Polygraph Tests Are Notoriously Unreliable. They're Even Worse in Cases of Sexual Assault. - Mother Jones
Polygraph Tests Are Notoriously Unreliable. They're Even Worse in Cases of Sexual Assault. - Mother Jones |
- Polygraph Tests Are Notoriously Unreliable. They're Even Worse in Cases of Sexual Assault. - Mother Jones
- Pete Buttigieg Was Rising. Then Came South Bend’s Policing Crisis. - The New York Times
- 20 Reasons Not to Trust the Journal Editorial Page - FAIR
| Posted: 05 Apr 2019 12:00 AM PDT  RichVintage/Getty Images Last Friday, as the two women who have accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault prepared to go on CBS This Morning and recount their stories to anchor Gayle King, Fairfax was traveling to a Washington, DC, law office to sit down with a very different type of interviewer: polygraph examiner Jerry Hanafin. Hanafin, a retired FBI agent, had administered a polygraph test last fall to Christine Blasey Ford, who had just accused then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her. Those results appeared to support her case. But this time, with Fairfax, Hanafin was giving the exam to someone on the other side of a sexual violence allegation. His report, obtained by CBS and published Wednesday, concluded that Fairfax's physiological indicators—such as perspiration, breathing, and heart rate—were "not indicative of deception" when he denied engaging in "non-consensual sexual activity" with either of his accusers, Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson. Fairfax, for his part, seems to have taken the results as an exoneration: "I feel so strongly regarding my innocence that I submitted myself to polygraph tests for each of the accusations against me," he said in a statement to CBS. "I passed those tests. I did not assault either of my accusers." But what does the polygraph exam—a controversial technique whose results are typically not admissible in court—really tell us about Fairfax's responsibility for the alleged sexual assaults? According to Leonard Saxe, a social psychologist at Brandeis University who has studied the accuracy of polygraphs for decades and led a congressional study on their efficacy in the 1980s, the exam is basically useless in determining if someone is telling the truth. "The test is just not supported by either theory or data," Saxe argues. "Somebody who lies, maybe they sweat a lot. They may look away, and so on. But the other possibility is also true. If you're arrested for some serious crime, if your life is on the line, you may be nervous, you may be sweating just because you're concerned about being truthful." That's the crux of most criticisms of polygraph exams (and there are many): that they measure signs of nervousness, and being nervous can result from any of dozens of indistinguishable factors—guilt, yes, but also fear that another kind of wrongdoing will be discovered, or even anxiety about having to take an exam considered by many to be junk science. "The lie detector is not a lie detector—it's a fear detector," Saxe says. That's part of the reason sexual assault victim advocates have typically discouraged investigators from asking victims to take polygraphs: The physical reactions that may come along with discussing a traumatic event, like a sexual assault, can produce false indicators that the person being tested is lying, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. It's also the recommendation of the International Association of Chiefs of Police not to polygraph sexual assault victims, because it can alienate them and destroy their trust in police, lowering the odds of a successful investigation. But on the other side, lie detector tests are perhaps even more flawed when used on those accused of sexual misconduct. Mary Koss, a public health professor at the University of Arizona who has studied sexual violence for decades, argues that polygraph exams are particularly ineffective in testing the truthfulness of a person accused of sexual assault because "most rapists, even those in prison, do not perceive what they did as rape no matter what others saw." She adds, "If you truly believe something to be true, even if it is a misperception, you can pass a polygraph." Indeed, research shows that most offenders will not admit to "rape" or to "sexual assault," even at the same time as they cop to behavior that amounts to it. That's according to Kevin Swartout, a Georgia State professor of psychology, who studies perpetrators of sexual violence and the type of people most likely to commit those crimes. When Swartout surveys men about whether they've committed sexual violence, he has to carefully design his questions to account for this problem. "If you were to ask somebody, 'Did you penetrate someone's vagina with your penis when they did not want to?' They might say, 'Yeah, I did that, when I was in college,' or whatever." But when you ask if they committed rape? As Swartout explains, "They'll say, 'Oh, no, no, I've never, I've never done anything like that.'" Once, he says, when he asked about 350 college men a similar series of questions, about 30 admitted to behavior that the FBI would label rape. But only one person openly said yes, he had committed