December 11, 2003
Steve Gigl at Helloooo Chapter Two! alerts his readers to the following story from the AP, reprinted in the Star Tribune with the following headline: Driver hit while talking on radio call-in show in SUV Steve Gigl adds: Does "in SUV" tacked on the end there supply any useful information? To say it differently: do you lose anything by just reporting "Driver hit while talking on radio call-in show?" No, it doesn't, but note that it does associate four "evils" of the Left in one story: * driving, instead of using public transportation * SUVs, the new epitome of conspicuous consumption * using cell phones while driving * talk radio When this came across the wire, the news desk at the Strib must have tripped over themselves rushing this to print with the superfluous mention of the SUV. Only when you read the article do you read that she had...
Yasser Arafat hinted at recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, according to a transcription of an interview with Henry Siegman, which this article describes as an "American Jewish activist": Israel would receive sovereignty over the Western Wall — a remnant of the Second Temple compound — and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, "because we recognize and respect the Jewish religion and the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine," according to the transcript. Asked about Israel as a Jewish state, Arafat said that it was up to Israel to define itself, as long as it was democratic and guaranteed the rights of minorities. Arafat included the reference to democracy and the rights of minorities to appeal to American and EU audiences, but left unspoken the tripping point of refugee return, through which Arafat hopes to establish a Palestinian primacy in Israel. Dore Gold, a Sharon adviser, makes this...
Continue reading "Would You Buy a Used Car from This Man? Or This One Either?" »
The Commissar writes an open letter to Ariel Sharon, warning of the same tactic that Yasser Arafat is pushing by stealth, but that Thomas Friedman appears to espouse openly -- the "one-state" solution: To start, watch out for a certain reporter/worldbeater, friend of Saudi royals, ... da, the anti-zhid himself, Thomas Friedman. ... He and that Palestinian hottie, Diana Butto, are chatting, oh-so-earnestly, about "one state solution." Da! What if Palestinians say, "No problem. Israel exists. From Jordan to Mediterranean. All of historical Palestine. Is good country. We fly Star of David flag over our homes. NOW GIVE US VOTE." What will happen then? Do you think America would allow the Palestinians to exist within a Greater Israel without a vote? Of course not, and we shouldn't. But what will that lead to? It leads to the overthrow of Israel as we know it, replaced by yet another Arab thugocracy...
December 12, 2003
As I predicted in my post last night, the story regarding the meeting between Henry Siegman and Yasser Arafat continues today in the New York Times with very little clarification about Henry Siegman, his motivations, or his past history as an Arafat supporter and associate: Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, has released a statement saying that he recognizes and respects "the Jewish religion and the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine," in a bid to restore his standing as an advocate of peace after more than three years of conflict. ... Mr. Arafat was said to have made his comments in a meeting last Wednesday in the West Bank city of Ramallah with Henry Siegman, the director of the United States/Middle East Project of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Siegman provided The New York Times with a summary of the meeting prepared immediately afterward and then translated into English. Mr....
December 14, 2003
Power Line has an important post on the Telegraph story regarding the training of Mohammed Atta by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and why the story is not getting any attention from major US media outlets. In order to understand why the Washington Post, for example, does not appear anxious to look into this claim, Hindrocket notes the following exchange during an on-line chat this morning: Annapolis, Md.: Will the Post be looking into the story reported by the Telegraph about connections between Abu Nidal, Mohammad Atta and Saddam Hussein? Very likely to be untrue, but would be immensely significant if true. And there's no mention on the Post's Web site about it yet. Robert G. Kaiser: If we put every rumor and story in the British press (not to mention many others around the world) on the Web site, you'd be dizzy--and no wiser. The Post does not print other...
December 19, 2003
In yet another breakthrough based on materials found with Saddam Hussein, ABC News reports that Coalition intelligence services have identified moles working for Saddam within the Coalition Provisional Authority: Among the documents found in Saddam's briefcase when he was captured last weekend was a list of names of Iraqis who have been working with the United States — either in the Iraqi security forces or the Coalition Provisional Authority — and are feeding information to the insurgents, a U.S. official told ABCNEWS. "We were badly infiltrated," said the official, adding that finding the list of names is a "gold mine." Would someone at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune like to send a reporter to cover this and inform their editorial board of this development? (via Politburo Diktat)...
I won't have to explain to most of you why this caused me to do a spit-take when I read: Paris Hilton Beats Bush in TV Ratings It must have been one hell of a show ... can they do that on TV?...
Despite the blatherings of our local broadsheet, the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein paid off in a spectacular way today: Libya has tried to develop weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles in the past, but has agreed to dismantle the programs, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday in simultaneous televised speeches. Bush said Libya's leader, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, had "agreed to immediately and unconditionally allow inspectors from international organizations to enter Libya. "These inspectors will render an accounting of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and will help oversee their elimination," Bush said. Gadhafi approached US and British officials in March to discuss the disarmament of Libya. Does anyone remember what was going on in March? And does anyone want to hazard a guess as to why Libya approached Bush and Blair, rather than the UN? It's because with the Anglo-American...
December 20, 2003
Media recognition of the stunning diplomatic victory of Bush and Blair -- and even Gadhafi -- in Libya's trilateral disarmament agreement yesterday comes slow. Most of the major newspapers covered it as a news story, although both local Twin Cities newspapers buried it. Editorial boards mostly ignored it, with a couple of major exceptions. For instance, the Daily Telegraph in the UK had no problem proclaiming it as a major vindication of the Bush/Blair global strategy in the War on Terror: The stick has been applied, now a carrot must be offered as an incentive to other rogue nations, like Iraq. As for Mr Bush and Mr Blair, with Saddam captured and Libya tamed, it cannot be denied they have had brilliant end to a difficult year. The world is gradually becoming a safer place. Both their approval ratings should reflect that. The title of this piece is "A Safer...
December 30, 2003
No, I am not referring to the Minnesota Vikings. The title belongs to the state's "leading" broadsheet, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which constantly goes out of its way to demonstrate its parochialism and its condescending foolishness. Tomorrow's education in Strib madness comes from this article -- if you can call it that -- from Bill McAuliffe, a "rap" retrospective of 2003. In this case, "rap" replaces the more accurate "atrociously bad poetry", as even a quick read demonstrates: Prince Roger Nelson's in the Rock Hall of Fame. Purple is his color and music's his game. And the orchestra's one hundred, it's a real grand dame. With a brand new conductor, Osmo Vanska by name! Jesse Ventura got his portrait on the wall. Got a chokehold on "The Thinker" and he's lookin' real bald. He's smoking a stogie, lookin' like he's got it all. So why'd they have to put him in...
December 31, 2003
After the guys at Fraters Libertas got a chance to look at my post on the nauseatingly bad rap-poem the Strib published today, they assigned me the task of reviewing Bill McAuliffe's year-end poetry in 2000 and 2002. Up until that point, I had no idea that this was a running feature of the Star Tribune. My first impression is that what McAuliffe writes is only poetry in the sense that it rhymes. In fact, I can't spot a whole lot of metric or structural difference between any of the three, including this year's entry; it's almost as if McAuliffe has a MS Word Poetry Template into which he stuffs whatever comes into his head. For instance, these couplets don't show a lot of coherence or any sense of meter: Enter the Wild -- they're among hockey's best -- with jerseys so cool they're also best-dressed. Will St. Paul be...
January 1, 2004
Man ... I spend yesterday and today watching the granddaughter, and when I come back, one of my blogfriends writes a killer article taking it to the Los Angeles Times. Patterico spent a lot of time and effort researching the foibles of the West Coast's leading newspaper (which he calls the Dog Trainer), and the result is a long list of embarrasments, mistakes, and flat-out lies that you would imagine should qualify John Carroll, the editor-in-chief, for a spot on Monday's unemployment line. Take the time to read through the entire post, and if you haven't already done so, add Patterico to your blogroll. Great start to the new year! (New resolution: go through my blogroll more often ...)...
Quite frankly, Twin Cities residents take a perverse pride in the editorial idiocy of our leading newspaper, the Star Tribune. My neighborhood bloggers all have recurring examples of the foolishness that the Strib regularly publishes in its news and op-ed sections, and at least for my part, I'm happy to remain well-informed and reasonably rational in spite of the Strib. So when another major city lays claim to the Strib's championship of lunacy, we all feel a bit resentful. Yesterday, unfortunately, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tried to make its name ironic by publishing this tinfoil-hat editorial by Edward Wenk, Jr., described in the brief bio as "the first science adviser to Congress," as well as having accomplished the unusual hat trick of serving on the policy staffs for Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. These days, Wenk works as a crank, if his article gives a reliable indication: The shock and awe of...
January 3, 2004
In a typical editorial, this one "signed" by Commentary editor Eric Ringham, the Minneapolis Star Tribune castigates the Green Party and Ralph Nader for getting George Bush elected in 2000: Look at what's happened since your champion confused and divided the left in 2000. Nader, the nominal head of your party, dismissed any suggestion that he was splitting the liberal vote, sneering that the difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore was the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Later on, when the difference between Dum and Dee in deaths and deficits became all too plain, Nader and friends started arguing that if Al Gore couldn't put up a better fight, it wasn't Ralph Nader's fault. Well, no -- it wasn't Nader's fault that the race was close. It was just Nader's fault that Bush won. Without Nader, Gore would have won Florida, recount or no recount. He would have...
January 4, 2004
Art Coulson, editor-in-chief of our smaller but significantly more intelligent local newspaper, the Pioneer Press, writes in today's Opinion section that they have had enough of canned letters to the editor: We welcome letters to the editor from readers on just about any topic and written from just about any perspective. ... What we don't welcome, and won't publish if we can help it, are letters signed by but not written by the sender. These include forwards of messages bouncing around the Internet, cut-and-paste jobs from political Web sites and outright frauds sent by special interest organizations over false names and addresses. For some reason during this particular election cycle, activists on all sides have discovered the Letters to the Editor section of their local newspapers and insist on filling them with all sorts of one-off blurbs for their candidate or cause du jour. Instead of featuring reader response to...
I've often taken the Minneapolis Star-Tribune to task for its editorial policy, claiming that the newspaper's knee-jerk Leftism ill serves its readership. Sometimes, however, I wonder if it's really true after reading letters printed in reaction to their articles -- letters like this one, for instance (fourth item): On Dec. 29, Native Americans commemorated the 1890 battle at Wounded Knee, where some 300 unarmed Lakota (Sioux) Indians were massacred by U.S. troops. On Jan. 2, the Star Tribune ran an article about L. Frank Baum, the "Wizard of Oz" creator, and his book on holiday window displays. Baum's masterful window decorating might merit a 24-column-inch tribute, but running it so close to the Wounded Knee anniversary is, at best, insensitive. Following Wounded Knee, Baum publicly championed the genocide of the Sioux. As editor of the Aberdeen Pioneer in South Dakota, Baum wrote of the slaughter that "our only safety depends...
January 5, 2004
What a relief to quit writing about the Strib! Fortunately, as I wrote last week, I've discovered an even bigger example of the Tinfoil-Hat Brigade in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. As I saw on Blogs for Bush today, their Opinion section continues to attract the oddities. Today's exercise in Looneyvision comes to us via the P-I from guest columnist Neal Starkman, who claims to have discovered the reason George Bush remains popular with the electorate: The answer, I'm afraid, is the factor that dare not speak its name. It's the factor that no one talks about. The pollsters don't ask it, the media don't report it, the voters don't discuss it. I, however, will blare out its name so that at last people can address the issue and perhaps adopt strategies to overcome it. It's the "Stupid factor," the S factor: Some people -- sometimes through no fault of their own...
January 9, 2004
The AP and the Star-Tribune provides another example of the mass media's cluelessness in dealing with matters of religion. Today's entry involves a study of sexual practices in urban areas from the University of Chicago. For the most part, the story remains mildly interesting, as much as it can be when it's mostly telling us what we already know about sexual relations these days -- people wait longer to get married and have more sexual partners than they did before, men have more partners than women, women want "relational" sex and men want "transactional" sex regardless of sexual orientation. (In fact, it sounds to me like they haven't changed much in 20 years.) Towards the end, reporter Martha Irvine makes the following statement: Still, Laumann and his staff found that social services, the church and law enforcement have been slow to address this latest sexual revolution. ... And most churches...
Glenn Reynolds, the indispensable Instapundit, writes in his MS-NBC column that the New York Times needs an editorial transfusion: And if you read the Times oped page regularly, as fewer and fewer people seem to do these days, you'll notice a distinct staleness about many of the columnists. The Times oped page needs turnover -- either permanent, or temporary, with columnists sent off to do actual reporting, or something, for six months or a year while they regain their edge. But who would fill the gaps? Reynolds then discusses a couple of options available to the Gray Lady, including giving occasional guest columnist Dan Savage a regular run while Dowd and Krugman go on an extended vacation. (Maybe Krugman can write another book to follow up The Great Unraveling? He can write about trying to unravel during a record growth period.) Reynolds notes that Savage isn't even outside of the...
January 12, 2004
I'm puzzled by this piece in tomorrow's Washington Post that tells the story of former Ba'athists in Iraq and how difficult life has become, now that their privileges have been revoked: Less than a year ago, Ismael Mohammed Juwara lived high in the food chain of President Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He was a secret policeman feared and respected among his comrades and in his hometown, enjoying a cornucopia of privileges from the government. ... Now, as he scrapes out a living by selling diesel fuel illegally, he is a pariah in the new Iraq. "We were on top of the system. We had dreams," said Juwara, a former member of the Mukhabarat, the intelligence service that reported directly to the now-deposed president. "Now we are the losers. We lost our positions, our status, the security of our families, stability. Curse the Americans. Curse them." The entire article consists of several...
