Funmurphys: the Blog

Civic Hubris or Keep Your Opinions To Yourself

So I'm at Google News about to search for an article to link for the entry I want to write and I have to read about the flooding in Cedar Rapids - last summer when we went to Northern Tier a good chunk of the drive through Iowa was along the Cedar River - and I come across this:

Most of downtown Cedar Rapids was underwater. That includes City Hall, the county courthouse and jail, all of which, in acts of civic hubris, were built on an island in the middle of the river.

Um, so "in acts of civic hubris" is part of a straight news story now? And from the New York Times, which is located on Manhattan, which is an island in the middle of two rivers. Funny, did the New York Times call New Orleans an act of civic hubris, seeing as how the parts of it that flooded from Katrina are below the river they are right next to? I just want to know what the standard is for civic hubris.

Funmurphys Looks At The News

In a recent post , I highlighted the following claim about journalism:

The breakdown of journalistic conventions about point of view. In an earlier era these standards -- favoring austere, stoical language conveying voice-of-God authority -- were designed in part to ensure that stories betrayed no hint of the writer's real feelings.

But the convention was a pretense. There is a generally laudable move toward more conversational -- and more candid -- language in stories. This shift allows a respected pro like the Associated Press's Ron Fournier to unsheathe a knife and write this sentence earlier this year about Mitt Romney: "The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponents' record and continued to show why he's the most malleable -- and least credible -- major presidential candidate."

I'd like to pick up a couple of threads from this - one is the generally laudable move toward more conversational and more candid language. Is this a top down or bottom up move? I'll argue that it is a bottom up move, as journalists first push and then find that editors will let pass more and more conversational and candid language in stores. Of course, by candid I mean biased. i.e. representing the candid views of the journalist. At first you read stories where the reporters voice would be cloaked by euphamisms such as "experts say" - without ever naming a single expert who said any such thing. Now you just read the reporter in so called objective news stories not just unsheathing the knife, but sticking it in and then twisting it. So let's be honest about the new honesty, you aren't reading factual coverage anymore, you're reading opinion from cover to cover. And editors let this pass because it conforms to their own prejudices.

And on to the second thread - why did objective journalism sicken and die when it did? Objective journalism was good for the business of journalism. Our new candid journalism has been terrible for the business of journalism but has done wonders for the egos of journalists.

But why can you pick up a newspaper today and find editorializing in every news story where 30 years ago you would find straight news?

I'd say first liberals within the media, just like at universities, became predominant by first making the environment chilly for conservatives and then flat out not hiring them. Now that we have an overwhelmingly liberal media, why not drop objectivity? It's not like a conservative AP writer is going to be able to unsheath the knife, let alone stick it in a twist it because they don't exist. Nor is there a conservative editor or fellow journalist to privately dispute the liberal view in newsrooms. There is simply no hope of a group that is overwhelming composed of individual liberals to produce a product that is anything other than overwhelming liberal. The old convention didn't break down because it didn't suit the consumers of news, it broke down because it didn't suit the producers of news.

The move to objective journalism was driven by concern for the bottom line - an objective AP could sell stores to any newspaper, an objective newspaper could sell itself to any subscriber. The move away seems to be driven by demographics within the profession itself.

Obama's Major League Weapon

I read this story, Obama's Secret Weapon: The Media the other day and I was struck by a couple of thoughts (thankfully, not too hard).

The first, most obvious is that the media isn't Obama's Secret weapon, it's his Obvious weapon. I mean, come one, the media long ago shed any shred of objectivity, and the open rooting for and gushing over Saint Barry has been clear to anyone who isn't Obama Girl. Who's being arrogant and condescending here - does the media really think (1) we're not biased, and (2) the public doesn't notice? How clueless can one be?

And on to the second thought. The story touched on it only the briefest way:

The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.

Unlike the stock market, I think past media performance is a pretty reliable indicator of future media performance, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that McCain will be covered like all other Republicans before him - with dislike. What Clinton has had to face in the primaries is what every Republican in the last 40 years has had to face in national elections - a media that prefers, or much prefers the other guy. The only reason Hillary Clinton gets any sympathy, or at least a fair shake, in this article is because she's a Democrat and there actually are Hillary partisans within the ranks. McCain benefits from media cheerleading only when he is acting in concert with the Democrats, something he does routinely (and which allows him to claim with far greater effectiveness the position of uniter and bridge to the other side than Saint Barry).

But the authors can't actually face that truth, and instead we get this:

The breakdown of journalistic conventions about point of view. In an earlier era these standards -- favoring austere, stoical language conveying voice-of-God authority -- were designed in part to ensure that stories betrayed no hint of the writer's real feelings.

But the convention was a pretense. There is a generally laudable move toward more conversational -- and more candid -- language in stories. This shift allows a respected pro like the Associated Press's Ron Fournier to unsheathe a knife and write this sentence earlier this year about Mitt Romney: "The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponents' record and continued to show why he's the most malleable -- and least credible -- major presidential candidate."

Ron Fournier is respected by whom exactly? Adam Clymer? I laud the move to partisans within the press coming out into the open, but I don't laud the press for having so many liberal Democrat partisans. Why not pour the cup full - if there is no way reporters can hold in check their real feelings - which is a central thrust of this story, and an accurate one, how then can Americans rely on them for accurate, unbiased information? If it's opinions I want, I'd much rather talk to friends than listen to strangers with no particular ability or knowledge beyond the ability to write to length and deadline.

We're into syllogism land. Liberal Democrats clearly prefer liberal politicians from the Democratic Party -- that's what makes them liberal Democrats. The press is overloaded with liberal Demorats; consequently the press prefers liberal politicians from the Democratic Party. The coverage of national politics is partisan, and hopelessly so. Reading the New York Times, or watching a national news broadcast doesn't inform aobut what happened, it informs you about what liberal Democrats think about what happened.

This article is just a part of the press groping their way to this conclusion, but they haven't even begun to contemplate the ramifications of that truth - only part of which is that their audience is only a third to a quarter of the nation, not the whole nation as they expect. Another is that they don't speak truth to power and never did - they speak the liberal Democratic party line to the faithful. These are hard truths and I don't expect most of them to ever come to grips with them. I wouldn't.

The Real Reason the Media Is Liberal

I haven't noticed what station my alarm clock radio is set to until this week. Normally when it goes off, I have it back off in 2 seconds. But now that the funWife is away, I don't have to worry about waking her, and with her and the kids gone, I don't have to worry about missing my time in the shower and messing every one up. So I've been a little slow about turning the alarm off, and it turns out it is set to KHITS 96. And no wonder, they play my kind of music, and they have all the old (and I do mean old) DJs from KSHE's glory days.

I am not a talk radio guy, and while KHITS is not talk radio, morning personalities all talk way too much for my tastes. I foolishly listened to J.C. Corcoran this morning, and at least he wasn't threatening to commit mass murder or doing black dialect while mocking a black man because he missed the Super Bowl halftime show. Today, the liberal J.C. was apparently reacting to a Pew Research Center survey that says that decidedly more journalists self identify as liberal than conservative. Now I happen to think that is a "well duh" kind of result, but J.C. was a mite riled up.

I came to full consciousness when he was saying the media were only liberal in comparison to fringe right wing bloggers. Ahh, another convenient whipping boy, the fringe right wing blogger. Then after he had exhausted his spleen, he went on to claim that the job itself caused a certain empathy and understanding because you got to go into rural areas and see real live bigots like some lounge singer at a Holiday Inn who had a dancing black mannequin named Leroy (not that people in the big city would ever hear bigoted comments on the radio), and see real bad poverty, and travel a lot, unlike most people who live in big cities. So the job itself would just naturally make you a liberal.

I especially liked how the two explanations are contradictory - the first was that journalists are only liberal in comparison to rightwing nuts, and the second was that the job itself makes you a liberal. I didn't wait around for another possible explanation, because the most obvious one, that liberals discriminate against conservatives in hiring, was not one I was going to hear pass the lips of Mr. Corcoran.

Weather Economics.

I'm kind of shocked about a newspaper story I'm NOT seeing, namely the story that says that the recent slowdown is do the the harsh winter we've been having. They used to run stories about how warm weather increased spending:

The warmest January in more than 100 years lured consumers out to the shopping malls to spend money at the fastest clip in six months, giving a strong boost to the economy as the new year began.

So, does the weather play a role? My wife last night was lamenting that she hadn't been able to do any real shopping in a long while because of the lousy winter weather. Yes, an anecdote, but a perusal of back issues says the weather spending connection was once taken seriously by the media. I don't recall one story yet this winter making that claim.

Could it be that the media is trying to (1) tarnish Bush and (2) affect the outcome of the election?

Another interesting part of the 2 year old story:

However, a third report showed construction spending managed only a 0.2 percent increase in January, the weakest gain in seven months and far below the 1 percent analysts had expected.

A big reason for the slowdown was a tiny 0.1 percent increase in private home building, the poorest monthly performance since an actual decline of 0.4 percent last June.

It was a further indication that residential construction, which has enjoyed five boom years, is beginning to slow.

Sales of both new and existing homes fell in January despite the warm weather. Economists predict continued increases in mortgage rates will slow housing further in coming months.

What's this, a slowdown in the housing market 2 years ago? I thought the current slowdown was just that - current and because of the current sub-prime "debacle". Sometimes it really pays to go back and read old news because the news itself has so little correct historical context to it and too much current narrative.

Lecture Vs. Conversation

I hate to tell Steve, but newspapers don't control the national conversation anymore - they're still stuck in national lecture mode. At this point, they just hope to remain a part of the national conversation.

Dear AP, Richard Armitage Was The Plame Leaker

I was greated by this article this morning: Former press secretary points finger at Bush, Cheney for deceit in CIA leak scandal. I made the mistake of reading it. Here we are in 2007, and the AP still hasn't figured out the leak. 10 paragraphs about the leak that mention Rove, Libby, Plame, Wilson, Cheney and Bush but somehow manages to leave out Armitage. You know Richard Armitage, the guy who actually was Novak's source of the leak? Who didn't come clean for years and who Fitzgerald wanted to spare from embarrassment?

Our crack press - not bothering us with facts so they can continue to beat a dead horse. If we treated their reporting like testimony, they'd be serving a life term by now.

General Sanchez and Editing

I wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I haven't written one in a while, but their treatment of Lt. General Sanchez's remarks the other day caused a big enough gasket blowout to generate a letter. It wasn't one of my best, and I knew it was a little long for their taste, but I couldn't see a way to get from the 350 words I wrote to the 250 max they like without damaging my arguement. And frankly, the word limit just one more constraint newpapers operate under that doesn't exist on the internet.

First, the letter as printed:

Lt. Gen. Sanchez's message

"Ex-Iraq commander blasts Bush policies" (Oct. 13), about Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez's address, was appalling. It did not include his criticism of the media: "The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas.... You are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war."

Yes, Mr. Sanchez blasted the Bush administration, but he also blasted other government agencies and Congress. He said: "The administration, Congress and the entire interagency, especially the Department of State, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure and the American people must hold them accountable." His focus was on getting the nation focused. All readers were provided was another military officer who "harshly criticized the administration's conduct of the war." There was no hint of his equally harsh criticism of the press, Congress and political partisanship.

His message was clear: The military has been shouldering the whole load of the war on terror, but it cannot win the war all by itself, and partisan politics has kept the nation from bringing the full range of its power to bear on the war.

He said, "Our nation has not focused on the greatest challenge of our lifetime. The political and economic elements of power must get beyond the politics to ensure the survival of America. Partisan politics have hindered this war effort.... America must demand a unified national strategy that goes well beyond partisan politics and places the common good about all else...."

The letter as written, with the edits (mostly deletions) in red:

General Sanchez's Real Message

Your article of 10/13 on Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez's address to the Military Reporters & Editors Association was appalling. Your mis-reporting is exactly what the general spent almost half his address discussing. Somehow you didn't see fit to include this direct quote about the press: "The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our servicemembers who are at war." Clearly, you are among those General Sanchez called out by saying "the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconceived notions, biases, and agendas."

Yes, Sanchez blasted the Bush administration, but he also blasted other government agencies and Congress. "The administration, Congress and the entire interagency, especially the Department of State, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure and the American people must hold them accountable." His focus was on getting the whole nation focused. Somehow all that went unreported and all that your readers were provided was a another military officer who "harshly criticized the administration's conduct of the war." Not a hint of his equally harsh criticism of the press, Congress, and political partisanship in general.

His message was pretty clear - the military has been shouldering the whole load of the war on terror but it simply cannot win the war all by itself, and partisan politics has kept the nation from bringing the full range of its power to bear on the war. Or in his own words, "Our nation has not focused on the greatest challenge of our lifetime. The political and economic elements of power must get beyond the politics to ensure the survival of America. Partisan politics have hindered this war effort and America should not accept this. America must demand a unified national strategy that goes well beyond partisan politics and places the common good about all else. All too often our politicians have chosen loyalty to their political party above loyalty to the constitution because of their lust for power."

So as always, I ponder over the edits. Some were good, such as removing my weasel word "pretty". Some are just annoying, like the change of "Not a hint of his..." change to "There was no hint of his..." which is what you'd expect of an english major who doesn't see a verb and who has been taught to abhor sentance fragments. Some were clearly for length, such as "And America should not accept this." Re-reading the letter I wish I had swaped the ending around to end with my own words instead of the General's, but I can't expect them to clean up my act to that extent. But some make me see red - such as removing the last line about putting political party above loyalty to the constitution, or my linking at the start what the General was complaining about and how they reported his speech. I really think they were trying to soften General Sanchez's criticism of the press, and of the Democrats.

That's why I have a blog, that's why I use the internet and primary sources as much as possible for my news, and that's why newspapers have lost the trust of the majority of their readers.

The Joys Of A Democrat In The White House

In some ways I look forward to a President from the Democratic party. Overnight, the Democrats will be for the war on terror. I know that right now the right is calling the Democrats the Surrendercrats and otherwise calling out the lack of a Democratic backbone, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that with a Democrat in the White House the Democratic party doesn't just rattle sabers, it slashes away with great gusto. Bill Clinton had no trouble attacking other countries, and the Democrats didn't say boo. Our attack on Serbia over Kosovo was pre-emptive, our airforce bombed Serbian state television -- killing civilians and members of the press -- because we didn't like what they were broadcasting.

And lest we forget, it was the Clinton administration that invented "extraordinary rendition. It was Peace Prize winner Al Gore who defended the procedure in interal deliberations thusly: ""That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass."

Since the mainstream media isn't just made up of Democrats, but has become a chief supporter of Democrats, the tone of stories will change overnight. Our successes in Iraq will at last be reported; the economy will improve overnight (except for those areas that the Democrats want to change, so healthcare will still be in crisis, and the deficit will be mentioned only in the context of the need to raise taxes). And with the press not feeling the need to smear Bush any way they can, the tone of overall reportage in general will improve, while the stores about how bad the US is will dramatically decline, so much so that our stature in the world will improve (which naturally will be described as result of the policies of our wise and beloved Democratic President). Yes, the stories the US press pushes are picked up internationally; the idea that somehow our press stops at the waters edge and has no influence on how the rest of the world sees us is laughably naive. It's human nature to assume that a country's own press is more accurate than any foreign reportage.

You might think I'm cynical - but I don't. I think I'm quite scientific, since I've seen this happen before.

Arab American Actors

When my local paper ran this article about Arab-American actors typcast as terrorists, they put the headline "Do these men look like terrorists" over the pictures of three American actors of middle eastern descent. So I thought to myself, they don't look like IRA terrorists, or ETA terrorists, or LTTE terrorists, or FARC terrorists, but oddly enough, they do look like Arab terrorists (Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas spring to mind). Really, what does a terrorist look like?

I suppose fewer movies should be made about current events? Or should TV and movies employ blue-eyed blondes to protray arabs?

Left unsaid is that the complaint used to be that blacks were always pimps and hustlers, asians were martial artists or brainiacs, italians always mobsters, etc.

As far as I can tell, the claim is that Hollywood, that liberal bastion, is stereotyping Arab-Americans. Must be the Jews fault.

Raindrops On Roses

A Few of My Favorite Things, St. Louis Post-Dispatch version:

Eric Mink has the day off today.

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad

We Can't Handle The Truth

Last night I was watching the local news (mainly for the weather) when they did a story about a Washington University coed raped in her dorm room. They talked about the suspect, read a description, and never mentioned he's black. I only know that because they showed the composite sketch. My wife thought it odd that they would mention gender, height, weight, age, hair length, even the cap he was wearing, in describing him, but not his skin color. Fox 2 News has the same lack of information. KMOV, the TV news outlet in town we usually watch(and I'm not sure why we were watching KSDK instead of KMOV - maybe because Karen Foss retired) has no trouble in using his skin color. I guess KMOV isn't worried all us bigots will be confirmed in our error.

So today I'm not surprised by this news: Another rape a Duke University, but no mention of (black) skin color. The media just keeps protecting us from our baser instincts - or so they think.

Think they'd ever caught Michael Devlin if they didn't include the color of the pickup in its description? White, BTW.

A Tipping Point?

Are there already more mil bloggers in country than members of the MSM?

At what point will there be more bloggers embedded in Iraq than members in good standing of the MSM? I ask because Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston are going over, joining Bill Roggio and Bill INDC/Iraq among others.

Since Michelle has decided to go on her own nickle (donations accepted), she asked that Eason Jordan pay Kathleen "Who are you to question me?" Carroll's way instead:

"I have notified Jordan of our plans and encouraged him to move forward with his trip and his offer to bring Curt of Flopping Aces.

More importantly, I have asked Jordan to extend the travel funds and security coverage he would have spent on me to the AP's Kathleen Carroll.

Ms. Carroll, you may remember, was the AP executive who derided bloggers for sitting at home instead of traveling abroad to do their own reporting during the fauxtography debacle last summer:

"It’s hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy," said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s senior vice president and executive editor.

Yet, from her own comfortable office, Ms. Carroll has decided that bloggers, Jordan, the U.S. military, and Iraqi government officials are all wrong to question her news organization's questionable news sources.

Questionable news sources? Pretty strong words, but the Confederate Yankee
digs into the story the way reporters in the movies do:

The only way I can do this is to take the 61 stories Curt found, Google the keywords and dates of the described events, and see if other news organizations can corroborate the details of the events provided. Those with LexisNexis access might be able to do a better job of verifying or disputing these accounts, but you get to research using the tool set you have, not the tools you would like to have. As I don't have the time to do a complete search, I'll attempt to search through roughly the first half of the 61 stories using Jamil Hussein as a source."

The result? Short answer - not pretty. Long answer - go read it yourself.

The question isn't whether (some) bloggers do journalism (this one never soils his hands that way), but do journalists do journalism anymore? Or do they just write the story a source gives them, no questions asked.

Business As Usual, or The Press Lies

I'm shocked, shocked that someone would accuse the news media of turning a blind eye to the provenence of their sources.

Next people are going to claim that the news media shamelessly plugged the silicone breast implant scare no matter how many times it was debunked, or that they used pre-packaged interviews provided by trial lawyers, or just in general demonstrated a reckless disregard for the truth.

I mean, once the media finds out somebody stages fradulent events, they'd stop using them.

So shame on you, Jeff Medcalf, even writing a song about it.

I mean, it's not like the business model is selling your attention to advertisors, it's selling you the truth. Right?

Another Press Fault

You remember how the American press was bemoaning the perils of embedding - no, not that they would be physically hurt, but that they would become beholden to the American Armed Forces, and horrors! might even favor the military because they spent so much time with them.

Well, why don't they have similar worries when it comes to foreign stringers, who do the bulk of the international reporting for the American press? Instead, they have no worries about who they hire to do their reporting, no matter how often it leads to biased, inaccurate, or faked coverage. Apparently the press thinks foriegners are made of far sterner stuff than Americans, able to withstand any and all entanglements, biases, and scrupulously fair and honest.

The New York Times Is Worse Than Nixon

Tom Maguire is all over the NYT's latest "the public be damned" moment, and points the way to this funny satire by the New Editor entitled "NYT Announces Formation of Shadow Government":

"Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it's the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost on morons who don't work for the New York Times, especially the knuckledraggers and mouth breathers who vote for Republicans," said Keller. "And while we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, we just feel ... well, that we're smarter."