rape. The reason boils down to our tendency to give ourselves a pass when we're evaluating our own behavior, especially compared to others. Labels like "rapist," Swartout says, "carry a special meaning above and beyond their actual definition. It's basically the worst thing that you can be labeled." And the discrepancy between the facts and perpetrators' self-regard is exacerbated by rape myths—such as the belief that rape is usually a stranger-leaps-out-of-the-bushes situation—that reassure men who have committed sexual violence against a friend or intimate partner that they don't qualify as a perpetrator. All of this gets murkier when the behavior in question involves a disagreement over consent, not the actual sexual behavior in question. According to Maia Christopher, executive director of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, some perpetrators may claim they didn't "coerce" or "force" anybody to have sex. "That may very well be true," she says, but in cases of statutory rape, for instance, "that doesn't change the fact that's sexual assault." Same goes when there's a lack of affirmative consent. On the flip side, Dan Sosnowski, a former president of the American Polygraph Association who has been conducting polygraphs for 39 years, vociferously defends the accuracy of polygraphs, even in sexual assault cases—if they're administered by a good enough examiner. "There's an art and science of the interview," he says. "If something really, really happened, it's written to your memory. It's written to your hard drive. I just have to give you a way to access that." He also estimates that about half of the sexual assault criminal defendants he has tested over the years, usually at the behest of their private defense attorneys, maintained their innocence in exams and passed the polygraph. (If they were telling the truth, that would mean his clients experienced an extraordinarily high rate of false criminal sexual assault accusations, which experts estimate happen in just 2 to 8 percent of cases.) Yet even Sosnowski says there's not enough information in Hanafin's report on Fairfax's polygraph test to say the public should accept its results at face value. Of particular concern, he says, are the length and lack of specificity in the questions asked of Fairfax, including, "Did you engage in any non-consensual sexual activity with Vanessa?" as well as the same question regarding Watson. Fairfax answered "no" in both instances, but those are not useful questions, Sosnowski explains, unless the examiner has clearly defined "sexual activity" beforehand. A separate exam question, he says, should address the alleged lack of consent, like, "Did you have an express, complicit, consensual agreement?" Sosnowski adds, "We have to be very explicit when we cover those issues." He also believes other questions asked of Fairfax, such as, "Was Vanessa crying at any time she was in your hotel room?" skirt the heart of the allegations against him, which in this case include alleged forced oral sex in his 2004 Democratic National Convention hotel room. Whether Tyson was crying, he explains, "doesn't address anything to do with any sexual contact." There are other reasons to take a polygraph exam like Fairfax's with a grain of salt; for instance, people who have been asked repeatedly about a subject will have a more moderate emotional reaction to it, lessening the likelihood that a polygraph will detect an anomaly even if they're lying, Saxe says. No matter how you read Fairfax's polygraph, it's far from the end of the road for the investigation into his conduct; the lieutenant governor himself is calling for further inquiry into both allegations against him. "Law enforcement authorities in Boston and Durham have demonstrated a sensitivity to those who wish to report a crime," he suggested in a statement to CBS. "A civil lawsuit as well would provide a forum for assessing the credibility of all parties." Putting the final determination of guilt in any sexual violence case in the hands of police is far from a perfect solution. Then again, neither is a polygraph. Some polygraph examiners who work with police can successfully use the exam to intimidate suspects into a confession, or into giving up information, according to Saxe. But in determining guilt or innocence, "it's not useful," he adds. That said, polygraphs often have success on a different measure: pushing a favorable narrative with the public. For public figures like Fairfax, Saxe says, "just the fact that they were willing to take a polygraph may suggest to people they have nothing to hide—and they were being truthful."  |