January 16, 2004
Local prosecutors resolved a tragic and infuriating case yesterday by virtually guaranteeing a vicious murderer gets out of prison in less than 20 years: Tekela L. Richardson, accused of beating a 79-year-old St. Paul woman to death June 17 while stealing her vehicle, pleaded guilty Thursday to intentional second-degree murder. ... Under a plea agreement, prosecutors will recommend that Richardson receive a 25 1/2-year prison term as called for by state sentencing guidelines. That would require her to serve at least 17 years. However, District Judge M. Michael Monahan reminded Richardson that he is not bound by the plea agreement, and that she cannot withdraw her guilty plea if he decides to give her a longer sentence. She will be sentenced March 15. In my native California, murder during a robbery is automatically first-degree murder, and the only two options are death or life without parole. California has many issues,...
January 18, 2004
As I read over the main web page of today's Minneapolis Star Tribune, I noticed a link titled "Editor's Note: Why we pulled USA Weekend from Sunday's Paper." Certainly a provocative invitation, I began to wonder why: Financial disagreement? Offensive material? A Bush endorsement? When I clicked on the link, however, I found that even the explanation had been pulled from the paper. It looks like some sort of conspiracy! I'm sure that a portion of the blogosphere will assign deep and sinister intent to this, just like they do every time a 404 comes up on the White House web site. Those of us who live here will just continue to be amused by the parochial nature of our largest hometown daily....
A few items from the media that probably don't measure up to a full post on their own, but still seem interesting ... First this story from the AP regarding comments by Dan Rather on coverage for nominating conventions: CBS anchor Dan Rather says the day is coming soon when there will be virtually no live coverage of political conventions on television networks. The Democrats and Republicans are to blame for scheduling four-day conventions that do little except advertise their established positions and candidates, he said. This actually makes sense and it's one of the few times I'll agree with Rather. Modern nominating conventions only serve to anoint predetermined winners and so generate very little in terms of real news. Only the keynote and acceptance speeches have any significance, and networks generally still carry those live (and should continue to do so). They also fail miserably as entertainment, making them...
January 21, 2004
Months after the suicide of a British government scientist threw into doubt Anglo-American claims of WMD possession by the Iraqis and touched off accusations of a murder conspiracy to silence the analyst, the BBC admits that it has an unbroadcast interview with the late David Kelly in which he insists that Iraq had WMDs and posed an immediate threat: The weapons expert slashed his wrists near his home in Oxfordshire, southern England, in July 2003 after being exposed as the source of a claim by a BBC reporter that the prime minister's team inflated the threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, to justify war. One week before senior judge Lord Hutton delivers his report on Kelly's death -- a judgment that could be critical of ministers -- the BBC said it would broadcast later Wednesday an interview it recorded with Kelly in October 2002, which it has never shown....
January 23, 2004
Here in the Twin Cities, we are accustomed to our leading newspaper's overt and covert anti-Republican bias, especially when the subject is the Bush administration. Other major broadsheets have similar problems, especially the Los Angeles Times (covered brilliantly by Patterico's Pontifications) and the New York Times. Editorial page preferences don't bother me; the op-ed section is where editors are supposed to take sides. These newspapers allow their editorial bias to inform their supposedly straight news reporting, and that serves no one well. One newspaper that had been fairly good at separating news from opinion was the Washington Post, which has been fairly straightforward during the Iraq war. Unfortunately, that seems to be changing now that the primary season is in full swing. Hindrocket at Power Line writes a devastatingly detailed critique on the work of the Post's Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus, two reporters whose bias had been at issue...
February 15, 2004
I missed this column from Mark Steyn last night, but fortunately The Big Trunk at Power Line didn't. Steyn notes the hypocrisy and blatant bias in American media in how they responded to two poorly-sourced scandal stories, and how only one of them actually pans out -- and that's the one they're not covering: Now let's consider the Kerry scandal: If you read the British newspapers, you'll know all about it. It's not about whether he was Absent Without Leave, but the more familiar political failing of being Absent Without Pants. It concerns a 24-year old woman - ie, 41 years younger than Mrs Kerry - and, with their usual efficiency, the Fleet Street lads have already interviewed her dad, who's called Kerry a "sleazeball". But if you read the US newspapers or watch the news shows there's not a word about the Senator's scandal. Though it seems to have...
Earlier today, I blogged about an excellent editorial in today's Washington Post that demonstrated their intelligence and insight into the empty-suit phenomenon that is John Flip-Flop Kerry. Unfortunately, as Power Line notes, that intelligence doesn't extend much beyond its op-ed section. Dana Milbank, a consistently biased Bush detractor on their Politics desk, engages in an exercise of obtuseness regarding the new Bush campaign ad: The ad accurately points out that Kerry has raised $640,000 from lobbyists, "more special-interest money than any other senator." And it fairly questions whether Kerry is disingenuous to accept money from those he would vanquish. But the Center for Responsive Politics, which calculated the figure Bush cited about Kerry ($638,358 raised from lobbyists since 1989, to be exact), has some bad news for Bush, too. The president raised $842,262 from lobbyists in the current election cycle -- almost four times the $226,450 Kerry raised. And if...
Power Line notes late tonight that the Sun in Britain is reporting that a major US television network is suppressing an interview Kerry's alleged paramour gave detailing their relationship: The beauty said to have had a fling with presidential hopeful John Kerry has recorded a bombshell tell-all interview. Journalist Alex Polier taped a talk with a US TV network at Christmas. The former Washington intern, 27, told all about an alleged fling with the 60-year-old super-rich senator in spring 2001. The channel is sitting on the tape until it has enough evidence to back her story. If the sex claims are true, they would shatter his White House hopes. Kerry, a married dad of two, has denied the fling. But Alex told pals she fled to Kenya on his suggestion. One TV source said: "She wants to tell her story. She has talked at length about her relationship with Kerry....
February 17, 2004
Fox News, depending strongly on its exit polling, has declared Wisconsin for John Kerry after getting 22% of precincts reporting -- and with Kerry trailing by several hundred votes. CNN also calls it for Kerry at 8:52 CST. Is it so necessary to "call" elections that are this close?...
March 4, 2004
The Captain has been invited to participate in a new group blog that launched this week: Oh, That Liberal Media. Organized by Stefan Sharansky and including contributors such as Ombudsgod and Patterico -- who's been brilliant at holding the LA Times accountable for its egregious bias -- the aim is to create a clearinghouse of items that will not only demonstrate the leftist bias in today's mass media but encourage their readers and viewers to demand more balance. My first contribution to the effort is a cross-post of my earlier item on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's editorial against the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Firearms Act. I hope you get a chance to keep up with this exciting new project....
March 6, 2004
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune once again gives new meaning to the term thin-skinned in its headline article on the recent bus strike, skewing the reporting with a bias so obvious it's laughable: The bus strike was quiet on all fronts Friday -- until the Minnesota Taxpayers League lobbed a grenade into the battlefield. "Transit just isn't that important to the smooth functioning of the Twin Cities transportation system," said league President David Strom. "That's the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the lack of chaos engendered by the bus-system strike." If indeed any strike could be called "quiet", the Strib's coverage of it certainly doesn't give that impression. Today, for instance, the Strib has two articles on the strike, including this one, and has headlined the strike since before it began. Yesterday the Strib ran seven stories on the impasse. Besides, while the Taxpayers League has been an active and influential...
March 10, 2004
John Kerry today stuck his foot squarely in the warm messy stuff today when he made an aside to a group of union workers while he thought he was off-mike: "Let me tell you, we've just begun to fight," Kerry said. "We're going to keep pounding. These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen. It's scary." The AP's Mike Glover, who originally covered this remark, wrote this about the incident: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on Wednesday called for deeper tax cuts for the middle class than proposed by President Bush and described his Republican critics as "the most crooked ... lying group I've ever seen." Contrast that passage with this passage in an article on the Kerry smear: Earlier Wednesday in Chicago, Kerry toughened his comments about his GOP critics after a supporter urged him to take on Bush [emph. mine]. "Let me tell...
In tomorrow's Star Tribune, the editorial staff sees fit to spread Iranian disinformation in the op-ed section by reprinting this story from the UK's leftist broadsheet, the Guardian: In order to save time, the following article is being printed several months ahead of schedule as a service to readers and nascent conspiracy theorists. The capture of Osama bin Laden, while warmly welcomed around the world, raises several questions about the interface between the war on terror and the U.S. election cycle. The most worrying of these is the suspicion that Bin Laden had already been in custody for a considerable period. George Bush's official spokesman has vehemently denied charges that the Al-Qaida leader was actually apprehended in December 2001. But there is more than a hint of a "nondenial denial" about the White House's rejection of claims that news of Bin Laden's capture was timed to coincide with the climax...
March 11, 2004
For those who say that political and cultural blogging only preaches to the choir and doesn't really change anything, I refer you to this post at Oh, That Liberal Media and also cross-posted on his own blog, where my friend and colleague on the group blog details how he got the Los Angeles Times to balance its coverage: The other day, when the Times ran a story about Justice Scalia's having spoken before an advocacy group, I told you here that Justice Ginsburg had done substantially the same thing in January. I explained that the experts' criticisms of Justice Scalia's speech applied equally to Justice Ginsburg's speech. I noted the fact that the group before which she had spoken had filed an amicus brief in a case on which she had ruled just 15 days before the speech. I also told you that I had sent an e-mail to the...
March 12, 2004
The Minnesota Senate will begin consideration of a series of increases to the state's minimum wage, currently set at the federal level of $5.15 per hour, the Star-Tribune reports: Minnesota's minimum wage, frozen at the federal rate of $5.15 an hour for the past seven years, would rise to $6.65 over the next 16 months under a bill sent to the Senate floor Wednesday. A party-line vote of eight DFLers in favor and six Republicans opposed in the Jobs, Energy and Community Development Committee produced one of the rare legislative movements on the state's wage floor since it was increased from $4.75 per hour in 1997. Proposals to increase minimum wage provide an opportunity for Democrats to throw some red meat to their base and normally appear, as this bill does, in election years. The Strib takes its normally biased approach, accepting the statements of the bill's proponents without rebuttal...
Continue reading "The Folly of Minimum-Wage Increases" »
In a stunning development, the families attending a 9/11 memorial didn't protest when George Bush arrived, and even supported his right to talk about it during the upcoming campaign: Ernest Strada, the mayor of Westbury, N.Y., was waiting in line to attend the groundbreaking with his wife, Mary Anne. Their son, Thomas Strada, was on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center North Tower during the attacks. He was 41 years old when he died. Ernest Strada said he had no problems with Bush using Sept. 11 imagery in his campaign ads or coming to East Meadow for the groundbreaking. "It's important that everybody in the country, led by the president, continue to remember what happened 2 1/2 years ago," Strada said. "I think the memory of that has waned since it occurred." Rosemary Cain of Massapequa was waiting in line with a large poster of her son, George...
March 13, 2004
A study released today by Mediachannel.org demonstrates the media bias of the national broadcast news networks -- and the disparity of treatment of George Bush and John Kerry isn't subtle in the least: The report reveals a strong negative cast to ABC, CBS and NBC news coverage of the president thus far in 2004. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry, Bush's certain opponent for November, has received more positive coverage by the same three networks. According to data compiled for MediaChannel.org by international media monitoring firm Media Tenor, network news broadcasts in January and February contained on average nearly three times more negative news statements about President Bush than about Senator John Kerry. This trend is demonstrated on all three major network news broadcasts, but none so pronounced as on CBS, where 35% of statements about Bush were negative, as opposed to 8% positive. In contrast, CBS was positive about John Kerry...
March 14, 2004
Just when you think there's nothing to write about the local news media, Doug Grow's column appears ... and the sun shines again. Grow performs the impressive feat of starting a biased and hack-worthy column, fisking himself in the middle, and still failing to grasp the situation by the end. In this case, we have the situation of three families who made the mistake of leasing land from the state on what is now valuable property, if it was converted to private ownership. In fact, 1800 other leaseholders on Horseshoe Bay were allowed to do just that twenty years ago; they bought their leased parcels from Minnesota. Only six lots were held in reserve, and the families allowed to continue their leases, three of which eventually left. Now the DNR wants that land -- even though they don't have a plan for its use -- and the Legislature is about...
March 15, 2004
CBS's Andy Rooney stirred up quite a response from his critique of Mel Gibson, both as a person and as a filmmaker, without making the effort to see The Passion of the Christ: The "60 Minutes" curmudgeon said Sunday he got 30,000 pieces of mail and e-mail in response to his February 22 commentary, in which he called "The Passion of the Christ" filmmaker Mel Gibson a "wacko." ... "I think the mail was a good indication of how bitterly divided our country is right now," Rooney said on his Sunday "60 Minutes" commentary. "I hope I'm not contributing to that -- even though I'm right and everyone else is wrong." Rooney, simply put, is a lousy writer and commentator; talking about how "bitterly divided our country is" is a cliche that rapidly has become one of the tritest and least informative phrases in punditry. Paying any attention to what...
March 16, 2004
I was skimming the AP news wire when I saw this headline: "Pakistan Kills Two Dozen Terror Suspects" Thinking that the Pakistanis had summarily executed captured prisoners, which would give the war effort a black eye internationally, I naturally clicked onto the story. What I discovered demonstrated the bias of the headline writers at the AP, at least: Paramilitary troops stormed a fortress-like compound with mortars and machine-gun fire Tuesday, killing 24 suspects in a fierce crackdown on al-Qaida and Taliban fugitives in the rugged tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, the army spokesman said. The operation — which left at least eight Pakistani troops dead and 15 wounded — was a stunning message delivered just one day after the military president promised to rid the territory of foreign terrorists. There have been several anti-terror operations in the semiautonomous tribal belt in recent months, but none so bloody. The Pakistani Army had...
