Media Minions

Part way down, there is a set of articles on media ownership concentration.

Journalism is honorable and valuable, because journalists pursue interests of society pursued by no one else. When they stop doing so, when they become antagonistic not just to corruption in the power-wielding institutions of society, but to the society itself, to its values and interests, then they cease to be honorable and valuable, and become simply villains and traitors.

Likewise, when journalists simply become instruments wielded by villainous institutions of power, they are no more than villains. While FDR waged his war on America, seizing monetary metal by edict, spending tax revenue to bribe farmers to let their fields go fallow, setting industrial prices and wages by edict, and otherwise imposing command economics, he could count on the White House press corps to act as cheerleaders. For the twelve years of FDR's presidency, they served FDR, not their readers. They were so thorough, they even kept FDR's paralysis secret, through all twelve years of his presidency. It was a unanimous conspiracy of silence by unrepentant fans of FDR and his command economics.

``We have yet to prove we can win a war in this media environment.''
-Jim Pinkerton, 2004-Dec-4, on Fox News Watch

``The madmen have taken over the asylum and now, dressed in white lab coats, they pronounce the rest of the world insane.''
-Orson Scott Card, 2004-Jul-12 (complete article below)

``The media has taken over and delivers news in the framework of their bias. Your letter was an antidote to the daily poison of the New York Times and Washington Post -- plus now the Los Angeles Times.''
-Ronald Reagan, in a 1988-May letter to George Murphy, late California senator and longtime friend of Reagan, cited in the Washington Post, 2004-Sep-29, p.C3

``This bias is unconscious. They don't even know they're biased.''
-Mort Kondracke, 2004-May-29, "Beltway Boys" on Fox News Channel, commenting on the liberalism of self-described ``moderate'' journalists, as revealed in recent Pew journalist survey results

``Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and that strives to be independent of undue commercial or governmental influence....But we don't wear the political collar of our owners or the government or any political party. It is that legacy we must protect with our diligent stewardship. To do so means we must be aware of the energetic effort that is now underway to convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise of, in disinformation, of alarming proportions, this attempt to convince the audience of the world's most ideology-free newspapers that they're being subjected to agenda-driven news reflecting a liberal bias.''
-Howell Raines, then executive editor of the New York Times, 2003-Feb-20, accepting the ``George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award'' at a National Press Foundation dinner shown live on C-SPAN2

``Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.''
-Daniel Okrent, "public editor" (akin to ombudsman) of the New York Times, 2004-Jul-25 (full article below)

``I thought he made some very good points. There is just no question that I, among others, have a liberal bias. I mean, I'm consistently liberal in my opinions. And I think some of the, I think Dan is transparently liberal. Now, he may not like to hear me say that. I always agree with him, too. But I think he should be more careful. I think Goldberg, Bernie, he was a very good reporter, you know. He said some very true things. There's only one thing about it: He just has a great knack for being a jerk, Bernie Goldberg.''
-Andy Rooney, 2002-Jun-5, on Larry King Live, regarding Bernard Goldberg's Bias

``The power to control information is a major lever in the control of society. Giving citizens a choice in ideas and information is as important as giving them a choice in politics. If a nation has narrowly controlled information it will soon have narrowly controlled politics.''
-Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly

``A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.''
-President James Madison, "Notes on Virginia"

``If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.''
-Thomas Jefferson

``In 1712, in response to a message from Queen Anne (Hansard's Parliamentary History of England, vol. 6, p. 1063), Parliament imposed a tax upon all newspapers and upon advertisements. Collett, vol. I, pp. 8-10. That the main purpose of these taxes was to suppress the publication of comments and criticisms objectionable to the Crown does not admit of doubt. Stewart, Lennox and the Taxes on Knowledge, 15 Scottish Historical Review, 322-327. There followed more than a century of resistance to, and evasion of, the taxes, and of agitation for their repeal. In the article last referred to (p. 326), which was written in 1918, it was pointed out that these taxes constituted one of the factors that aroused the American colonists to protest against taxation for the purposes of the home government; and that the revolution really began when, in 1765, that government sent stamps for newspaper duties to the American colonies.
     These duties were quite commonly characterized as 'taxes on knowledge,' a phrase used for the purpose of describing the effect of the exactions and at the same time condemning them. That the taxes had, and were intended to have, the effect of curtailing the circulation of newspapers, and particularly the cheaper ones whose readers were generally found among the masses of the people, went almost without question, even on the part of those who defended the act. May (Constitutional History of England, 7th Ed ., vol. 2, p. 245), after discussing the control by 'previous censure,' says: '... a new restraint was devised in the form of a stamp duty on newspapers and advertisements,-avowedly for the purpose of repressing libels. This policy, being found effectual in limiting the circulation of cheap papers, was improved upon in the two following reigns, and continued in high esteem until our own time.' Collett (vol. I, p. 14), says: 'Any man who carried on printing or publishing for a livelihood was actually at the mercy of the Commissioners of Stamps, when they chose to exert their powers.'
     Citations of similar import might be multiplied many times; but the foregoing is enough to demonstrate beyond peradventure that in the adoption of the English newspaper stamp tax and the tax on advertisements, revenue was of subordinate concern; and that the dominant and controlling aim was to prevent, or curtail the opportunity for, the acquisition of knowledge by the people in respect of their governmental affairs. It is idle to suppose that so many of the best men of England would for a century of time have waged, as they did, stubborn and often precarious warfare against these taxes if a mere matter of taxation had been involved. The aim of the struggle was not to relieve taxpayers from a burden, but to establish and preserve the right of the English people to full information in respect of the doings or misdoings of their government. Upon the correctness of this conclusion the very characterization of the exactions as 'taxes on knowledge' sheds a flood of corroborative light. In the ultimate, an informed and enlightened public opinion was the thing at stake; for, as Erskine, in his great speech in defense of Paine, has said, 'The liberty of opinion keeps governments themselves in due subjection to their duties.' Erskine's Speeches, High's Ed., vol. I, p. 525. See May's Constitutional History of England (7th Ed.) vol. 2, pp. 238-245.''
-Justice George Sutherland, 1936-Feb-10, decision of the US Supreme Court, Grosjean v. American Press Co.: 297 U.S. 233, 246

``The Internet is a frightful danger to all of us.''
-Walter Cronkite, in a speech given at the University of California - Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism

``The Congress shall have power [...] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors [emphasis mine -AMPP Ed.] the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; [...]''
-US Constitution, article 1, section 8

HOWARD BEALE: ``We are no longer an industrialized society; we aren't even a post-industrial or technological society. We are now a corporate society, a corporate world, a corporate universe. This world is a vast cosmology of small corporations orbiting around larger corporations who, in turn, revolve around giant corporations, and this whole endless, eternal, ultimate cosmology is expressly designed for the production and consumption of useless things . . . ''
NARRATOR: ``By the end of June, The Howard Beale Show was down eleven points, a catastrophic condition.'' -from the 1976 movie Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky

``The reality is that wealth can be translated into information power, and that the apathy of the people is allowing private wealth to control public information. We are very, very close to private tyranny.''
-Robert David Steele, President of Open Source Solutions, from God, Man, & Information: Comments to Interval In-House, 1998-Mar-9

recommended reading: Gabriel Schoenfeld's essay, “Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act?”, from Commentary Magazine, 2006-Mar. An excerpt:

What the New York Times has done is nothing less than to compromise the centerpiece of our defensive efforts in the war on terrorism. If information about the NSA program had been quietly conveyed to an al-Qaeda operative on a microdot, or on paper with invisible ink, there can be no doubt that the episode would have been treated by the government as a cut-and-dried case of espionage. Publishing it for the world to read, the Times has accomplished the same end while at the same time congratulating itself for bravely defending the First Amendment and thereby protecting us—from, presumably, ourselves.

from OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jul-21, by James Taranto, from Best of the Web:

Great Moments in Journalism

From an Associated Press Washington dispatch:

"We'd love to have a cease-fire," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. "But Hezbollah has to be part of it. And at this point, there's no indication that Hezbollah intends to lay down arms."

The AP headline? "U.S. Opposed to Cease-Fire With Hezbollah."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Nov-23, p.A17, by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.:

The Rational Herd

A handy idea for making sense of the modern world is the idea of an "availability cascade." It employs economics to explain how people come to hold faddish beliefs, even when those beliefs are at odds with other beliefs they hold or information they possess.

You can see this dynamic in Washington's lowbrow burlesque over gasoline prices. The idea is also known as rational herding. Senators in the recent grilling of energy CEOs couldn't have made it plainer that they were flinging charges of manipulation not because they believed them but because they believed their constituents believe them. Senators also let it be known they were perfectly prepared to enact unwise policies rather than argue with constituent misperceptions.

Said Republican Pete Domenici: "Polls show that our people have a growing suspicion that the oil companies are taking unfair advantage of the current market conditions to line their coffers with excess profits . . . My constituents think that somebody rigs these prices, that in the process somebody is getting ripped off."

Said Democrat Byron Dorgan, explaining why he was forced to introduce a bill confiscating the "windfall" profits of oil companies: "A consumer says to us, 'You know, Mr. and Mrs. Politician, what I see are big economic interests getting rich here.'"

This hand-washing is the essence of childishness but the political class is far from the helpless sock puppet of an ignorant or misinformed public. The same voters, in any poll, would happily affirm that the world is running out of oil, that the supply is controlled by unreliable foreigners. Yet let gasoline rise to $3.00 a gallon, and suddenly they believe that only the ruthless profiteering of oil companies stands between them and cheap and abundant gasoline.

The public doesn't adopt beliefs directly at odds with its other beliefs without help. In the latest instance, help came from state attorneys general who, at the first sign of a spiking gas prices, ran to the nearest TV cameras and proclaimed crackdowns on price gouging. It came from the media and politicians declaiming against Exxon's quarterly profit of $10 billion as aberrant and suspicious -- never mind that at 10% of sales, Exxon's profit margin was hardly out of line with those of other industries.

'Availability cascade" is a term coined by Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran in an important 1999 Stanford Law Review article. Their work follows distinguished prior work on informational cascades (when people knowing little about an issue take their cue from others) and reputational cascades (involving the rational incentive to go along with the crowd). All owe a debt to the Nobel Prize-winning work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who coined the term "availability bias" for people's willingness to judge the odds of a given event occurring based on how readily an example comes to mind.

The key is to remember that acquiring information is costly and that people look for shortcuts. Imagine a situation in which gifts are being distributed in red and blue boxes. You don't know what the boxes contain but everyone in line is asking for a red box. Therefore, you ask for a red box too, assuming they must know something you don't and because you want to appear "in the know" too.

This is rational herding. Now consider that everyone was thinking just like you, and that the chain began only because a prominent individual was seen picking a red box.

Put aside the reliance on jargon: That even intelligent people are capable of holding passionate views on matters to which they have given little thought or study is hardly a revelation. A plausible explanation indeed is that such people model their beliefs on the apparent beliefs of others whom they presume to be better informed.

Though the authors focused in their original article on environmental scares (and cited the presence of "availability entrepreneurs" who try to advance their agendas by inciting public misperceptions), their reasoning is widely applicable. After all, what was the collective estimate of the world's intelligence agencies about Saddam's WMD but an informational cascade? And, with rather more deliberation, what are Democrats now trying to create but an availability cascade for the belief that the Bush administration "lied" about Saddam's capabilities and intentions?

Messrs. Kuran and Sunstein used their Stanford article to suggest formal mechanisms to slow availability cascades that "spread empirically baseless information" and create "formidable political pressure in support of wasteful or counterproductive regulations." Among their ideas were creating a respected website to retail accurate risk information and greater reliance on formal risk-benefit analysis and peer review in the legislative and regulatory process.

Pierre Lemeiux, an economist at the University of Quebec who has also explored the practical implications of this work, points to cascade theory as reinforcing the classical case for protecting unpopular speech and cultivating the checks and balances of a decentralized state.

The danger of public herding in the media age is obvious but it can be overstated. Informational cascades are inherently fragile -- because they're based on slight information, thus ripe to be reversed when better information becomes available. It's the "reputational cascades" -- in which influential members of the public adopt positions based on fear of unpopularity or career damage -- and the resulting unnatural unanimity among elites that poses the real danger. So the senators rushing to enact punitive attacks on oil companies -- and blaming public opinion for making them do it -- let themselves off the hook too easily.

from CNN.com, 2009-Jan-15, by Elizabeth Landau:

Why so many minds think alike

You're in a room with 10 other people who seem to agree on something, but you hold the opposite view. Do you say something? Or do you just go along with the others?