| Pete Buttigieg Was Rising. Then Came South Bend’s Policing Crisis. - The New York Times Posted: 30 Aug 2019 02:00 AM PDT  SOUTH BEND, Ind. — On a Tuesday in March, just after Pete Buttigieg began to catch fire with Democrats nationally, he flew home for his final State of the City address. Mr. Buttigieg, the two-term mayor, drew more than 40 rounds of applause as he described the "comeback decade" in South Bend, pointing to new businesses and apartments downtown and the demolition of hundreds of blighted houses. He had far less to say about his city's police department: He devoted nearly as much time to it as he did to South Bend's "smart sewers." But out of the spotlight, public safety was about to get worse. Reports of violent crime increased nearly 18 percent during the first seven months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018. The number of people being shot has also risen markedly this year, after dropping last year. The city's violent crime rate is double the average for American cities its size. Policing problems in South Bend came to national attention on June 16, when a white sergeant fatally shot a 54-year-old black resident, Eric Logan. The officer's body camera was not turned on, which was widely seen as a sign of lax standards in the department. Mr. Buttigieg found himself flying home again, regularly, to face the fury of some black citizens and the frustrations of many others. It is the great paradox of Mr. Buttigieg's presidential candidacy: His record on public safety and policing, once largely a footnote in his political biography, has overshadowed his economic record in South Bend, which he had spent years developing as a calling card for higher office. "When he came in, the goal was to help turn the city around. That had nothing to do with the police department," said Kareemah Fowler, until recently the South Bend city clerk. Mr. Buttigieg's image as a young, results-oriented executive continues to make him popular with many upper-income white liberals. They have delivered an overflowing war chest to his campaign: He had the best recent fund-raising quarter of any Democrat in the race, pulling in $24.8 million. But criticism of Mr. Buttigieg's oversight of the police has damaged his viability as a Democratic presidential candidate, given the huge influence of black voters in choosing the party's nominee. He has slipped in the polls in recent months, from double-digit poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire in the spring to the single digits more recently. In a recent Fox News poll, he earned less than 1 percent support from black Democratic primary voters. Mr. Buttigieg continues to draw large crowds, and a strong performance in the next debate or the army of field staff he has hired in early primary states could improve his standing in the race. And he has tried to highlight other issues, campaigning on the urgency of the climate crisis, a proposal to revive rural economies and for mental health and addiction services. Image  In a campaign swing through New Hampshire last weekend, however, voters readily expressed concern about how the police issues reflected on Mr. Buttigieg's qualifications. "If he couldn't corral a 100-member police department, how will he corral the Defense and State Departments,'' said Len Gleich, 72, who heard the mayor in Hanover, N.H. A Dartmouth student, Eowyn Pak, 20, said she was a Buttigieg supporter but was disappointed he did not speak to how he'd unite the country given the racial divisions in his hometown. "If one took a gander at the audience in that room today, it would become apparent that Buttigieg lacks minority following and support,'' she said, referring to the virtually all-white crowd at his event. In a recent interview, Mr. Buttigieg said his handling of South Bend's policing controversies are "certainly something I have to speak to" on the campaign trail. But he rejected the idea that he neglected issues of crime and policing until a crisis arose. He said that among the major priorities of his first term — "the things that are on the whiteboard when we have our strategy meetings'' — an effort to reduce gun violence was in the top three. "If nothing else, hopefully it will come across that among the candidates I'll be one of those who has engaged these issues and the challenge that they represent," Mr. Buttigieg said. "This is not a specialty or back-burner issue for me. It's been so central for our community and the people I serve." Since the shooting two months ago, Mr. Buttigieg has pursued damage control on two fronts: an earnest willingness to embrace his critics, and a characteristically technocratic search for a policy response. He has laid out a "Douglass Plan" to address historic wrongs against African Americans, including "a fundamentally racist criminal justice system." He attended protest marches and town halls at home, where the anger of some minority residents lashed against him like a breakwater. While welcoming new police recruits the week after the shooting — all six of them white — Mr. Buttigieg lectured that their uniform came with a burden. "In our past and present, we have seen innumerable moments in which racial injustice came at the hands of those trusted with being instruments of justice," the mayor said. But eloquently describing a history of injustice and showing empathy for its victims have yet to improve trust in the police, according to black critics and supporters of the mayor in South Bend, a city of about 100,000 in northern Indiana. When pressed at the first Democratic debate in June about why just 6 percent of South Bend police officers were black, in a city where 26 percent of the residents are black, Mr. Buttigieg confessed, "Because I couldn't get it done." A rise in violent crimeDuring