In it, Ashley Feinberg does some solid reporting on this tweet-thread that you may have caught over the last few days:
You should read it all if you haven't already. It is, as my astute reader pointed out to me, devastating.So @salenazito blocked me and I couldn’t figure out why. All I’d done was ask her a simple question about a piece of reporting in her book. Then I ran into people in twitter threads who she’d done the same thing to.— Inanimate Carbon Rod (@rod_inanimate) August 24, 2018
Inanimate Carbon Rod, over the series of tweets, points out that some of the people Zito characterizes as Democrats or Independents who just happen to lo-o-o-ve Donald Trump just happen to be, you guessed it, solid Republicans.
Oopsie.
Feinberg got in contact with Zito (who still blocks moi on twitter, BTW) and posts some of her responses to these charges - they don't really help Zito's case, sad to say.
As of this moment, Feinberg's piece is on the front page of HuffingtonPost:
Why am I telling you this?
Because she's been doing this for years. Three years or so ago, Zito found a defender of Senator Pat Toomey and quoted him thusly:
Joe Eastman, 64, a retired Navy lieutenant colonel in Philadelphia, said he respects Sestak's service to the country but finds his allegations that Toomey abandoned veterans in Washington unacceptable.As an aside, let me say that it's been pointed out that Zito (and her editors) made a huge error in characterizing Eastman's Naval career as there are no lieutenant colonels in the Navy. That's an Army/Marine Corp/Air Force rank.
“His accusations are completely unfounded,” said Eastman, who spends time helping homeless veterans. “Anytime I have a problem or identified a growing concern, Senator Toomey's office has responded immediately.”
It's also besides the point for this argument.
Here's the point: after a little digging I found that:
[Eastman] has served on the boards of the Philadelphia Senior Center, Nationalities Service Center, the Philadelphia Homeless Veterans Coalition which is an advisory body to the Mayor’s Office of Supportive Housing. He presently serves on the board of directors of The Veterans Group, Thank-A-Vet, and is a member of U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey’s Military Academy Advisory Board advising the Senator on appointments to our nation’s service academies and serves as a veterans advisor to several Pennsylvania elected officials. [Emphasis from my original blog post]It was a rather important detail that Selena Zito decided you didn't need to know when describing a critic of Admiral Joe Sestak.
She's been doing this for years.
And now everyone who reads HuffingtonPost knows it.
Typical Zito, a sanctimonious fake. I once had a little back and forth with her after the early stirrings of the "Tea Party"(re-branded astro-turf funded GOP), when she claimed their Glen "Chalkboard Full O'Nuts" Beck-organized rally in D.C. outdrew President Obama's inauguration crowds.
ReplyDeleteI pointed out how this was based on nothing but unsupported assertion from the organizers, and was contradicted by metrics, such as hotel bookings, public transit receipts, observed traffic in and out of the city, etc., all of which indicated a crowd a fraction of the size. Her reply was that she was physically there, and could attest to the crowd's numbers.
(Actual measurements being discarded, in other words).
So I replied and attached a photo of fans at Heinz Stadium, asking her to estimate the number of people in the picture. Needless to say, I received a less than warm response, basically telling me I had an agenda (yes-asking a "journalist" to report factually) and she would no longer reply.
In other word, she's a paragon of right-wing journalism.