"What he said," said new shadow Secretary of Defense Paul Krugman.

A Response to Mr. McClellan

I think the only proper response to this Bill McClellan column, "Mr. President, you can woo blockheads for Talent" is, pardon my French, "Bill, you can kiss my ass."

Why I Hate The Press: Reason 1

Yesterday I'm reading a USA today editorial about how we need a press shield law to protect America. Not just no, but hell no. Can we get a special prosecutor, someone who's able to keep his eye on the ball, unlike Fitzgerald, to start prosecuting the leakers who are trying to help our enemies? And I mean yesterday. Because it's getting to the point that if Bill Keller were to show up on the inside of cage in Guantanamo I'm not sure I'd complain, let alone be troubled by that -- and that just isn't right.

Media Bias: A Description

The best description I've read of bias in the entertainment media and what it means from Andrew Klavan at Libertas:

All the same, it’s a relief to see it. I mean, personally, I would prefer my romantic comedy to come without partisan politics at all, but I suspect that’s almost impossible nowadays. One side has so much control over the narrative assumptions that underlie most movies that merely to work under a different set of assumptions is to declare an opposing position. I mean, in movies, the big corporation is always bad, the environmentalist always good; the gun-lover is always crazy, the religious guy always repressed or insane. The patriot is always a jingoist, wise men are always black, gays are always friends and advisors and, if you watch carefully, a poor man’s crimes are almost always traceable back to a rich man’s perfidy. The suburbs are always either comic or stifling, abortion may be rejected but never for moral reasons and – my personal favorite – the United Nations is always a force for truth and justice instead of the loathsomely corrupt gang of child-molesting, sex-trading kleptocratic tyrants we know and abhor.

In short, at the movies, as on the network news, one worldview is assumed to be the steady state of affairs, while any other is considered a more or less ugly aberration. As a result, even the slightest indication that the hero of a movie might be, say, a Charlton Heston fan is bracing, a noticeable statement nearly shocking in its aggression. As for patriotism, faith, energetic capitalism – what some of us call normal on a good day – these become ferocious political pronouncements measured against a radical baseline.

Amen, brother Andrew. OK, I teased you, because to learn what it means you have to go visit and read the end. I will add a filip of my own - it's worse than described because the entertainment media and the news media provide a seemless web of reinforcing bias since they have the same ones.

No Bias Here

The official figure of economic growth was revised upwards to 5.3% for last quarter - a blistering pace. And where was this tidbit of information - why, on page 3 of the business section in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Any guess about where it would have been if a Democrat was President? Mine is above the fold front page.

Dana Milbank Sucks

Yes, my title is an ad hominem. But I claim truth as a defense. The sad thing, Dana is just another in a sea of terrible reporters who can't tell where their opinion leaves off and reality begins.

The Real Story of Katrina

Not only is most of what you know about Katrina not true, but you've never heard the real story of Katrina: the National Guard (with lots of help from the Coast Guard, and the Lousiana Fish and Wildlife Department), supposedly overstretched and worn out from Iraq, saved tens of thousands of lives in New Orleans. Why? Quiet competence never gets media attention:

The procedure ran under a system known as EMACs (Emergency Management Assistance Compacts), a mutual aid pact among states. The conference call became a daily routine that was New Orleans' primary lifeline to outside aid. It bypassed local officials and the fouled-up federal chain of command that led to much publicized infighting among the Governor, FEMA and the White House. According to the Senate Select Committee on Katrina, "This process quickly resulted in the largest National Guard deployment in U.S. history, with 50,000 troops and supporting equipment arriving from 49 states and four territories within two weeks. These forces participated in every aspect of emergency response, from medical care to law enforcement and debris removal..." the report said. All from the Superdome.

Meanwhile, late Monday, Louisiana National Guard HQ moved its high tech "unified command suite" and tents to the upper parking deck of the Superdome. This degraded communications for about four hours but ultimately gave them satellite dishes for phone and Internet connections to the outside world, Wi-fi, plus radios that were the only talk of the town. Helicopters and boats, as we noted, were already bringing in survivors there. About fifty men and women, black and white, worked per shift, equipped with maps, laptops, phone and radios to coordinate the rescue operation. The rescuers called it the "eagles' nest".

The operation was impossible to hide or ignore and some news outlets may have mentioned it in passing. Still, I haven't seen anything reported that sounded like what the two Majors described Tuesday morning: helicopters landing every minute; big ones, like the National Guard Chinooks, literally shaking the decking of the rooftop parking lot; little ones like the ubiquitous Coast Guard Dolphins; Black Hawks everywhere, many with their regular seats torn out so they could accommodate more passengers, standing. Private air ambulance services evacuating patients from flood-threatened hospitals. Owners of private helicopters who showed up to volunteer, and were sent on their way with impromptu briefings on basic rescue needs. Overhead, helicopters stacked in a holding pattern.
...
In all this time, Dressler said, "We didn't see a single camera crew or reporter on the scene. Maybe someone was there with a cell phone or a digital camera but I didn't see anyone." This was in the headquarters area. Maj. Ed Bush, meanwhile, did start seeing reporters on Tuesday and Wednesday, but inside the Dome, most were interested in confirming the stacks of bodies in the freezers, interviews with rape victims, he said, and other mayhem that never happened. He pitched the rescue angle and no one was interested. A few reporters and film crews did hitch rides on helicopters, came back, and produced stories of people stuck on rooftops, not stories about rescues, he said.

Neither Maj. Bush nor Dressler saw TV until the end of the week. They were aghast. Apart from sporadic mentions, the most significant note taken of this gigantic operation was widespread reporting of the rumor that a sniper had fired on a helicopter. What were termed evacuations in some cases, rescue operations in others, were said to have been halted as a result. "I never knew how badly we were being killed in the media," Maj. Ed Bush says. In reality, the only shots fired at the Guard were purely metaphorical and originated with the media. Rescues continued 24/7 at a furious pace.

I'm reminded time and time again just how badly the press, which always holds others up to such high standards, does in getting stories right.

A Letter To The Editor

I do so enjoy a good letter to the editor. And today the Post served up a good one:

Paradoxical Post

In light of the May 4 editorial opposing use of the term "Christmas holidays break" by the Francis Howell School District, the May 5 edition is a fascinating example of paradoxes.

On May 4, the Post-Dispatch told us the issue is of no practical impact at all, but on May 5, the story was on Page 1, above the fold. On May 4, the Post-Dispatch decried the emotional content of the issue, but on May 5 published a letter from a lady who does not live in the Francis Howell district but who most emphatically does not want Christmas shoved down her throat. (I suppose she avoids all shopping malls from October on each year.) On May 4, the Post-Dispatch told us Americans are free to call the holiday whatever we want, but on May 5 repeated warnings the district may face lawsuits.

On May 4, the Post-Dispatch warned us of how emotions can be whipped up, and on May 5 demonstrated its willingness to be one of the whips.

Roger W. Collins

Roger, Roger, Roger, you need to remember a foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of small minds.

Blogs Vs. MSM

I wrote this in response to the Don Surber post The Truth About Newspaper Circulation

Don,

Why does blog vs. MSM have to be binary either or? They both have strengths and weaknesses. Do I have to read only one and not the other?

Why make a comparison between the hits the top 770 newspapers get and those one top blogger gets? Shouldn't you be comparing either the hits of the top newspaper to the top blogger or the top 770 newspapers with the top 770 bloggers? If 770 newspapers get more than 365 time the hits one blogger gets, does that mean the top blogger gets more than twice the hits of the average top 770 newspapers? Wouldn't that be an amazing statistic?

Don, what's with "blogs have no credibility"? With whom? You? Do you have any data (the plural of anecdote isn't data) to base this on? Frankly, there are blogs that have no credibility with me, and there are those who have a great deal of credibility. There are a few MSM outlets left that have a great deal of credibility with me, but most have little to none. Can I generalize from my opinion to what the general public thinks? Not without data. For what it's worth, my memory of the last survey I saw on this subject said that only 19% of people surveyed thought that newspapers were usually reliable.

There are some blogs out there doing far better analysis than most of what I read in the newspapers. Not opinion in the sense that most opinion pieces are written: I present only the facts that support my position, but a real exploration of what's going on and an honest attempt to make sense of all the messiness of the real world.

There are blogs out there doing original reporting - who's provided better basic eyewitness reporting in Iraq than Michael Yon (or Michael Totten in the middle east)? We get better basic eyewitness reporting of protest demonstrations in blogs all the time. Blogs finally got Dan Rather off the air, and Captain Ed brought down a government. The sad truth is that at the moment the best blogs are bringing clarity and the best newspapers are bringing FUD (and the worst bloggers are far worse than the worst papers).

For me, there are certain structural problems with the MSM (what is news, the news cycle, that sort of thing), but they pale in significance to what I would consider the real problems of the MSM today: bias, arrogance, poor judgement, and quite frankly just lousy quality. These are quite fixable problems if the MSM can just realize what the problems are - and I fully expect with the MSM moving to the net the outfits that correct them will thrive and those that don't will disappear.

I want a reliable press who can report the facts, provide the context,and help me understand what's happening in the world. I'm not getting that today, and I'm unhappy about it.

Eggers Resigns At The Post-Dispatch

Terrance Eggers, the publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is leaving the newspaper effective May 19th. Last November, Ellen Soeteber resigned as Editor-in-Chief. It seems that Mr. Eggers is leaving for the same reasons Ms. Soeteber left - the Post has money problems, or as they described it, the paper faces a "choppy advertising market that prevented Egger from meeting modest revenue targets during his last year of a decade-long run in St. Louis."

I have to feel sorry for newspaper people these days - its the best of times as the internet beckons, and it is the worst of times, as the current advertising base dries up. Here we are in a robust expansion, and the ad revenue isn't coming back -- which means it isn't going to come back. I think this accounts for the generally unhappy outlook on the economy by the press -- their economy isn't good, so they assume nobody else's is, either.

Bill McClellan wrote about Mr. Egger's departure. Bill get's his facts right but his interpretation is way off: "An odd but endearing quality of newspaper folk is that we profess to know a lot about everybody else's business but know almost nothing of our own." It isn't odd but endearing - it's thoroughly annoying. And then he notes the big bucks Mr. Eggers has been paid ($3 million when Pulitzer was bought out, $675,000 retention bonus, and $1 million severance package) -- all the while his editorial page has been blasting other execs for similar excess. The press can't stand the same scrutiny and standards they hold everyone else to.

Rumsfeld For Press Secretary

So President Bush needs a new press secretary, and Ed Driscoll has a couple of candidates. My own would be to have Don Rumsfeld slide over to take that position. Who better to do battle with the forces of darkness every day? Now that al qaida is on the run, he can turn his attention to islamofascism's last bastion of support.

After watching him actually say "my goodness gracious" in response to a question from a reporter the other day at a press conference that was mainly about how some tough guy generals were complaining about how mean Rumsfeld was -- a regular Dinsdale Piranha -- I knew he was a black belt in verbal aikido. Of course he said it while the look on his face said "you are a moron who smells like stinky cheese, bigtime. And I mean bigtime on both the moron and the smell." Since most communication is mostly non-verbal, you need a guy who can communicate so well both verbally and physically.

And the left would clearly like him, since they didn't think McClellan was a good speaker, unlike Rumsfeld.

Tempest Meet Teapot

Hugh Hewitt makes a good point about the media pushing the story about dissenting generals calling for Rumsfelds resignation:

Why are MSMers Broder and Dionne willing to assign such great credibility to a half dozen generals (out of at least 4,700 and perhaps as many as 7,000 retired gerenals and admirals) when there is no evidence that they have credited similar insider criticism of their own business, say from Bernard Goldberg, John Stossel and Michael Medved to name just three MSM-insiders turned MSM critics.

My news judgement tells me this is a popular story with the media only because they hate Rumsfeld (and the feeling is apparently mutual) and a perfect example of how the liberal media monoculture distorts not just the story, but story placement as well. Of course, I don't bother with Broder and Dionne because (1) I already know their take on any given subject, and (2) it lacks depth and undertanding.

For Us But Not You

One of the things I dislike the press for is the way they hound people who have suffered a profound emotional experience - the loss of a child, displaced by a natural disaster, victim of a terrible crime. David Gelernter wrote eloquently about the hounding in his book Drawing Life. And when called on it, they always tell us not to shoot the messenger, they have no choice because it's what the public wants.

Jill Carroll came home from being kidnapped in Iraq, and after a couple of brief statements the press has respected her request to respect her privacy. What about the clamoring of the public that must be obeyed? I guess that can be ignored for a fellow member of the press. Too bad they excercise such restraint for other people.

Unity Takes Time

Cori doesn't seem to think that it's right for a columnist at the paper to break news while the reporters sit on their hands. Don't read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch then, where columnists routinely break news that their reporters show little interest or ability to cover.

But what's more important is what's actually reported -- the progress in the talks between the political parties in Iraq to forge a government:

The political agreements are fragile, and they will be blown away if the factions can't form a government soon to put them in practice. Meanwhile, beyond the Green Zone, Iraqis are still being slaughtered every day in the streets. But given where Iraq was six months ago -- when Sunni and Shiite leaders were barely talking -- their agreement on the framework for a unity government is important. These negotiations may not succeed, but they are not a fairy-tale fantasy, as some critics argue.

We Americans are an impatient lot. From my meagre experiences abroad, time takes on a different meaning once you leave the country.

I'm wondering if that chick at the AP will take Mr. Ignatius to task for the "as some critics argue" line. OK, that was a rhetorical device because I'm not wondering at all, since she didn't note that President Bush was following the lead of the reporting about him which is routinely larded up with "some critics claim" constructions without ever naming the critics.

Couric Jumps Ship

Katie Couric is leaving NBC's Today show to anchor the CBS evening news and take part in 60 minutes. As Rachel at TinkertyTonk notes "I cannot remember the last time I watched the network evening news. Can you?" Ah, no, I can't. And the next question would be when did I last watch the evening news and not notice their bias?

The NYT article gets the salient fact right here: "The evening newscasts have for some time been programs in decline at all three networks, with audiences that have grown markedly older." I do clearly remember the parade of denture, medicare supplement, and adult diaper ads last time I watched even though I couldn't tell you when that was. So great, a women gets to helm the nightly newscast when pretty much nobody cares.

Breast Asymmetry Linked to Cancer

In a study with 504 women, researchers at the University of Liverpool led by Dr. Diane Scutt found that a difference in breast size was linked to an increased risk of cancer in a fairly linear way, with every 100 milliliters of difference equating to an increase in the risk of cancer of 50 percent. The average breast size is approximately 500 milliliters, so we're talking fairly sizable differences here.

You can tell the caliber of the news organization by the headline (and photo) they chose to run with this subject:

BBC: "Uneven breasts linked to cancer"

Daily Mail: "Uneven breasts may increase cancer risk"

Xinhua: "Breast asymmetry may increase cancer risk in women"

Atlanta Constitution Journal: "Asymmetrical Breasts May Raise Cancer Risk"

Elites TV: "Study: Breast Size Matters When It Comes To Cancer"

Glasgow Daily Record: "MATCHING BREASTS ARE BEST"

The Sun (UK): "Lopsided boob risk"

Missing the Real Story

One of the things that burns me up about the coverage of Saddam's trial is that it focuses on the wrong two things and ignores it's only point. It focuses on what he or his lawyers did in court, but not the testimony. Witnesses come in and describe the horrors he perpetrated - hardly a mention of the contents of their testimony. Saddam stands up and blusters - full coverage. And the other question that consumes the press is Saddam getting a fair trial. Personally, the fact that he's getting a trial at all is all the fairness he deserves (yes, I'm aware of the proceedural arguments for the need for a "fair" trial) and the whole point of the trial is for the fullness of his crimes to come out and that he be given a chance to answer for them.

But that isn't what we get. Is this how the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa was covered?

A Network Moment

I was complaining about the news media the other day at work. I started with the local newspaper, the Post-Dispatch. I was relating that I had to disregard any item in it that was "news" because the high likelyhood of its inaccuracy. I was told there were other sources of news. I then said TV news wasn't any better and that cable news focused far too much on sensational but trivial stories (yes, even Fox). Just get your news from the internet I was told. The trouble is that even on the internet most of the primary sources are the very same news organizations that have been misinforming me for years and show no inclination to stop. You have to check everything against primary sources, which is a time consuming pain in the rear.

What I want is a reliable newspaper I can read in the morning. I love the idea behind them, it's just the execution that stinks. I want to be able to flip on the TV and be informed by accurate and relevant reporting. This current passing off opinion as fact just drives me nuts, and does so because I care about the news. If I were indifferent, I wouldn't care that the press can't do its job.

In other words, I'm having what he's having:

I want to be able to read the New York Times or watch CNN, or listen to NPR and be able to trust what they're telling me. Since I can't do that, since the media is no longer fulfilling their basic function, I have to blog, and I have to read blogs. It pisses me off, because I had better things to do this decade than be my own news service. I don't like having to read transcripts of press conferences because I can't trust the media to even write down what was said correctly. I don't like having to spend hours finding real experts on the web to analyze how this or that media expert has distorted the facts. I don't like having to pore through the blogs of journalists, soldiers and Iraqi citizens so I can get some inkling of how things are really going, without the hype. Even though I do it, I don't even like having to download the Brookings report once/month in order to see what the numbers say about how the war is going.

But I have to do all that, because its the only way I can truly be an informed citizen.

Is that really too much to ask for?

And I feel this anger too:

But I’m pretty sure the message behind “The Unit” wasn’t that the press is the cause of global terrorism. I haven’t watched the show or anything, but I’m just guessing that the message is that terrorists are the cause of global terrorism. Not American foreign policy, not economic inequity, not religious oppression, but terrorists themselves. You know, the killy, murdery, explodey kind.

That’s a nuance that’s lost on the Express’ Chris Mincher, though. “The enemies are nothing more than terrorist caricatures with beards and guns,” he writes. “Their goal: killing. Their purpose: to be shot. Their motivation: unknown.”

Maybe Chris longs for a TV show or movie that personalizes terrorists, that tells their story, that makes us empathize with them and think that maybe they’re just not that bad after all.

Sometimes a bad guy really is just a bad guy.

Questions Easy, Answers Hard

Is it just me, or does Larry O'Donnell sound like he had a few too many before going on the air with Hugh Hewitt? Actually, Larry always sounds like he's had a few too many and isn't a happy drunk.

What about the ambulence attendents? Would they be in on the cover up, too? Maybe an intrepid reporter can track them down and get their story.

Here is another example where reality will divurge between left and right; it will become an article of faith on the left that Cheney was drunk when he shot Mr. Wittington, and it will become an article of faith on the right that he wasn't. And I'm not one of those people who like to split truth down the middle, either Cheney was or he wasn't and so one group is quite simply wrong.

I Love To Laugh

I cannot tell a lie - I'm simply filled with glee at thought of the Scooter Libby trial. At this point, I don't care if Scooter is convicted or acquited, if he wrongly is set free or wrong is convicted -- what I want is the press to get what's coming to them. I neither know nor care about the guilt or innocence of Scooter -- but I want to see the press pay for the crimes they've committed against the truth all this time. Yes, I understand that nobody from the fourth estate will be fined, let alone jailed, but just having to go into court and be exposed to the best disinfectant, sunshine to quote the St. Louis Post Dispatch editorialist (not plagiarize, since the Post editorial page no longer recognizes plagiarism).

Libby was indicted because his testimony didn't agree with three reporters. So what else can his defense be but that he was telling the truth or at worse made a simple but unintentional mistake of recall based on what everybody actually knew at the time?

And the benefits are limited to just the people who are called to testify - the disappointment of those who aren't might be palpable, as they too might be exposed like everyones unfavorite, David Gregory:

I'll bet that the Libby defense team will want to chat with more than just Ms. Mitchell. That said, we should note that David Gregory may really be out of the loop - he chimed in with this:

GREGORY: And it is interesting--it's also interesting, I should just point out, that nobody called me at any point, which is unfortunately...
WILLIAMS: Apparently not.
GREGORY: ...not the point.
RUSSERT: Does anybody ever?
GREGORY: But I just wanted to note that.
RUSSERT: I've been meaning to talk to you about that.

