The New York Times uses an Associate Press article titled, Federal immigration failures fuel state action.

Mark Krikorian is the expert quoted. He is from the "Pat Buchanan" school of mainstreamed white supremacist political lobbying. His employer, the "Center For Immigration Studies", is an alleged think tank that used to be the research arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

Even though it has been spun-off and allegedly separated from the more radical FAIR, the Southern Poverty Law Center still considers the Center For Immigration Studies part of the list of anti-immigrant hate groups created by John Tanton.
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One thing that we all agree on quite strongly here at CultureKitchen is that most of what we read and hear from the various mainstream news media sources is bogus to some extent -- incomplete, inaccurate, in many cases biased.

How can we tell when we're being told the truth and when we're being misled or lied to? How do we know who we can count on to tell us the truth and who we can safely assume is blowing smoke at us? How can we tell the difference between good journalism and bad?

It's difficult to separate the news wheat from the spin chaff, because every time we look at a new article or listen to a new story we have to keep asking ourselves the same questions time after time:

Is this a good story?
Is it informative?
Is it fair?
Is it well-sourced?
Does it show the "big picture"?
Can we trust the publisher of this story?

That's a time-consuming set of mental hoops to jump to every time we see a headline or hear a lead-in to another piece of news. If the answer to all or most of those questions is "yes", then we don't want to miss out on exploring and learning from the story in question. If the answer to all or most of those questions is "no", then we don't want to waste our time or bandwidth wading through it at all.
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How do you know that Team Hillary is definitely planning a run for 2008? When James Carville starts writing Op-Eds that make the threadbare case that she can be elected.

Carville's case is essentially this: Hillary got elected in 2000 to the Senate despite objections from the naysayers; some of her polling numbers are not catastrophic; she has a net positive rating of 54%-42%; having been through the right-wing slime treatment for over a decade, nothing they can say, supposedly, will stick; and besides, those people who like her really, really like her.

Wake up, James (if I may call you that). It ain't so.

Hillary got elected in 2000 because of four factors: her willingness to work very hard for it, her own glamour as First Lady, her luck in having a weak opponent, and because New York is a blue state, at the time a blue state still angry over impeachment. For a sitting First Lady, especially this one, to get elected against a completely unknown junior Congressman in this state is not illustrative of anything. Whatever naysayers there were, not that I can really recall any, were at best marginal; after all, Rangel and Moynihan recruited her.
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Matt Bai's article on YearlyKos, Can Bloggers Get Real?, has some on the lefty blogosphere atwitter.

Susie Madrak, Jeralynn Merritt commented favorably about it; but it's comments by bloggers not affiliated with DailyKos like George Nemeth and Jill Miller Zimon that I find particularly important. Especially when read before Barbara O'Brien's reality check. I also liked that John Holbo picked on the same quote as I did but for purely onotological reasons.

The quote in question follows :

The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos’s front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it’s Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm.
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The plot thickens people.

I have yet to hear from anybody over at The New York Times or from their most notorious consultant, the blog 'evangelizer' and publisher of Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis. Jeff is the same guy that led campaign against Dell for, of all things, ignoring his comments and criticisms about the company.

Irony works in mysterious ways.

The news of my wandering around their blog has been reviewed, newsed, gawked, slated and wired, to say the least. Here's the current list :

Daily News | Daily Politics
The Times uninvited new blogger

Lisa Stone
Surfette: Remember "Step 1: No more rookie maneuvers"? Here's how NYTD can avoid delivering Exhibit C.

Online Journal Review
NY Times leaves backdoor open on new politics blog?

Doc Searls
The Doc Searls Weblog : Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Life Of Rubin
Wednesday Morning Link-a-thon

Gawker
Remainders : Toos is a virgin who can't drive

Slate
Fast and sloppy rules

Wired
All The News That Anyone Can Log In and Print

Metroblogging NYC
Security Blooper at NYT political blog in development

Jossip
NYT political blog needs better homeland security
**Best. Title. Ever.**

Bloggy
New York Times Working on a NY politics blog

Room Eight
New to blogging?

Editor and Publisher
Blogger Gets Sneak Peak at New 'NY Times' Politics Blog

I want to do a follow-up experiment. I would like people to submit the story to Boing Boing. And I want to wait and see what happens.

BoingBoing is now managed by a company called Federated Media. Federated Media got an initial round of funding from ...

wait for it ...

wait for it ...
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