Nominee for the worst person in the world

Dave Neiwert at Orcinus has a remarkable post up on his site which does a thorough debunking of Michelle Malkin, who has a new book out and is subsequently back in the public eye. Her last book was the insane "In Defense of Internment," making her the only Asian-American to wholeheartedly support the baseless detaining of other Asian-Americans. Neiwert

As I've explained previously, I have something of a history with Malkin. I edited her column at the Bellevue Journal American in the early 1990s, while she was syndicated through the Los Angeles Daily News. The LADN only ever employed her as a columnist. Likewise, when Malkin moved to the Puget Sound to go to work for my friend Mindy Cameron at the Seattle Times, it was only as a columnist.

Now, it's true that while at the Times, Malkin did make the occasional foray into providing original reporting within her columns. Indeed, she was rather eager to write various exposes -- but unfortunately, she had trouble doing the requisite legwork to make those exposes actually stick.

First, there was the attempt to question a bit of local "corporate welfare" that turned out to be factually wrong. (Note the correction at the top.)

Then Malkin unleashed a tirade against city officials that explicitly called them prostitutes. Even readers recognized it as crudely libelous, not to mention devoid of basic ethical standards.

There were other instances that raised questions about her judgment as displayed in her columns: one, a column on "envirocrats" that was full of false facts and dopey assertions.

In another piece, she touted the film Waco: Rules of Engagement, which was later thoroughly debunked -- not to mention that its chief promoters and admirers were the Patriot/militia crowd.

Similarly, another column [which has since been strangely removed from the Times' archives] touted the later-debunked "statistical analysis" of John Lott regarding gun control.

The capper, perhaps, was a hit piece accusing the state's Democratic attorney general of manipulating prosecutions in drug cases. A key problem, as the victim pointed out, was that Malkin never bothered to contact the AG's office to get its side of the story -- and moreover, Malkin was once again simply wrong on the facts.

Shortly afterward, she announced she was "moving on."

Neiwert sources every single one of these in his post, too. Because he's a journalist.

Incidentally, Malkin did it again today. She writes a screed (no need to link to it, go see it yourself, I'm not giving her traffic) against Boots Riley of the Coup, who's part of this whole World Can't Wait thing today (which I don't support). She posts The Coup's infamous album cover (which features the WTC blowing up) and says it's "from 2001."

The album cover was made before September 11, and subsequently pulled after the attack. Does she mention that? No, a journalist would do that. She deliberately gives the impression that an "unhinged" lefty would see the attack on September 11th and then glorify it in an album cover, precisely the opposite of what happened.

Strangely, Malkin does consider herself a journalist, depsite the fact that her facts are often wrong and her opinions often overwhelm the story. Hunter posits it as a "facts v. punditry" liberal-conservative schism, where the opposite of journalism is Fox News.

The countermeasures that the Right demanded of the "mainstream" media, in outrage at the terrible liberality of a New York Times or Big Three network, is that factual journalism include conservative opinions about the story at hand, as "balance" to the presumed slant of each article. And they got it, in spades: there are few stories in today's press that don't include a conservative talking point from a conservative think-tank-based talking head to balance even a patently obvious and accepted fact. In the years of the Bush administration, much of factual "journalism" has positively devolved into a Monty Pythonesque Argument Sketch, with few scientific or other unambiguously factual stories that do not contain at least a token conservative figure to proclaim an unsupportable "No it isn't."

And it's not just limited to the bottom-rung, ambiguously moral ideologues that have historically populated the farthest fringes of the movement. The Bush administration itself has taken up the practice, as well, simply rewriting scientific and other government reports that contradict stated administration opinions about the issue at hand. Facts, now, are optional things in the national debate. Facts are explicitly liberal things in the national debate, in fact, and in that the movement sees facts everywhere, they therefore also see liberalism absolutely everywhere, threatening to rain down on them from every conceivable vantage point and profession.

That is why the most vocal figures of the right are even now continually infuriated with the mainstream media in general, and why there is literally nothing which will satisfy them that no, the press is not actually out to get them. What the press sets out to do on its best days -- expose uncomfortable facts, question government statements and authority, and report meticulously on hidden problems or issues -- are exactly the behaviors that sets the right on edge.

I think this is a crucial issue for the country. Because of the discounting of facts, politics has become professional wrestling, debates have become nothing but gainsay, and the two-party system has become as rigid as Catholicism and Protestantism. I think there are those of my friends on the left who are unnecessarily angry, who see conspiracies in everything, and who are generally unworthy of debate. But the right has succeeded in lumping those who value facts with that lot. Facts=liberalism to this group. The facts hate America, and therefore they cannot be trusted.

Look, facts are facts, and as much as conservatives push back against them, the best way to counteract it is to continue to push facts out into the light of reason. It's no longer interesting to me to argue dogma. Show me some facts (and not ones you made up, either, a la Miss Malkin).