Stand tall, Stretch - you may be the last man standing if Russert, Mitchell and Williams have a ghastly experience at the Libby trial.

Yes, that is the unmistakable stylings of Tom Maguire. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants today.

Some Professionalism

I guess I should be glad I've only dealt with nice people at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (like Carolyn Kincaid, Greg Freeman, and Bill McClellan), and not the jerks Cathy Seipp dealt with at the New York Times. Just so we're clear - don't tell me anything confidentially until after I agree to keep it confidential.

Another Confederacy of Dunces

I don't think I'm the only one who's licking his chops at the thought of the Scooter Libby trial and the thought of all those top drawer journalists hauled into court and forced to testify. What a gratifying spectacle that will be. It's too bad they don't allow TV cameras into court rooms - they really ought to make an exception in this case. Perhaps it could be on pay-per-view, I know I'd pay good money to watch. It would be Reality TV at it's finest. Instead we will have to content ourselves with comparing the carefully sanitized version from the organizations who have their minions testifying and independent outlets. I'm reminded of the ending of Samson - you know, where the Philistines capture him and make sport of him in their temple, so he pulls the temple down on him and them.

Do I know if Scooter lied or not? No, I wasn't party to the conversations. I do think lying during a criminal investigation is not just a bad thing, but a legally punishable one. My problem is that once Fitzgerald concluded that no law had been broken by the leak of Ms. Plame's connection to the CIA, then his whole investigation should have been over. And that conclusion had nothing to do with his investigation of Libby - in fact, that should have been determination number one. And once the determination was made that there was no crime, then the Fitzgerald should have shut the whole enterprise down and gone back to actual crime fighting. If Fitzgerald got sand in his eye, it was because he took it off the ball. Instead, he went ahead to try and find out who said what to whom when in Washington. Good luck buddy, you'll need it.

Bill And Me

Bill McClellan is probably the most popular columnist at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Not the best, that would be Dave Nicklaus. Bill does a mix of local and national stories, more local than national, and is probably best known for his tales of ne'er do wells, and he has quite the soft spot for hard luck stories.

A couple of years ago he wrote a column about Johnny "Taliban" Walker Lindh (which is no longer available) where he had quite a lot of sympathy for Mr. Walker. I have sympathy for Mr. Walker to the extent it appears he went to Afganistan and fought for the Taliban before September 11 2001. Poor judgement and a very bad choice to be sure, but not treason. But in making his case, Mr. McClellan had to go for the icing on the cake, so he claimed that Mr. Walker had every right to be confused because the US was friendly with the Taliban at the time because of the Taliban's anti-drug stance, and as evidence of that friendship was the 43 million dollars the US paid the Taliban:

"At the time he went to Afghanistan, our government liked the Taliban government. At least, we were giving them money because we thought they were allies in our War Against Drugs."

Despite being repeated ad naseum in 2001-2003, the United States never did provide the Taliban 43 million dollars. Robert Scheer, as was his wont, twisted some facts into this fiction and once a "respected" newspaper prints it, it must be true.

So when I read this lie repeated again, I went into full attack dog mode. Namely, I wrote a letter (Okay, email). It's what I do. When an op-ed contributor to the Post Dispatch had made the exact same claim earlier, I wrote the letter to the editor linked above.

So Mr. McClellan and I had the correspondence included below the fold. In summary, while Bill never exhibited a smug or insulting manner (upon re-reading, if anybody was smug and insulting, it was me) but he dispayed an astonishing vagueness, disregard for facts, and a touching yet misplaced reliance on his feelings and cynicism. In the end he agreed that he was wrong (probably just to stop the emails) but of course there was no correction or mention that an important thesis in his column now rested on empty air.

Now on to the correspondence:

I carefully marshalled my facts, my links to supporting evidence from respected sources, and I even provided in my conclusion why I thought this was important (and still do) -- there seems to be no way to correct bad information once printed.

Dear Mr. McClellan,

In a column a couple of weeks ago, you wrote about John Walker: "At the time he went to Afghanistan, our government liked the Taliban government. At least, we were giving them money because we thought they were allies in our War Against Drugs."

We didn't give money to the Taliban as part of the War on Drugs. That is Scheer (http://www.robertscheer.com/1_natcolumn/01_columns/052201.htm) fabrication. What we did do is provide humanitarian assistance, mostly wheat and other food, worth 43 million dollars to Afghanistan. This assistance went to the United Nations and non-governmental organizations, and Secretary Powell at the time made it quite clear that not a penny would be going to the Taliban regime because in his words, they "have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it."

This assistance brought the total US humanitarian aid to Afghanistan for the year to 124.2 million dollars, and was a continuation of similar aid provided by the Clinton administration. The US was the largest aid donor to Afghanistan for both 2000 and 2001. You can these facts for yourself at CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/05/17/us.afghanistan.aid/index.html) which provides a contemporaneous account or Dan Kennedy at the Boston Pheonix (http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/this_just_in/documents/01839506.htm) who debunked Scheer's account.

Jason Blair was a fool; guys like Robert Scheer can drip misinformation into the media over years without ever losing his ability to do so. And the way the media is set up, once the information stream is polluted, there is no way to clean it up. People will be citing this bunk in good faith until no one remembers the Taliban.

Kevin Murphy

I thought I kept it short and factual, thus perfect for the busy columnist. So I was happy to get a reply, just dismayed at the contents.

Kevin: I read the LA Times piece and the CNN story. I could not call up the Boston Phoenix story. But after having read those first two, it seems to me that things may not be as black and white as you indicate. Couldn't both stories be true? That is, we were giving them "humanitarian aid" -- just as the CNN story said -- but perhaps we were their biggest donors precisely because, as the LA Times story said, we saw them as allies in our War on Drugs. I'm not sure about this, but it certainly seems possible, if not likely, to me.

Bill wants to hold on to what he wrote while trying to claim we're both right. How can we gave money to the Taliban like Bill claims be right at the same time we didn't give them a penney as I claimed? I guess if I were a columnist at a major newspaper, I'd understand. Also note the confusion of the motive - allies in the War on Drugs - and the action - providing money to the Taliban. So if you have the motive right, you must have the action right? It was such an unsatisfactory reply that I had to write again.

First, you seem to be unclear as to who the "them" are - of all the organizations we gave money to in Afganistan, none of the them were the Taliban. So you're assertion that we gave the Taliban the money is simply wrong. (See Colin Powell's announcement of the aid: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/2928.htm). From that announcement:

"Our aid bypasses the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it. We hope the Taliban will act on a number of fundamental issues that separate us: their support for terrorism; their violation of internationally recognized human rights standards, especially their treatment of women and girls; and their refusal to resolve Afghanistan's civil war through a negotiated settlement. "
Hardly the the ringing endorsement of an ally.

Second, the reason we gave the money to the UN agencies and non-governmental agencies is clear - people were on the verge of starvation in Afganistan. (See Anne Applebaum's article in Slate: http://slate.msn.com/id/105417/). From that article:

"War and politics have compounded a natural crisis: Afghanistan is now experiencing a second year of drought and may be on the brink of a terrible famine. The World Food Program thinks the drought has severely hit 4 million people in the country: Kenzo Oshima, the U.N. undersecretary-general in charge of humanitarian affairs, has said that 1 million are at risk. The numbers vary widely because no one actually knows what is happening in the interior of the country, where refugees report that they were surviving on boiled grass. "

Giving food to starving people is something that enjoys broad support in this country.

I know what you're thinking - what about that line in Secretary Powell's announcement:
"We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance for Afghans, including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome. "

While an intriguing line, it doesn't contradict that fact that we didn't give money to the Taliban, and that food was the main thing provided (most of the 43 million was food and not money). To me it indicates an awareness that an anti-drug program is not without costs to people outside the US, and that the US is willing to help out - not that the Taliban was an ally in the War On Drugs (a war I'll note in passing that I don't support). If we wanted to reward the Taliban, wouldn't it have made sense to have provided them with something other than insults?

While we are all free to draw our own conclusions from the available facts, you cannot change the facts -- even in an opinion column. We didn't give a penny to the Taliban, and any claim that we did, for whatever reason, is false. To leave out that most of the aid was food and what cash was provided was for food and food related aid while Afganistan was in the midst of a famine is misleading.

Kevin Murphy

Okay, more facts, and I'm clearly rebutting (1) money to the Taliban, and (2) aid was quid pro quo for being part of the War on Drugs. Clear, persuasive, and impossible to misconstrue. Hah, was I ever wrong.

You seem to miss my point, Kevin. We were giving aid to Afghanistan while the Taliban were the government. There is no denying that -- whether the aid was mostly food or all food, and whether the aid was given indirectly -- from our hands to the UN to the Afghans. We were giving the Afghans aid. The secretary of state made explicit mention of the fact that the Taliban was restricting the cultivation of poppys, a decision he said we welcomed. I'm not making any of that up, nor am I changing facts. Is it that far-fetched to think that we give aid based on whether we approve of specific actions a government takes? I think we often give aid based on whether or not we think somebody is playing ball with us. Perhaps I am just too cynical, and you might argue that we would give aid to anybody whether we liked their policies or not. But I can think of several famines in which we did not rush forward with aid. We often use foreign aid as a carrot. I have never thought that was so wrong. Is it your argument that the present administration is less concerned about international politics and more altrusitic than former administrations?

Bill seems to skip right over all my facts and clear statements of what my argument is and when I don't agree with him, feels I'm the one missing the point. And his response is a classic of muddleheaded thinking. It's Dowdism (the elimination of the inconvient and the rearrangment to suit the quotor) applied to thinking. Note the repetition of unfounded assertions. Note the restatement of a clearly made argument into something completely different at the end. It's pretty clear to me who's missing the point (and it ain't me).

I'm not missing your point. Your point was that John Lindh could have been confused about our feelings for the Taliban: "At the time he went to Afghanistan, our government liked the Taliban government. At least, we were giving them money because we thought they were allies in our War Against Drugs."

You have ignored my points and provided no supporting facts.

You said we were giving money to the Taliban. There is no denying that we didn't. Trying to equate providing food and money to the UN and NGOs, and giving cash to the Taliban is wrong. Would it have been the same thing if in the 60's the USSR had given money to the Weather Underground or the Nixon administration? I mean, it's all Americans. According to you it would be the same thing.

Would giving food to the Afgans indicate that we liked the Taliban government? Just the opposite, since we made clear that we were giving the food to NGO's and the UN precisely because we didn't like the Taliban.

We gave food to starving Afgans. This is a payoff to the Taliban how?

The Taliban outlawed poppy cultivation. Powell said we'd work on ways to help out Afgans, including the farmers hurt by that ban. That would mean we were trying to make the farmers allies, not the Taliban. Powell indicated that until the Taliban stopped being the Taliban, not only wouldn't they get anything from us, we would continue to support UN sanctions against them. Maybe you and I have different definitions of "ally".

We provide monetary and military aid directly to governments pretty much completely based upon international political concerns. But that isn't what we are talking about here. We're talking about food aid here - and the only time I know that we've withheld food aid is in North Korea where for several years we asked for better accounting and NGO access and never got it. Doctors without Borders pulled out of North Korea because they said the food aid was only going to supporters of the regime (http://www.msf.org/countries/index.cfm?indexid=22D113E8-BEC7-11D4-852200902789187E). I don't think this administration is much different than any recent ones when it comes to providing famine relief by and large without regard to the current relationship between the two countries. If you're a deeply cynical person, you might consider food aid to a country we dislike in our best interests as it would tend to undermine the recipient.

If you could think of these famines where we haven't rushed forward, could you do me the favor of telling me? As I tell my wife, I'm not a mind reader.

Kevin Murphy

Okay, I got snippy. But at least I'm providing facts and clear reasoning. Could I have been any more clear? I thought the reasoning by analogy would be a big help, but apparently not.

Okay, Kevin. We're not getting anywhere. I'm a little more cyncial than you, that's all. Maybe we don't do things in our own self-interest. As far as famines go, I could go back to the terrible famine in the Soviet Union under Stalin or to the more recent one in Somalia in which we intervened only after it was on television for months. But if you want argue about what constitutes aid, and whether or not our motives are absolutely altrusitic, I know I can't change your mind. Thanks for the notes.

There's our problem, I'm insufficienty cynical. So is being more cynical right? I guess in this case. We aren't arguing about what constitutes aid, but who it's going to. We aren't arguing about the degree of altruism of our motives, but what they were. I suppose some debate teacher taught Bill this technique - divert attention from what's said by restating it incorrectly. Or maybe he's that stupid. But hey, at last I have some verifiable claims from Bill - even if they are pretty much a tangent. I don't know about you, but the impression I get of Bill's fact gathering technique is trying to remember back to what he learned in junior high or what he read somewhere that made an impression on him. The idea of actually trying to do a little research, especially the internet, never seems to have entered his head.

You are right, we aren't getting anywhere. But it isn't because I want to argue about what constitutes aid, or how altruistic our motives are -- I don't. It's about simply getting facts right. It's a sad day when the top columnist at a major newspaper can't see that giving food and money to organizations not connected to the government in a country is not the same thing as giving money to that government. All the other stuff is interesting but not pertinent. You cannot say we gave money to the Taliban for any reason and be accurate for the simple reason we never gave money to the Taliban.

I will comment on your two examples - we did send food to Somalia, and when it was used as a weapon by Somali warlords, we sent in the Marines to insure its proper distribution. Rather than an example of where we withheld food for political reasons, Somalia shows both our willingness to provide famine relief and the limitations thereto.

As far as reaching back to the famine under Stalin in the early thirties, I'm not sure what you want. The soviet regime maintained that there was no famine, and used people like Walter Duranty to reinforce that message (hey, when do you think the NYT will give back the pulitzer for his lies? Just curious). In a sense they were right - there was no famine, there was murder by starvation. When a country's government is deliberately starving certain of its citizens for policy reasons, I'm not sure what you want the US to do. Invade? We did that in Somalia, but I'm not sure we could have been very effective in 1932 invading the USSR. (see http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/eara.html).

Kevin Murphy

OK Mr. smart guy, you want to wander off on a tangent, I'll crush you like the bug you are. I just couldn't resist the Duranty column, because it really undermines the idea that the newsmedia has ever been any good. There was no golden age. OK, what's going to be his response?

Kevin: One reason we're not getting anywhere is from the start I said there might be some truth to what you're saying, but you insist on claiming all the truth and I don't think you can back that up. In fact, you're too much of a "what is the defnition of is is" guy for me. We gave aid to the Afghans while the Taliban ran the government. To me, that's a fact. But you do your "definition of is is" argument that it's not really aid, because it's food, which is like saying we don't give the Egyptians aid because it's really weapons -- and no, I don't want to debate that -- and furthermore, you argue, we didn't really give the aid to the Afghans because we gave it to the UN to give to the Afghans. Very Clintonesque. I still say the fact is we gave aid to the Afghans. At the time we gave the aid to the Afghans -- or in your view, we gave food to the UN which was supposed to give to the Afghans -- the Secretary of State specifically mentioned how helpful the Taliban were in stoppiong the growth of poppys. I'm not sure I understood your denial of that except you said something about how we wanted to help the farmers, and the farmers are not the Taliban. I mean, Kevin, you could argue that the sky is not blue, and I would still insist it seems blue to me. So let's just stop. You're convinced you're completely right about all of htis, and I don't think the facts are on your side -- unless you twist them. And with all respect, I don't have time to keep restating my position.

Clintonesque!?! -- them's fighting words bub.

So now I realize I'm beating my head into a brick wall because I'm insisting on claiming all the truth. He still is hung up on what is aid and can't make the jump of who the aid is going to. When I say we didn't give money to the Taliban, he's stuck on money and I'm talking about the Taliban. And apparently he likes his facts one fact at time, any more than that and he gets confused. And then he decides to go for a little analogy himself, only he make sure he picks on he can win - the sky is blue. Yep, I'm going to argue that one. I bet he doesn't even know why the sky is blue (because sunsets are red). Of course, he can look out any window and see that we gave money to the Taliban in 2000. That's some window. And with all due respect, all you've been doing is simply restating your position and misstating mine.

I'm not trying to claim all the truth. I'm trying to focus on a very specific idea, namely that providing food to starving Afghans is not the same as providing money to the Taliban. Yes, we gave aid to the Afghans while the Taliban ran the government (although we never did recognize the Taliban government as the government of Afghanistan), but the Taliban government did not equal the Afghani people. You cannot substitute Taliban government where ever you see Afghan person(s). They are not the same. Again, let's look at your exact remark that I thought was in error:

"At the time he went to Afghanistan, our government liked the Taliban government. At least, we were giving them money because we thought they were allies in our War Against Drugs."

We were not giving the Taliban money. We were sending food to starving Afghans. We send food to starving people around the world, typically without a concern for their government. We've sent over 500 million dollars worth of food to North Korea in the last ten years, the government of which we clearly dislike, just as we clearly disliked the Taliban. We're sending millions of dollars worth of food to Zimbabwe, even though we clearly dislike the regime of Robert Mugabe, just as we clearly disliked the Taliban. We have sent millions of dollars worth of food to the Sudan under a government we clearly dislike, just as we clearly disliked the Taliban. We did not like the Taliban - we never even recognized them as the government of Afganistan.

We did not send money to the Taliban. Sending food to starving people is not the same as giving money to their government - that is a fact to me.
We did not like the Taliban. Sending food to starving people does not indicate whether or not the United States government likes another country - that too is a fact.

That leaves the idea that we thought the Taliban were our allies in the drug war. I'm not a mind reader, so I'm forced to look at all the facts to arrive at my conclusion.

Secretary Powell's statement:
We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance for Afghans, including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome.

We distribute our assistance in Afghanistan through international agencies of the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations. We provide our aid to the people of Afghanistan, not to Afghanistan's warring factions. Our aid bypasses the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it. We hope the Taliban will act on a number of fundamental issues that separate us: their support for terrorism; their violation of internationally recognized human rights standards, especially their treatment of women and girls; and their refusal to resolve Afghanistan's civil war through a negotiated settlement.

UN sanctions against the Taliban are smart sanctions and do not hurt the Afghan people, nor do these sanctions affect the flow of humanitarian assistance for Afghans. "

Are those the words of one ally to another - the only thing we welcomed by the Taliban was their ban on poppy production. And we didn't think much of that; Asa Hutchinson, head of the DEA thought the ban was a cynical ploy to increase the price so that the Taliban could make more money off the huge existing stockpiles in Afganistan (http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/03/inv.drugs.terrorism/?related)

And I'm not arguing that the sky is not blue; I was making a cynical argument that if you follow the money (isn't that what cynics do?) that since we clearly said we weren't going to give the Taliban a dime, but we were looking for ways to put aid in the hands of the actual farmers, we were treating the farmers, not the Taliban as an ally. The ally would be the group we we send aid to, not the one we insult. And yes, the farmers are not the government. If I want to give Bill McClellan money, I don't send it to the US Treasury, nor when I want to give the US government money do I send it to Bill McClellan. Perhaps as your wife handles the finances, you aren't acquainted with such a simple economic idea.

But I think Occam's razor solves this question nicely - is it simpler that we sent food to a country with starving people because we don't like to see people starve given our history of sending food to starving people despite their government; or that we sent food to people living in a country whose government we wanted to consider an ally but whom we didn't recognize, whom we got UN sanctions against, whom we'd attacked once before and whom we would go on to depose, because they had banned poppy production while they continued to sell heroin and other opiates?

If the Taliban government is the same as the Afghan people, is it fair to say that when we wiped out the Taliban, we wiped out the Afgans themselves? No, such a statement is absurd on the face of it, and so to is equating the Taliban government with Afghans in general.

Kevin Murphy

I'ts like hearding cats - you've got to keep coming back to the point. When I was in Pakistan I was told they hit their camels in the head with a brick to get their attention. That was my metaphor for the last email. Would this be the straw that broke the camel's back (yes, I realize that's a mixed metaphor)

Kevin: You are correct that we did not send the Afghans money. I was wrong on that point. The rest I think is a little hair-splitting.

He still can't get it right - we didn't send the Taliban the money - not the Afgans. Even the gods themselves wail in vain.