Decades of research show people tend to go along with the majority view, even if that view is objectively incorrect. Now, scientists are supporting those theories with brain images.

A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the "oops area" becomes extra active, while the "reward area" slows down, making us think we are too different.

"We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment," said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.

Participants, all female, had to rate 222 faces based on physical beauty on a scale from 1 to 8. Afterwards, researchers told each participant either that the average score was higher or that it was lower than her rating. Some participants were told the average rating was equal to her rating. The researchers then chatted with the participant before suddenly asking the participant to do the rating again. Most subjects changed their opinion toward the average.

The two leading theories of conformity are that people look to the group because they're unsure of what to do, and that people go along with the norm because they are afraid of being different, said Dr. Gregory Berns, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

Berns' research, which he describes in the book "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently," found that brain mechanisms associated with fear and anxiety do play a part in situations where a person feels his or her opinion goes against the grain.

Participants looked at projections of three-dimensional objects, and had to identify which shapes were similar. As with the new study in Neuron, participants tended to shift their opinion to the majority view, although in this case the problems had objectively correct answers. The effect was also more potent in this experiment because actors were in the room to simulate a group with a shared opinion, he said.

But brain images revealed participants were not lying just to fit in. Changes in the activation of the visual part of the brain suggest the group opinion actually changed participants' perceptions of what they saw.

One reason behind conformity is that, in terms of human evolution, going against the group is not beneficial to survival, Berns said. There is a tremendous survival advantage to being in a community, he said.

"Our brains are exquisitely tuned to what other people think about us, aligning our judgments to fit in with the group," Berns said.

The most famous experiments in the field were conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. He found that many people gave incorrect answers about matching lines printed on cards, echoing the incorrect answers of the actors in the room.

But unlike Berns' finding that fear and anxiety relate to this effect, Asch saw conformity studies reflections of people's reliance on one another for knowledge of the world, experts say.

The darker side of conformity relates to Stanley Milgram's experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, in which most people obeyed orders to deliver electric shocks to an innocent person in the next room. As in these studies, subjects caved into social pressure, presumably going against their own previous moral convictions.

The research calls into question decision-making bodies that operate by consensus, Berns said. For example, in the U.S. legal system, many cases are decided by the unanimous judgment of the members of a jury.

"You can't separate those judgments from the fact that you have 12 people who have to come to a unanimous decision, and have to conform their opinion to each other, so of course it will distort how they view evidence," he said.

"Any type of group decision-making process that does not require unanimous decisions is likely to make a better one," Berns said. "That applies to committees in particular."

What does it take to break the conformity effect?

Asch talked about the power of the "minority of one." When a unanimous group pressures the individual, that group is weakened as soon as one person breaks off.

"Anyone inclined to draw too pessimistic conclusions from this report would do well to remind himself that the capacities for independence are not to be underestimated," Asch wrote in a 1955 "Scientific American" article describing his research. "He may also draw some consolation from a further observation: Those who participated in this challenging experiment agreed nearly without exception that independence was preferable to conformity."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Jan-8, by Jaron Lanier:

World Wide Mush

In his new book, "You Are Not A Gadget," online pioneer Jaron Lanier explains how the Internet has gone off course; a chorus of voices makes everything flat\u2014and scary

All too many of today's Internet buzzwords\u2014 including "Web 2.0," "Open Culture," "Free Software" and the "Long Tail"\u2014are terms for a new kind of collectivism that has come to dominate the way many people participate in the online world. The idea of a world where everybody has a say and nobody goes unheard is deeply appealing. But what if all of the voices that are piling on end up drowning one another out?

There's no escaping collectivism in our online world. If you search about most any topic online, for instance, you will likely be directed first to Wikipedia, a collective effort. Google Wave, a new communication tool that is intended to supplant email, encourages you to blur personal boundaries by editing what someone else has said in a conversation with you, and you can watch each other as you type so nobody gets a private moment to consider a thought before posting. And if you listen to music online, there's a good chance your listening will be guided by statistical analysis of Internet crowd preferences.

Most people know me as the "father of Virtual Reality technology." In the 1980s and 1990s, I was a young computer scientist and entrepreneur working on how to apply virtual reality to things like surgical simulation. But I was also part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working.

Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

There's a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn't proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code\u2014like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe's Flash\u2014 always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth.

Actually, Silicon Valley is remarkably good at not making collectivization mistakes when our own fortunes are at stake. If you suggested that, say, Google, Apple and Microsoft should be merged so that all their engineers would be aggregated into a giant wiki-like project\u2014well you'd be laughed out of Silicon Valley so fast you wouldn't have time to tweet about it. Same would happen if you suggested to one of the big venture-capital firms that all the start-ups they are funding should be merged into a single collective operation.

But this is exactly the kind of mistake that's happening with some of the most influential projects in our culture, and ultimately in our economy.

Digital collectivism might seem participatory and democratic, but it's painting us into a corner from which we will have to concoct an awkward escape. It is strange to me that this isn't more obvious to many of my Silicon Valley colleagues.

The U.S. made a fateful decision in the late 20th century to routinely cede manufacturing and other physical-world labors to foreign competitors so that we could focus more on lucrative, comfortable intellectual activities like design, entertainment and the creation of other types of intellectual property. That formulation still works for certain products that remain within a system of proprietary control, like Apple's iPhone.

Unfortunately, we were also making another decision at the same time: that the very idea of intellectual property impedes information flow and sharing. Over the last decade, many of us cheered as a lot of software, music and news became free, but we were shooting ourselves in the collective feet.

On the one hand we want to avoid physical work and instead benefit from intellectual property. On the other hand, we're undermining intellectual property so that information can roam around for nothing, or more precisely as bait for advertisements. That's a formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.

The "open" paradigm rests on the assumption that the way to get ahead is to give away your brain's work\u2014your music, writing, computer code and so on\u2014and earn kudos instead of money. You are then supposedly compensated because your occasional dollop of online recognition will help you get some kind of less cerebral work that can earn money. For instance, maybe you can sell custom branded T-shirts.

We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.

And it's going to get worse. Before too long\u2014in 10 years, I'd guess\u2014cheap home robots will be able to make custom T-shirts from free designs off the Internet. When that day comes, then a T-shirt's design will be no more valuable than recorded music is today.

The T-shirt-making robot is only one example of a general principle. As technology gets better and better, more and more jobs will essentially become threatened, just like today's jobs for reporters or recording musicians.

One of the bright spots in the employment picture for the U.S. is in health-care jobs, such as those related to elder care. But the Japanese are developing health-care robots to anticipate the needs of their aging population. When those robots get good and cheap, which they probably will within a couple of decades, a lot of health-care jobs in the U.S. will either go away or become much less well-paid.

This isn't how things should be. Improving technology is supposed to create ever more comfortable and cerebral jobs for people. Some kind of intellectual-property system is the only way Americans, or people anywhere, can earn money in the long, long term, as technology gets very good.

The owners of big computer resources on the Internet, like Google, will be able to make money from the open approach for a long time, of course, by routing advertisements, but middle-class people will be increasingly asked to accept a diet of mere kudos. No one should feel insulated from this trend. Poverty has a way of trickling up. Once everyone is aggregated, what will be left to be advertised?

All too often, a youthful perspective falls prey to the fallacy of collectivism. I fell prey to it myself. In my early 20s, I lived in collective households and belonged to food co-ops, as did most of my friends. I recall these things now as harmless diversions, more of a way of extending the experience of childhood than an attempt at revolution.

Youthful fascination with collectivism is in part simply a way to address perceived "unfairness." If everyone shares, then a young person arriving on the scene fresh will not have less than an older person who has been around for a while.

This is all harmless enough, but the pattern can be manipulated in dangerous ways. I don't want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that. When they work together, I hope they'll do so in competitive, genuinely distinct teams so that they can get honest feedback and create big-time innovations that earn royalties, instead of spending all their time on crowd-pleasing gambits to seek kudos. This is not just so that they and their children will thrive, but so that they won't become a mob, which, as history has shown us again and again, is a vulnerability of human nature.

Jaron Lanier is known as the father of virtual-reality technology and has worked on the interface between computer science and medicine, physics, and neuroscience. This essay is adapted from his book "You Are Not a Gadget," due out next week from Knopf.

from Commentary Magazine, 2010-January, by Stephen Hunter:

James Cameron's Unbelievium

Avatar, the latest cinematic science-fiction epic, turns out to be a half-a-billion-dollar case of reinventing the Ferris wheel. The final product is a hyper-gaudy, brainless attraction that goes round and round and deposits you exactly where it picked you up, only you're poorer and dumber and you'll never get your 2 hours and 40 minutes back.

The longtime dream project of writer-director James Cameron, the perpetrator of Titanic, Avatar is big, impressive, and stupid. In fact it's so stupid, it might well be called stupefying. What is so mystifying about it is that a man of Cameron's technical sophistication could be so blinded by the banality of his vision. Stylistically, Cameron draws his inspiration from two sources, the westerns of the 1950s and the Vietnam War of the 1960s, about which he is an expert, having watched it on television.

The plot is a perdurable liberal gizmo, the noble-turncoat thing. It was first (and best) featured in Delmer Daves's gritty 1950 western Broken Arrow, with James Stewart, Debra Paget, and Jeff Chandler as Cochise, in which the Indian chief saves Stewart's character and lobbies for peace. In the late 1960s, the message became ugly and violent, shaded by Vietnam; Soldier Blue re-created in slo-mo a famed Custer massacre, and A Man Called Horse showed an imperialist white man going native. And of course the ne plus ultra of noble-turncoat expressions arrived in 1992, the appallingly cloying Dances with Wolves, an atrocity sprung on the gullible by Kevin Costner, in which an American soldier actually becomes a Sioux and fights against his own countrymen.

Cameron adds high-tech production and science-fiction tropes to this 19th-century fable. His story is set on a planet called Pandora 150-odd years down the pike. The times may have changed, but Western manunkind is still up to its dirty tricks: it has invaded the Endoric splendors of this jungle paradise strictly for exploitation, as a gigantic corporate entity with a military subdivision means to strip the place bare of a mineral called (is this somebody's idea of a joke?) “unobtainium.” They mine by applied destruction. Gigantic bulldozers grind the flowers and the trees and the birds and the bees to pulp and gravel, splintering thousand-year-old majestic Redwoods in order to uncover a vein of the dull space-gold that is sent back to home-planet Earth for God knows what purposes. Surely Cameron missed a trick here: could he not have specified unobtanium to be a key ingredient in producing prolonged sexual experiences in aging white men?

But just think how much more provocative the movie would have been had unobtanium been a source of cheap, abundant, clean energy or a cure for cancer or some other plague on the universe—maybe a universal pain debilitator, without narcotic side effects. Then, of course, the cost-benefit analysis that underlies most “exploitation” of Third World resources would come into play, and the issue would become genuinely interesting. But Cameron wants to keep it at the greenie agitprop level.

In any event, the problem is that Pandora is peopled by small tribes of eco-Sioux called the Na'vi, pictured by Cameron as 10-foot-tall refugees from Blue Man Group. These creatures are imbued with an unusual grace and mobility, cute chipmunk ears, 22-inch waists, and a litany of Third World affectations such as dreds, warpaint, and beads. They glide noiselessly through the snarled trees, leap the lumpy boulders, slide in Tarzanic freedom on the ever-convenient freeway of vines, even patrol the skies from atop giant flying lizards, and, when pressed, fire off arrows the size of telephone poles. All this without ever getting their blue toes dirty.

_____________

I suppose Cameron means to make the Na'vi some kind of ideal of eco-purity—an Aryan race of Übermensch in über-harmony with the environment—but, like so many of his creations, the conceit feels a little off. Despite the highest technology ever deployed in feature filmmaking, he can't get much out of their faces, which remain Olmec stylizations throughout, with an upper nasal thickness that suggests that Woody Harrelson was the Genghis Khan of Pandora. Their movements are so balletic as to make them even more unreal, which, coupled with V-shaped torsos and Japanese-anime eyes, adds up to a race of creatures for which we are required to feel empathy (that empathy is the fulcrum of the movie) but cannot. They remain distant, even comical, ectoplasms of Picasso's id after an absinthe binge during his blue period.