March 20, 2004
The AP is at it again, this time with more than one American broadsheet as enablers. While Pakistani soldiers are fighting and dying to capture or kill the hundreds of al-Qaeda soldiers protecting a high-value target in Waziristan, the AP treats the entire operation like a drug raid in Minneapolis (bold type is my emphasis): Pakistan's military has arrested more than 100 suspects in a five-day assault on militants holed up in mud fortresses along the border where al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al Zawahri is believed trapped, a commander said today. Those detained included foreigners and the local Pashtun tribesmen who have been sheltering them, said Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, who is in charge of the sweep. Hussain said 400 to 500 militants are believed to still be fighting from within the heavily fortified compounds in the tribal South Waziristan region, using mortars, AK-47s, rockets and hand-grenades in a face-off...
March 22, 2004
As I posted late last week, John Kerry's campaign has backed off its earlier assertion that Kerry hadn't attended the November 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War meeting, where the Phoenix Project was debated and put up for a vote. The Phoenix Project was a plan by Scott Camil to assassinate several pro-war elected officials, including Senators John Stennis, John Tower, and Strom Thurmond. Their recantation sprang from the discovery of FBI informant reports -- at least five of them -- of the meetings, which put Kerry firmly in the debate in Kansas City, unearthed by pro-Kerry historian Gerald Nicosia. This was reported earlier in the month by Thomas Lipscomb at the New York Sun, in an excellent piece of journalism. So what does the Los Angeles Times and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (who reprinted the article) highlight on this episode? The trampling of John Kerry's rights by J. Edgar Hoover,...
While CBS gave Richard Clarke the star treatment in a rare double-segment interview on CBS's 60 Minutes and promoted the appearance for several days prior to airing the segment last night, CBS hid the fact that Viacom -- the network's parent company -- published Clarke's book, through Viacom's Simon & Schuster under their Free Press imprint (via Drudge and Instapundit): 60 MINUTES aired a double-segment investigative report on the new book "Against All Enemies" -- but did not disclose how CBSNEWS parent VIACOM is publishing the book and will profit from any and all sales! ... 60 MINUTES pro Lesley Stahl is said to have been aware of the conflict before the program aired. CBSNEWS.COM did add a disclaimer to its Internet coverage of the book over the weekend: "Against All Enemies," which is being published Monday by FREE PRESS, a subsidiary of SIMON & SCHUSTER. Both CBSNews.com and SIMON...
March 26, 2004
The Washington Post's John Harris writes an article that seems more interested in making excuses for John Kerry's rhetorical stumbles than in genuine reporting or analysis: Some Democrats are worried that their presumptive nominee's campaign is suffering from the candidate's inability to put a period in his sentences. They say an arguably trivial trait -- Kerry's penchant to wander off into the rhetorical woods -- has already proved damaging. His explanation about a vote on funding for Iraq -- "I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it" -- was mocked by Vice President Cheney the next day, and was on the air in a commercial for President Bush the day after that. In context, Kerry's comment to West Virginia veterans was clear: He backed the spending request only if Bush agreed to pay for it by increasing taxes on the rich, instead of adding to...
March 27, 2004
I am often -- which is to say, almost never -- asked, what constitutes a hack column? Why do some columns merely display mediocrity, and how do you distinguish them from the chosen few that sink to the execrable? Sometimes that question is difficult to answer, although thanks to my local newspaper, the Star Tribune, I can offer one objective criteria. If you keep inserting verses from a union picket-line version of an old spiritual, you have officially entered hackdom, as did Terry Collins today: They spoke out and sang their hardships, hoping that two people in particular would hear them. "Sit down! Stop wasting time, settle the strike today," a crowd of about 40 people, many with disabilities, sang to the tune of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." They gathered Friday across the street from Metropolitan Council Chairman Peter Bell's office in downtown St. Paul. At least it wasn't the...
April 1, 2004
Today's Boston Globe manages to surpass other American broadsheets in covering John Kerry's association with the Phoenix Project, the assassination plot cooked up by Scott Camil and debated at the November 1971 meeting of the VVAW, where Kerry was present as one of the organization's leaders. However, as reader Pat Curley notes, the Globe tries its best to minimize the seriousness of the plot in order to limit the damage to the home-town candidate: Senator John F. Kerry said through a spokesman this week that he has no recollection of attending a November 1971 meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War at which some activists discussed a plot to kill some US senators who backed the war. Quite frankly, although Pat feels that the Globe didn't bury the lede, this is one of the weakest lead paragraphs I've read on a major news story (as opposed to human-interest stories, which...
April 2, 2004
Jim Rutenberg at the New York Times watches very little television in his role as entertainment critic -- or else he wouldn't have written such a pandering, naive article as today's report on the shocking development that Hollywood has 'suddenly' started injecting partisan politics into its TV shows: Galvanized politically in ways they have not been since the early 1990's, Hollywood's more liberal producers and writers are increasingly expressing their displeasure with President Bush with not only their wallets, but also their scripts. In recent weeks, characters in prime time have progressed beyond the typical Hollywood knocks against Washington politicians to calling out the president directly or questioning his policies, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, the support of the antiterrorism law and the backing of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Translation: Having a Republican in the White House galvanizes Hollywood activists to get partisan...
April 4, 2004
Walter Pincus puts on a ballet of spin in today's Washington Post, as he tries to wrap readers around the inherent contradictions in his analysis that a degraded al-Qaeda, an ineffectual Osama bin Laden, and the replacement of terrorist leadership with less-capable candidates is somehow bad news: The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has accelerated the spread of Osama bin Laden's anti-Americanism among once local Islamic militant movements, increasing danger to the United States as the al Qaeda network is becoming less able to mount attacks, according to senior intelligence officials at the CIA and State Department. At the same time, the Sunni Triangle has become a training ground for foreign Islamic jihadists who are slipping into Iraq to join former Saddam Hussein loyalists to test themselves against U.S. and coalition forces, these officials say. Translation: the attacks on al-Qaeda and their state sponsorship has made them increasingly unable to mount...
April 5, 2004
Normally I don't even bother to read Bob Herbert in the New York Times' op-ed section, as he routinely bases his screeds on half-truths or sometimes flat-out lies, which the NYT rarely if ever corrects. However, this morning I had the misfortune of popping it up accidentally and reminding myself why I avoid him. Today's fractured fairy tale involves the recent gains in productivity and Herbert's assertion that employers are screwing labor in tandem: American workers have been remarkably productive in recent years, but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits of this increased productivity. While the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, has been strong for some time now, ordinary workers have gotten little more than the back of the hand from employers who have pocketed an unprecedented share of the cash from this burst of economic growth. ... Andrew Sum, the center's director and...
April 11, 2004
Predictably, the major news media are treating the 8/6/01 PDB as a revelation, a document that contained startling new evidence of al-Qaeda intentions rather than the recap of well-known data that it demonstrably is. A good example would be how the Los Angeles Times headlines their story, "Memo Cited Fears of Attacks in U.S.," making it sound as though the document referred to the 9/11 strikes. However, in its lead, the Times makes the distinction a bit more clear: The White House took the extraordinary step Saturday of releasing a top-secret intelligence briefing President Bush received five weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, declassifying a document that contained no specific warning of the looming strikes in New York and the Pentagon but provided fresh information that Al Qaeda was bent on hitting targets in the United States. The 1½-page document cited intelligence on Al Qaeda dating to the mid-1990s. But...
April 14, 2004
... Jason Keyser and Lourdes Navarro at the AP, whose otherwise uninteresting article on the fighting in Fallujah brings doublespeak to an entirely new level: U.S. warplanes and helicopter gunships firing heavy machine-guns, rockets and cannons hammered gunmen as a truce in besieged Fallujah was strained by increasingly intense battles. With more troops killed, April became the deadliest month for American forces since they set foot in Iraq. Perhaps the AP has a different dictionary than I do, but when I look up the word, the definition I read appears somewhat incongruous to other words like battles. When was the last time you heard of a truce that involved warplanes and gunships firing heavy machine guns? Based on their description, war is safer than peace, since more troops have been killed since the "truce" broke out than in any other month since we "set foot in Iraq." Vive la guerre!...
April 16, 2004
The Los Angeles Times goes far afield this morning in order to capture a bit of voter angst towards George Bush and the war in Iraq: For both parties, Minnesota is rich with potential; its voters are among the most independent-minded in the country. They list no political party when they register to vote. Nationally, they are known for sending Democrats to the U.S. Senate, among them Hubert H. Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter F. Mondale and Paul Wellstone. But they stunned the country by electing wrestler Jesse Ventura, a Reform Party candidate, as governor in 1998. They also lean regularly toward Republicans, choosing Richard Nixon (three times), Gerald Ford (once) and Ronald Reagan (twice) for president. In 2002, they elected Republicans Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman to replace Ventura and Wellstone, respectively, and the GOP picked up seats in the state Legislature. The LA Times engages in some transparent sophistry...
April 23, 2004
An interesting thing happened to CNN's analysis of John Kerry and his allegations of widespread American atrocities in Vietnam. After setting up the story as an analysis of how Kerry's words affected Vietnam veterans then and continue to do so now, the story itself is almost entirely dedicated to Kerry's apologetics and pays scant attention to any veteran reaction: The strong, vivid words John Kerry uttered 33 years ago continue to ring through time. Back in 1971, the square-jawed, clean-cut decorated combat veteran, with a generous mop of dark hair, told a rapt audience of senators of atrocities he said had been reported to him by his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. Rapes. Razed villages. Ears and heads cut off. Random shootings of civilians. Bodies blown up. Wires from portable telephones taped to genitals, with the power then turned on. Food stocks poisoned. Dogs and cats shot for the fun of...
April 26, 2004
John Kerry's fumble on his medal-tossing incident has produced an aroma of desperation from the New York Times this morning, where an article titled "1971 Tape Adds to Debate Over Kerry's Medal Protest" broadens out inexplicably to cover a range of what reporters Jim Rutenberg and James Dao must feel are Kerry-friendly topics. First, Rutenberg and Dao hedge on calling Kerry a liar, even though their own reporting makes it clear that Kerry lied about the medals: The Kerry campaign Web site says it is "right-wing fiction" that he "threw away his medals during a Vietnam War protest." Rather, the Web site says, "John Kerry threw away his ribbons and the medals of two veterans who could not attend the event." But the issue is not so cut and dried. A television interview Mr. Kerry gave in November 1971 shows that Mr. Kerry himself fed the confusion from early on....
The Sacramento Bee analyzed a Los Angeles Times poll (always a dangerous task) on gay marriage in a state with the nation's strongest gay movement. The results of the poll showed that less than a third of Californians supported legalizing same-sex marriage. However, the Sacramento Bee headlined the story thusly: Poll: Nearly one of three Californians favor gay marriage Wow -- nearly a third support gay marriage! That's about the same percentage that supported Cruz Bustamante in the recall election. I'm talking about the actual vote, not the LA Times' polling, which had both of them ahead until the final weekend before the vote -- labeling the race as "too close to call" just before Californians rejected Gray Davis by 10 points and Bustamante 48%-30%. "Nearly a third of all Californians" didn't help them much in the end. Talk about viewing the glass half-full! Who knew that the Sacramento Bee...
April 27, 2004
Normally, newspapers print gossip -- unsubstantiated rumors that tend towards the salacious or damaging -- in specialty columns, such as the New York Post's Page 6 or the syndicated Liz Smith column. However, if the unsubstantiated and unsourced rumor involves high-ranking members of the Bush administration and can be used to tweak the president, the New York Times feels free to run gossip as a "news" story, as it does today regarding the latest (ho hum) Colin Powell rumor: Forget the official pronouncements that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is staying put at the State Department. The buzz in the capital is at least a couple of steps beyond that, as people in business and finance circles here are speculating that he could become the next president of the World Bank, the largest and most influential development agency in the world. The whispers only grew louder the other night...
May 2, 2004
After unrelenting negative coverage, especially over the past month while spot insurgencies flared up and the discovery of distasteful mistreatment of prisoners came to light, the New York Times attempted to give a more balanced look at American efforts in Iraq today. George Vecsey reports on American efforts to rebuild Iraq and to provide safety, security, education, and childhood back to Iraqi children: You rarely see smiles like these on the 6 o'clock news or on the front page. Alex Fyfe gets to see Iraqi children with a happy look on their faces, as they kick soccer balls on the dust and rocks. He thinks of the green soccer fields of Long Island and the lacrosse fields at the United States Military Academy. ... As the civil affairs officer for his battalion, based near Mosul, Fyfe's job is to improve conditions in one small corner of Iraq. With the help...
May 5, 2004
Colin Powell, appearing on Larry King last night and reported on CNN this morning, rejected the notion that his tenure as Secretary of State has made him a "casualty of war" and that he enjoys his job despite some difficult days: In an interview with CNN's Larry King, Powell disputed the popular caricature of him as a frustrated and sidelined figure soldiering along in an administration where he's not appreciated. "I enjoy serving my country. I enjoy this job," Powell said. "But are there difficult days, are there tough times? Sure. These are tough issues. They're tough issues to get your mind around ... There are debates. Sometimes you win debates, sometimes you lose debates." "That's not the point. In this job ... the issue is not to win or lose a particular debate. The issue is to make sure that the president gets the very best information he can...
May 7, 2004
Today's New York Times editorial continues their fact-challenged series this week by demanding the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. The Times doesn't justify the demand through the revelations of abuse, whose nature surfaced this week in photographs through CBS News, but which had already been under investigation for months by Rumsfeld's Department of Defense. Instead, the editorial castigates Rumsfeld for the entire war in Iraq in a blistering but essentially empty-headed screed in which the name Rumsfeld obviously stands in for Bush. Even the first two sentences show the hypocrisy and obstinacy of the Times editorial writers: There was a moment about a year ago, in the days of "Mission Accomplished," when Donald Rumsfeld looked like a brilliant tactician. American troops — the lean, mean fighting machine Mr. Rumsfeld assembled — swept into Baghdad with a speed that surprised even the most optimistic hawks. I believe that came directly after the...
