L.A. Times’ Entry for Worst Reporting of the Year?
David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times’ Washington Bureau took a deep left turn into flyover country last week, churning out an appallingly inaccurate article on former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Siegelman was convicted on felony bribery charges in 2006 (after being voted out of office in 2003). Siegelman, whose prior appeals had been largely denied (two minor counts were thrown out by the Eleventh Circuit while the major bribery convictions remained intact), appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. SCOTUS declined to hear that appeal on Monday. Siegelman, who served nine months of a seven-year prison term before being released on bond in 2008 pending appeals, will now go back to federal court in Alabama for re-sentencing.
Much of Savage’s article should be downright amusing to those familiar with either Siegelman or Alabama. In attempting to explain the strange creatures from this mysterious hinterland to his La-La Land readership, Savage presents this:
Siegelman was the rare Democrat who could win in Alabama. He had also won election as Alabama’s secretary of state, attorney general, and lieutenant governor. But his career ended when Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys charged him with corruption.
That’s one way to put it, if you either don’t know a thing about the political history of Alabama or are anxious to put a pro-Siegelman spin on the whole affair. While all of Alabama’s statewide offices did flip — by significant margins — to the GOP in the 2010 elections, prior to that year “Dirty Don” was far from being a “rare” Democratic officeholder.
How far? The state legislature had been majority Democrat for an astonishing 136 consecutive years prior to 2010.
The lieutenant governor’s office, which Siegelman held from 1995-1999, has had exactly two Republican occupants in the state’s post-Reconstruction history.
But, “rare.” Should I go on?
As Savage notes, Siegelman was also secretary of state. A total of four Republicans have held that office since Reconstruction, the most recent being Nancy Worley from 2002-2007. Ditto for attorney general: four Republicans.
How about governor? Alabama has had exactly four GOP governors. The first in the modern era, Guy Hunt, came to power essentially by accident in 1986 when the Democratic Party tossed out primary nominee Charlie Graddick in favor of its preferred candidate Bill Baxley. Up until that year, the Democratic primary had been tantamount to election in any statewide race. (At the federal level, Alabama has had fairly even party distribution over the past several decades.)
Speaking of Guy Hunt, he was cashiered out of office following a 1992 conviction on ethics charges, which was widely considered a partisan prosecution carried out by a Democratic attorney general.
Savage also was wrong with plain points of fact regarding Siegelman’s prosecution. He wrote regarding the first of two corruption trials for Siegelman:
To the surprise of many, a jury in Birmingham acquitted him on all the counts in 2005.
Eh, that’s not what happened. Savage didn’t even get the year right.
You’re expecting actual facts and something approximating the truth from Pravda West?
This recall is exactly the same way Obama is going down as the proven liar and fraud even worse than Warren. You bet we see through their cheap charades and Theaters of the Absurd being burned down. Yes it makes the case for raising the voting,age to 25. The truth hurts and cuts both ways as ”liberals” are the gifts that keep on giving every time they open their mouths. Sit back and watch the,”Social” Democrats destroying themselves and each other as they attack anyone they don’t want to hear! Any Antisemites are just ”humanitarian, MLK and free speech frauds!
Remember the Liberal Media Motto “Never let the facts get in the way of the narrative”
“Savage obviously neither knows nor cares anything about the state or the people he’s writing about. All that mattered to him (and apparently his editors) was painting yet another hackneyed portrait of “Southern justice,” complete with every lame stock character in the book.”
That’s what I don’t get. Are these folks (Dear Liar has said that Texas has always been Republican) fundamentally ignorant — which is an indictment of our education system — or are they intentionally creating misleading propaganda? It’s really hard to tell the difference these days.
It’s interesting – the same way that a really bad car accident is interesting – to see just how profoundly ignorant most Democrats and “independents” really are. I mean the ignorance of basic facts goes DEEEEEP.
So, yes, it gets very difficult to tell when it is merely ignorance or willful lying that is being presented.
They (democrats) have this make believe narrative (that everybody now takes for granted) that in the old days the gop was like the democrats and the democrats were like the gop. Somewhere between the Civil War and Civil Rights was this make believe shift and all the racist democrats became republicans and all the fine republicans became democrats.
It’s true (rolls eyes) ask them!
I often hear the same. However, when asked about which one of these racists changed parties, they are unable to list them, not even one. because there are none. Progressives attempt to re-write history and fact. The symptom of the disease is to repeat something over and over (obsessive compulsive?)as if it makes it true, hoping that people continue to only read headlines.