Mr. Buttigieg's first term as mayor, from 2012 through 2015, reports of total violent crime were relatively stable, although the number of homicides rose after he took office. In his second term, though, reports of violent crimes rose sharply, according to F.B.I. and South Bend records. The increase was almost entirely from aggravated assaults, one of four offenses that comprise the F.B.I.'s main violent crime category. Mr. Buttigieg's aides said the increase was because of changes in how violent crime data was classified and reported, which they said have significantly overstated crime trends. In 2016, the South Bend police changed their definition of aggravated assault at the urging of the F.B.I. to include a wider number of crimes, said Mark Bode, the city's communications director. Reported aggravated assaults more than doubled that year. The F.B.I.'s national crime report for 2016 noted that because of the changes, the city's crime data was not comparable to previous years. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, cautioned that the data reporting changes made it difficult to render a judgment about violent crime overall during Mr. Buttigieg's time in office. And aggravated assaults are a less reliable category for depicting trends, he said. Still, even accounting for the changes implemented in 2016, the city's violent crime rate has been rising lately, according to city data. "I've not seen any acknowledgment from the mayor that our violent crime has increased substantially" over the past year or so, said Ricky Klee, a former City Council candidate who has written blog posts critical of the mayor. "He's made statements that have been vague, inaccurate or misleading," Mr. Klee said. Mr. Buttigieg, in the interview, denied those criticisms. "We adopted every best practice we know about in order to drive down violent crime,'' he said. "What I wish I could do is do something about guns. In the state of Indiana, that's obviously challenging.'' Mr. Buttigieg said he believed violent crime and murder rates in South Bend were comparable to cities with similar poverty rates and other characteristics. He also said an increase could be explained by residents trusting the police and reporting more crimes. The mayor argued that homicide rates were a more appropriate yardstick than overall violent crime, because virtually all murders are reported, whereas other crime data include statistical "noise'' that he said makes it impossible to scrutinize trends or to compare to national averages. "The thing we pay most attention to and the thing I worry most about is the murder rate,'' he said. Since Mr. Buttigieg took office in January 2012, there were 100 homicides through the end of 2018 — an increase of about 30 percent from the seven years before he became mayor. That does not include 10 homicides in the first seven months of this year, a number that has already topped last year's total of 9, which was the lowest since 2013. On another front, minority police hiring, South Bend under Mr. Buttigieg took a step in reverse. There are now just 15 black officers in the police department, down from 29 in 2012, according to city data and local news reports. The city has recruited just two new black officers since April 2017, compared to 20 white officers. City data released to The New York Times show some black applicants were rejected after a pre-polygraph interview and a written test. Turnover at the topAlthough there is a national shortage of police candidates, critics said South Bend's problems have been exacerbated by the mayor, who made a series of decisions on personnel and police discipline that sowed mistrust and failed to stabilize the department. In Mr. Buttigieg's first months in office, he demoted the city's first black police chief, Darryl Boykins, which the mayor acknowledged damaged relations between the police and minorities for years. Mr. Buttigieg said he demoted the chief after learning that the F.B.I. was investigating the police department for taping officers' phone calls. Rumors flew that white officers had been recorded making racial slurs. The tapes have never been released, because the officers who were recorded sued to keep them private, and the case remains tied up in court. Mr. Buttigieg replaced Mr. Boykins with a white police chief, Ron Teachman, who he recruited from a department in Massachusetts. Like the mayor, Mr. Teachman had a reputation as a technocrat, interested in technology and academic approaches to crime solving. But the hiring of an outside chief proved unpopular with some in the department. "Morale went down with all officers," said Davin Hackett, an officer who quit the department in 2017. Mr. Hackett was one of three black officers who filed lawsuits in 2016 and 2017 charging racial discrimination under Chief Teachman and his successor, Scott Ruszkowski, who is also white. "A lot of minority officers left," Mr. Hackett said in an interview. Mr. Hackett claimed in his lawsuit that he was twice denied promotions in favor of less qualified whites. His case was dismissed by summary judgment in July. One of the other officers' cases was also dismissed summarily, and the third officer reached a settlement with the