingly held off until the 24th paragraph explaining the other half of what the erroneous headline meant:
By a margin of 52 percent to 41 percent, Californians disapproved of last week’s state Supreme Court decision permitting gay marriage.
That, boys and girls, is a big deal number.
It is irrelevant whether you favor or oppose gay marriage. The point is that the Times mis-reported.
The numbers go against the Times’ agenda. Therefore, it is legal and moral by their wobbly reckoning to garble the data.
Attention, All Polar Bears
Indiscriminate liberal readers probably will not notice. Subtleties usually elude them. They are slower on their feet than molasses in the refrigerators of proliferating polar bears to catch on.
Under the mercifully deposed editor John Carroll, the Times’s unpopular one-time ideologue-in-chief, it became embraced routine for Times reporters to editorialize in news stories. Ms. Decker’s opinionating today is scandalous.
Cathleen, Baby, is pulling so hard for Obama that, if you hold the front page close to your left (naturally) ear, you can hear her grunting.
Reporters don’t write headlines. So that cannot be blamed on her. But the headline accurately reflects the thrust of Ms. Triple Decker’s manipulated story.
Anyone for Horseshoes?
Imagine if the Times had reported this morning that today’s high temperature in Culver City was going to be 21 degrees. Since my thermometer presently reads 60 degrees, the Times headline could read:
60 degrees
barely exceeds
predicted high
If your child told you this kind of tale, you would not put up with it. You would dispatch him to a shrink or to a stern teacher.
Upon closer inspection of Triple Decker’s story — may we call her BLT for short? — the first obvious failure is there are is no data of even the most rudimentary kind in the first 5 paragraphs.
Ms. Decker, the ideologue, used this space to clumsily build her case, as in: “The survey did not come out as we thought it would. So let me throw a little baloney into your eyes at the beginning as I try to massage the subject.”
Lefties Never Seem to Catch on
Don’t liberals realize that at least half of the country wiggles into giggles over their sophomoric behavior?
No wonder Democrats lose most Presidential elections — 7 of the last 10, 24 out of 36 since Abe Lincoln. To be slightly hyperbolic, only they take themselves seriously.
Final Footnote Before Escaping for the Holiday: While completing ignoring the deadbeat behavior of U.S. Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Long Beach) in its print edition because she is a Democrat, the Times posted a brief story on its website, and failed to mention, by golly whillickers, that Ms. Deadbeat is a Democrat. Gosh darn…