May 8, 2004
Jodi Wilgoren attempts some heavy lifting for the John Kerry campaign in today's New York Times. In an attempt to undo the damage that Kerry has inflicted on himself, Wilgoren takes on the worst of Kerry's stumbles -- the infamous "$87 billion" vote comment: President Bush's re-election campaign sent squadrons of researchers to scour Senator John Kerry's three decades in public life in search of material to use against him. But they turned up nothing as potent as 13 words that spilled from Mr. Kerry's mouth shortly after he effectively secured the Democratic presidential nomination. "I actually did vote for the $87 billion — before I voted against it," Mr. Kerry said on a March afternoon in Huntington, W.Va. Mark McKinnon, Mr. Bush's media man, summed up the sound bite: "You don't get gifts like that very often." Michael Meehan, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, called it "an expensive lesson."...
May 13, 2004
Instapundit notes a phenomenon related to the Nick Berg horror and the lack of media coverage of its images. He quotes Neal Boortz and Andrew Sullivan on the curious dichotomy of the media's approach to Abu Ghraib and the Berg execution, where they argue for publishing the pictures of one and spiking the pictures and video of the other. Jeff Quinton takes a look at his referrer logs today and sees an interesting bump in traffic, mostly from Google and other search engines looking for information on Nick Berg. When I got up this morning and began to blog, I checked my own traffic stats from Sitemeter (Hosting Matters' own stats collection only updates daily, which is unfortunate because it is tremendously detailed). I know what my normal traffic in the early morning hours usually is, and I was surprised to see that traffic was well above my normal rate....
June 2, 2004
Thanks to reader Bipin Pathak, who read my post from last night discussing the ludicrous Howell Raines article in today's London Guardian, and to which Glenn Reynolds and Neal Boortz kindly linked. Bipin brought a letter from Albert Einstein to my attention which notes that Raines may indeed have followed a long and storied tradition in his stewardship of the New York Times. This letter currently stands for auction at Christie's, but an excerpt is posted on line: "You see that I have retained my black humor despite Palestine, corrupt American politics and daily reading of the N.Y. Times which doesn't even lie honestly but distorts the truth with malicious intent." So, as my intrepid reader points out, I keep pretty good company. (Mom will be proud of me!) The more things change, unfortunately, the more they stay the same -- which Einstein's work might also address ......
June 4, 2004
As D-Day approaches, news media have focused on the macro and micro stories surrounding what remains the largest single military maneuver in history and its impact on geopolitics and the people involved. Most of these stories report on the tremendous losses of the liberating Allies or the pain and degradation of those who lived under the brutal Nazi occupation. The AP, however, feels it necessary to smear the memory of those who served in France's liberation by reporting at length on an upcoming book -- one that hasn't even been released at this time -- that paints American GIs as rapists and worse after most of them have died and can no longer defend themselves. Call it the Abu Ghraib-ing of the Greatest Generation: President Bush and other leaders gathering on the beaches of Normandy this weekend will celebrate the heroism and ingenuity of June 6, 1944. But some scholars...
June 7, 2004
Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech to a security conference in Singapore yesterday which was reported by the Chicago Sun-Times as critical of the US stance on the war on terror. The headline of the Sun-Times reads, "Rumsfeld fears U.S. losing long-term fight against terror," and the text of the article by Robert Burns supports the header: The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday. The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them. ''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an...
Mark Shields takes George Bush to task in his regular CNN column for not being sufficiently respectful of his father. Shields notes that Bush 43 considers the ending of the 1991 Gulf War to be a mistake, and one he doesn't intend to repeat now: If the foregoing was simply insensitive, George W. Bush's comparison of the first U.S. war against Iraq, when his dad was commander in chief, and the current U.S. war against Iraq is damning. In "Misunderestimated: The President Battles Terrorism, John Kerry and the Bush Haters" by Bill Sammon of The Washington Times, George W. Bush states: "I think freedom will prevail, so long as the U.S. and its allies don't ... do what many Iraqis still suspect might happen, and that is cut and run early, like what happened in '91." That is nothing less than a slur on George H.W. Bush by his own...
June 10, 2004
Yes, I read all about how the Los Angeles Times shows Kerry leading by seven points in the national race. Their poll also reports that adding Nader to the mix actually increases Kerry's lead by one point. Does that make sense to you? It should -- if you read the LA Times on a regular basis. Here's the LA Times poll less than four weeks before the California recall election last October: California voters are almost evenly split on whether to recall Gov. Gray Davis, and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante retains a narrow lead over Arnold Schwarzenegger in the tightening race for a successor, according to a new Los Angeles Times poll. Likely voters in the Oct. 7 election support the ouster of Davis by 50% to 47%, with just 3% undecided, the poll found. The result, a statistical tossup, is virtually unchanged from an August Times poll. ... More...
June 12, 2004
You really have to hand it to the New York Times -- they have a talent for bias that other newspapers only hope to achieve. Whether a reporter writes about sports, the weather, or certainly this week the obituaries, the Times will find a way to editorialize about the election or the war. Today's example can be found in an otherwise innocuous article about a reincarnated Buddhist saint who currently serves on a mission in Russia at the Dalai Lama's behest. While interviewing Erdne Ombadykow, believed to be the latest reincarnation of Telo Rinpoche, about his efforts to restore Buddhism in the predominantly Mongol enclave of Kalmykia, the Times managed to sneak this into the story above the jump (on the web site): "We are all reincarnations," said Mr. Ombadykow, who has been Mr. Ombadykow for 32 years. "As I see it, every human being and every animal is a...
June 17, 2004
The Chicago Sun-Times took a unique and creative approach to boosting circulation, as well as energizing recycling efforts, the rival Chicago Tribune reports. In fact, they falsified their circulation numbers by trashing large amounts of its daily run -- by some reports, as much as 25%: A program to significantly overstate weekday circulation numbers at the Chicago Sun-Times accelerated between 2002 and 2003 as sales slipped and the newspaper's marketing budget was slashed, company sources said Wednesday. "There was tremendous pressure to keep the numbers high," said a source with knowledge of an internal investigation into the matter. ... Hollinger International executives wouldn't say how much the figures were inflated, but Sun-Times Publisher John Cruickshank denied a Chicago Tribune report that it was as high as 25 percent of newsstand sales. ... Though details as to how the programs worked are sketchy, a source with knowledge of the investigation said...
June 19, 2004
As I predicted earlier this week, now that Senator John McCain has forcefully told the Democrats to find someone else for the VP slot, the media which took a Democratic fantasy and blew it all out of proportion has now scrambled to rewrite the meta-story. Mike Allen reports today for the Post that McCain and George Bush have "put aside their animosity" to campaign together for Bush's re-election, continuing the new story line of bringing two old foes back together for one last hurrah: Bush and McCain, whose relations had been at best businesslike since they faced off in the GOP primaries of 2000, praised each other effusively as they appeared on the same podium for the first time in more than four years. Bush, waving repeatedly to the crowd as he strode onto the stage amid applause, walked straight toward McCain and put his arms around him. The Arizonan...
Yesterday's blockbuster statement by Vladimir Putin that the Russian intelligence services warned Washington on several occasions that Saddam Hussein planned terror strikes within the US has prompted predictably divergent responses from the American media. Yesterday, even after several hours, major news organizations kept all mention of the warnings from their viewers. This morning it appears that all major media outlets have at least covered the statements in detail, although some outlets insist on treating the statement with a skepticism that one expects from the editorial pages. For instance, the New York Times puts its skepticism right into the second paragraph, reporting that Putin's allegation surprised the State Department: President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday that Russia gave intelligence reports to the Bush administration suggesting that Saddam Hussein's government was preparing terrorist attacks in the United States or against American targets overseas. But officials at the State Department expressed surprise, saying...
June 21, 2004
Jack Kelly at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette makes an extraordinary claim in today's edition -- that they bungled the coverage of the interim staff report from the 9/11 Commission. What's even more interesting is their review of the media coverage surrounding the report: On Thursday, the lead headline in the Post-Gazette was "Saddam, al-Qaida Not Linked. Sept. 11 Panel's Conclusion at Odds with Administration." In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that day, the banner headline read: "9/11 Panel Debunks Saddam Link. Report: No Evidence of al-Qaida Ties." This was false, as the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 commission hastened to make clear. ... The Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review were by no means alone in getting the story wrong. The erroneous PG story Thursday was from The Washington Post. The story we ran Friday, headlined "Bush, Cheney Defend Linking Iraq, al-Qaida" -- which avoided mentioning that both the chairman and co-chairman of the...
June 23, 2004
Thanks to alert reader Paul Escalona from Trenton, NJ, the Washington Post has been caught in another instance of allowing its editorial bias creep into its news reporting. In today's story about the brutal beheading of a South Korean interpreter by al-Qaeda terrorists, the Post makes this odd statement: But Kim's death appeared almost certain to broaden opposition in South Korea to the country's already unpopular involvement in Iraq. Public opinion polls show that more than 56 percent of the population opposes the troop deployment. More than a thousand South Koreans took to the streets for a second day on Tuesday, demanding a withdrawal from Iraq, while hundreds more took part in candlelight vigils for Kim. That passage precedes quotes from two South Koreans, who apparently agree with Jackie Spinner and Anthony Faiola's assertion that the killing should spark renewed calls for appeasement. However, the Post does not give any...
June 24, 2004
I'm not really following the Laci Peterson trial, since (a) I'm not a relative of the victim, (b) I don't live in her community, and (c) the media has spent so much time blowing it out of all proportion that I'm getting flashback nightmares of the OJ trial. However, I do follow the media, and Romanesko links to a story at SFGate regarding the juror who just got the boot from the judge -- and the media maelstrom that ensued: The same media people who maligned Juror No. 5 a few days ago, threw themselves at him Wednesday. News producers grabbed at him, television bookers blocked his path and reporters stuck cell phones to his ears with famous talk-show hosts murmuring sweet nothings on the other end. He was wooed with promises of limo rides, hotel rooms and round-trip fares to New York with his whole family. He was even...
In an otherwise dry report on an esoteric Supreme Court ruling, the AP injects a little bit of bias into the story. In describing the split court on the 5-4 decision to deny the appeal of death-row prisoners sentenced to death by judges rather than jurors prior to the SCOTUS ruling against such processes, reporter Gina Holland notes: Chief Justice H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas agreed with Scalia. On the other side were four of the court's more moderate justices [emph. mine -- CE]: John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. In fact, only Souter among these could reasonably be described as a moderate, and most observers consider O'Connor and Kennedy the moderates at the Supreme Court. Stevens and Ginsburg have always been unabashed liberal activists on the bench, and Breyer only somewhat less so. As we...
July 2, 2004
NBC News still may be wiping the egg off of its face yesterday, when it declined to cover the most important war-crimes effort since Nuremberg in favor of ... Katie Couric's badminton match: ABC and CNN managed to outhustle their competition yesterday morning and placed the only Western journalists, aside from a news pool reporter, inside the Baghdad courtroom where Saddam Hussein was listening to the charges he will face when he goes to trial as a war criminal. No network was more red-faced than NBC, which passed up the chance to broadcast, at the same time as every other television news outlet, the first scenes of the former dictator in the courtroom. NBC chose instead to continue a taped interview with the movie star Robert Redford, followed by a live badminton match between Katie Couric, the anchor of the network's "Today" program, and competitors from the United States Olympic...
July 3, 2004
The Los Angeles Times breaks the "big" story this morning that the American military engineered the destruction of the Saddam Hussein statue in the Baghdad square as the city fell into American hands, and used Iraqi civilians to make it look more spontaneous: As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking. After the colonel — who was not named in the report — selected the statue as a "target of opportunity," the psychological team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians to assist, according to...
Walter Pincus keeps spinning the news for the Washington Post any way possible to make sure that the liberal meme stays afloat, and today provides a clear example of his efforts. Under the headline "Chemicals Not Found in Iraq Warheads," readers find out this in the third paragraph that Pincus negates his own lede: Sixteen rocket warheads found last week in south-central Iraq by Polish troops did not contain deadly chemicals, a coalition spokesman said yesterday, but U.S. and Polish officials agreed that insurgents loyal to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorist fighters are trying to buy such old weapons or purchase the services of Iraqi scientists who know how to make them. The Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad said in a statement yesterday that the 122-milimeter rocket rounds, which initially showed traces of sarin, "were all empty and tested negative for any type of chemicals." The...
July 6, 2004
The Washington Post reports today on the official inclusion of bloggers at the national conventions this election cycle by both Democrats and Republicans, and reporter Brian Faler manages to miss the point of blogging almost entirely: The Web sites, which are essentially online journals, have become a prominent campaign tool this election season -- ever since former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's official blog caught on. Since then, scores of other candidates have developed similar sites. Some candidates have begun advertising on other independent blogs -- especially sites that feature commentaries, usually partisan, on the political news of the day. But neither party has ever allowed bloggers to cover one of its presidential conventions firsthand -- and the decision seems to promise a clash of two very different cultures. The conventions have become carefully staged productions intended, primarily, to reintroduce the parties' nominees to the general public. Independent blogs --...
July 7, 2004
Yesterday's revelation that US and Iraqi joint patrols had captured two Iranian intelligence officers with explosives and building car bombs sounded to me like important news. Here, after all, is proof that the so-called insurgency is not only supported by outside forces but contains active elements of official outside governmental agencies. As the Bush Doctrine states, any government engaging in terrorism or supporting terrorism against the US has made itself a target in the war on terror -- and this shows that Iran does both. Big news, right? Not in America, apparently. The World section at the Los Angeles Times: nothing. The World section at the Boston Globe: nothing. The Minneapolis Star Tribune (AP) reports the story with the headline, "Iran treading lightly in trying to influence Iraq," which contains the following assertion: Monday's announcement of the arrests by the Iraqi Interior Ministry was a rare instance of tying Iranians...
