Is It Bias, Or Just Bad Reporting?

From UPI via Drudge Report:

Bush was denied wiretaps, bypassed them

WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.

Who writes this crap? What serious student of journalism could possible write something so crappy? Finally, how could crap like this ever make it onto the report of a global press syndicate? I've been out of college for a lot of years and more fatty tissue presses on my brain every day, but even I, in my advancing state of age, know crap journalism when I see it. And this is crap.

The White House may have decided to bypass FISA because of difficulty obtaining warrants, but that in and of itself does not prove the flippancy the article and headline state in direct terms. Where is the source for this accusation? You mean to tell me that there wasn't even one anonymous source?

If we are to believe the numbers supplied (which I think are probably correct) we still can see that the Bush White House has requested 1411 requests per year. In the prior 22 years of the Court's existence, there were, on average, 595 per year. The court's workload rose over 137%. Did the added work load of the Court slow things down to an unacceptable pace? We don't know because the obvious question was not asked or answered.

We also can see that, according to the numbers, only an infinitesimal portion of the requests by previous Presidents were ever modified. In the Bush(2) years we see that over 3% were modified. Does that mean that the requests were blatantly unapprovable as written, or does that mean that the Bush White House was under more serious partisan scrutiny than previous administrations? Oops, I guess that question wasn't asked or answered either.

Finally, we, as news consumers do deserve a little bit of context. What is so special about the times we live in? Why would request levels for warrants rise so high? Were these requests driven by any particular events?

I guess in the modern days of journalism we can expect no context but fully unattributed accusations backed up by poorly analyzed data.

Egad. That is crappy.

Journalism 101. F.