Reuters

From the March 8 edition of James Taranto's Best of the Web. (H/t: Nathan Burchfiel):Another Man's Victim?Reuters has a cute little human interest story about funny people from Vermont holding "town meetings" where they call for President Bush's impeachment. What caught our eye was not the darling little Vermonters, though, but something in this paragraph:

This is really too funny. On Monday, Reuters released the findings of an international ACNielsen Internet poll concerning global warming. As one might imagine, Reuters took the most dire assessments from the study and made them the focus of the piece.Yet, the most startling conclusions from this survey – that only “50 percent reckoned [global warming] was caused by human activities,” and that “…

It’s always nice to have your father stick up for you, even when you’re 60 years old.Such was the case when former President George H. W. Bush spoke at a recent reception for a journalism scholarship. As reported by Reuters (emphasis mine throughout, h/t Drudge):President George W. Bush's father accused the news media of "personal animosity" toward his son and said he found the criticism so…

We all know the face of real terror. Nick Berg getting his head sawed off by a knife wielding Islamist, suicide bombers laying waste to mass transit in Israel, the World Trade Towers collapsing on the morning of 09/11/01. That is real terror. But, to Reuters, enforcing U.S. immigration laws is terror. The title of the Reuters piece sets the tone for the overwrought sentiment infused throughout…

An unbylined report on unemployment claims by the Associated Press is a classic of the genre (bold is mine): The Labor Department reported Thursday that applications for jobless claims dropped by 26,000 to 299,000 last week on a seasonally adjusted basis. It marked the first time jobless claims have fallen below 300,000 since the week of July 22. The improvement was much better than the decline…

The last paragraph of their Wednesday editorial (my bold) makes the point that the wire service, its defenders, and those who want to see the whole to-do as being about "just one incident," won't see, or won't admit to seeing:What is clear about all this is that nothing is clear. Maybe there's a Jamil Hussein with the Iraqi police, but he's a sergeant, not a captain. Maybe there's a police…

Why isn't Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, who first broke the "fauxtography" scandal out of Lebanon, among Time's "digital democracy" change agents?After looking at the weak collection of candidates available to vote for as Time's Person of the Year last week (based on what they did in 2006, which wasn't much), I wrote:Perhaps YouTube, online forums, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and online…