July 13, 2004
The Washington Post's Dana Milbank continues his ongoing sniping at the Bush administration today by revealing the salaries of the entire White House staff and attempting to spin them into a gender-bias story: The president's men are doing very well. The president's women are doing slightly less well, but still not bad. With new White House salary figures leaked to The Washington Post and an Excel spreadsheet, crack researcher Margot Williams determined that men in the Bush White House earn an average of $76,624 a year. Women earn $59,917 on average. That means Bush women earn about 78 percent of what Bush men earn. Wow -- Bush's White House must hate women, right? They only pay them 78% of what they're worth! However, if you read the next paragraph, the picture changes somewhat: As it happens, that's almost exactly the national average for the gap in pay between the sexes,...
July 15, 2004
In an unsigned editorial today, the Los Angeles Times demonstrates its lack of seriousness regarding security. Any other time, laxity in visa management would raise the ire of its editorial board, but when it involves people who identify themselves as journalists, the Times inveighs against Customs officials who have the nerve to actually enforce border laws: When British journalist Elena Lappin arrived in Los Angeles in May, on assignment for a British newspaper, little did she know she would end up being the subject of her story. By her own account in The Times later that month, Lappin was interrogated for four hours, subjected to a body search, fingerprinted, photographed, handcuffed and forced to spend a night in a cell in downtown L.A. and a day as a detainee at the airport before being deported to London. Lappin's crime? Admitting to customs officials that she was a journalist. Quite frankly,...
Now that the the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on pre-war intelligence and the UK's corresponding Butler report both point to the uncomfortable conclusion that Joe "Restore Honesty" Wilson lied about his wife snagging him the Niger gig and the efforts of the Iraqis to buy uranium there, you would expect the mainstream media outlets that gave Wilson his bully pulpit would be issuing retractions, or at least covering the collapse of his story. You would be wrong: NBC was the most aggressive Wilson promoter on TV, beginning with a Meet the Press appearance on July 6, 2003 hyping Wilson's original breakout in a New York Times op-ed. On July 22, Katie Couric promoted a Today interview: "Still to come this morning on Today, a man who says he's become the target of a White House smear campaign for blowing the whistle on the president's State of the...
July 16, 2004
Capital Eye, the newsletter of the Center For Responsive Politics, last year published a chart of political contributions from the 25 largest media companies in the last two major election cycles, and the percentage of their support that went to each political party. The general results will not shock too many people, but the extent of the bias surprised me, and might surprise you too. Capital Eye based its report on public filings with the FEC in April 2003, and it shows that twice as many of the top 25 corporations gave more to Democrats than Republicans, 16-8; in fact, only one company (Hughes Electronics) managed to split their donations 50-50. Even apart from the number of companies on either side of the divide, the companies that tend to give more to Democrats tend also to do so more dramatically. Most companies (with one notable exception) managed to give some...
July 19, 2004
I'm coming to this a day late (via Memeorandum), but I couldn't let this pass from the Los Angeles Times. Alex Jones, in an op-ed piece yesterday, inveighed against bloggers, reminding us that bloggers aren't real journalists, after all: The Democrats and the Republicans are inviting a limited number of bloggers — those witty, candid, irreverent, passionate, shrewd and outrageous Internet chroniclers — to their 2004 conventions. It's a gesture of respect for the growing influence of the blogosphere, and if ever there were events ideally suited to bloggers, the heavily scripted and tensionless conventions top the list. But make no mistake, this moment of blogging legitimization — and temporary press credentials — doesn't turn bloggers into journalists. What could Jones mean? He wants people to recognize that bloggers don't uphold the traditions and standards of journalism, as taught in J-schools like Harvard, where Jones teaches on press and politics....
July 25, 2004
In an admission that only shocks because it was made, the New York Times' ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, came out and told us what we already know: Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is. Okrent's confession provides a relief to those of us who have chronicled its overtly leftist bent in every section of its newspaper. In this case, Okrent also delivers, as he has a quip for almost every department: In the Sunday magazine, the culture-wars applause-o-meter chronically points left. On the Arts & Leisure front page every week, columnist Frank Rich slices up President Bush, Mel Gibson, John Ashcroft and other paladins of the right in prose as uncompromising as Paul Krugman's or Maureen Dowd's. The culture pages often feature forms of art, dance or theater that may pass for normal (or at least tolerable) in New York but might be pretty shocking in...
Howard Kurtz notes a disconnect in the coverage of Joe Wilson's disintegrating credibility. In a secondary article of his Media Notes column, Kurtz has the numbers to demonstrate either a leftist bias or simply lousy and lazy journalism in the mainstream media, especially broadcast outlets: Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's allegations that President Bush misled the country about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium from Africa was a huge media story, fueled by an investigation into who outed his CIA-operative wife. According to a database search, NBC carried 40 stories, CBS 30 stories, ABC 18, The Washington Post 96, the New York Times 70, the Los Angeles Times 48. But a Senate Intelligence Committee report that contradicts some of Wilson's account and supports Bush's State of the Union claim hasn't received nearly as much attention. "NBC Nightly News" and ABC's "World News Tonight" have each done a story. But CBS hasn't...
July 27, 2004
An anonymous commenter pointed me towards an article appearing today at Investor's Business Daily, reviewing the abdication of the mainstream media on the Joe Wilson story once it became apparent that Wilson lied: Media Bias: When ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson said President Bush lied, it set off a media stampede. When he turned out to be wrong, the hoofbeats fell silent. In fact, as the chart below shows, that might be an understatement. The coverage is so one-sided that you might think something was at work here — something like, say, extreme media bias. ... But in the past month, two reports — one from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the other from Britain's so-called Butler Report on intelligence leading up to the Iraq War — both concluded Bush was right. Saddam sought uranium in Africa to make WMD. Big news, right? It wasn't treated that way. It got cursory treatment by...
July 28, 2004
... the Associated Press, whose crack staff came up with this headline: Republican, Democrat Win Okla. Primaries No kidding? Who would have expected a Republican and a Democrat to win Republican and Democratic primary contests? Everyone but the AP, I guess....
August 12, 2004
Today's editorial from the Washington Post denigrating the Swiftvets is a mastery of slicing just enough off the truth to retain the sheen of credibility without actually addressing the issues that the Swiftvets have raised. First, the editorial attempts to portray a fairness in its opening paragraphs that it quickly discards later on: . To the extent, then, that there are legitimate questions about Mr. Kerry's behavior -- either in Vietnam or back home as a prominent antiwar activist -- those are fair game. Mr. Kerry's four-plus months in Vietnam made for an unusually short tour. He used his third Purple Heart to go home early, and his wounds were relatively superficial. After that, it's Katy bar the door, as the Post goes into full damage control -- protecting its own lack of coverage on the Swiftvets as a subtext to attacking them: But a new assault on Mr. Kerry...
August 14, 2004
More cracks in the media-dam have appeared this morning regarding the John Kerry credibility "meltdown", this time in the Rocky Mountain News. Columnist Dave Kopel castigates his Colorado colleagues in today's edition for ignoring the Christmas in Cambodia implosion: According to Newsweek's assistant managing editor Evan Thomas, "There's one other base here, the media. Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards . . . as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them . . ." (Inside Washington television show, July 10). Thomas' prediction is amply supported by the (non)coverage which the Denver dailies, like most of the rest of the media, have given to this week's meltdown of the Kerry campaign. ... As reported in The Congressional Record, on March 27, 1986, Sen. John...
August 17, 2004
CQ reader (and frequent e-mailer of late) Tamsey sent over a very interesting alternate view of the UNITY conference of minority journalists, at which both George Bush and John Kerry appeared. It gives an insight into the kind of coverage that the American electorate receives for the presidential election, including a pretty good indication why the Swiftvets' specific allegations have received almost no attention, except to call the group a bunch of Republican stooges. James T. Campbell, a member of the Houston Chronicle's editorial board, describes the vastly different receptions given to both men by what are supposed to be journalistic professionals: It was an affirming moment. Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry walks onto the stage and audience members jump to their feet and applaud with wild enthusiasm. A campaign pep rally in Boston? No, it was the UNITY: Journalists of Color convention, a gathering of African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American...
August 18, 2004
Has anyone ever seen a media hack self-implode the way Chris Matthews has over the past week? First he comes unglued all over John O'Neill and can't keep from interrupting him every time O'Neill says something Matthews can't refute. Next he shouts down Matthew Dowd for supporting George Bush. Last Friday he put on his tinfoil hat and blamed 9/11 not on the terrorists, not on foreign-policy and intelligence failures, but on one man -- the left's favorite example of eeeeeeeevil Republicanism, Vice President Dick Cheney: MATTHEWS: MSNBC‘s Felix Schein is on the campaign trail with John Kerry up in Portland, Oregon. And MSNBC‘s Priya David has been on the campaign trail with Vice President Dick Cheney. Let me go to Priya, sitting with me right now. Priya, what is this argument over the word “sensitive”? What‘s wrong with that? PRIYA DAVID, MSNBC POLITICAL REPORTER: Well, according to John Kerry,...
August 20, 2004
If readers would like to know why MS-NBC/CNBC has become a cesspool in both ratings and content, Michelle Malkin can explain it all to you in her blog today. Malkin describes what an evening on CNBC's featured political talkshow, Hardball, feels like when having having to deal with the increasingly emotionally unbalanced Chris Matthews: As I am seated at the table with Matthews, who I am meeting for the first time, he cracks a joke--and not in a well-meaning way--about how I look. (There are quite a few people who are hung up on this.) "Are you sure you are old enough to be on the show? What are you? 28?" I grit my teeth. He badgers me again with the same question. I politely answer his question and supply my age. (I wonder how Matthews' wife, the respected TV journalist Kathleen Matthews, who hosts a show about working women,...
August 27, 2004
One of my good blogfriends, Patterico from Patterico's Pontifications, has done remarkable work over a long period of time documenting the bias and carelessness that has become routine for the Los Angeles Times. When the paper asserted last week that none of the Swiftvets had ever served on Kerry's boat, Patterico complained to the paper about the inaccuracy on his blog and in a letter to the Times' readers rep, Jamie Gold: Dear Ms. Gold, A front-page story in today's L.A. Times titled "Kerry Starts Firing Back at Critics of War Record" (August 20) states: "None of the men in the Swift boat group behind the anti-Kerry ad, including [Larry] Thurlow, served on Kerry's patrol boat during the war." This is not true. As an article in your paper's August 17 edition acknowledges, Steven Gardner, a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, served on one of Kerry's patrol...
August 29, 2004
Last week, Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker of Power Line wrote an op-ed piece in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune detailing their frustration with the local and national coverage given to the deconstruction of John Kerry's Viet Nam narrative. They specifically focused on the Christmas In Cambodia fable, which even the Kerry campaign now has retracted, and factually refuted it point by point. The Strib's editorial board responded in an editorial written by Jim Boyd that called Scott and John "fraudulent" and spewed a lot of vitriol abut the two being part of the "Republican smear machine" -- but actually conceded their central point, calling it a "niggling criticism". If so, then they must be the first fraudulent smear machine that operated by spreading the truth. Scott and John respond in today's Strib after reaching an unusual agreement with the editorial board to be allowed to respond to Boyd's vicious personal attack...
September 2, 2004
CQ commenter FredRum points us to a USA Today article on the talking-head coverage of the Republican convention that not only supports my earlier diagnosis of Chris Matthews' self-infatuation but asserts that narcissism has spread across the entire television punditry like an epidemic. Media analyst Robert Bianco has a simple solution: As President Bush's acceptance speech tonight closes the Republican convention and sends us full speed into the final electoral push, would it be too much to ask one tiny favor of TV's anchors, analysts and pundits? In the name of all that's holy, shut up. Sometime over the past few years, interview shows morphed from the intent to draw information from guests that would inform and entertain viewers to a pitched duel between the interviewer and the subject/victim, a duel to the rhetorical death in front of a nationwide arena of rapidly diminishing numbers of fans. Chris Matthews did...
September 4, 2004
My Northern Alliance colleague and fellow RNC blogger Hindrocket from Power Line notes a horrendous example of media bias that should shock anyone who reads the news. The Associated Press, one of the primary resources of the mainstream news media, deliberately reported false news regarding Republican reaction to Bill Clinton's emergency bypass operation to make GOP supporters and George Bush look petty and mean-spirited: WEST ALLIS, Wis. - President Bush (news - web sites) on Friday wished Bill Clinton (news - web sites) "best wishes for a swift and speedy recovery." "He's is in our thoughts and prayers," Bush said at a campaign rally. Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wis., booed. Bush did nothing to stop them. Bush offered his wishes while campaigning one day after accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in New York. Clinton was hospitalized in New York after complaining of mild...
Justin Webb, the BBC's Washington correspondent, files an odd and cranky report from his time in New York at the Republican National Convention. Webb starts off his time wondering why Republicans decided to host their convention among hostile and rude New Yorkers, and his upturned nose catches even more rain as he continues along: What can the Republicans make of this place? When you talk to them they are polite in a glassy-eyed kind of way. But it is an odd paradox that the Republicans chose to show their solidarity with people who regard them with contempt at best. Most New Yorkers are Democrats but, more importantly, most New Yorkers are cross and busy. I stood on a Manhattan corner this week as the president passed. The police hemmed us in, batons drawn. The helicopters buzzed overhead and the sirens blared. Now on most corners of most cities in the...
September 5, 2004
Last week, Leslie Seifert from Newsday contacted me to request my permission to excerpt my convention blogging in order to give their readers a taste of our coverage. I had anticipated that a few media outlets would want to do this, so the request did not especially surprise me. I wrote back and asked them to send me the excerpt they planned to use, and they selected this: One of the challenges we faced yesterday was the lack of beverages available at the Garden . . . I assumed that we would have all of the concession stands open, but they seem to be closed . . . Stepping into the breach to soothe dry throats is Political Grounds, which describes itself as "America's Politically-Incorrect Coffee." They've set up a booth giving away free bottled water and very good cups of coffee to anyone who wants to stop by their...