The problem with them, as a Marine officer turned corporate mercenary puts it, is that they're “damned hard to kill.” Ordinary military means are stifled by their guerrilla skills. (Sound familiar?) Thus the corporation has invested in a bioscience initiative to complement its mining and military components run by a small group of rump intellectuals (headed by Sigourney Weaver, in the movie's best performance) whose superior intelligence and freedom from the greed for unobtanium and for kills allows them to see the bigger picture and, in classic intellectual expression of instinct, attempt to subvert the corporation's aims.

_____________

They create avatars—artificially created biomechanical Na'vi replicants with which humans can mind-meld. The avatars are then dropped in the jungles, though it's a homo sapiens brain in their skull cavity. The object is for the faux-aliens to penetrate Na'vi tribal culture and either attempt to nudge the tribe toward a diplomatic solution or, failing that, steer it into a kill zone. It's kind of like the CIA's Vietnam-era Operation Phoenix. But of course the Stockholm syndrome comes into full play. The avatars quickly see the Na'vi point of view, enter the Na'vi culture, intuit the Na'vi moral superiority, fall in love with the Na'vi chicks, and yearn for and in some cases fight for Na'vi victory.

Our hero is grunt Jake Sully, well played by the young Australian Sam Worthington. Jake's a paraplegic Marine fulfilling his late twin brother's contract (the fact that they are a perfect genetic match enables him to get into the program without prescreening). He immediately reaches an allegiance with the military division's commanding officer (the great Stephen Lang in the least great performance of his career as a one-note buffoon blowhard), who makes Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now seem positively Dostoevskian in his complexity.

But freed from the blasphemous culture of the military, softened by the ambivalences of the intellectuals, and impressed by the grace and delicacy of a Na'vi princess, Worthington's Jake is soon leading the Na'vi against the oppressors. He's gone native in ways Lawrence of Arabia would never understand. Thus the last half of the movie becomes essentially a battle hymn of the Na'vi republic in which we are invited to side with the Blues against the oppressive oppression of the oppressors who would actually destroy the Na'vi's most sacred site in order to obtain the unobtanium. (Once they obtain it, do they call it “Obtainedium”?)

Perhaps I'm thinking too hard about all this. After all, there's not that much to think about. The issues play out on the rebus level, and the script feels as if it were written by the old and crabby Brecht in the East German paradise of 1953. Humans bad, Na'vi good, 24/7, without subtlety, nuance, tonal variety, political sophistication, complexity, or much in the way of characterization.

_____________

You could think of the movie as the answer to a 12-year-old's What-if question: what if the Lakota Sioux of 1877 fought the First Air Cav of 1969? Cameron has a reputation for action sequences and has electrified audiences throughout his career; particularly in his breakthrough film, The Terminator, he brought a new energy to the generic staleness of the gunfight and gave that movie a dynamism that has sustained his career. But the fights here have yielded to the generic; they are mostly on the level of men running at each other amid huge blasts of earth and wood pulp. A final confrontation is an airborne battle between the Na'vi aboard pterodactyls and the corporate militiamen in their futurized Hueys. Perhaps younger people, schooled by cyberfantasy to enjoy the mixture of genres, can get with it; but to me, blue Indians on flying lizards against helicopter gunships just seemed like a fool's gold called Unwatchablanium.

If the movie has a pleasure, it's to be found in the fretwork. Cameron's control-freak personality seems to have spent at least $200 million of his reported $500 million budget on exquisite if meaningless detail. Each helicopter cockpit, for example, has not one but three holographic screens: forward, port, and starboard, and each animated with a steady flow on mil-spec graphics. To what end? Were the two extra boards worth it? Then there's the planet itself, its flora, its fauna, its misty waterfalls, and endless rolling forests and far-off mountains. Too bad the plot gets in the way of what, to pervert a Pauline Kael line, could otherwise be called nature-Nazi calendar art. Each insect, each vertebrate, each leaf, each stem, seems realized to perfection, some of them quite lovely. My favorite was a helo-bug, some kind of shell-less oyster affixed to rotating whirls of blade that give it a soft, easeful trajectory.

_____________

But all the way through, small idiocies intrude, indicating a lack of rigor on the part of the conceptualizers. Why, for example, would one bird-form be bright red? Why in fact would the Na'vi be blue? Has off-world nature given up on the principle of protective coloration? Why would all vertebrates have six limbs, while the birds and the humanoids have four? Why would the Na'vi's sacred site resemble the magical tree in the 1950s potboiler Raintree County? Why would a military a century and a half down the way still be using smokeless-powder cartridges and recoil-powered small arms, communicate by old-time radio, and transport personnel by carbon-fueled helicopters? Why is the only real technological advance we see here an exoskeleton fighting machine Cameron has clearly cribbed from his own Aliens (1986), where a younger Sigourney Weaver used one to stomp a queen alien?

In the end, the movie essentially decodes into a 1960s pseudo-intellectual's power-trip dream. At its most basic, Avatar is about a Green Beret from the Harvard English department. Imagine: the dreams of the cognitive elite given strength and sinew and courage and high pain endurance not to march in demonstrations but to wage actual war on behalf of the faculty. The movie watches as such a man actually takes the field and fights against the oppressors of his day, which happen to be those of our own: the nation-state, the corporation, hoi polloi, the vast and useless unenlightened. Avatar is every assistant professor's dream come true

Stephen Hunter's latest novel, I, Sniper, is out from Simon & Schuster. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2003

from the Politico.com, 2009-Dec-6, by Josh Gerstein:

NPR reporter pressured over Fox role

Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network's top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network's political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said.

According to a source, Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR's executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network's supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. The NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox's programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.

At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she'd seen no significant change in Fox's programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.

NPR's focus on Liasson's work as a commentator on Fox's “Special Report” and “Fox News Sunday” came at about the same time as a White House campaign launched in September to delegitimize the network by painting it as an extension of the Republican Party.

One source said the White House's criticism of Fox was raised during the discussions with Liasson. However, an NPR spokeswoman told POLITICO that the Obama administration's attempts to discourage other news outlets from treating Fox as a peer had no impact on any internal discussions at NPR.

Liasson defended her work for Fox by saying that she appears on two of the network's news programs, not on commentary programs with conservative hosts, the source said. She has also told colleagues that she's under contract to Fox, so it would be difficult for her to sever her ties with the network, which she has appeared on for more than a decade.

Liasson did not return phone calls seeking comment on the meetings. In an e-mail message, she declined to be interviewed for this article.

NPR spokeswoman Dana Rehm declined to discuss Liasson and her work on Fox.

“It isn't our practice to comment about internal conversations or about personnel matters, and we're not going to be changing that policy,” she said. “As part of our ongoing work we have internal conversations about talent appearances all the time that are part of our regular editorial evaluation.”

Rehm added, “There's no relationship between the White House's criticism of Fox and any discussions about Fox that we're having.”

A Fox spokesperson declined to comment on specific questions about Liasson. However, the spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said in an email: “With the ratings we have, NPR should be paying us to even be mentioned on our air.”

The White House aide behind the campaign to denounce alleged bias at Fox, then-Communications Director Anita Dunn, said she had no discussions with NPR executives about the issue. However, in an interview with NPR in mid-October, she said, “We see Fox right now as the source and the outlet for Republican Party talking points.” Dunn recently left the White House communications post.

Liasson is one of the most high-profile journalists to appear as a regular guest commentator on Fox News. A bio of Liasson posted on Fox's website describes her as a “political contributor” and says she joined the network in 1997.

Fox disputes White House charges that it is a conservative media outlet, saying it clearly differentiates between news programs and commentary from hosts such as Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

As the White House's campaign against Fox heated up in October, Liasson's work on Fox drew fire from Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate.

“By appearing on Fox, reporters validate its propaganda values and help to undermine the role of legitimate news organizations,” Weisberg wrote in an Oct. 17 Newsweek column, “Why Fox News Is Un-American.” “Respectable journalists — I'm talking to you, Mara Liasson — should stop appearing on its programs.”

from the Media Research Center's Business and Media Institute, 2009-Dec-2, by Julia A. Seymour:

12 Days, 3 Networks and No Mention of ClimateGate Scandal

Even as Copenhagen looms, broadcast news ignores e-mails suggesting warming alarmists 'manipulated' data, conspired to destroy information and thwarted peer reviews.

It’s been nearly two weeks since a scandal shook many people’s faith in the scientists behind global warming alarmism. The scandal forced the University of East Anglia (UK) to divulge that it threw away raw temperature data and prompted the temporary resignation of Phil Jones of the university’s Climate Research Unit.

Despite that resignation and calls by a U.S. senator to investigate the matter, ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programming has remained silent – not mentioning a word about the scandal since it broke on Nov. 20, even as world leaders including President Barack Obama prepare to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark next week to promote a pact to reduce greenhouse gases.

Other news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Associated Press have deemed ClimateGate worthy of reporting, but the networks were too busy reporting on celebrity car accidents and the killer whale that ate a great white shark. Instead of airing a broadcast news segment that might inform the public about the science scandal, both ABC and CBS relegated the story to their Web sites. There was one mention of the scandal on ABC’s Sunday talk show: “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

The ClimateGate scandal, as it is being called, has the hallmarks of a major news story: private emails purporting to show unethical or illegal behavior supplied by a hacker or whistleblower, high profile scientists like James Hansen and Michael Mann, and a potential conspiracy to distort science for political gain. But the networks haven’t bothered with the story.

Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist and BMI adviser, said Nov. 20 of the leaked e-mails and documents: “This isn’t a smoking gun, it’s a mushroom cloud.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded to a question about ClimateGate by insisting that “global warming is happening” and that for most people it isn’t really a question anymore. That is the same message viewers get from the network news about climate change.

An examination of morning and evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC since Nov. 20 yielded zero mentions of the scandal, even in the Nov. 25 reports about Obama going to Copenhagen to discuss the need for emissions reductions. But during the same time period, the networks reported on pro-golfer Tiger Woods’ “minor” car accident at least 37 times. They also found time to report on an orphaned Moose and the meal selection at the president’s State Dinner.

ClimateGate began after someone (hacker or whistleblower) attacked servers of University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and made thousands of e-mails and documents public. Those e-mails appear to show a conspiracy to falsify temperature data, a willingness to destroy information rather than release it under Freedom of Information (FOI) law and the intimidation of publications willing to publish skeptical articles.

CRU’s director Phil Jones admitted real CRU e-mails had been stolen when he told New Zealand’s Investigate magazine, “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.” Others argue a whistleblower was responsible for the breach.

One of those alleged e-mails was from Jones to Michael Mann (famous for his hockey stick graph of global warming) and two others appeared to indicate manipulation of scientific data.

Jones wrote: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [Sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Jones, who contributed to a chapter of the U.N.’s IPCC report, claims the term “trick” was used “colloquially as in a clever thing to do.” Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), supplied his own view of what Jones and Mann meant by hiding the decline.

Ebell wrote in the National Post: “What is the clever method that Prof. Jones learned from Prof. Mann? I think he is referring to the way Prof. Mann constructed his celebrated hockey stick graph. His proxy records showed flat temperatures for the past 1,000 years, including the past century. But everyone knows that temperatures have gone up rapidly in the past few decades … So what Prof. Mann did was splice the last few decades of surface temperature records onto his proxy record. Voila! – the hockey stick.”

The alleged e-mails were enough to force Jones’ temporary resignation. On Dec. 1, Associated Press reported that Jones is “stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.”

Other leaked e-mails asked people to delete e-mails and one said that if information was requested using FOI, it would be deleted rather than turned over:

Alleged e-mail from Jones to Mann Feb. 2, 2005:

“The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does !  The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”

In Britain, it is a crime to delete information requested under FOI.

Networks Focus on Tiger’s ‘Minor’ Accident, Sea Lions, Pete the Moose

In more than a week, the networks couldn’t be bothered to report on the ClimateGate scandal. Instead they fixated on professional golfer Tiger Woods’ car accident and the rumors surrounding the crash at least 37 times.

And ABC, CBS and NBC had even more trivial stories to discuss during that time than Woods. Somehow the networks considered a sea lion glut in San Francisco, Pete the orphaned Moose, the color of tablecloths at the state dinner, Great White shark vs. Killer Whale, a baby panda and the Sonoma, Calif. crush of grapes. All were more worthy of reporting than a scandal that prompted one U.S. senator to call for an investigation.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said on Washington Times Radio Nov. 23 that “Since Barbara Boxer is the chairman and I’m the ranking member on Environment and Public Works, if nothing happens in the next seven days, when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation because this thing is serious.”

