The Kansas City Star‘s editorial page editor learned the hard way that the Heritage Foundation is not a real think tank but rather a conservative talking point factory populated by charlatans and cranks. She won’t be publishing any more editorials from Heritage nitwit Stephen Moore, but I hope she takes a closer look at everything else coming out of that shady outfit, too.
The link has the deets, but in a nutshell, Moore submitted a piece rebutting a Paul Krugman piece about the sorry state of the Kansas economy ever since Gov. Numnutz decided slashing taxes would create an economic boom. It didn’t — it never does — but Moore begged to differ, offering a piece full of recycled supply-side ideas and cooked with some incorrect statistics.
As an aside, I really don’t get people like Stephen Moore. He’s writing a piece where he has to fudge his data to make his point work (and he didn’t even do that correctly), yet he’s still going to the mat on a discredited economic theory? Again: he can’t make the theory work without fudging the numbers and he’s still spouting it? Who does that? Not a real economist, but a fraud. How does someone like that look themselves in the mirror every day? What a pathetic loser.
Anyway, as the CJR pointed out, the blame rests on the newspaper, not the propagandist:
Of course, the responsibility here is not Moore’s alone. As Silverman says, “each of these outlets bear responsibility for the op-eds they publish. There are so few stats in this piece that it would seem reasonable to expect someone on the op-ed page to check them before accepting the column. That would have prevented this issue.”
Pepper acknowledges this responsibility. “We did not factcheck his BLS figures that we found out later were incorrect, and that was a failure on our part,” she says.
Indeed. This whole scenario reminds me of our own Gannett fishwrap, The Tennessean, which repeatedly ran op-eds from the corporate sockpuppets at Rick Berman’s House of Propaganda. For some reason newspaper editors seem to be the last to get the memo that conservatives are using the media to advance their political agenda. As with Stephen Moore, they either know it and don’t care, or they’ve drunk so much “two sides to every story” Kool-ade that they’ve forgotten their first job is accuracy.
Anyway, score a point for the Kansas City Star, at least. One fewer paper publishing one right-winger’s bullshit. At this rate our media will be cleaned up around the time the very last newspaper folds.
