Lowe's Workers stay late to Fix legless Vet's Busted Wheelchair (After VA Wouldn't)

[merrily]

29. Hmm. As people advocate for privatizing the VA, we get this story from Newser.

Don't get me wrong. If the story is true, I am thrilled for the vet and commend the Lowe's employees highly.

I am saying only exercise caution when reading stories like this, while privatization of the VA is drumbeat in the background.

As for the source, Wolff's newser, always exercise caution:

Criticism

In its review of Wolff's book Burn Rate, Brill's Content criticized Wolff for "apparent factual errors" and said that more than a dozen of the subjects he mentioned complained that Wolff had "invented or changed quotes" that he attributed to them. [20]

In a 2004 cover story for The New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote that Wolff was "uninterested in the working press," preferring to focus on "the power players—the moguls" and was "fixated on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money." She also noted that "the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events." Calling his writing "a whirlwind of flourishes and tangents and asides that often stray so far from the central point that you begin to wonder whether there is a central point", she quoted one daily New York columnist as saying "I find it nearly impossible to read his columns. They’re flabby. I don’t know what the fuck he’s trying to say." One journalist who knew Wolff told Cottle, "He can't write. He doesn't report."[21] Cottle subsequently called Wolff "possibly the bitchiest media big foot writing today."[22]

The Columbia Journalism Review criticized Wolff in 2010 when he suggested that The New York Times was aggressively covering the breaking News International phone hacking scandal as a way of attacking News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch. CJR called Wolff's analysis "pathetic", "disgusting", "twisted", and based on "zero evidence".[23]

In 2013, Gawker.com cited Wolff as a major example of "trolling", whereby media run stories designed solely for the purpose of outraging their consumers and thereby provoking public reaction. Gawker wrote, "Wolff is intelligent enough to be an actual, serious media critic; he's also canny enough to know that few people give a shit about serious media criticism, so he can get a lot more readers by tossing off ridiculous white wines [sic] about restaurant reservations and incendiary mansplanations; and, he's both needy and amoral enough to just, you know, insult people for attention."[24]

New York Magazine has called him an "angry man for pay" and a "media provocateur". [25]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wolff_%28journalist%29