Tucker Carlson

Jonah Goldberg (Last year: Number 7.)

In March Jonah Goldberg literally wrote “meh” instead of rebutting an argument, in his nationally syndicated political column.

Thomas Friedman (Last year: Number 3.)

Thomas Friedman continued to, domestically, demand a centrist third party that acted exactly like our current centrist Democratic party. But his best work, as always, concerned foreign lands. What other columnist would have the balls to go to the scene of a popular revolution and “quote” a native pleading with the wise American columnist to explain what he thinks is going on in her country?

Marty Peretz (Last year: Number 5.)

Poor Marty lost his New Republic blog and “editor” title, but the magazine still lets him go on at length about middle eastern affairs, despite his lengthy and well-documented history of being an unrepentant anti-Arab racist.

George Will (Last year: Number 11.)

Will got an early start on his traditional election year conflict of interest, trashing Romney and Gingrich on television and in print before being forced to disclose that his wife is a paid Rick Perry advisor. Also, he’s still lying all the time about climate change.

Marc Thiessen (Last year: Number 6.)

The lying torture-defender still has a Post column, and even got to ask questions at a presidential debate! It’s not as morally repulsive as his other work, but the single silliest thing he wrote this year was this bit claiming that “Occupy Wall Street” was to blame for the inevitable failure of the supercommittee.

Bill Kristol (Last year: Number 17.)

Kristol’s Weekly Standard belatedly and bizarrely hopped on the Gingrich bandwagon as the year drew to a close. And why not? Kristol wouldn’t be Kristol if he didn’t endorse and prop up toxic, unelectable Republicans.

Mickey Kaus Number 25.)

The inventor of annoying political blogging moved his blog to the Daily Caller, where I assume he is still complaining about immigrants. His hackiest moment: I’ll say, picking more or less at random, this post, expressing dismay that Arizona nutcase politician Russell Pearce was recalled, because it sent the message that Arizona voters may be going soft on fanatical hatred of immigrants.

Tucker Carlson (Last year: Number 22.)

Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller news site is as inessential as ever. His hackiest moment of the year: Hiring a professional Berman and Company liar to edit the Caller, then printing a rather blatantly untrue story about the EPA.

Tina Brown (Last year: Number 18.)

Tina may be working incredibly hard at salvaging a dying newsweekly, with a clueless boss holding the purse strings, but on the other hand, that Princess Di fanfic cover was unacceptable. (Her actual hackiest moment, though, might be doing a phone interview and a conference call from the Acela’s quiet car.)

The Caller claimed to have learned that the EPA was planning to hire “230,000 new bureaucrats — at a cost of $21 billion” to implement new greenhouse gas regulations. That was the scoop. $21 billion and 230,000 new EPA bureaucrats! That is false. It’s based on a misreading of a Justice Department brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals DC circuit, which presents the “$21 billion” figure as an example of what the EPA would need to regulate emissions if the rule they’re going to court to defend is blocked.

Here’s Politico — noted left-wing rag Politico! — handily debunking the story:

“Hiring the 230,000 full-time employees necessary to produce the 1.4 billion work hours required to address the actual increase in permitting functions would result in an increase in the Title V administration costs of $21 billion per year,” DOJ wrote.

DOJ adds that the tailoring rule is designed specifically to avoid that kind of scenario.

The EPA determined that phasing in the statutory limits would still allow most of the emission benefits “while avoiding the permit gridlock that unquestionably would result from the immediate application” of the thresholds laid out in the Clean Air Act, DOJ said in the brief.

(Emphasis mine.)

Who is fighting this “tailoring rule”? The biggest industrial polluters, as Kate Sheppard explains. The tailoring rule means opening up the permitting process to the biggest emitters first, because otherwise the EPA would have to immediately begin regulating every greenhouse gas emitter in the country, which would be a bureaucratic disaster and insanely expensive. Again: This is what the EPA would like to avoid. Polluters want to block the rule in order to force the EPA to give up on this crazy idea of regulating greenhouse gas emissions entirely.

So the Caller read a DoJ brief incorrectly. It happens! Those things are written in legalese, who can understand any of it?

They admitted their screw-up and moved on, right? No. Instead, they continue to insist that they’re right, and that the Obama administration purposefully and explicitly seeks to destroy American industry while bankrupting the nation by expanding the size of the EPA 13-fold and increasing its budget by $21 billion, and this secret plot was buried in a legal brief that they and they alone understand.

The Caller’s executive editor, one David Martosko, writes an editor’s note attacking all the Callers critics as left-wing pinkos and liars. “Despite the criticisms that some have offered,” he writes, “we haven’t changed a word.” It must be correct, then, because no one ever intentionally lies on the internet.