September 8, 2004
Muckraking author Kitty Kelley, whose hack jobs on the British royal family, Elvis, and Sinatra have been widely panned, turns her guns loose on her next conservative target, George Bush. Kelley's upcoming book, The Family, reportedly contains salacious revelations about cocaine use by W at Camp David which come from his ex-sister-in-law Sharon, who has long been at odds with the Bush family. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reports on the media storm gathering for the book's release: Kitty Kelley's volume on the Bush family won't be published until next week, but the White House communications director yesterday dismissed the book as "garbage" and a Republican National Committee spokeswoman said journalists should treat it as "fiction." With the author booked for numerous television interviews -- including three straight mornings on NBC's "Today," starting Monday -- "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty" is certain to generate media attention...
September 10, 2004
Matt Kelley writes a story that I first noticed from Threshold -55 (see below) that attempts to cast aspersions on the flight skills of George Bush while also moving the forgery story forward, which provides a textbook case of burying the lede: George W. Bush began flying a two-seat training jet more frequently and twice required multiple attempts to land a one-seat fighter in the weeks just before he quit flying for the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, his pilot logs show. The logs show Bush flew nine times in T-33 trainers in February and March 1972, including eight times in one week and four of those only as a co-pilot. Bush, then a first lieutenant, flew in T-33s only twice in the previous six months and three times in the year ending July 31, 1971. The records also show Bush required two passes to land an F-102A fighter...
September 14, 2004
The New York Times' publisher, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, whined to a Kansas State University audience about the tone of public debate yesterday, saying that news organizations attempting to provide objective coverage face unprecedented cynicism: The publisher of The New York Times complained Monday about what he called a cheapening of the public debate but said he thinks news organizations can improve the situation. Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., speaking at Kansas State University, said newspapers and broadcast stations that try to give unbiased information face increased skepticism and even cynicism from the public. Cynicism? You don't say! Sulzberger mentions the Jayson Blair scandal, in which a favored reporter took advantage of a lack of leadership in the newsroom to file a string of fictional reports despite numerous indications of his fraudulent behavior. But Pinch must be suffering from massive self-delusion if he thinks that Jayson Blair is the root of the...
September 15, 2004
Michael Dobbs continues his excellent work on Rathergate for the Washington Post, breaking the news that the Killian memos came from a Kinko's in Abilene -- just a half-hour drive from an old and disturbed nemesis of George Bush, Bill Burkett: Documents allegedly written by a deceased officer that raised questions about President Bush's service with the Texas Air National Guard bore markings showing they had been faxed to CBS News from a Kinko's copy shop in Abilene, Tex., according to another former Guard officer who was shown the records by the network. ... There is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents. Robert Strong, who was one of three people interviewed by "60 minutes," said he was shown...
September 17, 2004
The New York Times runs a series of corrections on its Rathergate coverage in today's edition that makes a reader wonder what exactly they got right. They blow a quote and can't fact-check George Herbert Walker Bush's resume, even though the guy turned out to hold a fairly significant job later on. (See: White House, 1989-1993.) But what I find interesting is the quote they blew. David Van Os represents Bill Burkett and also is running for the Texas Supreme Court. Here's what Van Os has to say about forgery: Mr. Van Os posed a hypothetical chain of events in which someone - not Mr. Burkett, he said - reconstructed documents that the preparer believed existed in 1972 or 1973. Mr. Van Os then asked "what difference would even that make" to the "factual reality of where was George W. Bush at the times in question and what was he...
Rarely if ever have I read an editorial which managed to pack more intellectual dishonesty and partisan spin as the one that the Boston Globe runs in today's edition. The Globe attempts to take the position that everyone should drop the talk about what happened thirty years ago, but then betrays its own position as an anatgonist in that particular catfight. Each paragraph is chock-filled with Terry McAuliffe spin and ignorance in equal measure: UNLESS THE documents used by "60 Minutes" in a broadcast on President Bush's National Guard service were fabricated by a campaign operative, they are part of a story relating to the news judgment at CBS and have little to do with presidential politics. Well, it wouldn't, except that the Kerry campaign, McAuliffe, Tom Harkin, Tom Daschle, and a slew of Democrats rushed to jump onto the story and demand "answers" to the allegations that arose from...
September 18, 2004
Today's New York Post notes that CBS News staffers seem to be a liitle predisposed towards Democrats. In reviewing the political contributions made by Tiffany Network news division employees, the overwhelming majority of funds went to the Democrats: WITH Dan Rather and CBS under fire for broadcasting what seem to be fake National Guard documents in a story slamming President George W. Bush, PoliticalMoneyLine.com probed the political contributions made by CBS News staffers. Turns out that Rather's minions are overwhelmingly Democratic. CBS News-ers have donated $17,050 to federal candidates and political action committees since 1982. Of that amount, $10,800 was for Democrats and the DNC; $3,500 went to Lenora Fulani's wacky New Alliance Party; and only $2,750 went to the GOP. The biggest individual recipient was Fulani, who received $3,500 from a CBS News staffer back in the 1980s. The second highest was Sen. Hillary Clinton, who took in $2,250...
A chill wind blows through America, threatening freedom of speech and the independence of the media. Is John Ashcroft to blame? No ... this time it appears CBS has decided to crack down on the criticism coming from its affiliates who have been less than pleased with the level of journalistic integrity at 60 Minutes and with Dan Rather's performance. The AP reports that a radio talk-show host has been fired for his outspoken criticism of The Dan: A radio talk-show host said Saturday he has been fired for criticizing CBS newsman Dan Rather's handling of challenges to the authenticity of memos about President Bush's National Guard service. "On the talk show that I host, or hosted, I said I felt Rather should either retire or be forced out over this," said Brian Maloney, whose weekly "The Brian Maloney Show" aired for three years on KIRO-AM Radio, a CBS affiliate...
(A down home message for Dan Rather in the colorful Texas idiom he so loves, from a CQ reader in the Lone Star State. UPDATE: Thanks to Leaddog, I'll note that this appeared in American Thinker, a great blog, which Russ forgot to mention ...) Y’all know what we all been thinkin’ out here in Texas, Dan, since you started all this foolishness? We think y’all been pissin’ down our necks an’ tellin’ us it’s rain for so long that you boys done got to believin’ it yourselves. Heck, we think maybe you been back East so long you got yourself thinkin’ us folks out here couldn’t hit sand if we fell off our horses; couldn’t hit water if we fell outta the boat. Danged if you ain’t been treatin’ us like you think we got squirrels swimmin’ in our gene pools or sumthin.’ You need to remind yourself that...
September 21, 2004
Newsday became the second mainstream media outlet to run an columnist's call for Dan Rather to step down. James Pinkerton tells his readers in today's edition that under any set of journalistic guidelines and precedent, Rather has to go: By any fair reckoning, Rather should resign. As a big shot at CBS News-in addition to being anchorman-in-chief, he has been the managing editor of the CBS Evening News since March 1981-he deserves to be held to the same standard as Howell Raines, the executive editor of The New York Times, who was forced to resign last year in the wake of a news-fabrication scandal. Some might argue that Rather was just a duped news reader, that he was simply following orders. In which case, following the precedent established in the 1998 "Tailwind" scandal-in which CNN's Peter Arnett was forced to quit after he read phony copy about Americans using poison...
September 22, 2004
Nicholas Kristof comes back for Round 2 against the Swiftvets, this time disguised as a "stop the mud" plea to both sides in the election. Unfortunately for Kristof, his latest offering is almost as fact-challenged as his last, and the equivalencies he draws between the two campaigns are at best obscure and at worst deliberately ridiculous: True, Democrats have also engaged in below-the-belt attacks. Some of "Fahrenheit 9/11," the Michael Moore film, was the liberal equivalent of the anti-Kerry smears. Its innuendos implying that Mr. Bush arranged the war in Afghanistan so backers could profit from an oil pipeline were appalling. But I, along with some others, immediately complained about "Fahrenheit 9/11." Aside from John McCain, where are the sensible conservatives? Why don't they denounce the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks? And why doesn't President Bush condemn those attacks, showing the kind of integrity that Mr. Dukakis showed? That's really the...
CQ reader Dave B. gets a biweekly e-mail from the New York Times with the top 10 list of the most popular articles from the past fortnight. In the e-mail he received today for Sept. 8-22, Dave was amazed to find this collection of links submitted for his perusal: In case you missed any of these stories, below are the Top 10 Most Read Articles on NYTimes.com over the last two weeks (as of 11 a.m. ET, Sept. 22). ... 1. Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time By SARA RIMER, Published Sept. 20 2. Falling Bodies, a 9/11 Image Etched in Pain By KEVIN FLYNN and JIM DWYER, Published Sept. 10 3. Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and RALPH BLUMENTHAL, Published Sept. 9 How clueless is this? Does the New York Times editorial board make it a habit to...
September 27, 2004
A number of bloggers took the New York Times Magazine to task for a slanted and superficial look at bloggers in yesterday's edition, or in a strange surrender by Billmon of the Whiskey Bar in yesterday's LA Times. ABC provides much the same slant in a Kate Snow piece from yesterday about political bloggers that treats the Daily Kos with a lot more respect than Power Line: That same day, Sen. John Kerry saluted as he walked onto a stage in West Palm Beach, Fla. The gesture drew immediate ridicule online. Someone calling himself "Hindrocket" posted a photo of the salute on a blog and wrote a warning to Kerry: "Every time Kerry brings up Vietnam, he opens himself to further body blows by the Swift Boat Vets." Someone named Hindrocket? John Hinderaker identifies himself by name on his blog (although not on his posts), which should have made identification...
September 28, 2004
... and apparetly, so do several White House correspondents, if what Milbank writes is true. Milbank, seldom known to pass up a chance at a cheap shot at the administration, takes an especially petty one this morning not at Bush but at Ayad Allawi, claiming that White House correspondents now spend their time searching for the Iraqi PM's speechwriter: It's a political whodunit: Since Ayad Allawi delivered his address to a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday, foreign policy devotees have been searching for the ghostwriter of the speech, which sounded curiously familiar to American ears. The White House denies that anybody in the administration did it. Several of the usual suspects outside the administration, including former White House officials Karen Hughes, Dan Senor and David Frum, have also denied culpability. Oooh -- they "denied culpability"? It's a cover-up!! Milbank then goes through an interminable series of quotations from both...
Al Franken is taking his show on the road throughout battleground states in the upcoming election. The AP reports that Franken will be doing live remotes throughout the Midwest in the same time frame as the presidential debates: Al Franken is taking his radio show on the campaign trail. "The Al Franken Show" will broadcast live across the country starting Thursday and ending Oct. 9, making stops in eight cities including swing state battlegrounds Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and Miami. "It serves a lot of purposes," Franken told The Associated Press Tuesday. "The main one is to drive me into the ground before the elections." Of course, the way that Air America is going, it may be the farewell tour more than a campaign support tour. It seems somewhat odd that (a) Franken's tour coincides with the debates, (b) his destinations mostly occur in battleground states, and (c) the AP sees...
September 29, 2004
A number of high-profile members of the Fourth Estate have gotten mighty testy about the blogosphere lately, writing poisoned-pen columns about how we have the audacity to write criticisms of professional journalists who write criticisms of everyone else. It was just a matter of time before the third-rate hacks took up the same mission, and as Nick Coleman shows us in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, that time is now. Nick starts off his factless tirade by sniffing about an odd characterization of Democrats: This just in: I am a very wealthy man, born into privilege and power, and a stooge of the Democratic Party. Oh. That reminds me, Smithers: Bring me the heads of some Republicans, would you? Also, set out the good silver. Fritz is coming over to give me my marching orders. Dad-ums would be so proud, wouldn't he, Muffy? Nothing in the opening paragraph is true, but bloggers...
September 30, 2004
Yesterday's "big" news was that the local weekly in Crawford, TX -- Bush's home town -- endorsed John Kerry in a half-page editorial. This made national headlines around the country in places like the Boston Globe and Chicago Sun-Times; not bad for a paper with a circulation of 425! The implication was clear: even Bush's neighbors aren't supporting his re-election. Too bad most of them will miss this follow-up of local Crawford reaction to the Lone Star Iconoclast's endorsement: But the rack that once held the Lone Star Iconoclast — Crawford's weekly newspaper — now is empty, thanks to a blistering indictment in Tuesday's paper of Bush's presidential record and a call to elect Democrat John Kerry in November. For a town drenched in Bush, the editorial is practically political heresy. "Not only is he the president of the United States, he's my neighbor, he's my customer," Coffee Station owner...
October 2, 2004
Tomorrow's New York Times runs a 10,000-word article about prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear program being called a "smoking gun", "persuasive", with predictions of "significant impact". I agree, although not on the Bush campaign, as Barry Ritholtz suggests. I believe it will have significant impact on the New York Times, because as Tom Maguire and CQ reader Michael K note, the Washington Post ran an article fourteen months ago that tells the exact same story. At issue is the national-security assessment of aluminum tubes sought by Saddam Hussein in 2000 from China. The administration determined that the type and size of the tubes indicated that they were to be used in a nuclear centrifuge. Now we know that was not the case, especially after the testimony and evidence of Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, but at the time the West had not been in Iraq for two years and had little information...
October 6, 2004
The Canadian Press reported this evening on a bit of internecine Islamofascist infighting, which killed as many as 37 radicals as they gathered for a conference in Pakistan. 34 killed in explosions at gathering of Islamic radicals in Pakistan - Two bombs exploded at a gathering of Islamic radicals in the central Pakistan city of Multan early Thursday, killing at least 34 people and injuring dozens, police said. Other media outlets weighed in on this story, but their reporting told different stories. Here's AFP (France) on the explosions: At least 33 killed, 70 wounded in Pakistan bombings - At least 33 people were killed and dozens others wounded when two bombs ripped through a congregation of Sunni Muslims in Pakistan's central city of Multan, police said. AFP doesn't bother to mention the fact that the crowd were radical militants or to report on the feud between the Sunni and Shi'a...