NOTE: The links provided were good in 2003. Your milage may vary.

Hiltzik: Stuck on Stupid

I've gone all year without a post criticising the media (I never get tired of that old joke) and I even went so far as to half way defend them yesterday. But for everything that's wrong about the news business today, read the assault with a limp weapon perpetrated on Patterico part 1 & part 2. Mr. Hiltzik commits the classic emotional fallacy of believing that his name calling works. It doesn't. Far better bloggers than I have responded, from Patterico himself, not just once, but twice, Armed Liberal couldn't say it all in just one post, but fine writing stylist and all around classy guyTom Maguire manages it in just one response.

Highlights of the Hiltzik's essays were his informative comparison of right wing critics of the news media (not just Patterico BTW - and yes, I'm disappointed I wasn't mentioned along with Hugh Hewitt and Mickey Kaus - not that I deserve it) to Stalin and their blogs to his show trials, his charming theft of Tailgunner Joe's line about how he had all kinds of evidence in his briefcase but he wasn't going to share, his claim that people who hadn't worked in daily journalism had no basis of criticism of same, and his rousing defense of story placement in the times that "The written language is a linear communications medium" so "something has to come first".

Argumentative, insulting, stupid, unsatisfying, remarkably fact free and misleading, and ultimately headshaking are the blurbs this critic ends with. Sadly, it's the standard response to criticism from those who understand daily journalism from their employment therein.

Battle of the Network Jerks

I guess it goes to show you just how bad David Letterman is that he's worse than Bill O'Reilly. When O'Reilly makes you look like a fool on your own show, you're a fool.

Media at Work

Hmm, which story provides the information you really want?

A or B?

Most of the stories cover the deceptive doctor angle, and don't mention any questions about how effective Nuvo or Cetaphil is as a lice killer. Only the ABC story (so far) focuses on whether or not Nuvo or Cetaphil works and examines the evidence, i.e. what kind of study was done and the basis of the buzz around Nuvo.

One story is easier to write, but far less informative.

The next step would be to examine the roll the press plays in hyping stories like the original Nuvo press release and who a press release is turned into press story. But I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Codger At Work

The press in theory is all about speaking truth to power but in practice its about offending those it doesn't like and if it happens to offend those it does like then it grovels while speaking soothing platitudes.

You Can't Handle The Truth

So, President Bush has finally decided to go after those Democrats who are smearing him by claming he lied or mislead about the intellegence on Iraq in order to drum up support for the war. It will be an uphill battle because not only will he have to contend with the Democrats, but the news media as well. The Democrats aren't that formidable a foe, but the news media is much, much smoother at lies and misrepresentations. Good luck Mr. President, you'll need it.

Masters of the Obvious

Is headline writer that difficult a job? Check these out:

Bin Husin May Have Been Planning Attacks

"Police found more than 30 bombs in the hide-out of a Southeast Asia terror ringleader shot to death during a raid by an elite security unit, triggering speculation he was planning more attacks, authorities said Thursday."

Why the 'may' in the headline -- he held on to the bombs for sentimental reasons? He was planning one heck of a stage show for the comeback tour of Great White? Whose speculating, experts? Sheesh a la Beef, what ninnies are writing this stuff.

The Best Darn Talking Points Period

Speaking of policy disputes versus morality plays, Brent Scowcroft criticized Bush administration policy and the Bush administration responded. If you believe Joe Klein, and I don't, the Bush administration responded by sending out "talking points about how to attack Brent Scowcroft" based on a claim by a source who deleted the email before he read it. Well, as Jim Taranto points out: "He [Klein] "reports" that the White House is trying to "destroy" Scowcroft, based on an anonymous source's description of an e-mail that not only Klein but the source himself hasn't read! It's such a hilariously inept bit of journalism..." The sad thing is that as we've seen, this is isn't inept journalism, this is SOP for journalism, and the main reason I don't get excited over claims of malfeasance reported by the media until I can see the primary documents with my own two eyes.

Like a lot of people who have read the talking points, I find them both civil and cogent, and frankly the right way to approach a policy dispute. I reprint them here from Elephants in Academia:

1. Bernard Lewis is perhaps our greatest living historian on the Middle East.

2. Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" was accurate, courageous, and important, as we learned from (among others) Soviet dissidents.

3. The assertion that we have had "fifty years of peace" in the Middle East is an odd one, if you consider (a) America's 1991 war against Iraq (which General Scowcroft favored); (b) the Iraq-Iran war (in which there were a million casualties; (c) the conflict in the early 1970s between Jordan and the Palestinians; (d) the civil war in Lebanon; (e) the four wars between Israel and Arab nations; and (f) the attacks of September 11, 2001 (which was carried out by Islamic radicals who emerged from the broader Middle East).

In some ways this point underscores the enormous difference between the worldview of Mr. Scowcroft and those in the Bush Administration. Mr. Scowcroft seems to believe that the status quo in the Middle East is tolerable, maybe even preferable; we do not. The President believes that if the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation and anger and violence for export. In the words of President Bush, "In the past, [we] have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold."

4. The "bad guys" -- the most ruthless among us -- do not "always" rise to the top. In fact in many elections - in Spain and Portugal, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the Czech Republic and Romania, South Africa and the Philippines, Indonesia and Ukraine, Afghanistan and Iraq, and many more - we have seen enormous strides toward freedom. For example, the Western Hemisphere has transformed itself over the last two decades from a region dominated by repressive, authoritarian regimes to one in which the overwhelming number of countries there have democratically-elected governments and growing civil societies.

It's also worth bearing in mind that some pretty bad guys (like Saddam Hussein) "win elections" in authoritarian and totalitarian societies. Indeed, non-democracies make it far easier for the "bad guys" to prevail than is the case with democracies. Is it the supposition of Mr. Scowcroft that from a historical point of view dictatorships have a better record than democracies? Or that because democratic elections don't always turn out well they can never turn out well? Or that because democratic elections don't always turn out well we should prefer authoritarian and totalitarian regimes? The habit of mind that sees all the weaknesses in democracy and all the "strengths" in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is, well, curious.

5. Mr. Scowcroft insists we will not "democratize" Iraq and that "in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful." Except that in the last two-and-a-half years Iraq has moved from tyranny, to liberation, to national elections, to the writing of a constitution, to the passage of a constitution. By any standard or precedent of history, Iraq has made incredible political progress. Iraq still faces challenges, including a ruthless insurgency -- but there is no question that the people of Iraq long for democracy and for victory over the insurgency.

The charge that the way we have sought to bring democracy to Iraq is "you invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize" is itself deeply misleading. Mr. Scowcroft's invasion was in fact a liberation -- and overthrowing one of the worst tyrannies in modern times and replacing it with free elections is a good start on the pathway to liberty. And of course this year we have also seen political progress -- not perfection, but progress -- in Kuwait, Egypt, and among the Palestinians.

6. The notion that democratic progress in Lebanon is "unrelated" to the war in Iraq is undermined by what the Lebanese themselves have told us. To take just one example, here are the words of Walid Jumblatt, who was once a harsh critic of American policy: "'It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

7. Mr. Scowcroft seems to wish that Syria were still ruling Lebanon with an iron fist. Brutal repression may be;wicked -- but (Scowcroft seems to believe) it does keep a lid on "sectarian emotions."

8. Sometimes when given a chance, we humans don't screw up. Sometimes ;human beings reach for, and (even if imperfectly) attain, nobility and the advancement of freedom and human dignity.Which seems to me to be an argument against cynicism and despair -- to say nothing of repression and tyranny. Let the debate proceed.

I suppose too many people don't know who to have a civil debate, so they have to resort to name calling and lying.

Real Journalism

Imagine my surprise to read this article in my paper on Sunday which completely bebunks the stories told by an OIF veteran named Jimmy Massey.

Among his claims:

Marines fired on and killed peaceful Iraqi protesters.

Americans shot a 4-year-old Iraqi girl in the head.

A tractor-trailer was filled with the bodies of civilian men, women and children killed by American artillery.
...
Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

Gateway Pundit is all over this and thinks Mr Massey should be behind bars; I think he should be in a mental institution getting the help he obviously needs (along with his partner in madness, Cindy Sheehan.)

And not content with that, Mr. Ron Harris then goes on to ask "Why did the press swallow Massey's stories?" The quotes Mr. Harris presents do not paint a pretty picture of the press:

Media outlets throughout the world have reported Jimmy Massey's claims of war crimes, frequently without ever seeking to verify them.

For instance, no one ever called any of the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's battalion to ask him or her about his claims.

The Associated Press, which serves more than 8,500 newspaper, radio and television stations worldwide, wrote three stories about Massey, including an interview with him in October about his new book.

But none of the AP reporters ever called Ravi Nessman, an Associated Press reporter who was embedded with Massey's unit. Nessman wrote more than 30 stories about the unit from the beginning of the war until April 15, after Baghdad had fallen.

Jack Stokes, a spokesman for the AP, said he didn't know why the reporters didn't talk to Nessman, nor could he explain why the AP ran stories without seeking a response from the Marine Corps. The organization also refused to allow Nessman to be interviewed for this story.

How typical -- stonewall when called on shoddy journalism.

While the story never comes to a conclusion about why didn't the press checkout his stories, I'll give you my answer - in some cases they wanted to believe them, and in other cases they just never bother. I don't know which is worse, but check out more quotes from the story:

David Holwerk, editorial page editor for The Sacramento Bee, said he thought the newspaper handled its story, a question and answer interview with Massey, poorly.
"I feel fairly confident that we did not subject this to the rigorous scrutiny that we should have or to which we would subject it today," he said.

Mr. Holwerk, please don't pee on my leg and tell me its raining. What steps have you specifically taken so this doesn't happen again? Yes, no doubt today, after having been alerted, you wouldn't run Mr. Massey's ravings without the slightest scrutiny like you did the last time, but what about other stories?

Rex Smith, editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, said he thought the newspaper's story about Massey could have "benefited from some additional reporting." But he didn't necessarily see anything particularly at odds with standard journalism practices.

The paper printed a story in which Massey reportedly told an audience how he and other Marines killed peaceful demonstrators. There was no response from the Marine Corps or any other evidence to back Massey's claims.

Smith said that, unfortunately, that is the nature of the newspaper business.

"You could take any day's newspaper and probably pick out a half dozen or more stories that ought to be subjected to a more rigorous truth test," he said.

"Yes, it would have been much better if we had the other side. But all I'm saying is that this is unfortunately something that happens every day in our newspapers and with practically every story on television."

Mr Smith, I have to credit you with telling it like it is, and in the immortal words of Latigo Smith, "the Truth hurts", but how do you look at yourself in the mirror every morning while willingly and knowingly participating in a gigantic fraud on the American people. Yes, fraud. We pay newspapars to tell us the facts and provide all sides to a story, and here you are telling us that what we get for our money is a collection of fairy tales that on a good day might concievably have some ever so slight basis in fact, but you don't really have any idea.

Michael Parks sees it differently. He is the director of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism and formerly the editor of the Los Angeles Times. Parks also reviewed stories written about Massey.

"A reporter's obligation is to check the allegation, to seek comment from the organization that's accused," said Parks, a Pulitzer Prize winner who covered the Vietnam War as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "They can't let allegations lie on the table, unchecked or unchallenged. When they don't do that, it's a clear disservice to the reader."

Dear Mr. Parks, it isn't a disservice to the reader, its fraud. When the press claims one to fact check but doesn't, it's fraud. And this happens over, and over, and over.

"We're not stenographers, we're journalists," Dixon [former managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and currently chairman of the Howard University Department of Journalism] said. "What separates journalism from other forms of writing is that we practice the craft of verification. By not doing that, that's saying they're abdicating any responsibility from exercising news judgment. ... As a journalist, you want to put accurate information before the public so they can make opinions and decisions based on accurate information. When something like this happens, harm is done, the truth suffers."

Amen Brother Dixon, Amen. Now if you can make that teaching stick with your students, I'll be much obliged to you.

My own theory on why Mr. Harris wrote two such take-no-prisoners articles: His sense of truth was offended by what happened. He was one of the imbedded reporters with the marine unit that Mr. Massey was maligning and as such he was a witness to the truth. And so he wrote two articles, one that looked at the liar, and the other that looked at those who uncritically spread the lies, and he discharged his duty to the truth.

Mr Harris and the Post delivered real journalism, powerfully delivered in two short articles. And Mr. Arnie Robbins, new editor in chief of the Post, that's something that I, and plenty others who also want real journalism, are willing to pay for, whatever the format.

The Editor Is Gone, All Hail the Editor

Ellen Soeteber has resigned as the Editor in Chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Her resignation followed a large voluntary employee buyout at the Post. I know the paper comes in for a lot of criticism here, but I do try to call attention to those times when the paper did a good job.

I think Ms. Soeteber did a good job within the limits of current journalism. By that I mean the faults of the Post are pretty much the faults of journalism today - too often smug, arrogant, unbalanced, inaccurate, and unfair. Certainly she did a much better job than Cole Campbell who championed "public" or "civic" journalism, which in those days just meant the the newspaper was supposed to be an advocate for public and civic improvement, in terms both of running the behind the scenes, and in terms of obvious steps to improve the paper. She focused on improving and expanding the business section and now it's a great section to read, often the best part of the newspaper. Her stress on local news is the right direction for a newspaper to take in today's wired world.

From her words in the article it sounds like she just grew tired of dealing with the financial pressures of the job. Newspaper revenues are being undercut by the weakness of the big department stores and car manufacturers who were a large source of advertising, the expansion of advertising in other mediums, and the loss in classified ads to the internet. I don't think this is the deathknell of newspapers, as there a lot of media that are still around, going strong, just not as dominate as they once were, such as radio or network TV. I don't think the adverstising and prestigue are ever going back to their old levels, but I think and hope that newspapers will be around for a lot longer.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

By and large, the St. Louis Post Dispatch is a terrible newspaper. It puts the crap in crappy. It survives because it is the only real newspaper in St. Louis. Yes, I subscribe (including weekends) for the following simple reasons in order of importance (1) my wife saves more money with the coupons than we spend on the subscription, (2) my daughter likes the everyday section, (3) my son likes the sports section, (4) I like the idea of getting a newspaper more than the actual one I get. But that doesn't mean it's a uniform consistancy of bad. Frequently somebody slips in something good, and sometimes it comes from the most unexpected sources.

For instance, the editorials are typically poor. Even good progressives like Archpundit think so. But they had a really good one today, in fact I was thinking about writing the same way on the very subject they did (only I'm not a paid staff and last week and this weekend was very, very busy). So instead I'll let them do the talking about oil company profits:

Mr. Durbin is one of several members of Congress proposing excess profits taxes on oil companies. The idea is excellent populist politics and lousy economics. It's a bad idea that would ultimately leave us with higher gasoline prices and tie us even more tightly to the unstable oil states of the Middle East.

It is true that oil companies are celebrating a profit gusher. Last week, ExxonMobil reported quarterly profits up 75 percent to $9.9 billion. Shell's take is up 68 percent to $9.04 billion.

Figures like that stick in the craw of all of us with sticker shock at the pump: $50 for a tank of gas! But those sky-high profits now will help ensure a steady supply of oil in the future.

...
But in the short term, the key to price relief is to dig more oil wells and expand refineries. Oil companies will do those things if they are highly profitable.

After all, oil drilling is a risky business, and refineries cost billions. Today's profit levels provide a great incentive to drill and build. But companies must also take gamble on what oil prices may be when new wells and refineries come on line. Long experience with the ups and downs of oil prices have taught oil executives to bet cautiously. That, along with the Gordian knot of regulatory red tape, helps explain why no new refinery has been built in America since the 1970s.

I wonder if the editorial staff talked with Dave Nicklaus, because it has all the earmarks of his thoughtfulness.

But let's turn our attention to the bad, as pointed out by Brian Noggle. Betty Cuniberti is retiring from the paper and I won't miss her pointless ramblings. She says farewell in her typically clueless style:

Even in the era of the Blogosphere (no thought too vacuous to share), this is good work if you can get it. What knucklehead would walk away from a newspaper column?
...
To cut operating costs, the paper offered an early-retirement buyout to folks over age 50 with five or more years on the job. It appears that some 40 newsmen and newswomen, whose combined service totals a staggering 700-plus years, are walking out the door. Just like that.

With them goes an era when a guy (and sometimes even a girl) got a job in the hometown and stayed 30 years, 40 years or more.

We'll see few of their kind again.

Newspapers aren't the money-printing machines they used to be. The Post-Dispatch is just one of many papers forced to dance with the enemy, the dark force that seeks to take the paper out of newspaper: the Internet.

Newspapers are joining doctors, lawyers and makers of psychotropic drugs, marketing ourselves with imagination we never knew we had. Or needed. We'll do anything short of coming to your house in a French maid costume, making breakfast and reading the darn thing to you.

Be assured, many of our best and most seasoned people remain. They will continue to do great work at all hours of the day and night and bring you news from every nook of the bi-state region and the planet. They'll be joined, I'm sure, by fresh, young talent. That is always a plus.

Just for the record, since some morons at the Post fired Elaine Viets, I have zero desire for any current employee to show up at my door in a french maid outfit, even if you do make me breakfast.

For a women who has done nothing but share vacuous thoughts, and whose vacuity I have spared both my readers from in the excerpt, that is quite the pot calling moment. Of course, it doesn't stop there (it never does), because she bemoans the internet, a device that has proven of inestimable value in providing the American people with a much better variety of news and news sources, and frankly a quantum leap in quality in news analysis, and yes, plain old columnists. What's left unsaid in her column though is the role of the erosion in trust of not just the Post, but all newspapers. Readership is declining for a very simple reason - the Post, like most other newspapers, has declined -- in accuracy, in fairness, in balance, in just about every way -- and the internet allows people access to information that shows just how badly it has declined.

And speaking of the internet, the Post has a lousy internet presence. The decided several years back to separate their internet portal, STLtoday.com, from the newspaper, and killed the old St. Louis Post Dispatch site. And STLtoday.com is pretty ugly. Just get aloud of their blogs. Ugh. If that's the future of blogging, count me out. I'll rename this site "Funmurphys: The Vacuous Thoughts" and keep on posting.

Misplaced Concern

There are times when I read the papers and I think I must be insane. It seems that a lot of people are worried about the fairness of Saddam's trial. Fairness? Is there really some question of his guilt? This is a guy who started out as a leg breaker for the Baathists, graduated to assassin, took over by killing his rivals and associates, and never hesitated to kill, torture, or maim anyone. He stayed in power not through the ballot box, but throught the overwhelming application of terror and death. He's ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands people, enough I suppose that for some it's no longer a crime but a statistic. Having a trial at all is all the fairness this guy deserves. I guess I've come to expect delusional arabs quoted in the papers, but when Saddam's fellow dictators publish self-serving editorials indistinguishable from an editorial run by what was once considered the top newspaper in the US, you have to wonder about your sanity.

Some people haven't lost it though, as this commentary in al-Adalah shows:

Imagine if justice tried Saddam with the same laws he enacted, such as executing him and asking his family to pay for the bullets, burying him alive in a single or mass grave with a number of his henchmen, cutting off his ear or tongue, throwing him in an acid bath or poisoning him with thallium or poisonous gas. The main lesson of this trial is not a brief show that will end up with the most severe punishment meted out to Saddam. Rather, it will be a trial of a whole black era revealing all the tragedies and disasters perpetrated by the dictatorship.

Exactly, the point of this isn't Saddam's long awaited and richly deserved death, but the exposure, exposition, and condemnation of his and his minions evil.

Some of our elite media, like Ted Koppel, have showed their concern for our fighting men by reading the names of the fallen or showing their flag draped coffins. I wish these same organizations, which were mute when Saddam was fertilizing the soil with Iraqi bodies, would starting reading the names of all the Iraqi's killed by Saddam, and showing their mass graves.

More Dead Horse Beating

I know you've already read this because Instapundit linked to it, but its just too good not to link to: AP Response to Bush Teleconference Staged! Apparently the AP thinks when the President wants to hold a teleconference to have soldiers in Iraq answer questions about the war there, it should be a pop quiz. What's next, guests on TV news shows given advance warning about what will be discussed, or even, the horror, the horror, newspaper reporters describing the general thrust of an article when inviting comment from experts who will be quoted in it?

