Archive for April 5th, 2013

Today in journalistic fraud.

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Philadelphia magazine recently ran a story called “The War Within” about John P. Boudreau, a former Marine sniper “who says he’s haunted by his actions in the Middle East”.

Here’s the headline and subhead according to Google:

The War Within: Meet the Sniper Who Killed 2,200 People in Iraq

“killed 2,220 people in Iraq”? Alarm bells ringing yet? Carlos Hathcock, for comparison purposes, had 93 confirmed kills. Chuck Mawhinney is credited with 103: that makes him #1 on the Marine list. Vasily Zaytsev had 242 confirmed kills, and Simo Häyhä 505 with a rifle.

So this guy had about 22 times as many kills as Hathcock and Mawhinney, about nine times as many as Zaytsev, and four times as many as Simo Häyhä, the most bad-ass sniper ever? And nobody raised any questions: like, how did you get to 2,200 kills? After, say, kill #110, or #200, or somewhere long before #2,200, you’d think the Marines would be pulling this guy back to teach at the sniper school in Quantico (or Pendleton, or Lejeune).

So why didn’t they? And why haven’t I linked to the article yet, or even a Google cached version of it, so you can play “spot the problems” along with me?

Yep. It was all a fraud. The magazine, and the writer (a Philadelphia radio host) got suckered by Boudreau:

In a series of conversations on Wednesday and Thursday, Boudreau, who claims a residence in Chester County, acknowledged that much of what he had told Gargano over the preceding several months—information he had also confirmed to Philadelphia magazine’s fact-checker—was either embellished or flat-out fabricated.

The magazine hasn’t even been able to confirm that Boudreau was a Marine. The article has been pulled from their website. (Google returns a search result for the original article, but the article has also been pulled from Google’s cache. Bing seems to have it cached, but I can only read page 1 and the comments.)

I don’t thnk the magazine was acting in bad faith, but it does bring to mind an observation that’s not original to me. I wouldn’t suggest we abandon the all-volunteer military, but back when we had a draft, you could count on the fact that a large percentage of the population – including the guys in the newsroom – had served in the military and could spot military related bullshit when they head it. If we still had a draft, I can imagine a Philadelphia magazine editor telling the writer, “I was in the Marines as a scout sniper myself. I talked to this guy: he doesn’t even know what color the boathouse at Pendleton is.”

Layers of fact checking, indeed.

(Forgot the hattip to Lord Jim.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Media | 3 Comments »

Firing watch.

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Tim Pernetti is apparently out as Rutgers AD over the Mike Rice scandal.

Also out: Jimmy Martelli, aka “Baby Rice”, an assistant coach.

Both of these are being spun as “resignations”, but my reading between the lines is that they were more like “I’m quitting now before I officially get canned.”

Posted in Clippings, Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Friday, April 5th, 2013

No kidding: this the actual quotation of the day in today’s NYT:

“It becomes more and more difficult to avoid the sad conclusion that political corruption in New York is indeed rampant and that a show-me-the-money culture in Albany is alive and well.”

-Preet Bharara, United States attorney in Manhattan.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Update.

Friday, April 5th, 2013

A long time ago, I wrote about the cases of Tyquan Knox and Michael Slider. Knox allegedly robbed a teenage girl, then tried to intimidate her and her mother into dropping charges against him. When that didn’t work, he killed the mother. Knox stood trial three times for the murder: the first two trials ended in hung juries, but Knox was convicted the third time and is serving life in prison.

Yesterday, Knox’s girlfriend, Keeairra Dashiell, was sentenced to “life in prison with the possibility of parole after 19 years” after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and attempted robbery. During the first two trials, she agreed to testify for the prosecution in return for a seven-year sentence:

Dashiell, however, proved to be a reluctant and unconvincing witness, often contradicting herself and getting caught in lies.

Noted #1:

After handing down the sentence, [Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael] Pastor spoke to Dashiell at length as she sat quietly next to her attorney with her head bowed. “You made horrific decisions and caused incalculable pain and suffering to others,” Pastor said in a somber tone. “You’re not entitled to pity.”

Noted #2: If this was reported at the time, I completely missed it. What ever happened to Detective Slider?

Taking in the emotional scene was Michael Slider, Henry’s uncle and a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department. Slider was fired by the department in 2010 for leaking confidential information about the case after he became convinced that his fellow LAPD detectives had not done enough to protect Henry and Lark from Knox. After an appeals court threw out one of the department’s allegations against Slider and sent the case back to the LAPD for reconsideration, police officials relented and reinstated Slider.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Roger Ebert.

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Thinking about what I wanted to write, I came to the realization that I’ve already written much of what I wanted to say: he was a huge influence on how I think about movies (for which I am grateful), his views on what is and is not art were questionable, and many of the political views he expressed later in his life were appalling. (Roger should have spent more time reading Mencken.)

Chicago Sun-Times. NYT. LAT.

A/V Club. Onion. There are several posts at Jimbo’s site, but this one in particular seems to be worth highlighting.

This whole thing is kind of odd, taken in the light of Roger’s April 2nd blog post, where he talks about launching a Kickstarter campaign to bring back “At the Movies”, relaunching RogerEbert.com, and various other projects. I wonder how things went downhill that fast.

And I also wonder what’s going to happen to RogerEbert.com. My understanding is that Ebert et al planned to move the site to their own servers, and off the Sun-Times site. That’s fine. But I went to the site for the first time in weeks yesterday and realized that I wasn’t all that interested any longer; only one of the current reviews was written by Ebert. Many of the others were written by Richard Roper (who I only tolerated because he was on the same show as Ebert), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Jim Emerson, and other reviewers who I don’t find interesting. I’m hoping the site stays up as an archive of Ebert’s writing (and it’d be nice if it also archived “At the Movies”), but it isn’t a place I’m going to go for movie criticism any longer.

That’s a little mean, but it is also the truth. Let’s end on an upbeat note. Or two.

They don’t make them like that any more. (Actually, they do, but only for the SyFy channel.)

I couldn’t find their “Worst Movies of 1992” show online, but here’s their original review of “Shining Through”, which was their pick for worst movie that year (this clip does include the strudel scene):

Someone’s done an IMDB list of all of Siskel and Ebert’s worst movies of the year, just in case you’re interested. A Google search will turn up clips from some, but not all, of those episodes.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed