THE MARKUP
"Niggardly" All Over Again [Stephen Spruiell]
Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post demonstrates today that he has no problem crawling into the race-baiting gutter by joining his fellow liberal bloggers in denouncing Tony Snow for using the phrase "tar baby" to describe a difficult political situation with no easy answers. He tops this display of ignorance by purporting to fact-check Snow and getting his own facts spectacularly wrong in the process. Take it away, Dan:
A White House press corps smitten with the telegenic, emotional nature of Tony Snow's first formal briefing yesterday — he laughed! he cried! — largely neglected to mention a few salient aspects of his performance.
Like, for instance: His inconsistent responses; his sloppiness with certain facts; and his embarrassing verbal gaffe.
Repeatedly questioned about the National Security Agency's collection of data on domestic telephone calls, Snow acknowledged the existence of the program enough to defend it in general terms — but when it came to answering specific questions, he refused to admit it existed.
He misreported poll numbers when it served his purposes — then refused to answer questions about poll numbers he didn't like.
He got away almost scot-free using a term — "tar baby" — that many consider racist.
Dan Froomkin is quite brave in his defense of the First Amendment — except, of course, for those totally innocuous phrases that, when used in other contexts, "many consider racist." Those must be excised from the national dialogue, because according to Random House (before which all must bow), "some people suggest avoiding the use of the term in any context."
This is "niggardly" all over again. Apparently we must reduce our public dialogue to the lowest common denominator for fear that someone like Dan Froomkin will slyly insinuate that we are racists.
Moving on to those "misreported poll numbers." Snow said:
Again, I would take you back to the USA Today story, simply to give you a little context. Look at the poll that appeared the following day. While there was — part of it said 51 percent of the American people opposed, if you look at when people said, if there is a roster of phone numbers, do you feel comfortable that — I'm paraphrasing and I apologize — but something like 64 percent of the polling was not troubled by it.
Froomkin writes:
There was indeed a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Friday and Saturday that found that 51 percent of Americans disapproved of the program.
But the "something like 64 percent" figure would appear to be taken from a Washington Post/ABC News Poll conducted a day earlier, just as the NSA story was starting to emerge.
Froomkin assumes that Snow is citing the Post/ABC poll's finding that 63 percent said the NSA program was acceptable, but if he had done just the minimum amount of research required to comfortably make such an assumption, he might have saved himself some embarassment by discovering that Snow was actually referring — as he said he was — to a question in the USAT/Gallup poll:
7. If you knew that the federal government had your telephone records, how concerned would you be — very concerned, somewhat concerned, not too concerned, or not concerned at all?
The percentages responding, "Not too concerned" and "Not concerned at all" added up to 64 percent — the number Snow cited.
Froomkin owes Snow a correction and an apology.
05/17 04:10 PM
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