The Story That Wasn't

The more we find out about what happened during Katrina and its immediate aftermath, the less the journalism of the moment holds up. Rapes, murders, chaos - not so much. People helping people, more than we ever heard about, or will hear about. You'd have been better informed to have just read these four words -- storm, flooding, mass evacuation -- than all the miles of column inches of rumor passed off as fact in the newspapers, and days of non-stop fear mongering on the TV.

I remember back in the floods of '93 the same talk about how the floodwaters are toxic as we heard about Katrina. I also remember how a few days after the levees broke in New Orleans, a reporter interviewed a Doctor and the reporter was so disapointed when the Doctor pretty much downplayed the toxic angle of the floodwater, and how the danger was limited pretty much to minor skin infections from direct contact because of the extra sewage in the water. The interview came to a quick end when no spectre of mass casualties was raised. So it's official now - at least for the press - the toxic floodwaters of Katrina aren't so toxic after all.

Hopefully the new media will throw out some of these old media story templates and frames because no matter how many times they are shown to be inaccurate after an event, they still get used the next time a similar event occurs. The institutional memory of journalism is always the sizzle, never the steak.

Journalism Needs No Shield

I'm not one of those people who think a reporter has a right to withhold information (like the name of a source) during a legal investigation. In fact, I don't think that reporters, or news organizations for that matter, should have any special legal deference, let alone rights. The first amendment right to freedom of the press resides in the people, just like all the other rights in the Bill of Rights, not in any particular member of the press alone.

I think we'd better off if you just had to show inaccuracy and damage for anyone to collect on libel, so I certainly don't think a journalist shield law is a good thing. As a blogger, I don't think I'm entitled to anything extra that just being in the United States doesn't provide, because I don't think a reporter, editor, or publisher should get anything extra either. If a company can be forced to pay damages for a defective product, a news company should be forced to pay damages for a defective, i.e. inaccurate or misleading, product.

I think the idea that we need a law to grant special privileges to members of the press ignores the current reality - the chief stumbling block to the press today isn't their accountability to universal responsibilities, but a lack of accountability to the public itself. And the currently proposed shield law, or any other such shield law, doesn't do a darn thing to fix that.

News Or Rumors?

Mike Brown was forced out of FEMA. Blanco and Nagin still have their jobs, along with all the newsies who not just got it wrong, but made things worse in New Orleans. How's that for accountability? Next time President Bush gives a press conference, maybe he should start by asking the reporters to repent of their mistakes.

Failure

There are a lot of people who distrust markets, and who are pretty quick to invoke the concept of market failure. While I typically trust markets more than politicians, there are times when I do think markets fail. I'm not thinking the energy business because the biggest market failures I see are in the press and movie business.

Newspapers and network newscasts are shedding customers at a rate that a straight line extrapolation will put them out of business sooner rather than later. Their main asset, credibility, is eroding just as quickly. Bernard Goldberg was only partly right with his book "Bias" -- as "Lousy" would have been a better description. The bias has become so bad mainly because the whole system is rotten. Rather than listen to the market, i.e their customers, the press is in full defense mode and consumers continue to leave. The message from the press has become the only thing wrong with the news media is that people are stupid, don't like being told the truth, and just don't appreciate the news. My local paper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, is somewhere between awful and terrible - with a few notable exceptions. They got rid of their ombudsman a few years ago, someone I came to respect, and now you have to contact people direct with any problems. And that's when you run into just how smug and arrogant journalists have become. We only get the paper for the coupons anymore - the overall news value is less than zero. But they were bought out by another chain and the look "updated" -- while my older eyes appreciate the increase in readability and whitespace (which I wonder is just a way to cut down on content), the rest of the changes are generally poor and seem to be driven not by usability but some designers color palate - where the colors used to provide information (like on the weather page or in the financial section) now they are just accents with no information content. Two aphorisms come to mind - they just put lipstick on a pig, and you can't polish a turd. But hey, why do the hard work of putting out a quality newspaper when you can do a redesign of the look instead. Fox News is killing the opposition because they put out a better (which doesn't necessarily mean good) product.

And the movie business seems to be run not based on making money but on making films some good leftists think you ought to see and making films that only teenagers would watch to pay the bills. I like movies. I like going to movie theaters, I like renting them, I like buying really good ones because just owning a great movie makes me feel all warm and tingly inside. I am denied these simple pleasures because Hollywood insists on making crap unfit for human consumption. The hottest properties in Hollywood are either extensions of old work like LOTR and Star Wars or comic books. Comic Books! I happen to enjoy comic books, and still own quite a few (make me an offer and they can be yours) but I don't want a steady diet of comic book based movies. I want epics, I want small movies, I want family movies, I want grown up movies, I want movies with intellegent dialogue, and I would really like to see comedies that don't insult you. Is that really too much to ask for? Why did a movie like My Big Fat Greek Wedding have such difficulty in being made? Why are there so few movies like Sideways -- aimed at the above 35 crowd? Why, after the huge success of The Passion of the Christ were there no copycats. C'mon, copycatting successful movies has been a staple of Hollywood since D.W Griffith. Here's a movie that made like $400 million dollars and brought people to the theater who hadn't been in years, and what's the followup? Kingdom of Heaven. That thud was the sound of a turd hitting the screen, and by a great director too. How could they have botched Troy and Alexander so badly when the source material was so good? If you can make Les Miserables into a musical, how can you fail at making the Illiad into an epic?

Heres a case where there is a market clamoring for one thing, but suppliers not providing it, and leaving money on the table doing so. That to me is one huge market failure.

Prescription for What Ails (2)

A follow on to Kevin's prescription: some good news reported by Ralph Peters in the Aug 23 New York Post The Real Iraq News

What should have made headlines? It would've been nice to see more attention devoted to the complexity and importance of drafting a new constitution for Iraq. But my nomination for the "Greatest Story Never Told" is a quieter one: Locked in a difficult war, the U.S. Army is exceeding its re-enlistment and first-time enlistment goals. Has anybody mentioned that to you?
[...]
Now, as the fiscal year nears an end, the Army's numbers look great. Especially in combat units and Iraq, soldiers are re-enlisting at record levels. And you don't hear a whisper about it from the "mainstream media." Let's look at the numbers, which offer a different picture of patriotism than the editorial pages do.

• Every one of the Army's 10 divisions — its key combat organizations — has exceeded its re-enlistment goal for the year to date.
• What about first-time enlistment rates, since that was the issue last spring? The Army is running at 108 percent of its needs.
• The Army Reserve is a tougher sell, given that it takes men and women away from their families and careers on short notice. Well, Reserve recruitment stands at 102 percent of requirements.
• And then there's the Army National Guard. We've been told for two years that the Guard was in free-fall. Really? Guard recruitment and retention comes out to 106 percent of its requirements as of June 30.

A Perscription For What Ails

I think Donald Sensing makes an excellent suggestion: form a joint information office to distribute information from the executive branch withou the filter of the media.

On a similar note, I can't help but think that a lot of anti-americanism in the rest of the world is supported by overwhelming presentation of negative info in the American media. Yes, there is plenty of what I see as plain anti-americanism as well, but I'm talking about the inherent bias of what is news or what makes a good story. Scientists spending years in researching, developing, testing, and then selling a breakthrough drug -- seen any movies or TV shows about that? On the other hand, I've seen plenty of good movies about doctors and pharmacuetical companies conspiring to kill critics of flawed drugs -- The Fugitive is a prime example.

The Stupidity of the Studios

Well, surprise surprise surprise, the new Dukes of Hazzard movie isn't getting good reviews. And the review is fairly typical - mindless action coupled with hot bodies. Who is the picture aimed at? Teenagers, of course. While the debate rages about the whys of Hollywoods decline -- Is it poor product quality or is it competition from other entertainment, let me agree with both of those positions and throw in the observation that Hollywood shouldn't be surprised that fewer people watch their movies because they go out of their way to make movies that fewer people want to see, since a large fraction seems to be aimed directly at teenagers. And frankly, not too many of us adults are going to plunk down 8 bucks and spend 90 minutes to look at Jessica Simpson's cleavage (delightful as it is) and other things blow up real good. This might make sense if teenage was an expanding demographic, but it isn't. It's not like if you get people hooked on movies as a teenager they'll keep watching the rest of their lives, either.

I'm not blaming teenagers -- I'm blaming an industry that keeps sawing away at its own jugular. Mel Gibson proved that people who don't ordinarily see movies will plunk down their 8 bucks and sit for a couple of hours to see a movie that is aimed at them. Did Hollywood notice and ask themselves what demographics (not just devout Christians) they are they leaving on the table? Are you kidding? Heck, they haven't even bothered with a follow up for Christians.

Eye Opener

Imagine my surprise to open my paper this morning and read this article about a leaked secret memo detailing plans to reduce troop levels in Iraq. Here we are fighting a war, American soldiers are dying, civilians are at risk, and newspapers are splashing war plans across their front pages. Tell me again how the press should have an absolute right to protect sources. Tell me again that the press is always looking out for my best interests.

Same Old Story

Omar discovers a well known story -- he's courted by the press, they hang on his every word, and then boom he's dropped like last weeks newspaper when he doesn't tell them what they want to hear. Just ask David Gelertner.

You might even think that re-opening of Baghdad Stadium and a crowd of thousands enjoying soccer without mishap would be news, but you'd be wrong according to news organizations.

The Reese's Solution

For reasons that escape me, the news media seems to think that the acquital of Michael Jackson on child molestation charges is REALLY BIG NEWS, of the caliber only slightly below THE END OF THE WORLD. Personally, I couldn't even muster a yawn.

They also seem to think that interrogaters playing Christine Aguilera to a mass murderer wanna be at loud volumes at all hours of the day is also REALLY BIG NEWS. I have to wonder if they've ever lived in a college dorm. I don't to make light of the plight of prisoners at Gitmo, but after reading the EXCLUSIVE article in Time I have to wonder how anybody can survive three years in a frat house. Do the faculty know what goes on there? George W. Bush has probably already been through worse during his time in college.

Now that Michael Jackson isn't going to be sharing his bed with boys anymore, and his career is further in the toilet than a Quran has ever been, and the use Christine Aguilaria is now out of the question, how about the government hires Michael to conduct interrogations at Gitmo? It would be a perfect fit and let Michael do something productive again. He can be good cop and he could share his bed with men. Just a thought.

Light Of Day

I wrote a letter to the editor at my local paper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, last week about how I thought they and the rest of the media were handling the Quran "desecration" issue. I was surprised when it didn't run, but then they whole thing seems to have sunk without a trace from their pages. But since I do have my own virtual printing press, I'm running it here:

The headline read “White House plays down report of Quran desecration by guard” but it should have read, “Media plays up American Quran mishandling”. The media seems to show little interest in informing the public but plenty of interest in settling a score with the White House which called Newsweek out on inaccurate reporting. So we went from a report of a guard flushing a Quran down a toilet to a guard deliberately kicking a Quran and a bare mention that the only Quran in a toilet was placed there by a detainee. Detainees abused Qurans three times as often as guards. Some scandal, especially in light of real, documented abuses of detainees at the hands of US soldiers, and the routine murder of captives at the hands al Qaida.

What puzzles me is the lack of interest in the media that the US government is providing a religious book to prisoners and issuing instructions affirming the holiness of the Quran. I wonder, do they provide Bibles, or Bhagavad-Gitas, or even copies of Dianetics on request? If my local school district or prison started passing out Bibles and issuing guidelines on the proper handling of the Bible based on the idea that it is the one true scripture of God, wouldn’t there be a huge uproar? Hindus would be pleased with the size of the cow that a certain segment of American society would have over that. But the media is focused with laser like intensity (read the transcripts at www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/) on guards mishandling Qurans and the meta-questions that raises. No wonder people no longer trust the media.

In The Pouring Rain

Every newspaper in the country keeps a coterie of solons on staff; a group of such surpassing wisdom and intellect that they can write on any topic with cogency and empathy, able to advise from the most exhaulted potentate to the humblest personage; comfortable at all levels of government from President to Governor to Mayor; equally adept in advising CEOs, school boards, and fellow citizens; nimbly covering politics, business, fashion, entertainment, science, and society at large or small -- any and all subjects they put a mind to -- and all for no extra cost to the reader. For them the past is illlumed like midday in the tropics and the future is no more the undiscovered country. What are these august sages called you might wonder? Why, editorial writers.

But it is passing strange that on the subjects nearest and dearest to the hearts of newspaper owners, circulation and reputation, these solons are not consulted, nor do they propound their wisdom to the masses. The subject must gnaw at them day and night - why do our readers abandon us? Yet the editorial writers remain silent - unasked and unanswering. Why are they not consulted? Yet not consulted, why not act still? Why do they approach their doom without their customary overflowing, uncontainable wisdom and knowledge? It remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that the owners do not ask, and the editorialist do not tell.

(After composing most of this in my head I find out that Michael Kinsley wrote something similar. Great minds think alike.)

Clarity From The Post

As regular readers (the both of you) know, I often jump on the Editorial page the of St. Louis Post Dispatch with both feet. But my hat's off to them today, they got it right:

"It is tempting to point out the Bush administration's credibility on Iraq and the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib is also suspect. It is especially tempting after the White House high-handedly told Newsweek "it would help to point . . . out" that military has procedures for respecting the Quran.

But trying to shift blame back onto the White House doesn't further the pursuit of the truth. Nothing the White House does or doesn't do absolves the media of responsibility for its errors."

Of course, they did manage to slip in a moment of cluelessness amonst the clarity:

"Journalists must face the fact that the failings of the Times, USA Today, CBS and now Newsweek have made an already skeptical public deeply suspicious of everything they read and see in the mainstream media. Many cynics say they find more truth in the unsubstantiated rantings in the blogosphere than the careful reportage on the front page of the daily newspaper. That breach of trust could prove deadly to journalism and damaging to democracy."

How much careful reportange is there on the front page of the daily newspaper anymore? That's the question, and it's increasingly being answered with very little. How much unsubstantiated rantings in the blogosphere is there? Plenty, but there is plenty on most editorial and op-ed pages too, and there seems to be more careful reportage and substantiated opinion in the blogosphere than in MSM these days.

I long for a paper I can read and trust, but I can't buy one today. The problem is simple -- they've become hollow organizations that just don't have the processes in place to deliver that kind of quality. You will always have mistakes, yes even among American troops in wartime, but what you don't always have are the systems in place to minimize and correct those mistakes. And it seems that most of the people in the business don't even realize there's a problem, let alone what it is. But at least for today the Post Editorial staff gets it.

Standards? Ha

The ever offensive St. Louis Post Dispatch celebrated Mother's Day in style, with a picture too graphic to run in full on their own lousy website plastered on the front page. Some poor lady has horrific scars from a liver transplant, and the Post decides to run that photo on Mother's Day. Brian Noggle is made of sterner stuff than me, because he was actually able to pick the paper up and read the accompaning article about the hazards of donating organs. I figure the article is just the legal-journalistic complex laying the ground work to sue docters, hospitals, etc. over live organ donations, which is even more offensive than running a gross picture on Mother's Day.

Clock Cleaning of the First Rank

As long as I'm on takedown's, Glenn Reynolds pretty much knocks Sylvester Brown's block off. The problem isn't that Sylvester has a poor memory, it's that so many people have bad memory's and share the same view. And if you don't understand our strategy in the War on Terror, you won't be able to decide if it's the right one or not, or if it's effective.

But I have to admit I read Sylvester pretty much to find out what a particular demographic is thinking, not reality. Reality rarely intrudes, usually as a distant line on the horizon, sometimes glimpsed but never arrived at. Here's another howler of a column, wherein Sylvester grapples with the real meaning behind an IMAX film at the local Science Center. Seems some local peace activists (where were they during our war in Kosovo?) don't like an aviation themed movie financed by Boeing with the full cooperation of the Air Force -- it's just a long military recruitment ad in their opinion -- no word on their take of Top Gun. I loved the response of the Science Center:

John Wharton, vice president of strategic initiatives at the Science Center, said he can hardly comprehend the activists' concerns.

"The film may not deal with the Iraqi war, it may not teach aviation, but it certainly deals with the application of technology," Wharton said.

"We recently ran 'Super Speedway,' a film about auto racing. We weren't trying to recruit drag racers. We ran a film about raising the Titanic. Was that an attempt to recruit scuba divers?"

Still, Sylvester's not sure:

"Are there ulterior motives behind the military film? Maybe, maybe not. I haven't seen it. I'm more bothered that since President George W. Bush's election, Americans are often asked to accept a manufactured reality. "

Like no pre-war speechs about delivering democracy to the Middle East? Or
"That news came on the heels of the conservative fake news reporter-Internet porn escort who was allowed access to the White House for two years. That exposure came after revelations that conservative columnists were paid to promote the administration's pet projects and policies."

Of course you can't blame Sylvester, he recalls reading it the paper, so it must be true. Or perhaps in a book or even a movie. I mean, just read this howler of a column (you'll laugh until you realize he isn't alone in his paranoid fantasies) all about seeing a movie based on a book about Karl Rove and how he pretty much runs the country with his brilliance containing gems like this one:

"It would take an audacious genius to create fake news and slip it under the radar of seasoned journalists. Dan Rather, a real newsman, damaged his reputation and almost lost his job under such accusations. Rather produced documents critical of Bush's military record shortly before the election last year. OOPS! He didn't bother to validate the authenticity of the documents and was accused (mainly by conservatives) of a partisan attack against Bush. No one knows definitively if the documents were forged. We do know, however, that media attention shifted away from Bush's dubious military record to the origination of dubious documents. Some wonder whether Rove somehow leaked dummied documents to CBS? Hmmmm."

And in Sylvester's not uncommon trademark, he doesn't have the facts straight. It isn't that Dan didn't bother to authenticate the documents, it's that he did and his experts told him they couldn't authenticate them. And every expert has in fact reached the conclusion that the documents were forged - even the experts CBS brought in for their internal investigation.

And if you go back to when he was gloating about his bet with Bill O'Reilly, there's this gem "You're no Bush clone. In fact, I heard you criticize Bush on your radio show Jan. 19. You were commenting on his ever-morphing reasons for invading Iraq."

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm

Would one of those ever morphing reasons be, oh I don't know, perhaps bringing democracy to the Middle East? Of course, no mention of what those reason's might be.

If you want to know what the latest weird leftest fantasy is, Sylvester is your man. If you want a grasp of reality, best to give Sylvester a wide berth, along with most of the rest of the paper he appears in.

One Blog Roundup

Are you reading Ranting Profs? You ought to, or you might have missed a few things, like

Rick Bragg was fired by the New York Times for using uncredited stringers -- that is passing off someone else's reporting as his own. Guess what, everybody is doing that in Iraq. What's the difference? Good question Cori.

No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Could it have been because they were moved at the start of the war? According to the NYTs, it was more of that looting George Bush failed to prevent. According to Hitch, it was a carefully planned military operation. Still, if there were no WMD, what was looted? Just the equipment to make them, which wasn't used because?

What really happened with the Italian kidnapping in Iraq? Like did the Italians refuse to cooperate with the Iraqi investigation during and after the kidnapping? Just like they didn't tell the US what was going on? Great job there Italy.

Which is more important -- the sentencing in the Peterson case, or the first meeting of the Iraqi Parliament?. It's a trick question of course, because who cares about the Iraqi parliament. No wonder some people don't think the American sacrifice in Iraq is worth it, because we have no idea what's really happening.

Now that it's just Cori, I'm wondering when she'll change the name.

The Future of News?

There have been two things that have marked the news business from its start: distinction by time and media. That is to say, the news business has been divided up by when and how the information is delivered. Right now we have three media: paper, TV, and Radio, and we have several times a day, daily, weekly, and monthly. Media has often determined when information is delivered. Now some news ownership may span multiple media and times, but typically the gathering and dissemination end of the business has stayed fractured in those cases even while the business end of the business may have been more closely meshed.