The three broadcast networks ignored ClimateGate even in reports about the upcoming climate change conference. On Nov. 25, all three evening newscasts mentioned Obama would be going to Copenhagen. NBC’s Brian Williams called global warming “one of the biggest issues facing the planet,” But didn’t say a word about the hacked emails or possibly manipulated data that laid the foundation for emissions reductions.

But just one day earlier, CBS’s Declan McCullagh reported on CBSNews.com that Congress might investigate “whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change.” McCullagh’s lengthy story detailed the e-mail leak and reactions to it from both warming advocates and skeptics.

ABCNews.com waited until Nov. 28 to do an original report on the leaked e-mails on its Web site.

Scientists implicated…

The e-mails (which can be viewed and searched online) appear to show unethical and potentially illegal behavior on the part of prominent scientists (many of whom are involved in the UN IPCC process).

Here are just a couple of the most embarrassing e-mails that can speak for themselves:

From Kevin Trenberth to Michael Mann and others including James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer in Oct. 2009:

“The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

From Jones to Raymond Bradley, Malcolm Hughes and Michael Mann on Feb. 21, 2005:

“PS: I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!”

A May 2009 e-mail from Jones allegedly told Mann to delete e-mails regarding the Fourth IPCC draft and said Keith and Caspar would also delete the correspondence.

One scientist featured prominently in many of the CRU e-mails was Mann, whose research has long been scrutinized by other scientists. He introduced his hockey stick chart in the 1990s, but it was questioned in 1998 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard, according to a February 2005 Wall Street Journal article. In 2003 others, including mathematician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, also criticized Mann’s hockey stick.

The Journal reported at that time that Mann “tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions.”

Mann defended himself in a letter to the Washington Post on Dec. 1, 2009 saying “some have engaged in a smear campaign.” “They have stolen thousands of scientists’ personal e-mails, including some of mine, and have mined the e-mails for words or phrases whose meaning can easily be distorted,” Mann continued.

Iain Murray, a senior fellow at CEI, explained why the e-mails were so important and the three things everyone should know about ClimateGate.

“This may seem obscure, but the science involved is being used to justify the diversion of literally trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out fossil fuels. The CRU is the Pentagon of global warming science, and these documents are its Pentagon Papers,” Murray wrote.

Murray said the three vital things the documents indicated were that “the scientists discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results,” talked about “subverting the scientific peer review process” to prevent skeptics from being published, and worked to prevent disclosure of the information.

But the leaked e-mails were only the tip of the iceberg. According to The London Times online, scientists at the University of East Anglia “admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.”

That article described CRU as “the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures,” and quoted Roger Pielke, an environmental studies professor from Colorado University.

“The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us.’ So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” Pielke said.

Networks promote global warming, censor skepticism

Sadly, the willingness of the networks to capitulate to the global warming agenda and ignore other voices is not a recent phenomenon.

The Business & Media Institute has reported for years the way in which the news media have latched on to climate scares in the past 100 years (cooling, warming, cooling and now warming again). From ice age threats in the late 1800s to the warming in the 1920s, before returning to cooling fears again in the 1970s, print media encouraged fears of climate apocalypse.

But even more worrisome is the way the network news media have stifled debate on the issue of climate change. BMI released a Special Report in 2008 that found global warming skeptics rarely get any say on the networks, and when they do barbs like “cynics” or “deniers” are often thrown in to undermine them.

On the networks, man-made global warming proponents overwhelmingly outnumber those with dissenting opinions. During the 2007 study window, there was an average of 13 global warming advocates for each skeptic featured. CBS had the worst ratio: 38-to-1. That report also found that the networks frequently omit the cost of so-called solutions to global warming.

In 2009, BMI found that the networks remained silent as House committee passed a cap-and-trade bill out of committee. That bill, known as Waxman-Markey, could cost $9.6 trillion in GDP loss by 2035, according to one estimate. Meanwhile, the networks ignored the bill and almost never explained what cap-and-trade meant.

Ignoring the ClimateGate scandal is just the latest in a long line of poor reporting on climate issues by the network news media. Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com told the Business & Media Institute that the fact that the networks aren’t covering the story is actually “great news for the truth.”

Morano explained that the networks are making the “classic mistake” of thinking if they ignore the story it will go away, but talk radio and the internet are getting the information out to the public without spin from the networks which he said are “heavily invested in manmade global warming.”

from the New York Times, 2009-Nov-9, printed 2009-Nov-10, p.A35, by David Brooks:

The Rush to Therapy

We're all born late. We're born into history that is well under way. We're born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn't choose. On top of that, we're born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can't control. We're thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we're doing them.

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

Among all the things we don't control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves.

The stories we select help us, in turn, to interpret the world. They guide us to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. They lead us to see certain things as sacred and other things as disgusting. They are the frameworks that shape our desires and goals. So while story selection may seem vague and intellectual, it's actually very powerful. The most important power we have is the power to help select the lens through which we see reality.

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don't see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” and then start murdering.

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did that in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn't want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people's stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It's important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn't carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility. He didn't have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn't the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

from the Washington Post, 2009-Oct-23, by Charles Krauthammer:

Fox wars
The 'post-partisan' president makes an enemies list

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he's put a horse's head in Roger Ailes's bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn't scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox "not really a news station." And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to "be led [by] and following Fox."

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration -- from exposing "green jobs" czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 "truther" to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation -- the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry -- finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.

At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House "pool" news organizations -- except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.

This was an important defeat because there's a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand "the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties." They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other -- and an otherwise imperious government.

Factions should compete, but they should also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.

But didn't Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical -- and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than those of CNN and MSNBC combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN -- which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a "Saturday Night Live" skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark that CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox's flagship 6 o'clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I'm not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She's been attacked for extolling Mao's political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one's own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

from Politico.com, 2009-Oct-20, by Josh Gerstein and Mike Allen:

White House: Media shouldn't follow Fox

A White House attempt to delegitimize Fox News – which in past times would have drawn howls of censorship from the press corps – has instead been greeted by a collective shrug.

That's true even though the motivations of the White House are clear: Fire up a liberal base disillusioned with Obama by attacking the hated Fox. Try to keep a critical news outlet off-balance. Raise doubts about future Fox stories.

But most of all, get other journalists to think twice before following the network's stories in their own coverage.

"We're doing what we think is important to make sure news is covered as fairly as possible," a White House official told POLITICO, noting how the recent ACORN scandal story started because Fox covered it “breathlessly for weeks on end.”

“And then you had a couple days of breast-beating from The Washington Post and The New York Times about whether or not they were fast enough on the ACORN story,” the official said. “And it's like: Wait a second, guys. Let's make sure that we keep perspective on what are the most important stories, and what's being driven by a network that has a perspective. Being able to make that point has been important.”

To some media observers, it's almost the definition of a “chilling effect” – a governmental attempt to steer reporters away from negative coverage – but the White House press corps has barely uttered a word of complaint.

That could be because of the perception among some journalists that Fox blurs the line between reporting and commentary - making it seem like not the most sympathetic victim.

Fox denies its news coverage is slanted, and even White House aides say the network's top correspondent there, Major Garrett, is a straight shooter. But in its non-news hours, Fox mixes in a steady diet of criticism of President Barack Obama by its prominent conservative commentators Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. It's a formula that works for Fox, with the highest ratings in cable news.

And in fact, not everyone at the network is complaining at being elevated into Obama's target-of-choice. Some of the lack of protest from the mainstream press may be driven by the sense that the assault on Fox is actually strengthening the network.

Fox officials didn't respond to a request for comment. But on Monday night, O'Reilly and former Fox News Washington Bureau chief Brit Hume seemed to be reveling in the attacks by Obama's aides.

“This is an effort in effect to quarantine Fox News and to discourage other media outlets from picking up on stories that originate here,” Hume said on “The O'Reilly Factor.” “My guess is it won't work….Look at Glenn Beck, he's having a field day with this.”

O'Reilly keeps a page on his own website that urges his audience “not to patronize or advertise with” 11 news outlets, including the St. Petersburg Times, the New Yorker, Newsday and MSNBC.

Some see the warring between the White House and Fox as a boon to both sides.

“This is a mutually beneficial deal,” said Paul Begala, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. “Fox's ratings keep going up, as they're seen as the voice of opposition to Obama. The Democrats need to do something to excite their base, which is suffering from a case of the blues.”

In the media world, the main reaction to the barrage of Fox criticism by the Obama White House has been less outrage, and more puzzlement as to what Obama's aides hope to gain by taking on the network so forcefully.

A day after White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said other journalists should no longer treat Fox as a bona fide news outlet, the comments generated only a single, tangential question at the White House's daily briefing for reporters.

Still, the comments set off alarm bells with some journalists and media analysts.

“I can never remember a White House urging news organizations to boycott other news organizations. That strikes me as unprecedented,” said Thomas DeFrank, a Washington journalist who has covered eight presidents and now serves as the bureau chief of the New York Daily News.

from Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog, 2009-Oct-27, by John Steele Gordon:

Pardon Me, but Your Sycophancy Is Showing

According to a story — unconfirmed by me — a reporter was interviewing Albert Einstein shortly after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. In the course of the conversation, the reporter asked Einstein what the speed of sound was at sea level. The physicist said he was sorry, but he couldn’t remember exactly. The reporter expressed surprise that the world’s greatest scientist didn’t know something like that. Einstein looked at him balefully over the top of his reading glasses and said, “I know where I can look it up.”

It’s amazing how many people seem not to know where to look information up, or perhaps don’t care, as they have things other than accuracy on their agenda. Take Rocco Landesman, the new head of the National Endowment of the Arts. In a speech in Brooklyn last week, he said of Barack Obama, “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.”

Oh, dear, where do I begin? Well, let’s start with grammar. It’s “the first president who,” not “the first president that.”

Second, he implicitly accuses Presidents Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Hoover, Coolidge, and Wilson of having had their memoirs, autobiographies, and other works ghosted. Many of them received research assistance (one could hardly write a modern presidential memoir without it), and many, no doubt, also received a good deal of editing. Presidents are not usually professional writers. But research and editorial assistance is by no means the same thing as resorting to a ghost writer. I can’t imagine Harry Truman using a ghost writer. Herbert Hoover wrote sixteen books in his life, including Fishing for Fun — and to Wash Your Soul, published three years after his death, and a translation (with his wife) from the Latin of De re Metallica. Just a guess, but I don’t think there are many ghosted 640-page translations around.

Woodrow Wilson was a college professor and president before entering politics. Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, his best known work and one that ran through many editions, was not ghost written.

Third, Landesman implicitly accuses Theodore Roosevelt of being, unlike Barack Obama, a second-rate writer. Roosevelt wrote a total of 38 books in his life (not to mention countless magazine articles and thousands of letters, all while holding a day job and living only sixty years). His first, The Naval War of 1812, written when he was 23, is considered a basic historical text on that subject and is still both highly readable and in print. Will The Audacity of Hope be in print a 125 years after it was published?

Fourth, Landesman seems ignorant of even the existence of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. They were written in the last months of Grant’s life (he died in agony from throat cancer three days after he finished the manuscript). They are universally regarded as the greatest military memoirs since Caesar’s Commentaries, and among the genuine masterpieces of American literature. Perhaps Mr. Landesman should give them a try if he doesn’t object to reading memoirs written by someone who had actually done something (like — you know — save the Union) before writing them.

Fifth, Lincoln never wrote a book.

What is it about Barack Obama that causes such cringe-inducing butt-kissing?

from the Associated Press, 2009-Oct-30, by Nekesa Mumbi Moody:

Sting: Obama best person to handle world's 'mess'

NEW YORK — Sting isn't a religious man, but he says President Barack Obama might be a divine answer to the world's problems.

"In many ways, he's sent from God," he joked in an interview, "because the world's a mess."

But Sting is serious in his belief that Obama is the best leader to navigate the world's problems. In an interview on Wednesday, the former Police frontman said that he spent some time with Obama and "found him to be very genuine, very present, clearly super-smart, and exactly what we need in the world."

