Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Hell, Jack Shafer? This is a Rewrite.

Jack Shafer reprimands Howie Kurtz for not emphasizing in his recent story that it was mostly Democrats that journalists were giving money to. But, if I were an editor and I had Jack Shafer's story I'd have made Jack point something else out to his readers.

As Shafer himself notes, Kurtz claims to have found over 100 examples by looking through FEC records. There's no way to know if this is an exhuastive list or not. Then, Howard only lists 28 examples out of 100, so there's no way to know if this is a representative sample of the people he found.

That's the real story - Kurtz and Shafer are hacks. It could be that Kurtz busted more people giving to Democrats than Republicans, and that was clearly what he was trying to imply with his article, but he didn't actually bother to share enough information with us.

...Another interesting point Kurtz could have made is that while he lists plenty of people who gave to the Bradley campaign, there isn't a single person listed who gave money to Gore. Now there's a story!