What is the future of news? Convergence. I know that's a buzzword of long duration but little effect, but that doesn't mean that it's time won't ever arrive. Sure, we've seen some of the future already with different news media putting their product on the web, but you know instantly what kind of parent organization produced the product based on content and how it is organized and presented. But convergence will arrive, and with it, the balkanization of news delivery will end. CBS news will compete directly -- in the same time and media -- with the NYT, the WaPo, and even the St. Louis Post Dispatch and KMOV. OK, nothing you haven't heard before, just barely seen.

With this digital convergence, the media will be the internet, not the airwaves or paper, and the time will always be now, not tomorrow's edition or the 10 O'Clock broadcast. And so we will go from the push model to the pull model, and a great deal of the conventions of the news media will go out the window. Information will not be structured the way it is now. It is unhelpful to have information thrown into broad category buckets like "international news" or "entertainment" and then below that a series of unrelated articles - articles based on the current model of puting out a slug of info at a certain time - even when the articles are related.

Quite frankly, time will disappear as a basic organization element - it makes no sense when information is updated on an as gathered basis and grabbed by different people at different time. I think we'll see a persistant structure populated by dynamic data -- kind of like libraries (only more dynamic). While you know where to go look for a certain subject, what's actually on the shelves changes with time - as new books are written. Only in the case of news, I think you'll just get down to a single file that is updated, rather than a series of files over time (which is how we get news stories today).

Not All Bad

The St. Louis Post Dispatch is not a very good newspaper, even as newspapers go, unless you like your leftism served up smug and unthinking. And the columnists there are generally pretty awful, at least since they fired Elaine Viets for reasons not apparent to her readers. Yes, that includes the sports page, although I'm partial to Jeff Gordon who is a nice guy, at least he was to my wife when she worked briefly as a bank teller.

But in the interest of fairness and giving credit where credit is due, I'd like to point out that there are two spots you can read good columns - the business section and the outdoor section at the back of the sports page -- and I don't even hunt or fish. The Talk Tech guy is pretty good, as this column on iPods and PDAs shows. But Dave Nicklaus is far and away the best they've got -- he'd be worth mentioning even at a good newspaper. Try this column on the minimum wage and see what I mean - balanced, factual, thoughtful. Something you rarely get in the rest of the daily fishwrap -- any daily fishwrap. What's funny is reading one of his columns, and then not much later get the editorial page's take on a subject. Nicklaus writes about how college prices are driven up by third party pay and their ability to engage in "perfect pricing" through the financial disclosures involved in financial aid - the editorialists complain that the Bush administration isn't providing enough public money to reduce the cost of private tuition. When Nicklaus writes about soaring healthcare costs (here for example) you get a thoughtful look at competing factors with no villains, and the editorialists counter with how big companies and rich doctors work a "patchwork quilt of payers" to drive prices up -- mainly because they unswervingly advocate a single payer, namely all of us paying taxes. Actually, I should be happy that the rest of the columnists don't seem to read Mr. Nicklaus, or he might just disappear from the paper.

I Heard The News Today

Is it scalp hunting for people to question journalists and their stories? Isn't it journalism's finest tradition to question authority, to speak truth to power, to investigate and let the chips fall where they may?

Let me be clear on about one thing: the downfall of Dan Rather and Eason Jordan were brought about by Dan Rather and Eason Jordan, not bloggers. Bloggers just presented the words and deeds of these gentlemen to a wide audience.

But these scandals, and others like them, and the relentless fact checking of bloggers, have demonstrated that news media has been doing a lousy job for years. The problem isn't that the news media is made up of fallible and biased people because that's the nature of people, but that the systems the media touts - editors, fact checkers, oversight and review - simply have decayed to the point where they do nothing. The president of CBS news raised concerns and was ignored, and then circled the wagons when the exact same criticism came from outside the organization.

The wonder isn't so much that Eason Jordan (or Dan Rather for that matter) was fired, but that he stayed around for as long as he did. He should have been gone as soon as he admitted that in fact CNN had knowingly, deliberately lied in its Iraq coverage under Saddam Hussein just so that it could continue to misreport the news from Iraq, after he had denied doing any such thing. Both men lost huge market share while destroying the brand, and yet somehow they managed to stay employed.

Bias isn't so much a cause as it is a symptom - because the system is broken, the biases of the people involved are unchecked. The problem that is that the news media is simply unable to deliver accurate information, or correct the misinformation they flood us with. How many times has the Bush presented a fake Turkey at Thanksgiving story popped up? My personal favorite is the 43 million dollars we paid the Taliban, which has only faded because of another media bug, namely the inability to maintain focus on anything but one story at a time, so Afganistan has fallen out of the news taking the spectacular payment with it. Jason Blair put fabrication after fabrication into print not because he was a brilliant guy, but because the news media doesn't routinely fact check what they present as facts.

What the news media doesn't seem to realize is that more and more people are catching on to this, and simply do not trust the news media to present accurate news. And why buy or watch what you know to be unreliable? American manufacturers (especially car makers) learned this lesson a couple of decades ago and made adjustments. Americans have flocked to alternate news sources not because it's a fad, but because they are looking for a better product. Until the mainstream media takes some real steps to safeguard the accuracy of the information they present, Americans will continue to desert them and look for alternatives.

Meta Media Questions

Does the success of Fox News tell us something? Does the MSM resemble more a cartel or the rough and tumble of real competition? Why was Dan Rather still anchorman after years of dismal and declining ratings? Why does MSM attack Fox News so regularly and so vehemently? Is Fox News part of the MSM?

Can I fire the MSM? Does the MSM have any idea about how popular or trusted any particular member is? Do its members rise through the ranks more on the opinion of their fellows than their audience? If the work of the MSM is judged by the MSM and rewarded by the MSM, is groupthink the only possible result? Why doesn't MSM make better use of all the tools and resources at it's command?

Do the vaunted layers of editorial control add to or subtract from the final product? Is MSM focused on the method of delivery (a particular newscast or a particular edition of the paper) to the detriment of providing their customers the information they need? Will this fixation carry over into the internet age? Does it make sense to bundle information in the internet age?

Do we need a source of trusted, unbiased information? Is it even possible to have an "information referee" who is completely unbiased?

Are TV shows and movies part of MSM? Do they reinforce, contradict, or have no effect on MSM message? If what MSM says has no effect on its consumers, wouldn't advertisers be wasting their money?

Going And Going And ...

Ra^thergate just keeps getting bigger, weirder, and more corrupt. It's reminds me of when I first saw Independence Day: You think you're watching just another disaster epic, some character starts talking about Roswell and area 51, and the next thing you know all the crazy conspiracy theories about aliens are coming true. Well, that's where we're at on this story, we started off with a story of sloppy journalism and all of a sudden CBS news is just another cog in the Kerry Campaign -- and it sure seems like we're still closer to the beginning of the story than the end.

The story as of now - CBS learns by means/people unrevealed that Bill Burkett has some info on Bush's National Guard service. Despite the fact that Burkett had already fabricated a story about Bush's TANG files, CBS talks to and believes Burkett (he must be mighty persuasive in person). Burkett tells them he has some documents, gives one to them, and then names as his price for the rest that CBS has the Kerry Campaign talk to him. Mary Mapes, CBS producer, calls Joe Lockhart and Max Cleland, tips them off that Burkett is their source on a big story about Bush's National Guard service complete with documentary evidence. Lockhart talks with Burkett, but he claims he only humored him, talking about how Kerry could respond to the Swift Boat Veterans ads, and never discussed what Burkett was telling to CBS. It's pure coincidence that the Kerry campaign had ready that whole "Fortunate Son" theme ready to go immediately after the 60 minutes report. Oh that's right, Burkett slipped Cleland a copy of the documents (perhaps when Cleland was down at Bush's ranch?) so why should Lockard spend time yaking with the guy when he can look at the documents for himself.

Gee, I wonder why CBS didn't also contact the Bush campaign to let them know about the report they were going to do. That way they too could have their comments ready following the show. Maybe CBS found it too hard to think with all those alarm bells going off. I mean, Burkett had lied before about something and cited George Conn as someone who could back him up, and here he tells CBS he got these documents from Conn again (did Burkett pick him for the name alone?). CBS is apparently so dazed and confused that they can't figure out what their document experts are telling them, don't bother to check with George Conn to see if they are getting conned, rely on noted liar Ben Barnes to be the face of the piece, and then seemed defensive and shocked that anyone would question CBS authority. I mean, if CBS says they have authenticated the documents (they didn't), have an unimpeachable source (I guess he's certifiable, not impeachable), and airtight chain of custody (so airtight they don't need to check it), who but partisan idiot scumbags can question them? And just because they already told the Kerry Campaign who they're top secret source is doesn't mean they should tell the public.

USA Today also received the documents, but seemingly they could hear the alarm bells well enough they didn't run with the story like CBS. And when they went back to Burkett, they got the greatest shaggy dog story ever told: Lucy Ramirez gave them to me, and I burned the originals because, well, Ramirez didn't want forensic evidence coming back to name her. Who's Lucy Ramirez? Apparently USAT doesn't know either, but didn't think to ask.

If this were a movie, people would think it too contrived. Sadly, it's not, it's the network news in action. I suppose this way they can go out with a bang, not a whimper.

Gee, Ya Think?

It's not just rumored anymore, it's official: CBS admits that it cannot vouch for the authenticity of documents used to support a "60 Minutes" story. The network said it was wrong to go on the air with a story that it could not substantiate.

And for reasons known only to ABC news, they choose to run the story with a picture of John Kerry speaking at a fund raiser. That's enough to make me wonder if I shouldn't start complaining about a rightward tilt in the media.

Same As It Ever Was

It’s clear CBS lied to us. No, I’m not claiming they or any employee (e.g. Dan Rather) were the forgers of what are clearly forged documents. No, they lied to us about how they checked the authenticity. None of their so called experts authenticated the documents. They never did have a document expert as they claimed, and now they’re trolling blogs looking for any help they can get.

I think this is business as usual for the MSM. There was no golden age. The authority and trustworthiness on any story has always depended on the individuals doing the reporting and fact checking, not with the organization as a whole. Some people had integrity and were consciencous; other were not. Jason Blair exposed the same problems on the newspaper side that Steven Glass exposed on the magazine side that are now revealed on the network news side by Ra^therGate.

MSM has long been part of the trial lawyer media complex, an unholy alliance designed to win money for both trial lawyers through damage awards and journalists through advertisers. When NBC news allowed the destruction of a pickup truck to be staged using model rocket engines by trial lawyers, this connection was clearly exposed, not that anything happened beyond junior partners catching heat. The way for huge breast implant verdicts and awards was carefully paved by a media campaign that hyped non-existant dangers.

Where once reporting on social issues like gun control and abortion, or how different wars were portrayed based upon who occupied the oval office, or even economic news itself were and are slanted by the liberal views and biases of MSM, we know have a clear indication that political reporting suffers the same fate.

Trust is the only currency MSM has to spend, and for me they've spent it all. And that's terrible, we need reliable information.

UPDATE: I've been busy, but the new developments are even worse for CBS. The reason they didn't provide the names and reports of their authenticators is that the people they asked to authenticate didn't. That's right, after CBS looked into the memos for weeks the expert's verdict was not authentic. Yet CBS went ahead anyway. T hey didn't make a mistake, they lied, and they knowingly peddled a lie. Okay, CBS hasn't just spent all their trust with me, they are into me for a lot of trust.

What MSM Can Learn From Blogs

Blogs can’t replace the full range of MSM, but blogs have demonstrated that they can do certain things, like fact check, much better than MSM. Ra^therGate is a prime example.

The guys at Powerline are bright guys, Charles Johnson is a bright guy, same goes for Bill at INDC Journal, Donald Sensing, Pacetown, and all the rest. But two things sets them, and bloggers in general, apart from MSM (OK, more than that, but I’m only going to focus on two things. So keep Pajama cracks to yourself).

Number one is that they are happy to credit the people who send them information. You want your name mentioned, they’ll do anything short of the blink tag. When a reader sends them good info, they use it and credit the sender (or withhold the name if desired). They don’t act like they’re figuring out everything on their own or that they discovered all the info on their own. This is a huge multiplier effect – they are giants on the shoulders of thousands of other giants, people who may be experts in a given field, people who may be talented amateurs in a given people, people who might have just had a great idea or key insight. The point is, for MSM, I’m sure they have to rely on people giving them info, but they always act like somehow as good journalists they did all this on their own. They seem to actively discourage the notion that any part of what they present was even influenced by non-MSM participation. Yes, they get outside experts on occasion, but the experts come from MSM’s rolodex, not the other way around. But for whatever reason, MSM thinks any whiff off non-MSM participation dilutes their authority.

The other difference is that bloggers don’t try to be “exclusive”; that is they link to other bloggers. No blogger pretends to be a one stop shop. This is a big help because on something like the CBS forgery story nobody has the complete picture all by themselves; a bunch of people contribute various amounts but by linking the reader can get a full picture. It’s no skin off of Powerline’s nose to link to a INDC Journal post that makes a good point if it helps the reader. Actually, it’s better than that because Powerline doesn’t have to worry about all the angles, it just works it’s angle on the story and links to the other angles. MSM doesn’t work that way. MSM wants you to stay with them or a “partner” – usually another media entity with common ownership. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming the blogosphere is one great big love-in where nobody cares about traffic. It isn’t, they do. But competition takes a different form – if you don’t link where appropriate, traffic goes down. It’s that simple. Part of your importance as a blogger isn't just original content, but putting it into context.

Jeff at Caerdroia and The Daily Pundit also have thoughts on differences between blogs and MSM.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

CBS and the Boston Globe have decided if you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your B.S. Put your waders on boys and girls, because it's getting deep around here.

Dan Rather's response on national TV: "Today, on the internet and elsewhere, some people -- including many who are partisan political operatives -- concentrated not on the key questions the overall story raised but on the documents that were part of the support of the story." I have to question Dan Rather's news judgement (please note, not his patriotism), since he thinks allegations of activity that wasn't either illegal or unethical that happened 30 years ago is far more important than allegations of outright fraud that happened 2 days ago.

I can almost see the thought bubbles above Dan Rather's head "must tough it out -- if I can just tough it out long enough, it will all go away." Since I'm not a journalist, I won't go the extra mile and claim I really can see them.

CBS put on the lamest defense: an expert witness on handwriting who has said in the past that you can't positively authenticate a signature from a photocopy. Well, guess what, he positively authenticated a signature from a photocopy. CBS had no expert on documents themselves though -- not that they've named yet. As I said before, if they can't name one, can't produce his or her work, I have to doubt they exist. There's far more evidence for Santa Claus than there is that CBS did a thorough investigation of these documents.

The Boston Globe took up the slack on that and announced that a top expert on documents authenticated the documents. This one will blow your mind. They used the expert that Bill at INDC first contacted and who said 90% chance of forgery. After a Globe reporter talked with Dr. Bouffard, they ran the following headline:
Authenticity backed on Bush documents
OK, we can all get back to pummelling President Bush for his actions 30 years ago. Well, not so fast. It seems the good Dr. is "pissed" at the Globe for misrepresenting his views. What he told them was that he was still looking into it, getting more information, somethings he thought at first weren't quite true, and he was still considering it. But he still thinks the documents are most likely forgeries.

The guys at Powerline are ahead of the curve on all this (why not, they've been at the head of the pack so far) and have come out with a great idea:

"The next question is, how old are the "first-generation" copies that CBS has? If those copies, based on testing the paper, are themselves twenty or thirty years old, it would add considerable plausibility to the claim that there were, in fact, authentic originals, even if those originals cannot now be recovered. But I'll bet they're not. I'll bet that if tested, the CBS copies would be very, very recent. (I don't know how precise dating of paper can be. If any readers are experts in this, let us know.) So, here is the bottom line: if the CBS copies are recent, then the alleged originals were recently in existence. So where are they? Were they recently destroyed? If so, why and by whom?

If CBS would make its purported first-generation copies available for testing, it could go a long way toward verifying their authenticity, or--much more likely--proving that they are recently-created fakes.

One loophole in this approach: a clever forger could obtain thirty-year old paper, and use it to create the fake memos. So if the originals (or CBS' copies) are on old paper, it wouldn't necessarily prove they are authentic (they could, of course, have been forged long ago, but it's hard to see why anyone would have done that). But if CBS's copies are new, and they can't explain what happened to the originals, it would be the last nail in Dan Rather's coffin.

So let's get CBS's copies and test the paper.

I wouldn't worry about that clever forger too much - nothing has been particularly clever about it so far.

Wouldn't it be nice to put the whole sorry mess in front of an investigative inquiry, put everybody under oath, have CBS and the Globe put all their cards on the table, and get to the bottom of this? Maybe Lord Hutton is available. After all, when Hutton spoke, heads rolled.

I'd Ra^ther Not

It's deja vu all over again. Last year a star reporter makes blockbuster accusation; when his story is questioned, his company backs him to the hilt saying that his source was reliable; an inquiry is launched which discovers that the reporter distorted the information of the source and that his company didn't provide adequate oversight and then blindly backed the reporter; the chairman of the board, the CEO, and the reporter then resigned. In that case it was Andrew Gilligan and the BBC; today's case is Dan Rather and CBS.

The big difference (aside from the sexier accents across the pond) is that what the blogosphere did in a day took a government agency months. OK, that and we haven't gotten to the punishment of the guilty yet. Here's hoping that doesn't take too long either - a matter of days rather than weeks.

The first thing that strikes me about the whole thing is how bad a forgery the documents are. The forger don't even bother to spend a couple of bucks and buy an old typewriter to type them up. They then used the most common word processing software in the world, Word, and they just left all the standard defaults on. They didn't even change the font to Courier, which looks like a typewriter. They didn't even bother to proofread and so you have a "th" superscripted next to a number, and you have "th" not superscripted one space away from a number? Can you make it any more obvious that this was done on Word on a computer?

It's more understandable that the forgeries didn't get the military details correct. But I don't understand why LTC Killian would have written these in the first place. They seem to dovetail nicely with what some Democrats are saying today, but they make no sense in the context of LTC Killian writing them in 1973. For instance, why would an officer ever write a memo that says he caved to pressure from a superior, and title it CYA? Who's A is he trying to cover here? Not his, because he was admitting he lied in an evaluation. That wouldn't be covering his A, that would be uncovering his A, and waving a big red flag while doing so.

So I convinced that these are forgeries, and amazingly lousy ones at that.

Only blinding partisanship would let Dan Rather be deceived by such lousy forgeries, and put at risk both the reputation of CBS news and John Kerry. Those reputations were put at risk for claims that George Bush's superior really didn't think he was that good a pilot, that George Bush refused a written order to get a physical, and that George Bush didn't get permission to go to Alabama. Really, who cares? We've been throught this a dozen times already. At least Gilligan provided a blockbuster accusation of "tarted-up" dossiers (you got to love the brits, especially when they talk French). Rather provided a snooze fest of accusations, and did so with both skill, aplomb, and nothing but liars. The documents - fake. Ben Barnes - a liar. This is what passes for journalism these days?

But there is a certain deja vu with previous Bush scandals. Joe Wilson - liar. Richard Clark - liar. Michael Moore - liar. This latest non-scandal has the familiar ending: the accuser turns out to be a liar and the accusations baseless.

CBS has claimed they did a thorough investigation before they went to air. If CBS really did a thorough investigation of the documents, why aren't they able to release the results immediately? Why can't they simply provide their expert typologists report where they tracked down which typewriters in use by the TANG were able to use a proportional font and a superscripted th? Where is their comparison of other documents that have nothing to do with Bush also written by the LTC around the same time? They haven't even provided a name. Why can't they provide the chain of possession of the documents in question? Since they haven't, I'm forced to conclude that there was no thorough examination of the documents. Instead, they relied on people believing on CBS's say so. We don't live in 1973 anymore where just because Cronkite said it, we believe.

Dan Rather has responded and sadly provides no new information or a shred of support, just more of the same 'trust me':

"I know that this story is true. I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. We wouldn't have gone to air if they would not have been. There isn't going to be -- there's no -- what you're saying apology?."

