From Scott Johnson at Powerlineblog.com

“TRUTH,” ACCORDING TO THE TIMES

This past Thursday the New York Times hosted a TimesTalks conversation moderated by New York Times Magazine staff writer Susan Dominus and featuring Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, Dan Rather, and Mary Mapes. “The full catastrophe,” as Zorba puts it. They discuss the film Truth, which opens commercially in New York this coming Friday, before a large and enthusiastic audience. I have posted the video below (about 90 minutes long); the Times has posted it at the link above.

I find this to be a striking cultural document. The event is festive and celebratory. Susan Dominus gingerly attempts at several points to inject a note of realism into the discussion, but she is brushed aside and appears to knows almost nothing beyond what the movie presents as the story; she obviously has not read the Thornburgh-Boccardi report. (I wrote Dominus via the Times email platform to ask her if she has read the report. She hasn’t responded. Based on the limited scope of her questions and comments, I don’t think she can have read it.)

Having seen the film, for example, Dominus professes herself troubled by Mapes having “left the door wide open for the right to drive through.” (Close that door! She’s a good Times reporter.) The assumption implicit in Dominus’s observation is that the authenticity of the documents was only arguably in issue; Rather protests her focus on the “technical” or “procedural” issues regarding the documents’ provenance and repeatedly stands by their “truth” along with the rest of the story.

Rathergate is one of the great journalistic frauds of all time. What is the New York Times doing celebrating and promoting it with this event honoring the film? Though Rathergate lacks the enormous human pathos and historical importance of Walter Duranty’s journalistic wrongdoing, covering up Stalin’s terror famine of the early 1930’s in the Ukraine, it’s up there in the hall of shame with Duranty. There is a closing of the circle in the Times event.

As I see the video, the audience has gathered to honor the gods and cast out the demons of crazed liberalism. The event partakes of something religious and creedal in nature. The lies of Truth have become articles of faith among the believers.

_____________________________________
The Video is at Powerlineblog.com, but it is not worth viewing unless you wish to see more nonsense.

I didn’t make any predictions for the 2015 season because I just had a feeling that it would be a strange year. Murray Chass, the former NY Times baseball reporter and the best baseball writer of my time, has posted the following description of doomed predictions for 2015.
__________________
From Murray Chass on Baseball..
Everybody loves predictions, that is, everybody but me. Everybody in my business loves to make predictions, that is, everybody but me. I don’t know what the obsession with predictions is all about, but I know predictions make the predictors look foolish.

Look at Sports Illustrated. That estimable publication last spring picked the Cleveland Indians to win the World Series. Memo to Sports Illustrated: The Indians will not win the World Series because to win it, you have to be in it, and the Indians won’t be in it because they aren’t in the playoffs. They aren’t in the playoffs because they finished the season with an 81-80 record.

The team Sports Illustrated said would lose to the Indians in the World Series isn’t in the playoffs either. That team would be the Washington Nationals.

To complete their futility of foolishness, SI was wrong with its predictions of all five American League playoff teams and two of five National League teams. Well, you can’t win ‘em all.

Like most prognosticators, SI simply picked the winners. PECOTA, on the other hand, takes predictions to an entirely different level. PECOTA is an acronym for a formula created by Nate Silver, who has gained notice as a political prognosticator and employee, first by The New York Times, currently by ESPN.

Now the property of Baseball-reference.com, PECOTA tells you not only where each team will finish but also what its won-lost record will be. You wouldn’t want to bet the rent on PECOTA’s predictions or projections, whatever they are.

I don’t know how PECOTA has done in the past, but I know what its projections did this year. Its worst miscalculation was the Kansas City record, projected to be the A.L. second worst 72-90 but turned out to be the A.L. best 95-67.

Poor PECOTA was at its division worst with the N. L. Central. Pittsburgh won 98, not 80; the Cubs won 97, not 82; St. Louis won 100, not 89; Milwaukee won 68, not 80, and Cincinnati won 64, not 79.