02 May 2006 Caveat Emptor, Magazine Readers

Writing for the American Spectator, David Holman notes that a writer for the New Republic made stuff up.

Holman appears to be surprised, but it is a habit over there.

Addendum: The New Republic says it wasn’t fiction, but hyperbole. I leave it to readers to determine their own view about whether a figure of speech can be two paragraphs long.

Addendum, 5/2/06: The American Spectator isn’t buying the hyperbole explanation offered by the New Republic’s Jason Zengerle because the author of the piece, TNR senior editor Ryan Lizza, told the Spectator’s Dave Holman that he really meant what he wrote.

Meanwhile, the Spectator’s Quin Hillyer is quite annoyed at a line in Lizza’s piece that, in Quin’s words, is a “slander against poor people from an entire state and, by implication, an entire region of the country.” Quin likens the slur to Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf’s infamous “poor, uneducated and easy to command” quote from 1993, for which the Post apologized.

Quin wonders: “…will the New Republic… have the same decency the Post did”?

Having “the same decency” as the Washington Post is the very definition of an attainable standard, but my bet nonetheless is that the New Republic won’t meet it.

Note: Originally posted April 30; re-published May 2.