JUST THE FACTS, PLEASE

It would be nice if America's newspapers paid as much attention to the misinformation being spewed from The Bush Administration and right wing pundits as the NSA pays to average Americans


The Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League had a record of four wins and one loss after playing six games. (Actually, they were 4-2, having been beaten by the Indianapolis Colts in their sixth game.)

The action thriller movie “The Kingdom” was playing at the Wynnsong 16 Theaters on October 26, 27, and 28, 2007. (In fact, it left after October 25th).

The words “probable cause” do not appear in the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. (Former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, the guy in charge when the government illegally invaded the privacy of millions of Americans by tapping their phones and e-mail without warrants, said those words weren’t in it. The Fourth Amendment states, “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause...”).

“Big media” has “an auxiliary in the left wing of the Democratic Party.” The “big media” and “congressional leaders” of the Democratic Party viewed it as “the worst possible news” when acts of violence in Iraq decreased one week this October. (Cal Thomas, who never lets facts get in the way of his opinions, says so, claiming that the “big” media and congressional Democrats want American soldiers and Iraqi civilians to die. He didn’t and couldn’t give a single example of a media source or a Democrat to back up his assertion.)

What do all of the above have in common? They appeared as statements of fact in our daily newspaper, The Albany Herald. Every statement was wrong. Every statement was easily proved wrong. Obviously, the NFL standings and movie listings aren’t life changing events, although I did end up seeing the George Clooney thriller Michael Clayton when I arrived at the theater and discovered The Kingdom was nowhere to be found. But we who are the consumers of the daily newspaper are entitled to some basic fact checking on the part of the gatekeepers, whether they be the publisher, the editors, or the reporters and syndicated columnists whose material comprises the words we read and depend upon for accuracy.

As the Bush Administration once again attempts to warp the facts or spew outright falsehoods (Iran is no military threat to Europe or America and it is not “urgent” that we spend billions of dollars to put up a missile defense shield in Poland against an Iranian threat which does not exist), it would be nice to know that someone, somewhere, was making sure that our newspaper will not uncritically publish lies and exaggerations that will once again panic America into a catastrophic military misadventure