I think there's a lot of credit to go around: the guys at Powerline, Charles Johnson, INDC journal and Pacetown just to name a few. Hayek would be proud of the display of distributed intellegence in the internet -- how no one source has all the answers, but the flood of information coming from all directions arrived at a conclusion. The forgery wouldn't have been detected before the rise of the internet. Not just because of bloggers or skeptics, but because the documents wouldn't have been released to the public before. Now you have everything input into the network and the distributed intellegence standing by. But back then the documents might have been flashed up on the TV briefly, and then never seen again. And if the White House did dispute the authenticity, well, that would be just what you would expect, and by the time it was resolved, the election would be long over.

And of course, the blogosphere as befits a super intellegent being has a sense of humor.

Pretty Boys On The TV

There are times when I think I'm too hard on the press. But then I read something like this: Peter Jennings' interview of Karl Rove, and then I wonder if I'm not hard enough. This interview clarifies a few thing - while Peter is a very pleasant guy -- easy to look at, nice sounding voice (hey, these are all the things I lack!), he's not too bright and clearly looking not to inform the audience, which I think is what his job is, but looking to trap Rove and make him and the President look bad. Not surprisingly, Rove is ahead of him and rather easily avoids Jennings' snares. What a waste of TV time. No wonder more people were watching Fox News than any of the networks: Brokaw is an American version of Jennings, and Rather isn't even pleasant.

Via Frater Libertas, who also has good commentary (natch!) on the interview.

Top News Stories?

Is it just me, or does anybody really care about the Peterson or Kobe Bryant cases, outside immediate family that is? Cable News has been awash with the stories for months now, reporting every twist and turn, but who cares? I'm not interested in the least, and nobody I know is interested. Am I in a cacoon? Do I not get out enough? Have I not paid enought attention? Out of all the terrible murders out there, why is Laci Peterson's a matter of national interest? Is Kobe Bryant really that much a celebrity that his rape case merits leaving the sports page? I'm mystified how the MSM decides what warrants wall to wall coverage, and what merits a single mention.

The Great Unraveling

Jon Henke at QandO unravels Paul Krugman the pundit with the wisdom of Paul Krugman the economist. It's sad that a great economist has turned into a petty lying weasel.

Of course, blogs don't do any reporting, which is why you won't see this in the traditional news.

Food For Thought

Somebody searched the Washington Post website for the words let’s not David Broder and this blog was the number 1 result. Number 2 was a Washington post page, followed by a mixture of “real journalists” and blogs.

This is amazing. No, not that any blog would mention the amazingly boring David Broder, but that a blog with little traffic would beat out a newspaper at it’s own site on a search of it’s owncolumnist. It would like asking for a power tool at Home Depot and having the manager tell you could get the best deal on it at a T-shirt store down the street.

I wonder. Google stormed to the number one search engine with algorithms that rank blogs highly. They’ve tinkered with the formula, but blogs keep coming out on top. I wonder if they bought blogger because they noticed that using neutral yet relevant algorithms blogs kept coming out on top. Could it be Google figures even if they can't point you to the best match, they'll point you to somebody who can?

It's a common refrain among those bloggers who keep tabs on the media -- "Don't they know how to use Google?" And if they do, or even when searching newspaper sites, they keep coming across blogs. Is this the sort of thing that is causing a change in attitude within Big Media, as reported by Jeff Jarvis?

I'd much rather think about this kind of hit than all the ones I get looking for lady's hirsute pits.

What Rot? That Rot!

The LA times finally issues a correction about Paul Bremmer's farewell address - he gave one, the LA times reported he hadn't.

What's telling for me is their reason for not knowing -- it wasn't publicized to the Western press. In other words, because the CPA didn't give them a press release and a transcript, the press covering Iraq had no idea that he gave a farewell address. The press that purports to have their finger on the pulse of Iraq for us hasn't a clue, and doesn't realize it. Next time you read about how the Iraqis feel or what they think or what is going on in Iraq, just remember this.

And since this appeared in a "news analysis" piece, let me remind you, "news analysis" is just a fancy word for "opinion" that deliberately tries to make you think its actual news.

That's one of the rots in modern journalism - the lack of investigative ability and the reliance on handouts -- from "sources", from organizations, even from readers. Far too often a story is generated by the source, not the press. A think tank or advocacy organization (e.g. The Center for Science in the Public Interest) issues a press release about a study, and poof instant story that relies on the press release. I was amazed to discover through Google how many stories are created this way, and how reliant they are on the press release, with no critical examination of what lies behind the press release. Oh, perhaps the token "critic", but face value belief in the way the story is written. And then you go to the organization's web site, and you read the press release, and you see how much of the "story" is a verbatim copy of the press release, and then you read the substance behind the press release, and you realize how much of the context is missing, or how many of the caveats are missing, or how laughably "scientific" the study is, and you realize you've been duped.

Or a "source" drops a dime and settles a score, and a hit piece appears, and if you know anything about the situation you know it's a hit piece, but the reporter either doesn't care (heck, the response is a whole nother story that will fall in your lap) or doesn't know enough to know better.

There is a world of difference between an organization that relies on "facts" handed to it, and an organization that goes out and uncovers the facts themselves. And since news organizations don't fact check in any meaningful sense, what we have is a press that purports to keep us informed but simply provides us with information that particular people and organizations want us to see for their own reasons. The whole breast implant scare was cooked up by the journalist trial lawer complex to poison jury pools -- journalists used stories pre-packaged by trial lawyers copmplete with fake science but real anecdote.

And this is what passes for journalism. And this is why I no longer believe a word written in the paper other than direct quotes -- and even then I'm not sure.

Small Comfort

I suppose MM's new movie is the big news. I admit I was disturbed to learn that grown women and men plunked down something like $22 million dollars to see the fraud this weekend. But then I realized that the Nigerian 419 scam grosses hundred of millions of dollars annually, year after year, despite (because of?) its obvious nature. Of course, the 419 scam appeals to one's greed, while Moore's 911 scam appeals to one's hate, but they're both such obvious fakes it makes you wonder.

I'm sure you've already seen Beautiful Atrocities' reviewer quote roundup comparing what the reviewers said about Fahrenheit 911 compared to The Passion of the Christ. Even movie reviews are tainted by media bias. My own hometown St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a nutty marxist who hasn't met a conspiracy theory he doesn't believe as its lead reviewer. Speaking of Mel Gibson's movie, what happened to all that anti-semitism it was supposed to spark? Why does anybody believe anything the media says?

Hersh Thoughts

Some thoughts about Seymour Hersh's latest big story.

I have no way to to know if the claims are accurate either in part or in totality. And neither does Seymour, or anybody else except those who are allegedly on the inside of the program. Uncritical acceptance or flat denial by anybody else reveals their biases, not the accuracy of the claims.

The bulk of the press is treating the claims as valid. There's an old joke about the lawyer who can swim in shark infested waters because of "professional courtesy." There seems to be "professional courtesy" within the media - any story that once appears is treated as true - sometimes long after it's been debunked.

Either Hersh is making stuff up, or he's being lied to by sources, or his sources are telling the truth but breaking their word and the law by revelaing classified information. None of these possibilities is particularly appealing.

Hersh throws the code word "Copper Green" around like 007 threw "Grand Slam" in Goldfinger.

I don't find unnamed sources to be persuasive, and Hersh didn't have good sources in the Army a year ago, As this story from 2003 makes abundently clear. And all the meat of the current piece is contained in quotes from unnamed sources in the military.

Much is made of the military industrial complex, but little mention is made of the legal journalism complex. Journalists get information from three places - people who are regular sources for their own reasons; people who are one-time sources for their own reasons; and lawyers who do all the legwork and tiresome investigation in order to taint jury pools (think breast implants, side saddle fuel tanks, or rogue accelerating Audis). In all three cases, the journalist is in effect working for the source, and thus the sources motivations shape the coverage. And as pointed out in the Mudville Gazette, Hersh is working for the soldiers currently in the dock in the Abu Ghraib who's defense is, in a dreary recapitulation of past failed excuses, "we were just following orders." Gee, imagine, he just happened to have fall into his lap this program that would indicate that they really were just following orders. How convenient. And of course, Hersh feels no need to disclose his connection to the defense attorneys since he's not being paid money. Such connections are never mentioned for that reason, despite the fact that information is money to journalists. The MIC at least defends the country, while the LJC defrauds it.

We're Only Thinking Of You

Speaking of photos, what happened to showing pictures of flag draped coffins at Dover? Oh yeah, that was so last week. The press got much better pictures from Abu Ghraib to show that the war is a failure in Iraq. Getting the Dover photos was sooo important the press showed them to us once. Can you imagine how important that makes the stuff they never show us, and how insignificant the stuff they show us all the time?

UPDATE: I have joined my first Beltway Traffic Jam

What Memory Hole?

I haven’t seen the video of Nick Berg’s cold blooded murder, and I don’t want to. But you know what, the press is always telling and showing me stuff I have no desire to know about or see “for my own good”. It used to be video of teenagers whizzing in the pickle jar at a fast food restaurant – thanks for ruining eating out (here’s a tip: don’t upset your server until after the food arrives). Or it was how grocery stores sell you rotted food soaked in bleach – thanks for ruining eating in.

But now its showing me pictures that only the Marquis de Sade could love, all the while telling me it’s the fault of the Bushies (anyway could we retire that phrase along with Clintonistas? Just asking). Apparently though, my sensibilities are too delicate to see somebody get their head chopped off and held aloft for the camera. So instead they just show a picture of Berg trussed up in front of his killers, or they have video up to the point his killers take out the knife and saw his head off. Here's an idea for a compromise - provide the soundtrack. Let's listen to what his murderers have to say while the guy screams, gurgles, and dies, and we will get a pretty good idea what they want to do to all of us Americans.

One Article, Hold The Snark

I'm not a fan of political reporting these days. It's by and large stupid, and it seems that the writers try to make up for a lack of any real content with snark. When I hit Google News today to see what was happening, the lede of the New York Times article on the President's Bus Tour caught my eye with one of the all time great combinations of stupidity and snark:

"The dirty little secret of President Bush's bus tour is that he didn't spend much time on the bus."

As the great Forest Gump used to opine, "stupid is as stupid does".

The Latest Molehill

Do I care about all the ins and outs of John Kerry's military service in Vietnam? No. Is it worth digging through the records and trying to figure out whether or not he really earned 3 Purple Hearts? Absolutely not.

To the Republicans who think there is some hay to be made here -- put aside partisanship and honor one of our vets.

To the Democrats who claimed GWB was AWOL and demanded all his records -- you reap what you sow, so start reaping.

I would consider voting for the Kerry of 1968 - a decisive leader under fire, but the years have changed that youth into a man who starts his day by getting out of both sides of the bed and staying that way the rest of the day.

C'mon, important stuff is happening right now, and we're worried about what happened thirty years ago?

And while I'm at it, can somebody tell me the news value in showing us that the remains of our soldiers killed overseas are well treated, flag draped, and flown through Dover AFB? There are better photos -- like this one or this one.

Biggles Asks Questions

Can I fire the press? I mean it, really.

I managed to watch the Bush press conference the other night – it slipped my mind that Band of Brothers was on over on the History channel. While President Bush clearly has some deficiencies – most notably public speaking, the press clearly has its own deficiencies, like anything to do with their job of reporting the news. The press acted like a bad Monty Python imitation: Confess your mistakes, confess your mistakes, apologize for your mistakes, confess to your inability to communicate, confess, confess, confess. Poke him again with another soft-in-the-head question. All that was missing was Cardinal Fang and the comfy chair.

The Q & A period did manage to make one thing clear at least: now we know why the Strother Martin character from NPR never gets called upon – although it did allow the President to demonstrate once again that sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand. So I guess I can’t complain that it was completely uninformative.

Sadly, the truth of the matter is that the press doesn’t work for me; it doesn’t work for you either. Oh, the press likes to talk about “serving the public interest” and “the people’s right to know” (oddly enough, that one isn’t in the constitution), but their job isn’t to inform the public, their job is to sell stuff. The newspaper people push whatever the department stores are selling, which by the looks of things is mostly bras and panties. The TV news people mainly hawk denture creams and adult diapers.

I mean if the press really was interested in giving us the news, why do they spend so much time on the titillation du jour (e.g. Kobe Bryant or Scott Peterson), and why would they pass up a chance to seriously question the President and instead try to play Gotcha!

Yeah, I know, it's their favorite game, even when they play it so poorly.

Serious News Media?

Don't you love it when the news media tells you how important they are because keep the public informed with important and serious information, and that "fluff" only gets on because the public "demands" it? Cori Dauber goes looking for important and serious information about the terrible attack in Spain, and like Diogenes has a hard time finding what she's looking for because fluff crowds out the good stuff, even on cable news channels. (I wonder if she's going to change the name to Ranting Prof now that she's solo.)

I seem to remember when MSNBC (I think) did some survey about what news people would pick they were surprised that people favored hard news. I haven't noticed any improvement, though

Two Letters

As long as I'm complaining about the state of current journalism, there were two excellent letters to the editor in the paper today:

Punish criminals, not honest folks with guns

Your strident and hysterical objections to the recently passed concealed-weapons law are based on two false assumptions. First, you assume that honest citizens who obey the law and are no threat to anyone suddenly become dangerous monsters if they are licensed to carry a gun. I have carried guns under various circumstances since I was a child, and that was a long time ago, and I have never felt any urge to use one improperly or illegally. I am not alone in that. Honest people are honest, whether they are armed or not, and your assumption otherwise is insulting to all honest citizens.

Second, you assume that passing a law against something prevents people from doing it. It doesn't; it simply establishes a penalty for doing it. Honest people follow legal guidelines, but criminals ignore them and risk the consequences. That's why we call them criminals.

There are legal and illegal uses for guns. The right to have one available for legal use is guaranteed by the Missouri Constitution. The concealed-weapons law allows people to carry guns in a socially acceptable manner. Missouri is safer for it.

Leroy Madden
Ellisville

Tell it like it was

In reference to the March 7 story headlined "13 Palestinians are reported killed in Gaza battles":

Once, just once, can't the main headline read "Palestine militants and suicide bomber attack at Israel-Gaza crossing point," and a smaller one read, "In retaliation, 13 Palestinians are reported killed"? It is heart-wrenching enough to hear of such carnage without at least your telling it like it was.

Please remember the words of the late Prime Minister Golda Meier, who stated at one point in a previous conflict, "We can forgive the Palestinians for killing our children, but we cannot forgive them for making us kill theirs."

Meyer and Selma Kahan
Creve Coeur

Two excellent letters making great points clearly and concisely. Two (three?) amateurs providing better written content than anything else in the paper today. Of course, if they had to write a column, they'd have to pad them out to fill the whole thing.

Three Easy Pieces

Let's talk indecency for a moment. Let me offer you three pieces on it:

A Newspaper Professional in a Newspaper

A Newspaper Professional's blog

Just Some Guy

I agree with the last two. I think the first one is dreadful, and yet he's the only guy getting paid to write it. Think about that for a moment.

Consider this as well: the professional in a newspaper has presented us with a bunch of blather, a fact free zone adrift on a sea of paranoia and opinion: the professional in his blog has provided a few facts but much better writing; and just some guy has done his homework and provided a well reasoned piece of persuasive writing. Eric Mink has a week between columns and the resources of a newspaper at his disposal to ferret out the facts, and that's what he chooses to publish. What is wrong with this picture?

I think the professionals in the media today assume we are going to believe them because they are professionals in the media today. No facts, no reason, just take my word for it. How very insulting. And they wonder why readership and viewership continues to decline for the "serious" news media.

The Oscars

I watched the Oscars last night with the Other Fearless Leader. I offer my non-realtime thoughts.

For such a small industry, actors sure have a lot of award shows. What are they compensating for?

When did they all get so old? Bill Murray looks like he's about 70 now. And Jim Carrey - old and amazingly big eared.

Susan Sarandon, did you use double sided tape or glue? I'm just curious, totally non-purient.

Too bad ABC doesn't have the same policy as Clear Channel - I thought I was watching E! when Owen Wilson asked that gal if her's were real. Instead of a goofy grin, I wish she'd replied "As real as your talent, Owen."

The best part was right at the start - Michael Moore squished by a Mumakil. It was all downhill from there.

All that money for the event, and they couldn't get the sound mix right - the orchestra too loud, Billy Crystal too soft. And that was about the only fun, let alone funny part of the whole show.

For a bunch of egalitarians, they sure do have a pecking order. Why was Uma Thurman up front? Why was Peter Jackon way on the side in the back - his movie only won 11 stinking awards. And those people who win all the boring awards - they were so far back they cut to graphics so you had something to watch while they made the hike down to the stage. At least I didn't have to see Jack Nicholson sprawled out in the front row.

Good Reporting

As bad as the Post-Dispatch is, you have to give them credit when they do a good job. Phillip O'Connor has a great series of articles about the personal experiences of a couple Green Berets in the war on terror. What makes it so good is that he got great interviews with the people involved; his own editorializing leaves a lot to be desired, but overall the articles are well worth reading.

First Installment
Second Installment
Third Installment

Kudos to Dennis

As long as I'm going on about the press and columnists, I want to highlight good work by one. I think this column about Jews, Christians, and Mel Gibson's The Passion is simply outstanding. This is a very grown-up column (our culture fails us by the cooption of the adjective "adult" to mean only sexual), a rarity in today's media (a probably in yesteryears too - I wasn't around then so I don't know). Dennis Prager tackles an emotional, controversial topic in a very calm manner while doing full justice to differing viewpoints. It really is a wonderful job of writing that begins with a full grasp of the issue and sensitivity towards the people involved. If only our normal political reporting, let alone opinionating, was as grown-up. Wouldn't it be nice to see a column about social security written at this level, if only just once?

Something You Don't See Everyday

I think Halley's comet comes around more often that the elements of this story. A columnist dissed a segment of society, the segment put it's money where it's mouth is, and the columnist apologized. Now, the details: A columnist wrote another cliched column about video games (violent one's specifically) being the ruination of our youth (in an earlier era, it was comic books -- I'm sure every era has something that causes the ruination of its youth). So when readers at penny-arcade.com read it, they didn't get mad, they demonstrated that the colunist was wrong by raising $146,000 in cash and toys for Children's Hospital in Seattle (full disclosure - my daughter has spent time in Children's hospital right here in St. Louis). When the columnist found out, he apologized and wrote a column celebrating the exploits of the video gamers at penny-arcade.com. If only every protest was conducted in such a positive manner.

Power of the Press

I'm surprised this story didn't get much traction, but apparently the man who blew up the headquarters of HSBC bank in Turkey was motivated by persistant claims in portions of the Turkish press that US soldiers have raped thousands of Iraqi women. I don't blame the war critic, Dr. Susan Block, who wrote a crazy screed called "The Rape of Iraq" in Counterpunch that didn't claim any US soldier actually physically raped an Iraqi woman. No, if you want to print lies and distortions, you'll find a way.

There are plenty of people in this country who believe the harmless lies of our tabloids: that Elvis is still alive, that there is a miracle cure for (arthritis, cancer, lupus, ...), that some lady in Arkansas really did have a baby with space aliens. The problem is when the information stream becomes polluted with stuff that isn't harmless. And we have some of that here -- too many in the press have given up the goal of informing us and instead want to persuade us through the manipulation of facts themselves. Now, we do still have standards, fast eroding though they are, but it should be remembered by the press what they are, the responsibilites they bear, and that critics can criticize for good reasons as well as partisan ones.

Tilting at Windmills

The St. Louis Post Dispatch (home of the worst newspaper internet site - it doesn't have one) ran an op-ed by Michael Bellesiles yesterday. I responded with a letter to the editor:

I was amazed to see an oped in the Post by Michael Bellesiles that failed to identify him as serial liar and disgraced historian. Perhaps the Post has forgotten how he fabricated or distorted reams of data to support the theme of his book Arming America, how after the deception was discovered he was forced to resign from Emory University, the NEH took its name off the Newberry Fellowship he was awarded, and the Bancroft Prize for Arming America was revoked. What was Mr. Bellesiles response? Why he continued to lie and constantly change his story -- admitting no wrong doing but maligning his critics.

I was stunned that it ran the same day an editorial taking other organizations to task for their ethical lapses ran. Perhaps the editorial staff does have a fine sense of irony after all.

What's next for the Post? Will it hire Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, or Jayson Blair? I hear they too are available.