"I can't think of anyone better qualified because of his background, his education, particularly in regard to Islam," he said.

Still, Sting acknowledged the president had a "difficult job" ahead of him.

The British singer, who released the seasonal album "On A Winter's Night" this week, said he's fascinated by American politics, Obama, and also by Obama's opponents on the right.

"It's aggressive and violent and full of fear," he said of the backlash against Obama. "They don't want change, they want things to feel the same because they feel safe there."

Sting, 58, said he's hopeful that the world's problems can be dealt with, but is frustrated that "we seem to be living in a currency of medieval ideas."

"My hope is that we can start talking about real issues and not caring about whether God cares about your hemline or your color," he said. "We are here to evolve as one family, and we can't be separate anymore."

from National Review online, 2009-Oct-17, by Mark Steyn:

A Tale of Two Soundbites
Which one sounds “divisive” to you?

Here is a tale of two soundbites. First:

“Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”

Second:

“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa. Not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is: You’re going to make choices. . . . But here’s the deal: These are your choices; they are no one else’s. In 1947, when Mao Tse-Tung was being challenged within his own party on his own plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-Shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army. . . . They had everything on their side. And people said ‘How can you win . . . ? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?’ And Mao Tse-Tung says, ‘You fight your war and I’ll fight mine . . . ’ You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things. . . . You fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.”

The first quotation was attributed to Rush Limbaugh. He never said it. There is no tape of him saying it. There is no transcript of him saying it. After all, if he had done so at any point in the last 20 years, someone would surely have mentioned it at the time.

Yet CNN, MSNBC, ABC, other networks, and newspapers all around the country cheerfully repeated the pro-slavery quotation and attributed it, falsely, to Rush Limbaugh. And planting a flat-out lie in his mouth wound up getting Rush bounced from a consortium hoping to buy the St. Louis Rams. The NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, said the talkshow host was a “divisive” figure, and famously non-divisive figures like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed the hope that, with Mister Divisive out of the picture, the NFL could now “unify.”

The second quotation — hailing Mao — was uttered back in June to an audience of high-school students by Anita Dunn, the White House communications director. I know she uttered it because I watched the words issuing from her mouth on The Glenn Beck Show on Fox News. But don’t worry. Nobody else played it.

So if I understand correctly:

Rush Limbaugh is so “divisive” that to get him fired leftie agitators have to invent racist soundbites to put in his mouth.

But the White House communications director is so un-divisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America’s young.

From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse-Tung, and the few that aren’t know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or “agrarian reformer.” What else did he do? Here, from Jonathan Fenby’s book Modern China, is the great man in a nutshell:

“Mao’s responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin.”

Hey, that’s pretty impressive when they can’t get your big final-score death toll nailed down to closer than 30 million. Still, as President Obama’s communications director might say, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50–80 million Chinamen, you may have your work cut out. But let’s stick with the Fenby figure: He killed 40–70 million Chinamen. Whoops, can you say “Chinamen” or is that racist? Oh, and sexist. So hard keeping up with the Sensitivity Police in this pansified political culture, isn’t it? But you can kill 40–70 million Chinamen and that’s fine and dandy: You’ll be cited as an inspiration by the White House to an audience of high-school students. You can be anything you want to be! Look at Mao: He wanted to be a mass murderer, and he lived his dream! You can too!

The White House now says that Anita Dunn was “joking.” Anyone tempted to buy that spin should look at the tape: If this is her Friars Club routine, she needs to work on her delivery. But, for the sake of argument, try a thought experiment:

Midway through Bush’s second term, press secretary Tony Snow goes along to Chester A. Arthur High School to give a graduation speech. “I know it looks tough right now. You’re young, you’re full of zip, but the odds seem hopeless. Let me tell you about another young man facing tough choices 80 years ago. It’s last orders at the Munich beer garden — gee, your principal won’t thank me for mentioning that — and all the natural blonds are saying, ‘But Adolf, see reason. The Weimar Republic’s here to stay, and besides the international Jewry control everything.’ And young Adolf Hitler puts down his foaming stein and stands on the table and sings a medley of ‘I Gotta Be Me,’ ‘(Learning to Love Yourself Is) The Greatest Love of All,’ and ‘The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow.’” And by the end of that night there wasn’t a Jewish greengrocer’s anywhere in town with glass in its windows. Don’t play by the other side’s rules; make your own kind of music. And always remember: You’ve gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”

Anyone think he’d still have a job?

Well, so what? All those dead Chinese are no-name peasants a long way away. What’s the big deal? If you say, “Chairman Mao? Wasn’t he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?”, you’ll be hounded from public life for saying the word “Chinks.” But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any school room in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it’s so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.

Which is odd, don’t you think? Because it suggests that our present age of politically correct hypersensitivity is not just morally unserious but profoundly decadent.

Twenty years ago this fall, the Iron Curtain was coming down in Europe. Across the Warsaw Pact, the jailers of the Communist prison states lost their nerve, and the cell walls crumbled. Matt Welch, the editor of Reason, wonders why the anniversary is going all but unobserved: Why aren’t we making more of the biggest mass liberation in history?

Well, because to celebrate it would involve recognizing it as a victory over Communism. And, after the Left’s long march through the institutions of the West, most are not willing to do that. There’s the bad totalitarianism (Nazism) and the good totalitarianism (Communism), whose apologists and, indeed, fetishists can still be found everywhere, even unto the White House.

Rush Limbaugh’s remarks are “divisive”; Anita Dunn’s are entirely normal. But don’t worry, the new Fairness Doctrine will take care of the problem.

Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.

from NewsBusters.org, 2009-Oct-15, by Lachlan Markay:

Magazine Editors' Group Creates Award Category for Obama Covers

The Magazine Publishers of America's American Society of Magazine Editors has added a category to its annual magazine cover awards: Obama. This new category is the only ASME category focused on a single person, and highlights the reverential attitude for the President widely held in the magazine publishing community.

ASME represents about 850 magazine editors nationwide. According to its website, the organization "works to preserve editorial independence." How they manage to maintain this air of objectivity while devoting an entire awards section to such a polarizing figure is a mystery.

This year's best Obama magazine cover, and recipient of ASME's Cover of the Year award, was published by Rolling Stone. Fawning coverage of president and candidate Barack Obama from the music (and wannabe left-wing politics) magazine appeared on the cover on numerous occasions. The winning cover is at right.

The other categories are Delicious; Entertainment & Celebrity; House & Home; Lifestyle; News & Business; Sexiest; Science, Technology & Nature; and Sports & Fitness.

The organization's descriptions of the five runners-up for the new Obama category could not contain their magnanimous admiration for the President. "A singularly powerful and iconic image of Obama," AMSE said of an Economist cover.

A New York Times Magazine cover displays Obama with a "deeply thoughtful and real expression."

The New Yorker (with an accentuated `O' on the cover) used a picture of the Lincoln Memorial to honor the inauguration with "a contemplative and hope-filled image." The cover's designer said the opportunity to create it was "not only flattering, it's beyond humbling."

Perhaps most ironically, another New Yorker cover "shows Obama and his advisers Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod interviewing candidates for First Dog in the Oval Office, much as they had interviewed potential Cabinet members in the previous weeks." Yes, and we all know how effective the administration's vetting process has been (see Daschle, Tom; Jones, Van; Jennings, Kevin).

The blurb describing the winning Rolling Stone cover is worshipful in its praise.

The smile says it all. Photographer Peter Yang caught up with Barack Obama in Raleigh, North Carolina, just a few days after he had finally nailed down the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Obama was exhausted, excited, relaxed, gracious, open--yet still somehow elusive. Hundreds of photographers have shot Obama over the past couple of years, but no one has quite caught his quiet charisma as Peter Yang did last June.

The new Obama category may have been added out of reverence for the President, or due to the unprecedented volume of magazine covers devoted to him. Either case would demonstrate the undeniable veneration for Obama in the glossy pages of the nation's periodicals.

from Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog, 2009-Oct-1, by Jonathan Tobin:

What if Polanski Were a Republican Senator?

In today's New York Times arts section, film industry correspondent Brooks Barnes analyzes Hollywood's attitude to fugitive sex predator/Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski.

Most prominent artists have lined up behind the push to let the famed director off the hook for having drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl over 30 years ago. Polanski fled the country to avoid sentencing after he plead guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor and has since lived in a cushy exile in Europe. After his recent arrest, Polanski is currently sitting in a Swiss jail awaiting possible extradition to the United States.

The fact that Harvey Weinstein, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen (at least the latter is no hypocrite given his own past actions) are calling Polanski's arrest an outrage shows how disconnected the film industry is from the rest of the country when it comes to morality. However, according to Barnes, Hollywood's main problem with Polanski is that few of his films have made money recently. “Hollywood has most assuredly become a chillier place for Mr. Polanski over the last decade,” Barnes reports. “It's a judgment that this guy is no longer readily commercial.”

But in an attempt to understand what he describes as the industry's mixed feelings about the director, Barnes draws an absurd analogy between the fugitive rapist and Elia Kazan, the famed theater and film director who testified about secret Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “The closest equivalent is Elia Kazan. In some film circles, Mr. Kazan was forever a pariah for his friendly testimony in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Others finally looked beyond his McCarthy-era behavior to focus on his outsize directing talent.”

Thus, according to Barnes, telling the truth to Congress about the influence of active Communist-party members who supported Stalin in the film industry but who pretended to be merely liberal supporters of civil liberties is the moral equivalent of raping a 13-year-old!

Of course, not everyone in the industry who talked to Barnes has completely lost their moral compass:

“I'm kind of appalled,” said Alison Arngrim, an actress who is best known for her work in `Little House on the Prairie' and who has spoken publicly in the past about having been sexually molested as a child. “If Roman Polanski were a Catholic priest or a Republican senator, would these people feel the same way?”

Not likely.

from Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog, 2009-Oct-1, by Peter Wehner:

Media Mistrust

I wanted to pick up on your point, Jen, regarding Democrat Alan Grayson, who in the context of the health-care debate accused Republicans of wanting people to “die quickly” and, when asked whether he should apologize, said, “I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven't voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.”

For the record, and for those keeping count, Democrats have now accused critics of ObamaCare of perpetrating “lies” (President Obama), of being “evil-mongers” (Harry Reid), of using “un-American” tactics (Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer), of being members of “the mob” (DNC video), and have likened them to the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (Brian Baird). But of course it is the “fringe right” that is responsible for incivility in American politics today. Just ask Tom Friedman and the rest of the MSM. They react with fury when Republicans and conservatives cross certain lines yet react with relative indifference when Democrats and liberals do the same. Republican incivility borders on a criminal offense; Democratic incivility falls under the category “Boys will be boys.”

This hypocrisy and moral double standard isn't the only reason the media is one of the least trusted institutions in America today. But it's one of the reasons.

from Commentary Magazine, 2009-Oct, by Jonah Goldberg:

How Politics Destroyed a Great TV Show

Either you are with me, or you are my enemy!” shouted a young Darth Vader in 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, one of the execrable prequels to the original films by George Lucas. In response to this all-or-nothing provocation, a disgusted Obi-Wan Kenobi replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!”

Siths are Jedi Knights who have given themselves over to the Dark Side by embracing the evil emotions of anger, envy, and revenge. Readers of Commentary can be forgiven for neither knowing nor caring about this. But it is worth noting that for millions of Star Wars enthusiasts, it was very serious stuff indeed. Lucas revived, if not reinvented, the entire genre of science fiction in the 1970s by embracing bold and mythic depictions of good and evil and the heroic battle of the former against the latter. For decades, the established premise of the Star Wars franchise was that the universe is divided into the Dark Side and the Light Side of the “Force.” Jedi Knights—champions of all that is noble and virtuous—were warned never to give in, even a little, to the Dark Side, lest they lose their souls. If all that is not about “absolutes,” then what on earth (or in a galaxy far, far away) is? And Lucas threw it all away to get in a dig at George W. Bush.

His swipe at Bush’s famous iteration of the doctrine that would bear his name—“You are either with us or against us”—in a few seconds unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise. Such gratuitous political self-indulgence saturated the popular culture during the Bush years, in fare that had absolutely nothing to do with the policies of the White House.