Progressives are clueless. They believe the world is the same as a 1950′s movie where the dumb guy speaks with a southern accent ala Gomer Pile. They try to wash over fact to hide their truth: they are racially and regionally prejudiced.
It is endemic. Pelosi stating over and over something will create jobs, Obama stating over and over he is not spending money and the economy has turned around, Reid stating over and over taht he is being obstructed. When they reach the bottom, the rant gets louder.
Thankfully, congressional, court, and party membership records cannot be altered.
To many liberals, history seems to begin when they did – in the sixties.
Lived in Alabama for 17 years (including the Siegleman era). It’s a charming place but the Democrat political machine has always reeked of corruption. A Dem state rep walked around with a million dollar check in his pocket for a year to bribe someone to build a road into his hunting lodge.
Richard Schrushy, Siegleman’s crony bilked Health South stockholders out of millions to support his lavish lifestyle, When charged he had a jailhouse conversion and built a church building for a church in Birmingham and started a Sunday night Christian tv show where he gave out advice for the downtrodden. Alabama politics are like that, a thin veneer of respectability over a rotten carcass of corruption.
They don’t know much about history in the lib party and they don’t care about accuracy. All they know is that everyone in the south is racist and racist means republican. Or something like that.
“Siegelman was also a staunch supporter of Bill Clinton.”
Why does this NOT surprise me? Well when it comes to criminals, it takes one to know one.
By the way, did Bill Clinton ever get his law license back after it was taken away from him after the whole Paula Jones mess? And let’s not even talk about Clinton lying to a Grand Jury and being impeached by Congress (although not convicted). Yep, I can see why a guy like Siegelman would be such a staunch supporter of Bill Clinton. They had so much in common.
That your state of Alabama is considered backwards by your MSM News Corps probably had its genesis in lost power?
Siegelman should be stuffed, mounted and displayed in the state history museum: “White Alabama Democrat (extinct)”.
The Narrative in a Nutshell: Southern = Racist = Republican.
That’s all the history the Times’ readers need or want to know. To them, the South is bubbling cauldron of racism, the lid kept on only by the untiring efforts of liberal Democrats. If they relax for one instant, those evil Jim Crow Republicans will have black people sitting in the back of the bus before you can blink.
Will, that’s an excellent summary. I’ve lived in Alabama for most of my life, and your thumbnail of Alabama politics pretty much nails it. Back in the day, Alabamians thought of Republicans, when they thought of them at all, as the “rich Eastern bankers”; the type we now think of when we think of Goldman Sachs. The GOP was simply of no consequence, one way or another, in Alabama politics. And of course George Wallace was a proud Democrat until the day he died, and one of the most powerful machine politicans ever. At one time his machine rivaled Daley’s in terms of power, if not money, and Wallace had national aspirations.
BTW, Guy Hunt was pardoned in 1998. The parole board that issued the pardon concluded that he had been wrongly convicted. He died of lung cancer in 2009.
– can barely cover California news.
Obviously the La La LA Times has adopted the corollary # 1 to the Timesworn NYT slogan.
“All the S*** that’s New to Print!”
“L.A. Times’ Entry for Worst Reporting of the Year?”
Aw, they win that award every year. Give ir to someone else for a change.
As a 21 years paying sucker, I certify that this drekk product
deserves an award for journalistic malpractice. Not only that I knew
some of the brain dead “reporters” as well as a few “editors”,but
the Chandlers are not resting in peace while the Lefties in the newsroom
are having their seedy daily editorial meetings.
“worst reporting of the year”
I wish to object to this demeaning of the LA Times. It is an insult to the people who work there day after day and the levels of journalistic excellence of which they are capable.
There is still more than half a year to go. And an Obama administration in need of much cover during a reelection campaign. There will be plenty of opportunities for them to exceed their current effort and be wore than this time and again.
(The question mark in your title does admit of the possibility of worse reporting. But it sounds like you too skeptical.)
Yep – the year is not over yet. I live in SoCal and I know that on any given day at any given coffee shop, I can pick up a discarded Times and find you a candidate for “worst of the year”. Besides, by straying into Southern politics and away from their pet topics of entitlements, public employee union grievances and Mexico-California integration, they were out of their depth. But cut them some slack because they are continually distracted by the herculean task of making the biggest dufus in politics (Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa) appear to be a rising star in state and national politics.
“Will Collier is an aerospace engineer”? It would be nice to know of a still-employed US citizen engineer over the age of 35.
In STEM fields — after 22 years of displacements by cheap, young, pliant guest-workers with questionable ethics — that’s analogous to being a movie or sports star… or a non-corrupt politician. Wow!