OK, a touch harsh perhaps, but I wrote before I was declared a studmuffin. On second thought, perhaps it's not harsh enough. If Bellesiles had come clean and apologized, then I would have been harsh. As it is, why is this guy taking up valuable real estate in the paper? This is a question I ask about most pundits, though for different reasons.

Anyway, I haven't gotten a call yet, so I don't think they'll run the letter.

UPDATE 1/6/04:

The post ran a letter on 1/3/04 from historian Kevin Hurst taking Mr. Bellesiles to task for the inaccuracy of his history and shallowness of his argument in the his op ed and amonst other things cites:

"His claim that the "Gatling gun and its successors did not prove decisive in any war," is contradicted by the devastating effectiveness of the Maxim gun in the colonial wars of the late 19th century."

That was my mistake - rather than attack the substance of the letter, I attacked the man himself.

Return To Easterbrook

One of the things that upset some people about Mr. Easterbrook's rant against violent movies is that it made value judgements. The fact that Mr. Easterbrook feels that there are higher values than the profit motive has some, like libertarian Virginia Postrel, claiming that he's anti-capitalist which is downright nutty. If somebody says there are things you shouldn't do to make a buck, most people would agree. There would be some disagreement about exactly what those things are that you shouldn't do, and I realize that doctrinaire libertarians have a somewhat smaller list than most people, but having such a list doesn't make you anti-capitalist. My rule of thumb is that people are perfectly happy making judgements based on their own value system, but bristle when other people mention their own value judgements if they don't share the same value system.

Another problem for Mr. Easterbrook is that Jewishness is both an ethnicity and a religion, unlike for instance Christianity. Thus while he was comparing the behavior of certain individuals to the values of their religion (Judeism), others heard it as a slam on Jews the ethnic group. He could have, and I expect would have, made an appeal to Christian values if it had been different movie moguls - just as he did with Mel Gibson in an prior post.

Lastly, he got in trouble because you could lift out a single sentance out of his post: "Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence?" and fool people into thinking he was claiming that Jews in general worship money above all else. The trouble with words is that they can be taken out of context while they are always given in context - always. The context of that sentance makes it clear that he was talking about two particular Jewish executives. That gives me another rule of thumb, namely don't get outraged until you've seen the full statement, not just the excerpts.

Boycott ESPN.com

I used to look forward to reading Tuesday Morning Quarterback by Gregg Easterbrook Not only did he write a great sports column, it was filled with all kinds of other non-sports goodies (not to mention cheerleaders). It had to be one of their most read sections based on the number of people I know who reguarly read it. Well, Mr. Easterbrook not only was fired, but he has been removed from ESPN's site as if he never wrote for them. At this point, ESPN hasn't announced why he was fired. He just wrote an entry for his blog at The New Republic that some considered anti-semetic but which I found (contrarian that I am) pro-semetic. The passage in question:

"Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? "

The complaint was "Did he just blame Jews for being greedy, money-grubbing Hollywood executives partly responsible for today's real-life violence?" Ah, no, what he did was say that two particular Jewish executives worshiped money above all else, and he went on to pretty much hold Jews to a higher standard implying that because of their experience of violence in the Holocaust they ought to understand the impact of the glorification of violence. And he did implicitly claim that the glorification of violence in movies does have an impact on societies world wide.

If Mr. Easterbrook had said that (all) Jews worship money above all else, that would have been clearly anti-semetic and wrong. But what he said (to me, anyway), is that these two particular Jews worshiped money above all else (and not because they were Jews). This is important, because we should be able to call out individual behavior regardless of whether or not that behavior has been an unfair stereotype of a particular group in the past.

Ms. Yourish wasn't done though, she moved from the debatable to to the clearly wrong when she said that Mr. Easterbrook "All the while, of course, giving the Hollywood Christian executives (and other religions) a complete pass". Obviously, she missed the whole statement "Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence." In other words, Mr. Easterbrook in his column said that Jewish, Christian, and other Hollywood executives worshiped money above all else by promoting for profit the adulation of violence. He didn't single out Jews in general; he singled out Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein in particular because they are the executives ultimately responsible for Kill Bill, which is what the column was about.

Now back to ESPN. Should they have fired Mr. Easterbrook? No. Even if his original post could be construed as anti-semitic or you don't think Jews should be held to a higher standard, he quickly explained his position and apologized for any offence he might have given. He isn't anti-semitic. If he was fired because he attacked his ultimate boss at ESPN, Michael Eisner, even though it was in a publication unrelated to ESPN or Disney, that is an even worse reason. Ultimately, I think some other sports web site (whether Fox Sports, or CBS sports, or Sports Illustrated) should pick up his TMQ column - not out of the goodness of their hearts, but as a shrewd business move - it's popular. I know I won't be bothering with ESPN.com without TMQ - their news and analysis isn't any better than anybody elses.

Kevin Vs. The Post

The Saint Louis Post Dispatch is St. Louis' only major daily newspaper. It's not a very good paper, and tilts alarmingly to the left (though many a leftist also dislikes it). While I would have canceled my subscription long ago, the Other Fearless Leader has informed me that because we save more in coupons from the paper than we spend on it, we are not cancelling. Tightwad that I am, I have complied. At the last Midwest Blogbash, the idea of a PostWatch site was discussed and quickly dismissed because somebody would have to actually read it reguarly.

This morning over my breakfast, I felt compelled to write a couple of letters to people at the post. The first was over an article about the drop in City homicides. I sent the following letter:

I'm glad to read that homicide is down across the St. Louis Metro area. I found it odd that the focus of the article was on the city of St. Louis when, as you relate in the last quarter of the article, it showed one of the lowest homicide rate decreases. I suppose it is to be expected that the police and prosecutors pat themselves on the back, but it isn't clear that the other jurisdictions are doing the same thing as the city and thus it isn't clear that the undoubtedly fine police and prosecutorial work is the cause. Perhaps a follow up article could shed more light on this.

That's right, the article was all about how the City of St. Louis had a big drop in homicides, had quotes from prosecutors saying what a great job the prosecutors were doing and how the locals and feds were cooperating, had quotes from the police about how their aggressive police work was paying off. And then at the end they let on that St. Louis County had a larger drop in the homicide rate, along with the all the neighboring counties in Missouri. No back pats for these guys, though.

Then, a headline for a front page article set me off (I can't give a URL for that because the miserable Post website only puts selected articles on the net), and here's my letter for that one:

I noticed on today's front page a sub heading about the suicide bombing in Iraq says "attacks across nation intensify". In what way have they intensified? Are they more frequent, more deadly, involve larger numbers of attackers? Given that it is over an article about a repeat bombing that wasn't as bad as the first one, it seems to be particularly inappropriate. I've been reading that the attacks have been intensifying ever since early May, shortly after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations. This is odd, since just before the intensification process started we were fighting a major war. I have yet to see a chart showing the intensity of combat versus time in Iraq, yet many media outlets tell me over and over that the attacks have intensified. Quite frankly, not only is it not supported by anything in the article, I don't think it's supported by the facts in Iraq. Please keep the headline(s) closer to the facts of the article.

I'm sure I'll get a nice email blah blah blah but nothing will change. The Post gives me a choice - either get my news off the net, or get my news from late night talk hosts.

UPDATE: No replies to my email so far, but Andrew Sullivan linked to an oped in the NYT that claims attacks have declined from an average of 25 a day in July to about 15 a day today - still too many, but certainly refutes the claim of "intensifying attacks".

News Media Bias: A Different Take

I made a comment over at Population One and while I have several other topics I'd rather post about and thought about more, I'm going to amplify my comment over there (have I mentioned that 1. I'm very busy and 2. I'm very lazy? Just curious).

When we talk about bias in the news media, we always seem to talk about political bias - are they a bunch of lefties as most people think, or are they really righties in disguise as a few people think. But I think there are two significant biases that shape what and how things are reported that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with how one defines "news."

The first is contained in the word itself - news is something that is new. Old stuff need not apply, no matter how significant it may still be. Breaking developments are thus the most newsworthy, even if they don't amount to a hill of beans. Time is more significant than significance itself. Consequently, the news media, and especially the broadcast media (which has the least content bandwidth), only supplies the latest development to a news story, and if you're lucky, the penultimate development (yep, I try to work that word in whenever I can). This makes it hard to follow a story of more than one scene, let alone more than one act. Newspapers will sometimes take the time to tell a complete story, and news magazines moreso, but even there the topic has to be immediately relevant.

The second is that news is something out of the ordinary. Dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is news. The fact that my house didn't catch on fire today will never be in the news; let it catch on fire though and not only will it be covered, I'll be interviewed on the local TV stations (I'll get more air time if I cry). Laci Peterson killed: wall to wall national coverage. Another black teen shot in the City of St. Louis: barely a mention even on the local TV. This leads to a weird inversion of reality and news reports, a negative image as it were. If crime reporting is up, then crime itself is down. The news media doesn't report on the reality of life, but the rarity. News reporting is just the Springer show without the bouncers, but with the tired moralizing at the end.

So I'm not one of those who worry and fret about too much "bad" news and wish the news media would report the good news. Frankly, my view is just the opposite. If the newspapers were ever full of nothing but good news, it would be time to sell everything, buy survivalist gear, and head for the hills. In fact, my idea of a perfect world is one where the only news run is old lurid tales of unsolved crimes like the Sheppard case or JonBenet Ramsey's murder - day after day, year after year on every page, on every channel. Because if that is the only thing that is out of the ordinary, life must be very good.

The Plural of Anecdote Isn't Data

The Volokh Conspiracy seems to add another blogger every time I read them (I'd link to them if I knew how to pronounce the name (yeah, like they care)), but that only makes them better. But that's not the point; the point is that they have an email from a Naval Reservist in Iraq that's well worth reading.

" The tension is high all around here [in Baghdad], but not necessarily because of the protests or potshots being taken at the Army patrols. Everyone wants to succeed and is working 24/7 to do it, but it doesn't always seem as the world understands the issue because of the limited view the press provides. There is a very talented team assembled, with not the greatest access to the usual resources (phones, computers, air conditioning, etc). They’re also going to need some good people to fill their shoes in a couple of months; i.e., the President of Michigan State needs to head back to school at summer’s end."

I'm happy to hear of his positive experience, but as he notes, it's hard to tell what's going on because of the limited view I have. You read negative stuff, you read positive stuff, and you try to get an idea of how things are going, of what's happening over there. And frankly, you just can't tell. Nor is it clear that you can sum it up with a single adjective like well or poorly. It's a big country, and it isn't going to be homogenous. If you asked people in this country how things are going here, you'd get a wide diversity of opinion. Yet when it comes to foreign countries, we want a single response. How's safety over there? We'll, I'm sure there are locations over there I'd be much safer in than certain locations right here in river city, but there does seem to be a security problem. And at the height of the negative reports on looting (including the Baghdad museum) in Iraq, there was an incident in St. Louis where a school was cleaned to the bare walls -- apparently the theives started loading up a truck Friday night, worked through the weekend, and didn't stop until there was nothing left to take. It was ignored local news; the press was too obsessed with looting in Iraq to worry about looting in some poor neighborhood of St. Louis.

But I think there is one clear fact -- that as of right now, whatever the reality is, whatever may come, the bulk of the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam as their leader.

Brit Hume On The American Media In Wartime

Hillsdale College has an adaptation of a speech Brit Hume gave there online [After June]. It's not too long and well worth a read as he examines the media post 9/11 and how it's been not just out of synch with America, but with reality.

"Cynical? We journalists pride ourselves, and properly so, on being skeptical. That’s our job. But I have always thought a cynic is a bad thing to be. A cynic, as I understand the term, means someone who interprets others’ actions as coming from the worst motives. It’s a knee-jerk way of thinking. A cynic, it is said, understands the price of everything and the value of nothing. So I don’t understand why Ted Koppel would say with such pride and ferocity – he said it more than once – that he is a cynic. But I think he speaks for many in the media, and I think it’s a very deep problem."

Via Winds of Change

Pinch Lied!

Somehow, I don't think that will be the headline in the NYT over this bombshell: Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd have resigned. Despite Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr.'s earlier claim that he wouldn't accept Mr. Raines resignation, he did. One can only hope that the NYT worries more about accuracy than advocacy in the future.

Was It About Oil? Not According To Wolfowitz

Yes, I know that the Guardian is claiming that Paul Wolfowitz let the cat out of the bag, and in response to a question about the difference in handling of North Korea and Iraq, said it was all about oil:

"Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

The problem is, he didn't say that. Sad to say, you can't believe everything you read in the paper. Here's the actual question and answer, from the DOD transcript:

"Q: What I meant is that essentially North Korea is being taken more seriously because it has become a nuclear power by its own admission, whether or not that’s true, and that the lesson that people will have is that in the case of Iraq it became imperative to confront Iraq militarily because it had banned weapons systems and posed a danger to the region. In the case of North Korea, which has nuclear weapons as well as other banned weapons of mass destruction, apparently it is imperative not to confront, to persuade and to essentially maintain a regime that is just as appalling as the Iraqi regime in place, for the sake of the stability of the region. To other countries of the world this is a very mixed message to be sending out.

Wolfowitz: The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy. It’s is also a question of whether, if one wants to persuade the regime to change, whether you have to find -- and I think you do -- some kind of outcome that is acceptable to them. But that outcome has to be acceptable to us, and it has to include meeting our non-proliferation goals.

Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different."

I suppose something can be lost in translating from english into german and then back again, since the Guardian was relying on the reporting of a couple of German newspapers. Since I don't read german, I have no idea if the fault lies with the german papers (Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt), the Guardian, or somewhere in between.

So what Wolfowitz said was, to put it in soviet terms, in Iraq the correlation of military forces was heavily in our favor while the correlation of ecomonic forces wasn't too good; thus, the military option was used. In North Korea, the opposite balance obtains, so we are pursuing the economic option over the military. Why this is so hard for some people to grasp is beyond me - it isn't exactly rocket science.

UPDATE: The Guardian admits it was wrong:

"A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the department of defence website, "The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq." The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed."

Next question is, will all those sites that ran with this story come out and tell you that it has been retracted? I'm not holding my breath.

Al-Jazeera

The Washington Post has an interesting article about the Washington Bureau head of Al-Jazeera, the only non-national Arab TV news network. Is it accurate, does it pander? Read the article and see.

Media Coverage Of The War

I've been relying on the internet during the day and the cable news networks at night. I think having reporters embedded in the units has worked out great - in fact my biggest complaint about the coverage by the cable people is that they spend too much time with all their military retirees and not enough with their embedded reporters. I think context is important, but a little goes a long way. And if these guys really do know what's going on, they sure as heck aren't going to broadcast it where the Iraqi's can pick it up. So its great to have somebody talk in generalities over a map, but you could do that 10 minutes out of an hour and have it covered.

I've also found myself watching MSNBC the most. I can't put my finger on it, but they just seem to have the best coverage. Britt Hume on Fox is the best when he's on, but he still only comes on for an hour in the evening, and then it's all downhill from there.

I happened to catch the morning Centcom briefing this morning on the radio. It's amazing how little info they give out -- and rightly so. Some reporter asked this morning for them to describe what the war plan was, or at least how many thrusts were being made into Iraq, and how many at Baghdad, since the Iraqi's already know this. Well, maybe they do, and maybe they don't. Why run the risk? The press seems to act like they're not entirely sure that the military only shows the best LGB video. C'mon guys, of course Centcom only shows the best.

Is it possible for the media organizations to send people who have done some homework? Some guy this morning was asking if they kept video of all the precision strikes, and when could he get his hands on it? They put this video dog and pony on every war, couldn't you have thought to confer with the military before the war as to what kind of video you could get and when, and what had happened to it after other wars? They have public affairs officers for just that sort of thing. And while you're at it, wouldn't it have been nice to know what kinds of weapons we use, whether their guidance system does make a record, what the classification of that record is, and so forth, instead of asking what for what percentage of the strikes are such videos available? Do you honestly think the military keeps track of that number in the middle of a war? If you can't look at the video, and tell immediately whether it's from the designator of a LGB, from the seeker of an IIR weapon, or from a JDAM, you shouldn't be at that conference, let alone asking questions. OK, that last sentance was a trick - there is no video record for JDAM since it's an INS/GPS weapon.

And He's One Of The Good Ones.

I enjoy Gregg Easterbrook's writing, especially in his Page 2 Column for ESPN. For The New Republic, he's a jack of all trades, like all journalists, writing on any and every subject. The problem isn't just his, but endemic to journalism. His columns are a worthwhile read, but often contain errors. For instance, his article about tanks has a few mistakes while the overall sentiment is correct. For instance, he talks about the vulnerability of tanks in the urban environment. But where he talks about infantry walking behind tanks (he must have watched Patton), the technique that evolved in WWII for America was to keep tanks behind the infantry in cities, and use them as direct fire artillery. In other words, when the infantry ran into a problem, the tank would move up just enough to hit building where then enemy was holed up and blast away with high explosive rounds.

And when he gets to the difference between and the Abrams, a tank, and the Bradley, an infantry fighting vehicle (IFV - a term which, along with Infantry Carrying Vehicle (ICV), has replaced the term Armoured Personel Carrier (APC) because of the increased capability), he claims the Bradley is called a Fighting Vehicle in a huh? moment, but is really a baby tank. Talk about your huh? moments. He notes the lack of the cannon used by tanks in a Bradley, but somehow fails to notice the crew compartment. The Bradley is designed to transport an infantry squad, if not in comfort, at least in a leathal package. And then he says the Marines now have a Bradley Junior in the LAV. Well, they had them in Desert Storm, and the Stryker vehicle is also the LAV-III. Given the controversy around the Stryker in the military, you'd figure he'd know that.

And that's just his most recent piece. Earlier one's also contain mistakes. That's the problem with even smart media people. They make enough mistakes you never know how much you can rely on them.

Will Wonders Ever Cease?

This morning what greeted my eyes but a James Lileks column on the op-ed page of the St. Louis Post Dispatch (yes, the link takes you to something called StlToday, which is the Post's attempt to be a St. Louis Portal). The Post is continuing its efforts to move up from a fourth-rate paper to a third rate paper (where they'd be joining the NYT, incidentally).

Gotta Love Drudge

Columbia disentigrates upon re-entry; Colin Powell is calling the UN to battle; North Korea is warning the US of total war. Drudge links to a story about the decrease of shark attacks, which claims the decrease is due to a worldwide economic slowdown. Or it could just be the media has too many real stories to report on.

Media Bias in Action

The debate over embryonic stem cell research came up in the Talent/Carnahan debate the other night. Just to get it out, I'm against abortion except to save the life of the mother and against destroying embryo's for research because I believe what starts at conception is a human being and thus worth protection; the only objection I have to reproductive cloning is that it currently represents non-consensual experimentation on a human. Anyway, what I'm trying to point out is how on the one hand, the media is all up in arms about how troglodyte pro-lifers are blocking embryonic stem cell research while far more sympathetic to efforts by a different group blocking the use of genetically modified foods. And yet on the one hand you have a principled objection about killing people (whether you agree or not, that's the objection) over research that would work better with adult stem cells both ethically and medically and which while promising hasn't actually moved beyond research, and on the other you a great deal of respect for an objection based on fear of technology over use of something that would have an immediate and obvious impact on reducing starvation and improving people's health through better diet. And that tells me where the sympathies of the people in the media are, and how important is to have diversity of opinion in the media to combat bias; relying on a near uniformly biased group to self-control their way to objectivity just doesn't work. Far better to have multiple sources provide multiple biases and viewpoints.

MSNBC's Lack of Ratings, or the Phil Effect

The LA times is reporting that MSNBC is thinking about how to restructure its lineup. Given how awful there ratings are, I'm not surprised. I do have to chuckle at this paragraph in the article:

"As for Phil Donahue, whose widely heralded return to television hasn't lifted the channel as much as had been hoped, he is expected to spend much more time in front of a studio audience, as he did in his long-running daytime talk show, starting later in the month."

I thought Donahue's ratings were so lousy, the ratings hadn't lifted at all, they'd sunk. And I suppose the studio audience is just a way to dilute Phil (which is the problem with the show), but what they need to put him in front of is a TV in his living room, and not in front of a camera in a studio, audience or no audience. Heck, you or I could get better ratings than Phil's getting, and I don't even know who you are.