October 7, 2004
At the end of a Washington Post puff piece on teenage Democrat volunteers in Oregon, Evelyn Nieves writes in an unsupported and frankly weird allegation that seems to contradict almost everything she had previously written. Nieves reports on grass-roots efforts to get out the vote called "vote-mobbing", which just means that volunteers approach shoppers at malls and try to engage them in marketing questions designed to drive voters to the Democrats and possibly expand the volunteer ranks. In Portland, as Nieves writes, this is hardly difficult: There's no question that Portland is Democratic territory. It put presidential candidate Al Gore over the top in Oregon in 2000, beating Bush by more than 100,000 votes in a state that Bush lost by half of 1 percent of the vote. Portland is full of tie-dyed, punked-out lefties, aging hippies and run-of-the-mill liberals, and they all seemed to converge Sunday afternoon at a...
October 12, 2004
The Boston Globe spins this morning with the help of the Associated Press, describing John Howard's landslide Australian election as a referendum on economics while noting Howard's insistence on seeing the joint Iraq mission to its conclusion: Australian troops will stay in Iraq, Prime Minister John Howard declared yesterday, as the stock market in Sydney hit a record high following the conservative leader's election to a historic fourth term. At his first news conference since Saturday's election increased the parliament majority of his center-right coalition, Howard said his priorities were guarding the nation's security, working with allies to fight terrorism, and maintaining the booming economy. The victory was a resounding vote of confidence in the government's handling of Australia's economy, which has low inflation, unemployment, and interest rates, a budget surplus, and low government debt. While I'm certain the economy played a role in Australia's election, the notion that Iraq...
October 15, 2004
Pity the mainstream media, which apparently fell asleep for the last four years and have woken to discover a brand new world. This time it's ABC's turn for embarassment, as their attempted attack on the Swiftvets has foundered on the shoals of a thousand fact-checkers -- and the calm determination of John O'Neill: Nightline traveled to Vietnam and found a number of witnesses who have never been heard from before, and who have no particular ax to grind for or against Kerry. Only one of them, in fact, even knew who Kerry is. The witnesses, all Vietnamese, are still living in the same villages where the fighting took place more than 35 years ago. A Nightline producer visited them and recorded their accounts of that day. The accounts were subsequently translated by a team of ABC News translators. ... The Vietnamese government initially rejected Nightline's request to visit the village,...
October 18, 2004
Earlier this week, I wrote about the efforts of the Manchester Guardian to influence our election by starting a letter-writing campaign from Brits to American voters in Clark County, Ohio. Apparently, their project attracted quite a bit of attention, even getting my blog noticed in a follow-up article. Now the Guardian has started receiving feedback from Americans of all political stripes regarding their intention to corrupt our electoral process, and a lot of it ain't pretty. Most of the e-mail they've received opposing their project has been rather obscene, or at least those e-mails they chose to share with their readers: Wading River, NY: Have you not noticed that Americans don't give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies ... KEEP YOUR F****N' LIMEY HANDS...
The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation into fraudulent reporting of circulation numbers at newspapers owned by publicly-traded companies, the Washington Times reported last week: The Securities and Exchange Commission has started an investigation into newspaper circulation reporting after several publications acknowledged exaggerating their sales. In the past two months, the commission has requested circulation documents from at least six major publishers, including The Washington Post Co., Gannett Co. Inc. and the New York Times Co., according to a report the New York Times published yesterday. ... The investigation was triggered by a series of circulation scandals that has left the $55 billion-a-year newspaper industry stained. Since June, four newspapers have admitted to reporting faulty sales figures to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, an independent agency that audits circulation data for newspapers and magazines. The Chicago Sun-Times disclosed that it inflated circulation by as much as 10 percent...
October 20, 2004
It's not often that an American blogger finds himself mentioned in the foreign press, but yesterday the Guardian's (UK) blogger Simon Jeffery took me to task for criticizing Spain. In my post yesterday, I noted that Spain had captured seven Islamist terrorists planning a major operation in Andalusia, demonstrating that their precipitous withdrawal from Iraq did nothing to improve their security. Appeasement should have been discredited six decades ago, I argued, and Jeffery decided that them's fightin' words, by golly: Taking the temperature of the more right wing blogs, you cannot help but wonder if they were rather the US was fighting its war on terror against France or Spain. The foiling this week of a suspected bomb plot in Madrid led to another round of anti-Spanish outbursts. "Perhaps the Spanish electorate will understand now that appeasing terrorists only leads to more terrorism, a lesson that Europeans learned the hard...
October 21, 2004
The London Telegraph reports on the efforts of its Labourite rival to influence American voters in Clark County, Ohio -- and it's clear that the results will not please the Manchester broadsheet or its constituents. David Rennie reports from Springfield that getting letters from foreigners presuming to instruct Americans on their best interests has created a groundswell of support ... for George Bush: The first letters to be made public all urged Clark County voters to reject Mr Bush. As he watched the reaction of friends and neighbours, Mr Harkins was delighted. He is the chairman of the Clark County Republican Party, and his neighbours' reaction was outrage. "It's hysterical," laughed Mr Harkins, showing off sheaves of incensed e-mails and notes from local voters. The Republicans' delight compares with the gloom among local Democrats, who fear that "foreign interference" is hurting Mr Kerry. Of course, the tone of the letters...
October 23, 2004
Lorie from Polipundit e-mailed me last night, unfortunately after I'd passed out from exhaustion after guest-hosting the Hugh Hewitt show, that Lawrence O'Donnell had a complete meltdown during the Joe Scarborough show on MS-NBC when Swiftvet leader John O'Neill appeared on the show. She wrote that the debacle was twice as embarassing as the Chris Matthews/Michelle Malkin debacle. (Michelle weighs in on O'Donnell here.) The Daily Recycler has a video excerpt that you have to see to believe. MS-NBC does not yet have the transcript up, mainly because it's difficult to retype "liar" 50 or more times. I'm not exaggerating. And I disagree that Lawrence O'Donnell had a "meltdown" at all. When you watch the video, O'Donnell seemed very much in control of himself -- he wasn't rolling his eyes or foaming at the mouth. He stared grimly into the camera and every time O'Neill opened his mouth, O'Donnell started...
October 25, 2004
Despite the NBC News report that told America that its own reporters verified the HMX and RDX had been removed from the Al-Qaqaa bunker in Iraq before American soldiers ever got there, the New York Times continues to push its discredited "gotcha" on its front page: The White House sought on Monday to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure, as Senator John Kerry seized on the missing cache as "one of the great blunders of Iraq" and said President Bush's "incredible incompetence" had put American troops at risk. ... Yet even as Mr. Bush pressed his case, his aides tried to explain why American forces had ignored a series of warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the vulnerability of the huge stockpile of high explosives, which was first reported on Monday by CBS and The New...
October 26, 2004
Like most paleolithic creatures whose fossilized remains come to the light of day, the New York Times' integrity gets put on display in its own editorial page today as the Gray Lady pontificates about the Theft That Never Was: James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger reported in The Times yesterday that some 380 tons of the kinds of powerful explosives used to destroy airplanes, demolish buildings, make missile warheads and trigger nuclear weapons have disappeared from one of the many places in Iraq that the United States failed to secure. The United Nations inspectors disdained by the Bush administration had managed to monitor the explosives for years. But they vanished soon after the United States took over the job. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so bent on proving his theory of lightning warfare that he ignored the generals who said an understaffed and underarmed invasion force could...
Unfortunately for the New York Times, no one gave a thought about the logistics of the notion that small bands of insurgents made off with 380 tons of explosives under the noses of the Coalition with no one noticing. CQ reader and retired Army Reserve Captain Ian Dodgson got paid to think about logistics, and he did some "cocktail-napkin" math that escaped the geniuses at the Paper of Record: We're familiar with the NY Times story and the IAEA accusations that the "missing" explosives were looted from the Al-Qaqaa military base due to US negligence in securing the facility. If I were a guerilla "looter" and I was planning such an operation from a military standpoint, here's what the task would require: Assumptions: -Each "looter" could haul comfortably about 25 pounds per trip to a truck. (of course after 12 hours that would require superhuman endurance) -I'd allow 5 minutes...
October 27, 2004
Editor and Publisher reports that an independent study of the media shows that George Bush got more than twice the negative coverage than John Kerry did in October, and that only one in seven stories reported about Bush cast him in a positive light: A new study for the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism suggests that in the first two weeks of October, during the period of the presidential debates, George W. Bush received much more unfavorable media coverage than Sen. John Kerry. In the overall sample (which included four newspapers, two cable news networks and the four leading broadcast networks), more than half of all Bush stories were negative in tone, during this period. One-quarter of all Kerry stories were negative, according to the study. ... In the final accounting, 59% of stories that were mainly about Bush told a mainly negative story, while 25% of Kerry stories...
The New York Times busily attempts to shore up its sagging reputation by tracking down the commander of the 101st Airborne unit that arrived at the Al Qaqaa weapons bunker in April 2003. Col. Joseph Anderson tells Jim Dwyer and David Sanger that his troops did not inspect the bunkers at Al Qaqaa, but that's no longer the issue: White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell. But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight. The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did...
October 28, 2004
ABC News reported late last night that the amount of high-tech explosives at Al Qaqaa has been wildly exaggerated by Iraqi officials, the New York Times, and CBS. Rather than the 380 tons of explosives which cannot be located, new documents put the amount stashed at Al Qaqaa at around 3 tons instead (via Instapundit): The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on "declaration" from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility. But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from...
AP actually titled a story "Mideast May Again Become Major U.S. Issue." Obviosly, we haven't been concerned at all about what goes on there. That's why Iraq has been the primary campaign issue. AP hastily inserts a Kerry campaign promise: "We'll do a better job of protecting the state of Israel." And a word from an "expert": Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was former President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, said in an Associated Press interview that "any administration will have to come to terms with the fact the absence of progress on the Israel-Palestinian peace front contributes to intensified conflict and hostility." Does the label "President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser" sound ironic to you too? I was so distracted I missed what he actually said, so I had to go back and read it again. I think he used too many words for "I don't have a clue." And finally,...
Our local ABC affiliate ran a videotape purporting to show the existence of HMX, RDX, and PETN at the Al Qaqaa storage facility, and the New York Times ran a new story heralding this videotape as the confirmation it desperately needs to rescue its credibility: A videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of...
October 29, 2004
The Washington Post injects some context and not a little sanity into the hyperventilation coming from the Kerry campaign and the left on Al Qaqaa. In fact, Bradley Graham and Thomas Ricks point out what I posted last Tuesday about the amount of explosives in question, and the fact that HMX and RDX pose little increased risk over the other explosives left over in Iraq: U.S. military commanders estimated last fall that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to 1 million tons of explosives, artillery shells, aviation bombs and other ammunition. The Bush administration cited official figures this week showing about 400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated. That leaves the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown. Against that background, this week's assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign about the few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq's Qaqaa facility have struck some defense experts...
Alert CQ reader Boaz B. noticed a detail in the ABC video that apparently has escaped the notice of their reporters and editors. According to the shot shown here, the IAEA seal on the cache found by the soldiers and filmed by the embedded crew did not match the inventory for HMX and RDX stored at Al Qaqaa: If you review the pictures on the KSTP web site that has the ABC video everyone is using you can see a very clear picture of a seal with its number (#144322). The PDF document of the UN inspections available show the numbers of the seals and none of them have that number. Therefore, it is clear that the bunkers that ABC videoed were not the ones that held the HMX the UN inspected. Here's a picture of the relevant page of the PDF, which I don't have a link to at...
October 31, 2004
Alert CQ reader Gracias Deo noticed that NBC has edited the transcript of the interview Tom Brokaw did with John Kerry three days ago. As I reported then, Brokaw's questioning of Kerry about his IQ caused the Senator to bristle (emphasis mine): Brokaw: Someone has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do. Kerry: That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from. However, in the transcript for the interview based on tonight's Dateline segment for the interview, the answer has been edited to remove Kerry's admission: Brokaw: "Someone has analyzed the president's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do." Kerry: "That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it." What...
November 1, 2004
The Center for Media and Public Affairs conducted a study confirming what everyone already knew -- the mainstream media gave John Kerry the kid-glove treatment this year, while being unusually harsh to George Bush. What most of us didn't realize is that the amount of positive press given to Kerry set a new record for media brown-nosing, the Washington Times reports: "It's not just that John Kerry has gotten better press than President Bush before this election, he's gotten better press than anyone else since 1980. That's significant," said Bob Lichter, director of the D.C.-based nonpartisan research group. "Kerry also got better press than anyone else in the days before the primaries as well," Mr. Lichter added. In October alone, Mr. Kerry had a "record-breaking 77 percent positive press evaluations," compared with 34 percent positive for Mr. Bush, the study states. The overall treatment of Kerry broke the record of...
November 3, 2004
Pity the poor UK Guardian, which tried valiantly to stick its nose into our election but wound up only irritating the very people it hoped to influence into voting for John Kerry. Now that George Bush has been re-elected for a second term, these die-hard leftists have reacted true to form -- they are immersing themselves in their own victimization: When, some time after midnight, news came through that the exit-polls for Virginia were too close to call - a sure sign, we'd been warned, that Bush was in trouble - there was exhilaration of an intensity not felt since Stephen Twigg unseated Portillo. We were going to win! The first email I received the following morning read: "F****d off, dejected, our hopes have been blown to shit." The next one read: "As REM once sang: 'It's the end of the world as we know it.' Only unlike REM, I...
November 4, 2004
In a sign that the mainstream media will not go gently into that good night, CNN's Netscape Network Election 2004 page included a picture of George and Laura Bush, smiling and waving for the camera, catching Bush mid-sentence. If you take a look at the properties of this picture (shown below), you'll find out what CNN thinks of President Bush. As of 12:41 am CT, the filename is asshole.jpg -- another example of the objectivity and fairness so evidenced by CNN. (Hat tip: CQ reader Jinx McHue)...