Martosko goes on to describe the filing with a marginally greater degree of accuracy, making this editorial something of a snide, defiant walk-back (a right-wing media special), but he insists on the opposite-day reading of the filing’s argument that underpins the Caller’s scoop, which was of course already latched onto by Fox and by anti-enviromental Republicans in Congress.

Dave Weigel charitably writes that Martosko “doesn’t really know what the ‘facts’ are,” but Weigel also notes where Martosko used to work: the “communications firm” Berman and Company, where he was, until this August, “senior strategist and director of research.”

Berman and Company is quite objectively in the business of manufacturing misinformation. They don’t just lobby politicians or send out press releases, they create front groups and spread specious pro-industry “research.” Martosko’s former job was to deceive journalists.

Any senior Berman and Company strategist would know how to take a document like this legal filing and argue that it says the opposite of what it says. They teach that on day one. (I would also not be shocked to learn that some of the polluters challenging the EPA in court are among Berman and Company’s clients, but there’s no way to know — Berman generally makes sure his clients names appear no where near his work promoting their interests.)

Why would any organization supposedly dedicated to journalism hire a Berman and Company “strategist” as executive editor? If your political beliefs align, let him write a column every week or something, but someone for whom truth is a malleable resource to be bent in the service of promoting influential industry players is not really someone you want in charge of a newsroom.

Unless, of course, “winning” the stupid partisan argument is actually more important to you than reporting reality.

The headline is, “Stress-related condition ‘incapacitates’ Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged.” Again, the “condition” is generally called “migraines.” And “heavy pill use” certainly sounds like an allegation of a prescription painkiller addiction, though the article does not once name any of the specific medications Bachmann supposedly takes.

The Minnesota Republican frequently suffers from stress-induced medical episodes that she has characterized as severe headaches. These episodes, say witnesses, occur once a week on average and can “incapacitate” her for days at time. On at least three occasions, Bachmann has landed in the hospital as a result.

“She has terrible migraine headaches. And they put her out of commission for a day or more at a time. They come out of nowhere, and they’re unpredictable,” says an adviser to Bachmann who was involved in her 2010 congressional campaign. “They level her. They put her down. It’s actually sad. It’s very painful.”

Bachmann has been hospitalized three times in the last … some unknown number of years. (And one of those trips to the hospital was reported to be an appendicitis attack, apparently?) But she gets bad headaches every week! And some people (one unnamed former aide, and “sources”) say that disqualifies her to be president.

And those pills!

Of particular concern to some around her is the significant amount of medication Bachmann takes to address her condition.

The former aide says Bachmann’s congressional staff is “constantly” in contact with her doctors to tweak the types and amounts of medicine she is taking. Marcus Bachmann helps her manage the episodes

OK, so, what do chronic migraine sufferers usually take? Are they all just popping Vicodins like Dr. House? If you’re going to accuse someone of relying too much on “pills,” shouldn’t you work to identify the pills, or at least make an educated guess as to what the pills might be? Typical migraine treatments include triptans, which have few side effects. Preventive treatment often means beta blockers or antidepressants. Or sometimes Botox. (Oh no, our president might not be able to frown!)

If Bachmann’s got some sort of untrustworthy 1970s-style doctor giving her narcotics to treat her migraines, that’s a pretty big deal. But if we’re just talking about standard treatment for chronic migraines, I am much less concerned about these “pills” she is taking all the time.

John F. Kennedy had Addison’s and hypothyroidism. FDR had polio. Ronald Reagan was senile. All of those conditions were newsworthy and affected job performance, but there’s a way to report on a politician’s chronic medical condition that’s informative and not just a transparent attempt to sink a candidacy.

The Caller actually had a very nice little story here — I didn’t know about Bachmann’s migraines! — but its habitual sensationalism means we don’t know the extent of her problem.

Here’s the Columbia Journalism Review on your usual Caller “scoop”:

But when The Daily Caller has reached for the big scoop, the results have been less impressive. Headline-grabbing exclusives—mostly intercepted e-mails and tweets and attacks on media rivals—have exploded across the web before fizzling under scrutiny. Sexed-up headlines burned above stories too twisted or bland to support them. Quotes were ripped out of context, corrections buried, and important disclosures dismissed.

Does that seem at all familiar?

Tucker says “we did not suggest” that the headaches make Bachmann unfit for office. They just quoted multiple sources making that claim in a story that says she is constantly “incapacitated” by her “stress-related condition.”

Michele Bachmann is unfit to be president because she’s a demented religious nutcase and a far-right extremist. But she seems to have managed her migraines well enough to make it this far.

The DMs are not that outrageous or shocking, because we already all know that Palin and her inner-circle are paranoid and petty. It’s news that they hate Mitt Romney? The fact that Palin’s operation is an unprofessional cult of personality is public knowledge. But they’re still entertaining for anyone fascinated by Palin and her camp.