city. Early in Chief Teachman's tenure in 2013, the Indiana State Police were called in to investigate a complaint that the chief failed to assist a fellow officer in breaking up a fight outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Center. The chief had remained inside the center when told of the fight and was untruthful to the lead state investigator, according to Patrick Cottrell, who at the time was president of South Bend's Board of Public Safety, an oversight body for the police. In response, Mr. Buttigieg said the episode "had more to do with interpersonal politics than public safety." Discipline within the department increased substantially under Chief Teachman, the mayor said. From 2014 to 2017, reported use of force incidents dropped by 35 percent, according to city data. "I think in the long run that will serve us well,'' the mayor said. In any event, after two years Chief Teachman left to work in private industry. His successor, Chief Ruszkowski, was a South Bend native with many years on the force. "He was popular in the minority community and among the police force," said Ms. Fowler, the city clerk, who is black. "What the mayor did was he granted their wishes." 'A lot of people are angry'At a City Council meeting after the Eric Logan shooting, Mr. Buttigieg listed multiple efforts by his administration to improve trust between the police and residents. They included rerouting patrols to keep officers in the same neighborhoods consistently, allowing residents to file online complaints about the police and spending $1.5 million on body cameras. Minority residents and officials, including supporters of the mayor and chief, said the current anger had far deeper roots than just the Logan shooting, which occurred when an officer responded to a report of a person breaking into cars downtown. "A lot of people are angry and hurt, but the issues didn't just start under Mayor Pete," said Sharon McBride, a black member of the City Council, known as the Common Council. Mr. Buttigieg "talked about fixing the heart before you can branch out to the rest of the body," she recalled about his policy priorities. Today, "the downtown is great," she said. "But did we do enough in the minority community? Absolutely not." In 2012, three white officers entered the home of Deshawn Franklin, a black teenager asleep in his bed, and subdued him with punches and a stun gun. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. A jury found the officers guilty of violating the Franklin family's civil rights. But it awarded them just $18, which activists called a slap in the face. Two of the same officers later pressured a convenience store clerk with a mental disability into swallowing cinnamon until he became sick. Officers posted a video of the episode on YouTube. The city settled a lawsuit for $8,000 and temporarily suspended the officers. In response to these and other complaints of excessive force, the mayor and police chief introduced bias training for officers. But for some minority activists and members of the City Council, the measures were insufficient; they called for a more aggressive civilian watchdog to receive and investigate complaints of police misconduct. Mr. Buttigieg resisted. He argued that the existing Board of Public Safety, whose members the mayor appoints, already served an oversight role. But that board did not conduct its own investigations. "We pushed and we organized and said this needs to happen," said Regina Williams-Preston, a member of the City Council who supported a new board. She called Mr. Buttigieg's refusal to endorse the idea "a betrayal of the community." Mr. Buttigieg said that he embraces civilian review of police and is open to activists' calls for more robust oversight. "The bottom line is the concept of civilian review makes sense," he said. "I think we have it up to a point. I think it's reasonable to say that we can do more." Oliver Davis, a city council member who is often critical of the mayor, acknowledged the success of many of Mr. Buttigieg's economic initiatives, such as demolishing or repairing 1,000 blighted houses in 1,000 days and rerouting downtown streets to increase pedestrian traffic and lure businesses. But he said Mr. Buttigieg's inability to solve the challenges of public safety overshadow those achievements. "If you build up the downtown and fix all the potholes but your police officers are killing people, your people are not around to enjoy it," he said. "That is the key issue with Mayor Pete."  |
| 20 Reasons Not to Trust the Journal Editorial Page - FAIR Posted: 01 Sep 1995 12:00 AM PDT 1. When Anita Hill took a polygraph test to try to substantiate her charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, the Wall Street Journal attacked her in an editorial (10/15/91) titled "Credibility Gulch": "Lie detector tests are so unreliable they are rarely allowed as evidence in court." But just eight months later (6/9/92), when the Journal argued against an Iran/Contra perjury indictment of former secretary of Defense (and editorial page contributor) Caspar Weinberger, this was its main evidence for Weinberger's innocence: "Mr. Weinberger has taken and passed a lie-detector test on the matter."