In the two (awful) sequels to The Matrix, a -science-fiction hit about humans being used as a fuel source by a world overtaken by machines, Bush is visually compared to Adolf Hitler. In the Pixar film Wall-E, the “global CEO” of an environmentally devastated Planet Earth apes Bush’s “stay the course” line. In -X-Files: I Want to Believe, Bush and J. Edgar Hoover are paired. On television, Bush hatred or liberal antiwar paranoia suffused the NBC series Law and Order like a metastasizing cancer. The hospital show Grey’s Anatomy, the attorney show Boston Legal, the cop show Bones, and even the mother-daughter show Gilmore Girls included notable and needless instances, some playful and others less so, of what Charles Krauthammer dubbed Bush Derangement Syndrome.

In most of these cases, political asides can be shrugged off. Hollywood is a very liberal place, Bush and the war were indeed very unpopular, so expecting producers and actors to escape the temptation to get their shots in would be like expecting them to treat global warming with skepticism. Denouncing the ideological intrusion into the dialogue of Grey’s Anatomy as a corruption of artistic integrity offers such televised junk more respect than it deserves. After all, few can look upon Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and wistfully ponder what might have been.

---

That is not the case with a cable-television series called Battlestar Galactica, a remarkable piece of work that nonetheless committed artistic and creative suicide owing to the intrusion of the political beliefs of its creator and writers, which eventually made a complete hash of their own show.

A remake of a campy 1970s science-fiction series made in the wake of the box-office receipts of the original Star Wars, the gritty, intelligent, and pensive Battlestar Galactica came as a startling surprise upon the premiere of the six-hour miniseries that began its run in 2003. The story line involves a futuristic human civilization spanning 12 planetary colonies. Robots (called Cylons) originally invented to serve as slaves evolve into sentient enemies bent on destroying their former masters. In the original series, the Cylons were depicted as fairly absurd tin men. In the new version, the evolved Cylons are human doppelgängers capable of infiltrating human society (the tin men, far more frightening this time, are still around but serve as shock troops). The doppelgängers are also essentially immortal—if one is killed, his or her consciousness is instantly transmitted into a new, identical body.

In the debut miniseries, we are introduced to a civilization very much like our own: open, decent, democratic. In fulfillment of a supposedly divine plan, the Cylons spread out among humanity’s 20 billion people, taking advantage of that openness and decency, as well as society’s boredom with military preparedness (memories of the last Cylon war have faded away). They orchestrate a 9/11 on a genocidal scale, murdering the vast majority of humanity in a perfectly timed nuclear cataclysm. An aging battlestar called Galactica—essentially a space-borne aircraft carrier—poised to become a museum exhibit narrowly escapes the -Armageddon with a tiny ragtag convoy of humanity’s survivors. Outmatched, outgunned, and outstrategized, they must all try to survive against a foe that needs no rest and has no conscience.

These premises gave Battlestar Galactica an ideal foundation to play off the headlines of the day. Indeed, as Newsweek’s Joshua Alston noted in December 2008, Battlestar Galactica captured “better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world.” The tensions between security and freedom, civilian and military leadership, healthy fear versus debilitating phobia, were explored brilliantly. The series won Program of the Year from the Television Critics Association, as well as numerous other awards. Time hailed it as the best thing on television in 2005, and the series earned a ranking in its top 100 TV shows of all time. From National Review to Rolling Stone, the series was justifiably hailed for its gritty realism, superb acting, and deft direction.

Originally, the series was very difficult to pigeonhole ideologically. An avid student of martial culture, Ron Moore, its guiding creative hand, treated the military with deep respect. William Adama, Galactica’s commander, is not a coffeehouse philosophe indulging his cosmopolitan sensibilities (the way Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard often did in the second iteration of the Star Trek franchise in the 1980s), but a gruff and stalwart leader. Laura Roslin (played by Mary McDonnell) is a saccharine liberal do-gooder accidentally thrust into the position of president who achieves a flinty toughness—and makes an unexpected ideological journey of her own when she decides that abortion cannot be tolerated with the human population reduced to a mere 50,000 souls.

Inevitably and justifiably, the show dealt with various “enemy within” themes, but unlike countless rehashes of The Crucible, Battlestar Galactica conceded that there actually was an enemy within. The enemy was very real, literally an existential foe guilty of murdering 20 billion people, not just the hobgoblin of alleged McCarthyite paranoia. Peace activists are depicted, at times, as deluded, dangerous, and even vaguely traitorous, giving the impression that at least some of the writers were familiar with Orwell’s writings on wartime pacifists. And the frightening nature of the relentless suicide-bomber-attack machine was indelibly captured by the sensational concept that any Cylon killed in battle could simply be resurrected to fight another day.

Though the show received raves from writers and critics associated with the Right, Battlestar Galactica was in no way a conservative document. Numerous subplots were congenial to liberal sensibilities, as when President Roslin’s breast cancer is cured with embryonic stem cells. But hawkish arguments and assumptions were portrayed with integrity. The regrettable trade-offs implicit in any war, particularly a war to prevent total extinction, were treated as real.

---

The original miniseries was written and filmed in 2002, when the war on terror was a nearly universal cause. The show’s first season was written and filmed in 2003, and the second in 2004. When it came time to make the third season, in 2005, the war on terror had become old hat, and the war in Iraq had become a grinding controversy. Moore and his colleagues felt compelled to move on from their analogical portrait of the war on terror to the occupation of Iraq—a decision that upended the direction the show had been heading over the previous 32 hours and that led inexorably to its self-destruction.

The third season opens with most of humanity—exhausted by war, deprivation, and internal divisions—settling on a bleak, barely habitable planet. Suddenly the Cylons, after annihilating all but .00025 percent of humanity, decide they want to live in peace. But rather than leave humans alone, they conclude the best way to achieve this goal would be to invade this last tiny outpost of humanity and forcibly convert them to the one true god (in the series, the Cylons are monotheists, while the humans are polytheists) . . . or something.

The truth is that the audience was never given a remotely decipherable, never mind plausible, explanation for this radically bizarre and nonsensical turn of events. Rather, it was simply asserted in a hodgepodge of babbling dialogue. Almost immediately, the show’s protagonists are transformed into “insurgents” who have little or no compunction about becoming suicide bombers. The Cylons, for their part, are finding the human colony very troublesome. In one particularly ham-fisted scene, one of the Cylon leaders mocks his colleagues: “How did you think the humans would greet us? With— ‘Oh, never mind’?” This is, of course, a naked reference to the idea expressed before the American invasion, that the war in Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”

Most egregiously, the human suicide bombers are not young men brainwashed in a madrassa and promised eternal life with 72 virgins, nor are they threatened with the murder of their families—the tactics used by jihadists to create their human bombs. Rather, they are decent, calm, and composed men and women fighting in a noble cause. Taken seriously, this romanticization of suicide bombers and “insurgency” has a cascade of revolting implications. The insurgency in Iraq was not an authentic resistance like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or De Gaulle’s Free French forces. The ranks of terrorists in Iraq were overwhelmingly made up of Baathist remnants of the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda interlopers with their own imperialist ambitions for a worldwide umma.

The extent of the show’s political and ideological corruption is best exemplified by the fact that one of the central pillars of the series had to be yanked: the notion that the Cylons had a grand, complex, conspiratorial plan involving their human doppelgängers that was unfolding inexorably over the course of the show’s run, one that humans needed to uncover in order to secure a victory in the war for the survival of their species. Indeed, every episode of the first three seasons began with an opening sequence in which the viewer is explicitly told that the Cylons “have a plan.” But in the third season, a Cylon leader explains that “plans change,” whereupon the Cylon quest to exterminate the human race simply evaporates so the show can riff on the evils of “occupation.” By the premiere of the fourth season, the Cylon plan was no longer mentioned during the opening credits. And every other seed of plot that had been planted over the previous years was left untended and forgotten as well.

Thus, a show marked by gritty realism about how a decent but flawed civilization modeled on our own tries to cling to its decency while fighting an existential war against an implacable enemy veered wildly off course. The humans were no longer analogized to Americans; rather Americans were analogized to genocidal occupiers. In other words, we are no longer the inspiration for the futuristic Israelites trying to survive. We are now the Nazis.

With this turnabout, left-wing writers suddenly fell in love with the show. Battlestar Galactica had “morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq,” cheered a writer in the liberal American Prospect. Spencer Ackerman, then an employee of the New Republic, wrote a piece for Slate titled “Battlestar: Iraqtica—Does the hit television show support the Iraqi insurgency?” His unequivocal conclusion: “In unmistakable terms, Battlestar: Galactica is telling viewers that insurgency (like, say, the one in Iraq) might have some moral flaws, such as the whole suicide bombing thing, but is ultimately virtuous and worthy of support. Wow.” That “wow” is celebratory.

After the Iraq story line, Battlestar Galactica deteriorated rapidly over the course of its final two seasons. The plot shift led the show’s writers and producers into a bizarre and meandering world of visiting angels, pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, and deus-ex-machina literary devices. Human and Cylon fell in love; robots killed themselves; a key character’s death and resurrection were never explained; and in the end it turned out that everything we were watching had led to the population of our Earth 150,000 years ago and that we were heading in a similar direction because we have some robots now too. The disappointment among the show’s fans was palpable, and its final episode provoked widespread rage-—there is no other word for it—among those who had followed the series passionately for the previous five years and felt they had been tricked by its conclusion.

No doubt the producers believe it was all worth it. For having the “bravery” to tackle the occupation of Iraq, the producers and lead actors were invited to a panel at the United Nations to dilate on the war on terror. It is hard to imagine that would have happened if the series had held to its original course.

Ron Moore told Salon in 2007 that “the show’s mission is not to present answers to what I think are really complicated, difficult questions. One of the mistakes TV often makes is that it tries to tackle complicated moral and legal issues and wrap them up in an hour and give you a neat, tidy message by the end: ‘And here’s the way to solve Iraq!’ I don’t think that’s helpful, and I don’t think that’s good storytelling or great to watch. Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions.”

It’s been said that the difference between the truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. After its third season, Battlestar Galactica steadily failed on both counts.

These failures are attributable not just to the allure of ideology and the desire to stay “relevant” but also to Moore’s fraudulent notion that merely “asking questions” isn’t itself a form of ideological commitment. Indeed, most propaganda is often posed in the form of invidious questions. A merely loaded question—have you stopped beating your wife yet?—is one thing. An invidious question is one in which evil fictions are given parity with truth. “I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, I’m just raising important questions.”

Joshua Alston’s conclusion that Battlestar Galactica best captures the fear, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the post-9/11 world still holds up, but with a thick layer of irony. For the series’s story arc demonstrates that Moore and Company were not immune to the pressures of the post-9/11 world. Indeed, it reveals instead that they could not handle those pressures.

Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review and the author of Liberal Fascism..

from City Journal online, 2009-Sep-18, by Harry Stein:

Beck Bashing
Glenn Beck is good for America—and bad for the Left

Glenn Beck and the Angry Style of American Politics reads the line under Time ’s current cover subject, the talk show host/author/provocateur who has lately so energized the conservative base. The headline inside gets more specific: Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? While the piece is scrupulously moderate in tone, no one will not be surprised to learn that Time answers its own question with a resounding “Yes!”

Beck is a “gifted entrepreneur of angst in a white-hot market . . . a man with his ear uniquely tuned to the precise frequency at which anger, suspicion and the fear that no one’s listening all converge,” as writer David Von Drehle puts it. “As melodrama, it’s thumping good stuff. But as politics, it’s sort of a train wreck—at once powerful, spellbinding and uncontrolled.”

Reading the piece, the conscientious Time reader will doubtless experience a keen sense of déjà vu—in fact, déjà, déjà vu. Like its brethren in the rapidly declining mainstream media, Time has long looked unkindly upon prominent conservatives and over the years has examined a number of them with the same mix of fascination and horror. Time’s cover line for January 13, 1995: IS RUSH LIMBAUGH GOOD FOR AMERICA? You can guess the answer.

This is hardly coincidental. Back then as now, a charismatic Democratic president, much esteemed by the press, was being challenged daily—and in key ways undermined—by a hugely popular conservative host, able to rally the opposition in ways that no conservative politician could, or, frankly, given the incoming flak from the varied powerful forces aligned with the president, would have wanted to. Like Limbaugh before him, Beck has grown too powerful to ignore.

