Bush family Moons the world

Is there a connection between the photo and the following story? We report, you decide....

(Excerpt courtesy of mahablog via buzzflash)

How to Fake News: A Primer

It's fun to check in with Memeorandum now and then to see what the righties are linking to. Yesterday they were gathering like flies to a carcass to a story that appears to be phony.

I say "appears"; maybe it isn't. It's hard to tell, for reasons that I hope become apparent as you read this post. The point of this post is not to prove or disprove certain allegations, but to illustrate how, shall we say, uncritical reading and writing can create a lot of smoke without there necessarily being a fire.

So, here we go:

An editorial in the Washington Times (link above) claimed that Air America Radio is stealing money from poor children and sick old people.
Did Al Franken's liberal radio network Air America divert city money for the elderly and inner-city children to itself? That's the question people should be asking this week after the revelation that the New York Department of Investigation is looking into whether hundreds of thousands of dollars were illegally transferred from a Bronx community center to Air America.

Now, this may be true, but it can't be verified through the Department of Investigation web site. And as I examined various other stories it seems no one has verified this claim with the D of I directly. So how does the Washington Times know about this outrage? From "sources quoted anonymously by the Bronx News," it says.

I live about a ten minutes' drive from the Bronx and wasn't aware there is a Bronx News. Nor can I find mention of a Bronx News through Google. There is a Bronx Times, and the Bronx Times recently carried a story about the legal difficulties of this same community center, the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club, but there was no mention in that story of Air America.

Read the rest of this story so you can understand the true value of media ownership and biased reporting.