Besides the blatant racism–it's unimaginable in any context that the Journal would write of "a pack of Jewish crooks"–BCCI was not run by Arabs. BCCI's founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, and Swaleh Naqvi, its chief executive officer, are Pakistani. The Gokal family, which received the largest defaulted loans, are Indian. The biggest loser in the scandal was the ruler of Abu Dhabi, an Arab country. Deception Overseas 3. George Melloan, then deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, appeared on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (2/19/82) to explain why the Journal had vilified the New York Times' Raymond Bonner for reporting on a massacre of civilians in El Mozote, El Salvador. Melloan insinuated that Bonner had a "political orientation that is Marxist in nature." Pressed for evidence, Melloan said Bonner "was covering the guerrilla movement in El Salvador without ever telling anyone, any of his readers, that he was being conducted around the country on a tour by the guerrillas themselves." As Newsday's Sydney Schanberg pointed out (10/27/92), each of the four articles that Bonner wrote when he was traveling with the rebels pointed this out; the first article in the series (1/26/82) was headlined "With Salvador's Rebels in Combat Zone."  Roberto D'Aubuisson 4. In a letter to the New York Times (4/12/88), Journal editorial page contributor and former editorial writer Jude Wanniski claimed there was no evidence linking Salvadoran military officer/politician Roberto D'Aubuisson to death squads, labeling reports to the contrary as "McCarthyist" and "one of the most successful propaganda hoaxes of the decade." D'Aubuisson's well-publicized ties to death squads have been confirmed by internal Reagan administration memos. A March 18, 1981 CIA report to then-Vice President Bush read: "D'Aubuisson has served as principal henchman for the wealthy landowners and as a coordinator of the right-wing death squads that have murdered several thousand suspected leftists and leftist sympathizers during the past year." A July 31, 1985 State Department cable stated that D'Aubuisson led a meeting in which lots were drawn to decide who would "win" the opportunity to assassinate Archbishop Oscar Romero, the head of El Salvador's Catholic Church (Washington Post, 1/4/94). 5. Journal editorials referred to Angolan guerrilla Jonas Savimbi as "a veteran of the struggle against Portugal" (11/8/79; 6/30/89) and claimed that his "UNITA rebels have been fighting for Angola's freedom for 23 years" (12/21/88). According to correspondence discovered after the Portuguese military government fell in 1978, Savimbi was on the Portuguese military payroll as an agent fighting against genuine anti-colonial forces (Ray et al., Dirty Work 2; Johnson and Martin, Frontline Southern Africa). 6. The Journal recently seemed to encourage France to use violence against Greenpeace in its attempt to blockade French nuclear testing in the South Pacific: "When confronted by fanatics spouting irrational demands, there is often no alternative to using force," an editorial declared (7/12/95). Greenpeace's "irrational demands"–that the French cease testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific–are echoed by the "fanatic" prime ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the heads of state of virtually every Pacific Island country. Crime and Punishment 7. In an editorial on crime (2/11/94), the Wall Street Journal claimed "it is very nearly routine procedure for criminals to kill their victims during a robbery to get rid of the evidence." According to FBI statistics, there were 672,480 robberies in 1992, and 2,254 murders associated with robberies–so about 99.7 percent of the time, robbers did not kill their victims. 8. An editorial page "Notable & Quotable" column (11/13/92) compared "top problems in the public schools as identified by teachers" in 1940 ("Talking Out of Turn, Chewing Gum, Making Noise…") and in 1990 ("Suicide, Rape, Robbery…"). The Journal got caught by a hoax which compared two totally dissimilar lists: One was based on the questions (not the responses) from a 1974–75 poll asking principals about crime in their schools, while the other was derived from a 1943 list of the most common classroom problems. (The phony comparison was debunked in the New York Times Magazine, 3/6/94.) In reprinting the lists (from Congressional Quarterly Researcher, 9/11/92), the Journal added an error of its own–moving the date of the "modern" problems from 1980 to 1990. Tree