But the comparison goes further. Even more than Limbaugh, whose style, in contrast, is positively genteel, Beck is viewed with embarrassed disdain by some of his ideological allies. Alternatively intense, comic, histrionic, now ranting, now exhorting viewers to “question boldly” or “follow me,” occasionally even moving himself to tears, Beck is, one conservative friend of mine flatly says, “an embarrassment, a clown.” In the angst he induces among certain conservatives, Beck can even rival Sarah Palin.

But, of course, there’s a key difference. Beck does not seek power; he seeks to expose its abuse. And in this, in the Age of Obama and a too-compliant media, he has proven extraordinarily successful. Were it not for Beck and his constant running of the videos exposing Van Jones as a crackpot racist conspiracy theorist, for example, few people probably would have heard of Obama’s “green jobs czar,” whose troubles the New York Times did not even deign to cover until after he had to resign. And Beck’s relentless exposure of the Acorn sting tapes, following his long campaign against that organization, brought widespread attention to the depth of Acorn’s corruption.

Indeed, it’s an excellent bet that the liberal journalists now wringing their hands about Beck, decrying his malign influence, would never have reported on the Acorn controversy, either, were it not for Beck and others on Fox—just as ABC’s Charlie Gibson, in his patrician above-it-allness, claimed ignorance of the story even after conservative viewers and listeners had been following it closely for more than a week.

Quite simply, at a time when conservatives find themselves so far out of power that all they can hope to do is stand athwart the Obama administration’s attempt to remake America yelling “stop,” no one has been more effective. “What I find striking is that if Beck were of the Left, taking down (or helping to take down) Bush appointees—with the same bombast and success—he would be hailed as the living reincarnation of the great Muckrakers of yore,” Jonah Goldberg rightly observes. “He’d be the working man’s I. F. Stone, the TV heir to Michael Moore (which is a good thing to the Left). If he explored the roots and idea animating conservatism the way he has with progressivism, he would be a vital service to the education of the nation.”

As another conservative friend of mine says, “Why should we play by the rules laid down by NBC or the New York Times, anyway? Where’s their distress about the incivility at MSNBC or the Huffington Post?” The Left has what most sensible souls would call more than its fair share of over-the-top types—and one of them was just elected to the Senate from Minnesota.

Is Glenn Beck bad for America? Ask Van Jones or Acorn’s executive director, Bertha Lewis, and you’ll get another “yes.” But no matter what we think of his style, conservatives should have a different answer.

Harry Stein is a contributing editor of City Journal. A journalist and novelist, he is the author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace) and the new I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican.

from the New York Times, 2009-Oct-12, by Brian Stelter:

Fox's Volley With Obama Intensifying

Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition.

“We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Her comments are only the latest in the volatile exchange between the administration and the top-rated network, which is owned by the News Corporation, controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Last month, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, and David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Obama, met for coffee in New York, in what Politico, which last week broke that news, labeled a “Fox summit.”

While neither party has said what was discussed, some have speculated that a truce, or at least an adjustment in tone, was at issue. (Mr. Ailes and Mr. Obama reportedly reached a temporary accord after a meeting in mid-2008.) But shots are still being fired, which animates the idea that both sides see benefits in the feud.

Fox seems to relish the controversy.

“Instead of governing, the White House continues to be in campaign mode, and Fox News is the target of their attack mentality,” Michael Clemente, the channel's senior vice president for news, said in a statement on Sunday. “Perhaps the energy would be better spent on the critical issues that voters are worried about.”

Fox's senior vice president for programming, Bill Shine, says of the criticism from the White House, “Every time they do it, our ratings go up.” Mr. Obama's first year is on track to be the Fox News Channel's highest rated.

One Fox executive said that the jabs by the White House could solidify the network's audience base and recalled that Mr. Ailes had remarked internally: “Don't pick a fight with people who like to fight.” The executive asked not to be named while discussing internal conversations.

Certainly, Fox continues to aggressively bolster its on-air talent, most recently with the hiring of John Stossel, the libertarian investigative journalist from ABC News, for its spin-off channel, Fox Business. The business channel is also keen on another administration critic, Lou Dobbs, who met for dinner with Mr. Ailes last month, according to two people with direct knowledge of the meeting.

The shift for Fox News — the favorite network of the Bush administration, now the least favored one of the Obama administration — has financial implications for the News Corporation, especially given the network's status as a growth engine in a perilous time for media companies.

Fox's programs have drawn record numbers of viewers this year. Through last week, Fox averaged 1.2 million viewers at any given time this year, up from one million viewers through the same time last year. Previously, the channel peaked in 2003, the year the Iraq war started, with nearly 1.1 million viewers.

But controversial comments by the host Glenn Beck have also prompted an ad boycott. And the perception of Fox News as an opposition party has also affected its news correspondents, including Major Garrett, its chief White House correspondent, who Ms. Dunn says is a fair reporter. Mr. Garrett and other Fox correspondents have been directed by Mr. Clemente not to appear on the channel's most opinionated programs.

Still, Paul Rittenberg, who oversees ad sales for Fox, said the channel existed in a climate where viewers choose cable news channels based on affinity. His channel, he said, stresses in its pitch to advertisers that “people who watch Fox News believe it's the home team.”

To many Democrats, of course, the “home team” is conservative, a view only compounded by Fox's at times skeptical coverage of Mr. Obama this year.

“I've got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” he said in June, though he did not mention Fox by name. He added, “You'd be hard pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.”

The White House has limited administration members' appearances on the network in recent weeks. In mid-September, when the White House booked Mr. Obama on a round robin of Sunday morning talk shows, it skipped Fox and called it an “ideological outlet,” leading the “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace to appear on Bill O'Reilly's prime-time show and call the administration “the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

Ms. Dunn called that remark juvenile and stressed that administration officials would still talk to Fox, and that Mr. Obama was likely to be interviewed on the network in the future. But, she added, “we're not going to legitimize them as a news organization.”

In an interview, Mr. Clemente suggested that there was an element of “shoot the messenger” in the back and forth. “Sometimes it's actually helpful to have an organization or a person that you can go up against for whatever reason,” he said.

Fox argues that its news hours — 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays — are objective. The channel has taken pains recently to highlight its news programs, including the two hours led by Shepard Smith, its chief news anchor. And its daytime newscasts draw more viewers than CNN or MSNBC's prime-time programs.

“The average consumer certainly knows the difference between the A section of the newspaper and the editorial page,” Mr. Clemente said.

The White House rejects the news and editorial page comparison, and officials there can rattle off any number of perceived offenses. They date to the month before Mr. Obama formally started his presidential campaign, when one of the network's morning hosts falsely claimed that he had attended a madrassa, an Islamic school. (The incident happened on what Fox calls an entertainment show, “Fox and Friends”; the mistake was corrected on the air later.)

More recently, Fox hosts have promoted tea party rallies against big government and steered attention toward a number of White House czar appointments. Mr. Beck, in particular, was credited with forcing Van Jones, a low-level White House adviser for environmental jobs, to resign last month. Mr. Beck devoted numerous segments to Mr. Jones and called him a “communist-anarchist radical.”

“If it wasn't for Fox or talk radio, we'd be done as a republic,” Mr. Beck said in the wake of the resignation.

Mr. Beck, whose 5 p.m. program consistently draws three million viewers, is a “cultural phenomenon now,” Mr. Shine said. But this success has come at a price: he is the source of considerable discomfort for Fox's journalists, especially for false statements on his program. In August, for instance, Mr. Beck claimed that Mr. Garrett was “never called on” at White House press briefings, but Mr. Garrett had asked a question that day.

Weeks earlier, Mr. Beck labeled Mr. Obama a racist, leading to an advertising boycott by ColorOfChange.org, an advocacy group that Mr. Jones helped found. Dozens of advertisers have distanced themselves from Mr. Beck's show, causing headaches for Mr. Rittenberg's advertising team, although he said Fox “hasn't lost a dime” because the ads were moved to different hours.

Fox has made the channel's tensions with the White House a story. In August, the network's top-rated host, Mr. O'Reilly, dispatched one of his opinion program's producers to ask why the administration seemed “so thin-skinned” at a White House briefing. The deputy press secretary disagreed, and said that Mr. O'Reilly had interviewed Mr. Obama during his candidacy last year. The administration's aggressive stance suggests that it does not view Fox's audience as one that can be persuaded. During the presidential campaign, Ms. Dunn said, it booked campaign representatives on Fox to try to reach undecided voters, but by mid-October, the campaign had mostly withdrawn them from the channel's programs.

“It was beyond diminishing returns,” she said. “It was no returns.”

from Fox News, 2009-Oct-18:

Obama Team Continues Effort to Isolate Fox News

Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view and not being a real news network.

Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view, one week after the administration fired its initial salvo to try to isolate the news network by accusing it of being a GOP mouthpiece.

"A lot of their news programming, it's really not news. It's pushing a point of view," senior adviser David Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week."

"The way we -- the president looks at it and we look at it, is, it is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel added on CNN's "State of the Union."

The open assault on Fox News began last weekend when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn accused the network of being a "wing of the Republican Party."

"What I think is fair to say about Fox -- and certainly it's the way we view it -- is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party," Dunn said on CNN. "They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is."

Despite calls to the White House this week, the administration did not offer a guest for this weekend's "Fox News Sunday" to talk about Dunn's comments, although administration officials appeared on all four Sunday morning shows to speak on various issues.

President Obama has had interviews with all of the other Sunday talk shows except "Fox News Sunday," including a whirlwind weekend in late September where he appeared on all other Sunday talk shows.

Michael Clemente, Fox News' senior vice president of news, said the administration's strategy appears to be misdirected.

"Surprisingly, the White House continues to declare war on a news organization instead of focusing on the critical issues that Americans are concerned about like jobs, health care and two wars. The door remains open and we welcome a discussion about the facts behind the issues," Clemente said in a written statement.

Former Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove said Fox News' commentators have been tough on Obama but the White House appears to be confusing the news and opinion that appears on the network.

"They're conflating the news side and the opinion side in order to -- in order to attack a media outlet. Again, it's undignified for the president of the United States to be doing" Rove said on "Fox News Sunday." He added that it is the administration's practice to attack its critics full-throttle.

"I think this White House is dominated by Chicago- style politics, so if you don't like the questions that are being asked by Major Garrett or Wendell Goler or Chris Wallace, then you try and demonize Fox News," he said.

Though Fox News has won the cable news ratings race consistently for years and is closing in on network news numbers, Axelrod and Emanuel both encouraged other news outlets to not treat Fox News as a news organization.

"The bigger thing is that other news organizations, like yours, ought not to treat them that way, and we're not going to treat them that way." Axelrod told ABC.

Axelrod was quick to point out that though the White House views Fox News as biased, the administration would continue to interact with Fox News. "We're going to appear on their shows. We're going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view."

"President Obama's going to talk to all the networks," said former Clinton adviser and administration confidant Terry McAuliffe, who appeared with Rove on Fox News. "He's going to go out there. He loves competition. He loves being engaged in the battle."

from Fox News, 2009-Oct-16, by Ellen Ratner:

White House vs. Fox News? Know This, What You Resist Persists

The White House hasn't asked for my advice in its feud with Fox News but let me give it here.

Any one who has ever spent any extended amount of time with children knows that if you put something in front of them and tell them not to do it, the "not to do thing" becomes enticing. So, the best thing to do is not to give credence to something and just ignore it.

That is exactly what the White House has not done in their battle with Fox News Channel. It has raised the level of rancor higher than it should be.

The White House hasn't asked my advice but I will give it here:

Ignore your issues with Fox News Channel unless something that's being reported on a news segment is wrong. Ignore pretty much everything that is being said on the opinion side as it is just opinion. The White House does not make a habit of addressing the various protests in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue so why should it spend valuable time and energy addressing opinion shows? -- By addressing your beefs with talk radio and talk television shows that you think are slanted against you, you just give them more and more legitimacy.

I have been working for Fox News as a confirmed liberal contributor for twelve years.

I know from the inside of the Fox News Channel operation that they are clear about the dividing line between reporting and opinion. They don't like to mix the work of reporters and the show hosts nor should they. I sit at the White House with Fox's White House reporters and they have asked the same questions as other reporters -- both during the Bush administration and the Obama administration.

As a liberal commentator on Fox News Channel I have never been told what to say and have only been asked to restrain myself once in twelve years. And when was that? -- It was on the day that Michael Jackson died and the producer asked me to keep my negative views to myself till some time had passed. That's a concern I can respect. They welcome my thoughts and views and they would welcome President Obama's views as well.