November 10, 2004
Nicholas Kristof would probably conclude that the cause of rainy days can and should be laid at the feet of the Bush Administration, based on his hysterical rant today about the freedom of the press. Kristof blames a rash of judges holding reporters in contempt for their secrecy on George Bush, not because any of the judges are Bush appointees (they're not), but because he sets an example of -- get this -- secrecy! Paging China! Help us! Urge the U.S. government to respect freedom of the press! It does sound topsy-turvy, doesn't it? Generally, it's China and Zimbabwe that are throwing journalists in prison, while the U.S. denounces the repression over there. But now similar abuses are about to unfold within the United States, part of an alarming new pattern of assault on American freedom of the press. In the last few months, three different U.S. federal judges, each...
November 11, 2004
Two days after John Kerry lost to George Bush, three of his teen supporters got into a dispute with a Bush-supporting schoolmate at their Minnesota Zoo School of Environmental Studies, and after some juvenile taunting, the budding Democrats beat the other teen with a baseball bat: Three high school students, one allegedly armed with a bat, were charged with attacking a pro-President Bush classmate after he reportedly said only gays would support Sen. John Kerry. ... The alleged assailants have all been charged: one with felony assault — because he allegedly went to his car to get a bat during the assault, prosecutors said — one with misdemeanor assault and one with disorderly conduct. In fact, both sides called the other "gay" for their political views, which still managed to outstrip the maturity level in some of the public debate from this election. Perhaps Lawrence O'Donnell counseled these young Democrats....
From USA Today: Many ABC affiliates around the country have announced that they won't take part in the network's Veterans Day airing of Saving Private Ryan, saying the acclaimed film's violence and language could draw sanctions from the Federal Communications Commission. The decisions mark a twist in the conflict over the aggressive stand the FCC has taken against obscenity and profanity since Janet Jackson flashed the world during the last Super Bowl halftime show. Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning movie aired on ABC with relatively little controversy in 2001 and 2002, but station owners — including several in large markets — are unnerved that airing it Thursday could bring federal punishment. The film includes a violent depiction of the D-Day invasion and profanity. "It would clearly have been our preference to run the movie. We think it's a patriotic, artistic tribute to our fighting forces," Ray Cole, president of Citadel Communications, told...
November 16, 2004
Chris Matthews, speaking on Hardball last night, made the ridiculous assertion that the Islamist lunatics in Fallujah are ... well, I'll let Chris tell ya: MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you about this. If this were the other side, and we were watching an enemy soldier, a rival—I mean, they‘re not bad guys, especially—just people that disagree with it. They‘re in fact the insurgents fighting us in their country. I guess Matthews is singing from the Michael Moore hymnal these days, turned to page 147, "Iraqi Minutemen, We Praise Thee". As for them not being bad guys, tell that to Nicholas Berg and Margaret Hassan....
November 18, 2004
The British daily The Guardian covers the news from the liberal point of view in the grand British tradition of partisan reporting; its counterpart, the Telegraph, does the same for Conservatives. I normally enjoy reading both papers as they unapologetically highlight the news from their own honest perspectives, unlike our own newspapers that fake objectivity while slanting their product. Also, I find that the Guardian usually features better writing than many of their American cousins. One of my least favorite parts of the Guardian are their in-house editorial cartoons, drawn crudely by Steve Bell. They're mostly dull, unimaginative, knee-jerk leftist hack jobs. (In fact, editorial cartooning is the one journalistic area in which I feel Americans far excel.) Today's Bell cartoon seems especially egregious to me, as you'll see: I have no beef about the image of George Bush, although I think the hairy knuckles around the turkey's neck lacks...
In a move eerily foreshadowed by my complaint about Steve Bell and The Guardian, the Washington Post has announced that they will no longer carry Ted Rall's despicable editorial cartoons. After a career of crude scribbles conveying even cruder sentiments, Rall's cartoon depicting a developmentally disabled student taking over a classroom as an allegory for the election provided the final straw for the Post: WashingtonPost.com is no longer running the cartoons of hard-hitting liberal Ted Rall. Rall said he thinks the site dropped his work because of a Nov. 4 cartoon he did showing a drooling, mentally handicapped student taking over a classroom. "The idea was to draw an analogy to the electorate -- in essence, the idiots are now running the country," he told E&P. "That cartoon certainly drew a significant amount of negative comment from our users," said WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Doug Feaver when contacted by E&P. But...
November 20, 2004
Nicholas Kristof once again takes the germ of a good idea and twists it into senselessness. Kristof starts off his latest column by pointing out the damage that the lack of competition in House races has done to the electorate. As he notes, getting elected to the House once often means lifetime employment: The U.S. electoral system looks increasingly dysfunctional, and those of us who used to mock the old Soviet or Iraqi "elections" for lacking competition ought to be blushing. In Arkansas, 75 percent of state legislative races this year were uncontested by either the Republicans or by the Democrats. The same was true of 73 percent of the seats in Florida, 70 percent in South Carolina, 62 percent in New Mexico. And Congressional races were an embarrassment. Only seven incumbents in the House of Representatives lost their seats this month. Four of those were in Texas, where the...
November 22, 2004
The headline in today's Los Angeles Times boldly proclaims that "Study Finds Enforcement of Civil Rights Laws Plummets," reporting on a new study by Syracuse University's TRAC data-collection project. Below the eye-grabbing banner, the story keeps its hyperventilating tone going, implying that the Bush Administration has abandoned civil rights: Federal enforcement of civil rights laws has dropped sharply since 1999 even though the level of complaints received by the Justice Department has remained relatively constant, according a study released Sunday. Criminal charges alleging civil rights violations were brought last year against 84 defendants, down from 159 in 1999, according to Justice Department data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University. In addition, the study found that the number of times the FBI or other federal agencies recommended prosecution in civil rights cases had fallen by more than one-third, from over 3,000 in 1999 to just...
December 8, 2004
Kitty Kelly opened her latest copy of Washingtonian magazine and was shocked to find herself removed from the masthead, where her name has, er, graced the magazine for thirty-two years. When she protested to her friend and editor Jack Limpert, he delivered the truth that the rest of us already knew about the sleazy, undersourced "biographer": After a relationship of more than 30 years, Washingtonian magazine and writer Kitty Kelley are divorcing, and the terms are not amicable. Kelley is in a snit because the mag unceremoniously booted her from the masthead of its current issue, citing her controversial book "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty." In an e-mail last week, Editor Jack Limpert lashed Kelley for what he called the book's partisan timing and its irresponsible reporting about President Bush: "We are always willing to attack the policies, and the behavior, of the President," Limpert wrote...
December 14, 2004
Media Matters for America will announce its intention to protest the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the Los Angeles Times reports today. Elizabeth Jensen writes that MMA will launch a new website and encourage a letter-writing campaign to highlight Sinclair's supposed political bias, stopping short of an advertiser boycott for the moment: A coalition of liberal political groups is launching a nationwide protest against Sinclair Broadcast Group, charging that the 62-station TV broadcaster, which was also the target of intense criticism during the presidential campaign, is misusing public airwaves with partisan news programming. The groups, led by Media Matters for America, today will announce a campaign to pressure Sinclair's advertisers with letters. The groups, however, are stopping short of demanding an advertiser boycott. ... The main focus of the protest is the nightly "The Point" commentary by Mark Hyman, who is Sinclair's spokesman and also oversees the company's Washington lobbying. A recent...
December 22, 2004
Rick Perlstein in the Village Voice writes a very convoluted essay that both chides the Democrats for spewing insane conspiracy theories about the 2004 election, and at the same time spins an even more ludicrous paranoid fantasy about why Democrats keep losing elections. He wants Democrats to shut up about what he sees as trivialities and easily-explainable happenstances and instead focus on the eeeeeevil genius of Karl Rove: It's possible that their vindication will come, that what's already being referred to as the "vote fraud community"—the allusion is to the "JFK assassination research community"—won't disappear up its very own grassy knoll. But the charges producing the greatest heat online often turn out to have the most innocent explanations. The recount isn't amounting to much, either. Last week the Franklin County Board of Elections did discover one extra vote for Kerry—offset by the extra vote they found for Bush. The irregularities...
December 27, 2004
I sent the following e-mail to Daniel Okrent, the public editor (ombudsman) for the New York Times regarding the factual errors in today's column by Brent Staples. I'm hoping for a response in the next day or two. Dear Mr. Okrent, I must protest (politely!) the misleading column printed by the New York Times in today's edition by Mr. Brent Staples. In his haste to concoct a conspiracy among Republicans to count prisoners where they reside for the census, Mr. Staples either failed to research the data on which he based his conclusions or he deliberately misled his readers. Mr. Staples states that we have a "felon class" of 13 million people. That would be news to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which puts the entire American prison population at all levels for all crimes (not just felonies) at just over 2 million at the end of 2003. Moreover, the...
December 28, 2004
The Los Angeles Times runs a major story in its Nation section this morning that looks like a refugee from October. Peter Wallsten obsesses about George Bush's approval rating based on recent polling despite the results from the big poll on November 2nd: Despite a clear-cut reelection and the prospect of lasting GOP dominance in Congress, President Bush prepares to start his second term with the lowest approval ratings of any just-elected sitting president in half a century, according to new surveys. That distinction, which pollsters and analysts blame on public discontent over the war in Iraq, comes as Bush begins drafting two major speeches that could quickly recast his image: an inaugural address Jan. 20 and the State of the Union soon after. Bracketed between them is the Jan. 30 election in Iraq, another milestone that could affect public impressions of Bush. In two words: so what? First, George...
A business complex exploded in nearby Ramsey today, killing at least two people and critically injuring a third. A gas buildup apparently caused the blast, which destroyed the building: A gas leak was believed to have set off the explosion about 9:45 a.m., leveling the single-story structure along Hwy. 10 in the city of Ramsey, said Capt. Bob Aldrich of the Anoka County Sheriff's Office. However, Aldrich said more investigation was needed to confirm the cause. Investigators planned to talk to a man who had pulled up to the building just as it exploded. The man's car was damaged, but he was said to be uninjured. The explosion will require more investigation, but the odor of natural gas at the scene makes firefighters pretty confident that a gas leak is the culprit. However, that's not why I'm posting about this. Our local media swarmed over the site, quite literally, as...
December 29, 2004
Hugh Hewitt writes a companion piece to his new book in today's Weekly Standard column, explaining why the mainstream media has suffered body blows to its credibility and how they opened the door to the inevitable reaction: The new recruits to big journalism and their mentors did not work overtime to assure that, in the elevation of tolerance of ideological minorities, there would remain representation of majoritarian points of view. In fact, majoritarian points of view became suspect, and the focus of pervasive hostile reporting and analysis. Crusading journalists seemed to be an ideological pack. By the time the new millennium arrived, legacy media was populated at its elite levels by as homogeneous a group of reporters / producers / commentators as could ever have been assembled from the newsrooms of the old Hearst operation. Big Media had hired itself into a rut--a self-replicating echo chamber of left and further-left...
December 31, 2004
I'm a little late posting this link, but be sure to read Patterico's excellent review of the Los Angeles Times for 2004, in two parts. Patterico has maintained his high standard of media review that he began in 2003 and gives the LAT its toughest (and fairest) criticism. Don't miss his year-end finale....
January 3, 2005
Drudge links to a Broadcasting & Cable item that reports on a meeting between beleaguered CBS News president Andrew Heyward and the White House. Heyward, rumored to be on the chopping block when the long-awaited internal investigation of the Rathergate fiasco is released, may need a truce with the White House to save his job: Let the fence-mending begin. According to a Broadcasting & Cable source in Washington, D.C., CBS News president Andrew Heyward, along with Washington bureau chief Janet Leissner, recently met with White House communications director Dan Bartlett, in part to repair chilly relations with the Bush administration. ... Heyward was “working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House,” our source says, “and from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced.” CBS declined to comment. On its face, Heyward's mission appears doomed....
January 5, 2005
The attack on Sinclair Broadcasting by Media Matters for America has claimed its first scalp. Staples, the huge office-supplies retailer, has pulled its advertising for all Sinclair news programming, effective January 10th: Office-supply retailer Staples Inc. is pulling its advertising from news programming on Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. television stations, saying the decision was fueled in part by e-mails from customers angry at what they consider to be the broadcaster's right-wing bias in news and commentary. ... Staples, which has 1,400 stores, will continue to buy advertising during other programs on Sinclair's 62 stations but, as of Jan. 10, no longer will advertise during news programs, which include "The Point," a daily conservative commentary by Sinclair Vice President Mark E. Hyman. MMA claims a "partial" victory, stating that all they want is to raise the issue of fairness in regards to the Sinclair commentary rather than a boycott. However, listing...
January 7, 2005
Editor and Publisher reports today that five embedded reporters working with Coalition forces in Iraq have been booted from their privileged positions for transmitting information that endangered the security of the troops: As Iraq moves closer to its first democratic elections later this month, the number of news organizations requesting embedded slots with military units there is on the rise, according to officials. But those new embeds better watch their step. E&P has learned that five journalists have been kicked out of embed slots in the past three months for reporting secure information. "They were all for operational security reasons, (revealing) something that would have been of use to the enemy," Maj. Kris Meyle, who runs the embed program, told E&P from Baghdad this morning. "Generally, it gets done very quickly. Usually it was something that was not done intentionally by the reporter." Meyle did not disclose the identities of...
After a day of capitulation to Media Matters for America, Staples must have read its e-mail this afternoon. Reversing course from its statement published in yesterday's Washington Post, Staples now claims it never intended to stop advertising on Sinclair news broadcasts: To clarify that Staples does not have a policy against advertising on Sinclair Broadcasting news, Staples has the following statement: Our media buying process with Sinclair Broadcasting stations has recently been misrepresented by an organization with no affiliation to Staples. Staples regularly drops and adds specific programs from our media buying schedule, as we evaluate and adjust how to best reach our customers. We do not let political agendas drive our media buying decisions. Staples does not support any political party. We advertise with a variety of media outlets, but do not necessarily share the same views of these organizations or what they report. As we have done for...