Muggers 9. In two editorials (11/18/92, 1/15/93) urging a pardon for Bill Ellen, convicted in a federal court of violating federal wetlands regulations, the Journal claimed Ellen had merely been building a "wildlife sanctuary…to attract migrating waterfowl," and was prosecuted because he had "allowed two loads of dirt" to be dumped "on land that someone representing the U.S. said was a wetland," in an area that "the Soil Conservation Service had previously deemed non-wetland." Ellen, the Journal argued, had been unfairly charged with "violating a [1989] regulatory standard that didn't exist at the time of his actions." Bill Ellen's "wildlife sanctuary" was actually a hunting reserve. He was not charged for violating new regulations, but rather on five counts of violating the Clean Water Act of 1972. Ellen was convicted of filling some 86 acres of clearly wet areas, including part of a tidal creek, a violation of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1898 (Washington Post, 2/20/93). Ellen had already received three warnings to stop in 1988–a year before the 1989 regulations were added. According to journalist Bill Gifford in the Washington Monthly (11/93), "Ellen had filled or altered close to 1,000 acres, though the prosecution focused on areas that were indisputedly wet; the new wetland definition wasn't even an issue."  Kangaroo rat 10. "Violating the Endangered Species Act just might be the best thing Michael Rowe ever did," wrote Ike C. Sugg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in an editorial-page column (11/10/93) titled "Losing Houses, Saving Rats." Rowe saved his house from California's October 1993 wildfires, wrote Sugg, "by clearing a fire-break" around his property on land designated as a protected habitat for the Stephens kangaroo rat. Arguing that 29 other homes within the "77,000 acres of private property" designated as a kangaroo rat study area could have been saved if their residents had likewise broken the law, Sugg lamented, "most of Mr. Rowe's law-abiding neighbors lost their homes." Nothing prevented the cutting of brush on private land in the kangaroo rat's protected habitat, since the animal (a relative of the squirrel) lives underground. Nevertheless, the U.S. General Accounting Office studied whether houses could have been saved if homeowners had been allowed to plow under their land. "Overall, county officials and other fire experts believe that weed abatement by any means would have made little difference in whether or not a home was destroyed in the California fire," the GAO concluded (7/94), noting that the fire, whipped by 80-mile-per-hour winds, jumped over two highways and a canal. 11. The Journal launched yet another assault on the tiny kangaroo rat this year, charging overzealous enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. Columnist Gideon Kanner ("The Rule of Law," 5/24/95), a southern California law professor, wrote that Southern California farmer Tuang Ming-Lin was arrested in February 1994 because he had "run over five rats with a plow." "Since Mr. Lin speaks no English," Kanner continued, "there is at best a serious question as to whether he even knew about these regulations, though the Feds insisted that they had sent letters advising of their existence." According to The Recorder (6/14/95), a law publication, Lin was arrested not for running over rats, but for destroying the protected habitat of three different endangered species: the Tipton kangaroo rat, the kit fox and the leopard lizard. According to the Recorder, Lin was sent the first letter warning him about the protected species in December 1992; the last of several warnings was conveyed in person, one week before his arrest, by a game warden who told Lin, his son and the farm foreman that they needed a permit to continue to cultivate the land. Besides the factual errors, it's ironic that the Journal would have a law professor–in a column titled "Rule of Law"–argue that ignorance of the law is an excuse. Atomic Bombast  The atomic bombing of Hiroshima (photo: US Army) 12. The Journal (8/29/94) blasted the Smithsonian museum's proposed exhibit on the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, citing the draft script: "It is especially curious to note the oozing romanticism with which the Enola show's writers describe the Kamikaze pilots…. These were, the script elegaically relates, 'Youths, their bodies overflowing with life.'" The kamikaze quote was not written by the show's curators but–as was clearly spelled out in the script–by Yukiteru Sugiyama, a surviving kamikaze pilot. According to the Smithsonian script, it was "included to give viewer's insight into [the kamikazes'] suicidal fanaticism, which many American's would otherwise find incomprehensible." 13. As evidence of the supposedly soft-on-Japan "mindset" of the Smithsonian scriptwriters, the Journal editorial (8/29/94) cited this quote: "For most Americans, this war…was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." Here's the full context of the Smithsonian quote–hardly soft on Japan:
