This shows how "The Nation" tries to play it. From WSJ.com:
BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, January 21, 2002 2:10 p.m. EST
Left-Wing Rag or Right-Wing Gag?
On Friday, acting on a tip from reader Gregory Brunt, we noted that The Nation had published an article on its Web site by Matt Bivens, the very first sentence of which contained a major factual error:
When George W. Bush co-owned the Houston Astros and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the park after Enron.
Bush, of course, was part-owner of the Texas Rangers, not the Astros. Almost immediately after we published Friday's column, The Nation fixed the error. Or at least it tried. As The Weekly Standard notes, here's how the modified sentence read:
When George W. Bush co-owned the Texas Rangers and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the park after Enron.
Alas for The Nation, this was no more accurate. Enron Field is where the Astros play; the Rangers' home is the Ballpark in Arlington, which has no corporate sponsor. Bivens also screwed up the chronology. Bush sold his interest in the Rangers in 1998; Enron bought naming rights to the Astros' new stadium in 1999. So an accurate version of Bivens's lead would have read:
A year after George W. Bush sold his interest in the Texas Rangers, construction began on a new stadium for the Houston Astros, and Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the latter team's park after Enron.
That, of course, does not reflect badly--or indeed, in any way at all--on President Bush, though the incident reflects terribly on the bush-league journalism they practice at The Nation. Apparently the magazine's editors agree; by Saturday afternoon the Bivens piece had disappeared from their Web site (though the unmodified version still shows up in The Nation's search engine). |
