Time and Joe Klein, Still Top Turkeys

What a propagandist Time magazine's Joe Klein is. This is an old role for Time but it could be argued they did it for what they felt were national security reasons in the past. Now it is strictly for the Republican Party.

Jane Hamsher has a nice summary.

Glenn Greenwald has the fuller story.

The very idea of a reporter and a major news magazine publishing a piece about a crucial bill that neither the reporter nor any editor has ever even bothered to read is amazing. No blogger that I read regularly would ever think about doing that. But that's how the Bush administration has been able to depict all of its false statements about Iraq, and its illegal spying on Americans, as some sort of complex, impossible-to-resolve "controversy." GOP operatives say "X" and reporters write it down, and it would be terribly "partisan" for them to point out that "X" is actually an outright lie.

Had Klein even bothered to read the Democrats' bill before calling it "well beyond stupid" and passing on lies about it, he would have had a real story. This:

Last week, House Democrats passed a bill that allows the government to eavesdrop on foreigners outside of the U.S., but requires court approval to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens inside the U.S. But GOP operatives/politicians have spent the week telling reporters that the bill does the opposite, falsely claiming that it gives the same rights to Terrorists that it gives to U.S. citizens.

Those are the objective facts. That is actually what happened. Yet Klein's function -- like those of most of his colleagues -- isn't to report what actually happened, so he'll never say that. And thus, Time has yet again completely misled its readers on a critical political issue by passing on GOP falsehoods as fact, and they are highly unlikely to do anything in the way of alerting their readers to what they did, let alone reporting the real story here: how and why that happened.

Glenn started here: "simply doesn't know what he's talking about and he publishes demonstrably false statements."

Atrios imagines a Bizarro World and what would have happened if Klein lied about Republicans.

Wired security blogger Ryan Singel: Joe Klein Butcher's Wiretapping Debate.

When even FOX NEWS is turning against the PATRIOT and FISA acts, what is TIME thinking?

Tags: Joe Klein, Time, FISA, PATRIOT, FOX NEWS, Top Turkey