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Hack List No. 3: Newsweek

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:15:00 +0000

This year, my annual list of the worst of political media highlights not just individuals, but the institutions that enable those individuals. The 2012 Hack List will be counting down the 10 media outlets that are hurting America over the next two days -- stay tuned! (Previous Hack List entries here, here and here.)

One shouldn't speak ill of the dead, I know. But if Newsweek has taught me anything this year, it's that death is not truly the end, because Heaven Is Real, According to Science.

Yes, that was an actual, for-real Newsweek cover this year: "Heaven Is Real." It was the dumbest, probably, but not actually the worst. This year's Newsweek covers also included naked bondage lady, and sexy lady about to fellate asparagus (a stock image that had also quite recently been used in at least two other magazines). There was "what if Princess Di was alive and my friend," too, but that was from 2011.

Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens: Darlings of the right

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 12:00:00 +0000

The story of American writers and artists who decamped to Paris is a familiar one that's been recently recast in golden hues by Woody Allen in “Midnight in Paris.” The story of British intellectuals who decamped to the United States is less familiar — and perhaps less colorful. In recent years it has consisted mainly of writers and professors. They prosper in part because of deep-seated American Anglophilism. We hear an Oxford accent and conclude the individual must be more educated, charming — and articulate — than we are. It might be true. Simon Schama, the British historian, recalls that English students practiced debating as well as impersonating 19th century orators. The tradition of debating has all but disappeared from American education, and this may have left us more tongued-tied than our British brethren.

Niall’s most laughable lie

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:42:00 +0000

Of all the wrongheaded claims in Niall Ferguson’s much-mocked effusion of trite right-wing talking points, this is my favorite:

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

In fact, America has a barely progressive tax system, in which rich, poor and middle-class people all pay roughly comparable percentages of their income in taxes. As this study illustrates, last year people who had an average income of nearly $1.4 million (the blessed 1 percent) paid almost the same percentage of their income in taxes as the bottom 99 percent of the population. Indeed, at the very top of the economic pyramid our tax system becomes actually regressive – people who made $10 million or more in 2006 paid 20.9 percent of their total income in taxes: a lower percentage than all but the poorest Americans.

Niall Ferguson trolls everyone in Newsweek

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:42:00 +0000

Niall Ferguson is an intellectual fraud whose job, for years, has been to impress dumb rich Americans with his accent and flatter them with his writings. It's a pretty easy con, honestly, if you're born shameless and British (or French). His main argument is that Western Civilization as embodied by the British Empire is awesome and wonderful even though it traditionally involved quite a bit of killing and enslaving of non-Westerners. Since becoming an insufferable American political commentator he's decided that America needs to cut Medicare and spend the savings on fighting neo-imperialist wars with an army made up of "the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the convicts." (Also he sued the London Review of Books for publishing this devastating review of his career.)

So Ferguson wrote a Newsweek cover (Newsweek has become "trolling America weekly" since Tina Brown took over) about how he thinks Obama shouldn't be president anymore, and while there are tons of very legitimate and compelling arguments against the Obama presidency, Ferguson instead based his article on a bunch of crap he made up. And the piece is full of just really obvious fallacies and little moments of mendacity like this: