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February 07, 2005
Moyers and Factchecking
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a problem with fact checking. There have been several recent incidents mentioned here. The most recent instance was when the printed a column by Bill Moyers about how Evangelical Christians want to destroy the environment to encourage the second coming of Jesus Christ. In it he included a completely fictional quote by former Secretary of the Interior James Watt and truncated a quote by Senator Zell Miller. Part of what he said about James Watt is, "Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back." Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious."
The only problem is that Watt never said that and it is close to the exact opposite of what Watt says he believes. Moyers took the quote from a secondary source and never bothered to check with Watt or to check the Congressional Record to see if the quote was accurate. Considering that the Star Tribune recently criticized Powerline for supposedly not doing proper fact checking (in a column that the editors of the Star Tribune did not bother to fact check themselves) they should have learned to be better about checking the facts in a column like Moyers.
Moyers also writes, "The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought." Of course if Moyers quoted more of what Miller said it would read, "This blunt-speaking moral conscience of his time warns, in Chapter 8, verse 11 of the Book of Amos, as if he were speaking to us today: The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of bread or of thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord. And they shall wander from sea to sea and from the north even to the east. They shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it. ``A famine in the land,'' has anyone more accurately described the situation we face in America today? A famine of ``hearing the word of the Lord.''"
So it is absolutely clear that Miller was not talking about a physical famine of food, but a spiritual famine in "hearing the word of the lord." Was Moyers too lazy to look up the quote to see its context (it took me about five seconds to find the entire speech on google) or was Moyers intentionally dishonest about what Miller was saying?
Posted by Pete at February 7, 2005 03:51 PM
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