Mansour calls Palin “BigBoss” and Mitt Romney “Mittens.” She says “Evangelicals 4 Mitt” is a “fake org.” She calls blogger and CNN personality Erick Erickson “a total douchebag” and a “greasy dumb ass with a talent for self-promotion.” There is some outrage about Joe McGinniss, and an attempt to leak some semi-damaging stuff about Alaska radio host Shannyn Moore. [Update: Moore writes to say Mansour's claims are "not true, so not semi-damaging."]

And there are messages from when Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston were (briefly) back together, about how “heartbreaking” Bristol’s decision was to Sarah and Todd. (“Two words: Patti Davis. Okay three more: Ron Reagan Junior. Two more: Billy Carter. Doesn’t your family have one?”) That is the most embarrassing material, but even these messages are mostly harmless:

20:05:28: She’ll never publicly disown her daughter. She doesn’t have it in her. My mother would’ve never been able to do that either. Privately…

20:06:42: she will hold her at arm’s length. Even Thatcher was never able to disown her screw up son Mark. It’s a Mom thing.

I am not going to tut-tut about the journalistic ethics of this, because I read the story with great interest, and Sarah Palin’s closest advisor’s uncensored opinions about politics certainly seem newsworthy to me. Politico’s Ben Smith says he was offered this material last November, for a price, but Tucker Carlson says the Caller doesn’t pay for stories. The leaker seems to have done it for the lulz:

” I wasn’t serious back then. I was just … trolling you for fun. The Internet can be a boring place sometimes. :\,” the correspondent wrote.

I kind of can’t wait to see how Palin responds to this. She will probably call Tucker Carlson a child-molester on Facebook, for starters.

While that video — a supposed exposé of NPR’s fundraising practices — was produced by a regular Breitbart associate, it was first published and promoted by Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, for reasons unknown (perhaps because it was shoddier than some of O’Keefe’s other work, and the Caller, being more desperate for traffic, had slightly lower standards).

Today the Caller accuses Beck of being a serial content thief, with supporting quotes from Mr. Breitbart (and many others):

Over the past several years, Beck has relied on video, audio and written content from others to fill his radio and television shows, as well as his websites. Often he has credited his fellow conservatives for their work. Yet in many other instances say dozens of conservative journalists who spoke to The Daily Caller, he has not, often taking elaborate steps to cloak the origins of the material.

Publisher Andrew Breitbart has seen a number of his stories surface on various Beck media properties over the past few years. While he describes himself as “grateful for the many times he has credited me and my sites,” Breitbart says that “sometimes he also uses other peoples’ work without crediting them, making it appear as though it were his own. But especially since adopting ‘The Truth Has No Agenda’ slogan – and trying to deliberately re-position himself as the pious conscience and judge of many of those he took content from – he has exposed himself to his new motto’s unforgiving standard.”

The story goes on, at length, to make a high crime out of the common cable news practice of using content found on blogs, often without attribution. That is an annoying practice! And it is also one that every single cable news network does, all the time.

The story accuses Beck of playing videos made by bloggers while obscuring the watermark, summarizing research done by bloggers without crediting them, and borrowing story ideas wholesale without credit (or a coveted on-air invite). Victims of his theft, besides Mr. Breitbart, include the Media Research Center (a “watchdog” site that creates videos basically for this purpose, I thought), Pamela Geller, Jihad Watch, Accuracy in Media, and numerous other individual bloggers.

Using material found on the Internet without proper attribution is a detestable corporate media practice. But it’s so widespread — Sean Hannity does it, O’Reilly does it, MSNBC does it, the New York Times does it, even “The Daily Show” does it — that focusing solely on Beck’s actions seems to be missing the larger story. Unless there’s some other reason to go after Beck alone. A grudge, maybe? Or the simple fact that unlike other potential targets, he won’t be on TV for much longer.

Whatever defensible point the Caller might be making is betrayed by some silliness at the end. It is not particularly scandalous that Beck did not personally come up with his website’s motto, especially considering that he apparently hired the person who did. And this line from Mark Levin has absolutely nothing to do with the point of the article:

Beck’s reputation as an ungenerous user of other people’s work has occasionally surfaced in public. Conservative radio host Mark Levin recently took aim at Beck, whom he refers to as the “5-PMer,” this way: “You won’t find me putting my name on books that other people write. You’ll never find me doing that,” Levin said. “I would never, ever preach to you about principles and viewpoints that I am incapable of writing about. Never.”

Levin is clearly attacking Beck’s use of ghostwriters on his books. But Beck not only pays his ghostwriters, he also generously credits them. (And Levin’s attack is pretty weak: If using ghostwriters is a crime in the right-wing media now, someone ought to inform Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.)

Still, we say shame on Glenn Beck. If you’re going to borrow fantastical nonsense from a freak show like Pamela Geller, at least have the courtesy to credit the crazy person you got it from.