Astronaut Charles Bolden, veteran of four space missions. President Barack Obama appointed Bolden to be NASA Administrator. NASA image.
Let go of the power line, step back, and no one else will get hurt.
Paul Mirengoff at the much-read, and as we shall see, too-much-trusted PowerLine, asks a heckuva a question:
As Scott points out in the post immediately below, the news that President Obama tasked NASA head Bolden, as perhaps his foremost mission, with raising Muslim self-esteem is entirely absent from the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as the nightly newscasts of ABC, NBC, and CBS. Why?
It might be, as Mirengoff goes on to speculate wildly and without reason, because the news agencies are taking payoffs from Obama, or just so enthralled with him that they can’t bring themselves to report bad news.
Think about that for a moment: News agencies unwilling to report bad news? Is your Hemingway Sh__ Detector working yet? Mine’s clanging something fierce.
Does Mirengoff seriously think the Poobahs at Disney sit around issuing orders that ABC news gatherers ignore bad news about Obama? Has Mirengoff been in some sort of plastic bubble, deprived of newspapers and television for the past four years?
Why the silent treatment? Because it’s very much a not-much-news story, Paul. It doesn’t say what you think it says, or worse, what you know it doesn’t say, but claim it does for whatever trouble you can stir up.
Charles Bolden, NASA’s administrator, explained for a news channel that broadcasts to the Middle East, what his job is with regard to the Arabic and Islamic populations (this is the version reported by York):
“When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things,” NASA head Charles Bolden said in a recent interview with the Middle Eastern news network al-Jazeera. “One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”
Good reporters would look at the interview, and realize the PowerLine guys got the story dead wrong. Not bothering to speculate on why part-time yahoos misreported the story, they’d go on to real news.
Note carefully what Bolden said, and then note carefully what he did not say. Bolden didn’t say the mission of NASA had changed. Bolden didn’t say Obama told him to ignore the mission of NASA. Bolden said NASA, arguably our nation’s most famous and vanguard science agency, has a top duty to inspire children to do well in science in math, to cooperate with other nations in exploring space as we have done since at least the Reagan administration, and, for audiences in Arabic nations, to help them understand Arabic contributions to science.
“Let go of the power line, step back, and no one else will get hurt.” Downed powerline in New Jersey, in summer 2011. Photo by Saed Hindash, The Star-Ledger
Bolden did not say, as Hot Air misreported, “NASA’s spaced-out mission no longer includes . . . space.” Hot Air isn’t reporting. This is a time-tested propaganda technique they engage in: MSU, “making [stuff] up.”
Which of those goals does Power Line disagree with? Each of them is a noble enterprise on its own.
But, pausing for just a moment to make liars out of Power Line and the Examiner, and others, ABC News got it right. How soon do you think Mirengoff or Scott Johnson at Power Line will update their story to note ABC reported it? How much longer before others do?
Media Matters, who tend to be more careful and much, much more accurate, tells most of the story in the headline of their story: “Yet again, an Obama official says ‘Muslim,’ right-wing media freakout follows.”
If ABC can get it right, why not these other guys?
Yellow journalism was bad enough the first time around. PowerLine, could you at least take the time to get the story right? If you don’t have a Hemingway to help you out, you can always use the old Cheech and Chong Excrement Detection Method. I don’t recommend it, but it tends to make reporters more careful if they ever use it once.
You gotta wonder why these people spread easily-falsified, malignant rumors. Who are they working for? It’s pretty clear they don’t have much respect for their readers.
This is a hoax, people. NASA has not changed its mission. The president cannot change NASA’s mission since that is dictated by law (it requires an “act of Congress,” literally). NASA’s chief did not say that stupid thing others claim — he’s not stupid. Don’t pretend it’s news, don’t pretend it’s a problem when the head of NASA says he’s trying to promote interest in science, math and history, and international cooperation. That’s his job.
No one was assigned the job to get the story wrong. I wish people would quit working so hard at it.
What is Obama’s policy on NASA? Here’s the 2011 Budget Message.
Here’s the full Al Jazeera interview these guys misreported:
Here’s the Wall of Shame of blogs, reporters and news outlets who screwed up the reporting, in addition to Powerline, twice.
- Andrew Malcolm at the Los Angeles Times blogs
- Byron York writes with Osama at the obviously editorless Examiner
- Oh, my: Byron York can’t figure out why reporters don’t follow his malignant misreporting down a blind alley
- Cal Thomas, one of the Usual Suspects to get a story wrong if it says bad things about our president, fell into the hole.
- Charles Krauthammer calls it “fatuousness” on Fox, instead of correcting the story — Krauthammer’s clear animosity to science, space exploration and President Obama really blossoms here, the sort of stuff he may want to see a psychiatrist for, I sometimes think
- Hot Air effed up the story
- Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugged stumbled into the error, too (When Geller reports such a story, that’s often a clue that what she claims is dead wrong; any reporter worth her or his salt would have to be putting the Hemingway on “vibrate only” at this point.)
- Rand Simberg at Pajamas Media got it wrong –– but that doesn’t stop him from waxing malevolently about the problems with things, had he been accurate (can we really trust someone who doesn’t spell it “pyjamas?”)
- At the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News-Sentinel, columnist Kevin Leininger not only didn’t listen to the entire interview (and so get the story wrong), he reaches back to add the racist complaint that Obama put Martin Luther King, Jr.’s bust in the Oval Office, replacing a bust of Churchill borrowed from England. Leininger appears to be anti-American and racist both with that one, and now he shows religious intolerance. Somebody will send me a copy of Leininger’s column and say, “See, this is why we need to license journalists.” Hey, Leininger — why shouldn’t America honor American heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr.?
- Glenn Reynolds can never resist kicking someone who’s been knocked down, instead of trying to get the story straight and do justice.
- PJTV got there with half the story (remember the old saw, “half a truth is a whole lie?”) — Bill Whittle admits he’s lost his mind; you’ll have to suffer a plea to contribute to PJTV first. (Let me just say here on the record that Whittle is a crude liar, and deserves a punch in the nose from Walter Cronkite’s ghost.)
- “Space takes a back seat” at My Very Own Point of View
- Blogmeister (added August 5, 2010)
- “Was NASA’s Charles Bolden right all along about Muslim outreach?” Mark R. Whittington, Foreign Policy Journal, September 23, 2016
Also see this: Obama: A bold new course for NASA
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 