The National Review Online and The New Republic

When the right turned on The New Republic because Beauchamp was making stuff up, I was at first surprised at the vehemence… it seems to me the amount of made-up news is quite plentiful, and as bad Beauchamp’s BS was, it didn’t seem all that much worse than a lot of other reporting on both the left and the right. (I am not a reader of the magazine, nor had I heard of Beauchamp before the scandal broke, so I have nothing invested here.) I think the problem that the right had with The New Republic was that, well, in any religion, the worst crime is not being an infidel, its apostasy. And The New Republic was one of the cheerleaders for the War in Iraq.

Which brings up a new “scandal” – this one at the National Review Online – described here by Andrew Sullivan. As Sullivan notes:

The alleged factual inaccuracy – reporting 4,000 Hezbollah gunmen when they didn’t exist – dwarfs any alleged incident Beauchamp reported for TNR.

Now, if the problem with The New Republic is one of factual accuracy, presumably the right will tut-tut the National Review Online as they did The New Republic. Sure, the NRO has fessed up, but they’ve also downplayed the issue, whereas I understand that at first, The New Republic stood by its story.

But I don’t think we’ll see the right come down on the NRO. See, here at Angry Bear we’ve had post after post about the factual inaccuracies and sleights of hand at The NRO. (Plug in “national review” or “corner” into the search engine on the upper left side of this page for a sample.) And its not like we’re the only ones. But it doesn’t matter… the same factual inaccuracies and sleights of hand continue to appear, and from what I can tell, they don’t exactly issue corrections either. I think Matthew Yglesias once noted… if you can’t think of what to blog about, check the National Review.