14. In defending the use of the atom bomb, the Journal editorial (8/29/94) claimed that a U.S. invasion "would by all estimates have resulted in more than a million American casualties." "By all estimates"? Official reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June of 1945 estimated total U.S. casualties (including injuries) as between 132,500 and 220,000. Gen. Douglas MacArthur argued in June 1945 that an estimate of 110,000 casualties was too high. Historians have been unable to provide documentation for anything close to the "one million" figure (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 6-7/86; Diplomatic History, Winter/93). Arcane Reporting 15. In an editorial (2/5/93) attacking efforts to increase media coverage of domestic violence, the Journal claimed that FAIR's report that domestic violence increases on Super Bowl Sunday was "received as sacred writ by an entirely credulous army of journalists." The Journal praised one reporter, the Washington Post's Ken Ringle, who wrote an article dismissing any link between violent sports and domestic violence (Washington Post, 1/31/93): "He pursued an arcane reporting technique that has apparently slipped from favor: Mr. Ringle called up the source of the original story to ask if it were true." In fact, Ringle never did call up the source of the story–FAIR's national office–to ask if it were true. If he had, we would have told him that our information about the Super Bowl came from first-hand reports from women who work in domestic violence shelters, and from articles written by journalists who used the "arcane reporting technique" of interviewing battered women. One of the reporters specifically cited as part of the "credulous army" duped by FAIR, Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times, had actually been reporting about the Super Bowl's link to battering as early as 1987 (NBC Nightly News, 1/18/87). In writing an editorial whose whole point was that journalists should be skeptical and check their sources, the Journal editors didn't bother to check the Post's story out by calling FAIR. If they had, they might not have repeated Ringle's errors, and could have avoided making new errors of their own–like referring to the public relations firm Dobisky Associates as "FAIR's publicists," a firm we'd never heard of until the Journal's editorial appeared. The Journal refused to publish a letter from FAIR pointing out these and other mistakes. Economic Nonsense
This fundamentally dishonest comparison assigns two recessions–neither of which occurred during his presidency–to Carter, while counting no recessions for Reagan. You could find a 3.5 percent growth rate for Carter by playing a similar game and counting from 1975 to 1980. An honest economist will tell you that you have to compare similar phases of the business cycle: From the 1973 peak to the 1979 peak, there was a growth rate of 2.8 percent; from the 1979 peak to the 1989 peak, there was a growth rate of 2.5 percent. So much for the "seven fat years." 17. The Journal praised the 1981 deregulation of the Savings & Loan industry (6/29/81), saying, "The beauty of these solutions is that they are cheap because they depend on the market and not on the federal till." The federal till has so far paid more than $150 billion to cover the costs of this "cheap" solution. 18. Editor Robert Bartley has stated that in the U.S., "there aren't any poor people, just a few hermits or something like that" (Washington Post, 7/11/82). The Limbaugh Connection 19. Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund was the ghostwriter of Rush Limbaugh's first book, The Way Things Ought to Be. The book is wildly inaccurate, as demonstrated in FAIR's book, The Way Things Aren't. 20. Republican strategist William Kristol referred to Rush Limbaugh as "almost a Wall Street Journal editorial page of the airwaves."  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from "polygraph definition" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
Comments
Post a Comment