News Roundup for 10/14/11

George Soros (Reuters file photo)

-Headline of the Day-
"Reuters's Dizzying Changes to Its Soros-Occupy Wall Street Story."

Yesterday, Reuters posted a story about how it looked like shadowy gazillionare and source of all evil George Soros was behind all of this Occupy Wall Street business. Their evidence? Soros once gave money to a group that gave money to a group involved with OWS -- so that sounds super-solid already, right?

And it turns out that Soros gave money to the group that gave money back in 2009 and 2007 -- long before OWS was anybody's idea for anything. At this point, the reporting hinges on "if you squint real hard and drink a lot of vodka and ignore the fact that time exists, it kind of looks like maybe its possible that George Soros had maybe something to do with all this. Maybe."

So not everyone was sold on this and people started pointing out that this was really shitty reporting. At this point, Reuters changed the story to "Soros: not a funder of Wall Street protests." No, really. Apparently good reporting now involves the process of elimination. Look for the big, widely distributed story that Lexx Luthor isn't behind this thing either.

But the fixed story is not the only version that Reuters is distributing -- they also feature the unfixed story, in case that's what you like better.

So, if you live in the real world, then you can learn that George Soros has been ruled out as the mastermind behind the 99-percenters. If you're a Tea Party nutjob who blames George Soros every time it rains, then the uncorrected version is the one for you.

And through it all, the story has been updated and rewritten to death, when the most obvious solution would be a retraction. "Reuters cannot -- must not -- get a reputation as a right-wing media outlet," writes Reuters' own blogger Felix Salmon. "We have to report the news as impartially as we can. In this case, there was no story, and nothing to report. Inventing a tenuous and intellectually-dishonest link between Soros and OWS might get us traffic from Matt Drudge -- but that’s traffic which, frankly, we don’t particularly value or care for."

If that's the case, maybe leaving an uncorrected version of the story up for wingnut blogs to link to isn't the wisest decision ever. (Atlantic Wire)


-Wall Street reconsiders this "too big to fail" stuff-


Click to embiggen

Why do citizens have a monopoly on the citizenry? (DailyKos)


-Bonus HotD-
"Moody's Economist Says GOP Jobs Bill Would 'Likely Push The Economy Back Into Recession.'"

Which is weird, because that's exactly what it did when it was called "Bush's economic plan." (ThinkProgress)