The president needs to reach out to all Americans -- even the ones who completely disagree with him. His communication staff should suggest he do interviews with Fox News Channel and let his message be heard directly by Americans who did not vote for him or don't like his polices. The White House should also know their numbers. One study done by an independent media group found that almost a third of Fox's viewers were Democrats and independents.

The Obama communications strategy needs to let the criticism of the president and the administration roll off their back. It's a mistake to spend valuable communications capital on upping the ante and continuing the fight. What you resist persists.

Ellen Ratner is Washington bureau chief of Talk Radio News Service and a Fox News contributor.

from Breitbart.com, 2009-Aug-25, by Patrick Courrielche:

The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?

I recently wrote a critique of the art community’s lack of dissent in the face of many controversial decisions made by the current administration. Entitled “The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident,” one of the key points argued in the article was the potential danger associated with the use of the art community as a tool of the state. Little did I know how quickly this concern would be elevated to an outright probability.

Sometime between when I finished the critique and when it went live online, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Now admittedly, I’m a skeptic of BIG government. In my view, power tends to overreach whenever given the opportunity. It’s a law of human nature that has very few exceptions. That said, it felt to me that by providing issues as a cynosure for inspiration to a handpicked arts group – a group that played a key role in the President’s election as mentioned throughout the conference call – the National Endowment for the Arts was steering the art community toward creating art on the very issues that are currently under contentious national debate; those being health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation. Could the National Endowment for the Arts be looking to the art community to create an environment amenable to the administration’s positions?

Before arguing why I see this as a gross overreach of the National Endowment for the Arts and its mission, a brief background on the conference call is needed.

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

I learned after the conference call that there were approximately 75 people participating, including many well respected street-artists, filmmakers, art galleries, music venues, musicians and music producers, writers, poets, actors, independent media outlets, marketers, and various other professionals from the creative community. I suppose I was invited because of my work in creating arts initiatives, but being a former employer of the NEA’s Director of Communications was probably a factor as well.

Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans.

It sounded, how should I phrase it…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me.

The people running the conference call and rallying the group to get active on these issues were Yosi Sergant, the Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons.

We were encouraged to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these “focus areas” as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign, and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues. Throughout the conversation, we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to “shape the lives” of those around us. The now famous Obama “Hope” poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election.

Obama has a strong arts agenda, we were told, and has been very supportive of both using and supporting the arts in creative ways to talk about the issues facing the country. We were “selected for a reason,” they told us. We had played a key role in the election and now Obama was putting out the call of service to help create change. We knew “how to make a stink,” and were encouraged to do so.

Throughout the conversation my inner dialogue was firing away questions so fast that the NRA would’ve been envious. Is this truly the role of the NEA? Is building a message distribution network, for matters other than increasing access to the arts and arts education, the role of the National Endowment for the Arts? Is providing the art community issues to address, especially those that are currently being vehemently debated nationally, a legitimate role for the NEA? I found it highly unlikely that this was in their original charter, so I checked.

The NEA published a book entitled National Endowment for the Arts: A History 1965-2008 early this year. Combing through the 40+ year history of the NEA, I could not find a single instance of the agency creating or supporting a national initiative that encouraged the art community to address current issues under contentious debate.

The NEA was created by the Congress of the United States and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 as “a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.” The issue of health care is curiously absent from this description on their website.

So I’d like to start a little debate and ask you, the reader, the same question. Do you think it is the place of the NEA to encourage the art community to address issues currently under legislative consideration?

And before answering, let me give you my take.

The NEA is the nation’s largest annual funder of the arts. That is right, the largest funder of the arts in the nation – a fact that I’m sure was not lost on those that were on the call, including myself. One of the NEA’s major functions is providing grants to artists and arts organizations. The NEA has also historically shown the ability to attract “matching funds” for the art projects and foundations that they select. So we have the nation’s largest arts funder, which is a federal agency staffed by the administration, with those that they potentially fund together on a conference call discussing taking action on issues under vigorous national debate. Does there appear to be any potential for conflict here?

Discussed throughout the conference call was a hope that this group would be one that would carry on past the United We Serve campaign to support the President’s initiatives and those issues for which the group was passionate. The making of a machine appeared to be in its infancy, initiated by the NEA, to corral artists to address specific issues. This function was not the original intention for creating the National Endowment for the Arts.

A machine that the NEA helped to create could potentially be wielded by the state to push policy. Through providing guidelines to the art community on what topics to discuss and providing them a step-by-step instruction to apply their art form to these issues, the “nation’s largest annual funder of the arts” is attempting to direct imagery, songs, films, and literature that could create the illusion of a national consensus. This is what Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent.”

Now, if you are for the issues being pursued by the current administration, you may be inclined to think favorably of what I am labeling “overreach.” What a powerful weapon to fight those that are opposed to our ideas, you may think. For those in this camp I ask you this – will you feel the same when the opposition has access to the same machine? If history is any indication, the pendulum swings both ways. Is persuasion what the originators envisioned when they brought the legislation that created the NEA to the floor of Congress?

As a member of the art community for the past 14 years, I raise these questions only after careful consideration. Many of those on the call are from my hometown. My position here should not be construed as a personal attack on the call participants. Many of those on the call worked tirelessly on the Obama campaign and are proud of their victory. They look at this as an opportunity to be involved directly with the White House, which is an exciting prospect to many in the art world whose experience with the government may be limited to paying taxes and voting.

But the art community must put this excitement aside and ask itself about the proper role of government agencies created to promote the arts. And if put in the wrong hands, could a message machine built by the NEA be used in a nefarious manner not currently foreseeable?

In an attempt to recapture the excitement and enthusiasm of the campaign the organizers of this conference call have entered murky waters, a strait that the NEA cannot afford to swim. Previously shackled with the controversy over the Serrano and Mapplethorpe images of 1989 that escalated to a debate over its very existence, the NEA needs to stay far away from any questions of impropriety.

There is no shortage of problems within the art community that the NEA could tackle. Museums across the country have been hit hard by the financial crisis. Their trusts and portfolios have seen massive declines. Donations, attendance, and memberships are down. Many have had to reduce exhibition hours due to staffing and budget reductions. And countless art galleries, the lifeblood and revenue stream for many artists, have closed or are on the brink of closure. Rallying the art community around these issues seems a more appropriate use of its resources.

I’m not a “right-wing nut job.” It just goes against my core beliefs to sit quietly while the art community is used by the NEA and the administration to push an agenda other than the one for which it was created. It is not within the National Endowment for the Arts’ original charter to initiate, organize, and tap into the art community to help bring awareness to health care, or energy & environmental issues for that matter; and especially not at a time when it is being vehemently debated. Artists shouldn’t be used as tools of the state to help create a climate amenable to their positions, which is what appears to be happening in this instance. If the art community wants to tackle those issues on its own then fine. But tackling them shouldn’t come as an encouragement from the NEA to those they potentially fund at this coincidental time.

And if you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. “This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely… “

Is the hair on your arms standing up yet?

[See the original publication for four examples of artwork promoting Barack Obama. -AMPP Ed.]

from Breitbart.com, 2009-Sep-21, by John Nolte:

Propaganda, Health Care and ACORN: Full Context of NEA Conference Call Reveals Disturbing Pattern

At first glance, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) conference call of August 10th, 2009 sounds innocent enough because it's supposedly been organized by Michael Skolnik, political director for Russell Simmons and someone not officially associated with any government agency. Skolnik appears to be acting independently as a concerned citizen and to have taken it upon himself to gather together a group of artists and art organizations hoping to move them towards “national service.” And how nice of the White House, the federal government and the NEA to make the time to participate in the call and aid this group of American artists motivated to help their country and community.

But this is only how things appear.

All evidence points to the fact that the conference call was a ruse, a front for a White House using Skolnik as a kind of beard in order to put an innocent spin on their abuse of the NEA and two non-partisan volunteer organizations (United We Serve – an initiative overseen by The Corporation for National and Community Service – a federal agency, and the White House' Office of Public Engagement).

The goal: To motivate a group of hand-picked pro-Obama artists (grant recipients or those wanting grants) to push the President's flagging agenda, especially health care — and to funnel this promotion through the ACORN related- Serve.gov website.

***

Documentation gathered by Big Hollywood's Patrick Courrielche and the Washington Times, coupled with a newly revealed audio recording of the full conference call, points to eight troubling facts that put the full context of the call in a very disturbing light.

1. The NEA did not want it known they had any part in organizing the call. When the Washington Times asked Yosi Sergant, the NEA's then-Director of Communications (he was “reassigned” on Sept. 10th after the story broke) about the call, he claimed the NEA was only a participant and that Skolnik had set up the call.

2. We know Sergant lied to the Washington Times. The NEA did send the email invite for the conference call. Worse, Sergant himself sent it, letting this group of artists and art organizations know the call would focus on “core areas of recovery,” starting with “health care.”

3. We know that United We Serve (with the ACORN-related Serve.gov website) claims they were merely a participant in a conference call arranged by someone they referred to as an “individual interested” in their group. It seems obvious they mean Michael Skolnik.

4. Michael Skolnik was not merely an “individual interested” in United We Serve, but in fact was asked by the White House and the NEA to round up artists on their behalf. We know this because in the newly revealed audio of the call, Skolnik says so.

5. The conference call audio makes clear that everyone addressing the artists and art organizations are fully aware they’re speaking to pro-Obama partisans; the same artists who helped the president win the 2008 election.

6. While addressing this group of Obama supporters, United We Serve, The Office of Public Engagement and the NEA repeatedly focus on four areas where “national service” is most needed … and health care always comes first.

7. We know that both Nell Abernathy of United We Serve and Buffy Wicks with The Office of Public Engagement heard and did not dispute Michael Skolnik's opening statement asserting he had brought these artists together at the request of the White House and NEA, and that one of the goals of the call was to “push the president and push his administration.”

8. The remainder of this piece will prove a pattern shared by all three “guest” speakers: Sergant, Wicks and Abernathy:

• As mentioned above, all know this is a gathering of pro-Obama supporters.
• All make clear they want these pro-Obama artists and art organizations to funnel their activism through Serve.gov, which we now know filters activists to ACORN.
• When it comes to specific areas of activism, health care comes first.

***

THE PLAYERS:

Michael Skolnik – call moderator, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.

Nell Abernathy – Director of Outreach for United We Serve, an initiative overseen by The Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency.

Buffy Wicks — The Office of Public Engagement (White House).

Yosi Sergant – Communications Director for the NEA, now “reassigned.”

***

THE CALL: [all emphasis added]

0:00 – 8:30: This time is eaten up with everyone involved getting settled into the call. Jokes are made about how many people are on from Los Angeles. This fact will be pertinent in establishing that Buffy Wicks and Nell Abernathy were on the call from the beginning.

Michael Skolnik

Michael Skolnik — 8:40 – 12:50:

Skolnik's opening statement sets the stage for the call; why the call was arranged and what the goals are.

Skolnik states openly that the White House and NEA asked him to round everyone up…

I have been asked by folks in the White House and folks in the NEA about a month ago in a conversation that was had. We had the idea that I would help bring together the independent artists community around the country.

Skolnik believes that only those who campaigned for President Obama are on the call:

[I]t's clear as an independent art community as artists and thinkers and taste-makers and marketers and visionaries on this call, the role that we played during the campaign for the president and also during his first 200 some odd days of his presidency and the president has a clear arts agenda and has been very supportive of using art and supporting art in creative ways to talk about some of the issues that we face here in our country and also to engage people.

Skolnik lays out the goals for the call, ending with, “push the president and push his administration.”

And I think all of us who are on this phone call were selected for a reason, and you are the ones that lead by example in your communities. You are the thought leaders. …

And so I’m hoping that through this group and the goal of all this and the goal of this phone call, is through this group that we can create a stronger community amongst ourselves to get involved in things that we’re passionate about as we did during the campaign but continue to get involved in those things, to support some of the president’s initiatives, but also to do things that we are passionate about and to push the president and push his administration.

Skolnik then introduces Nell Abernathy with United We Serve – Serve.gov, who immediately hands the call over to Buffy Wicks with the White House Office of Public Engagement.

***

Buffy Wicks

BUFFY WICKS – 13:00 – 21:42

Buffy Wicks also believes that the only people participating in the call are partisan artists and art organizations who helped elect Obama:

I, first of all want to thank everyone for being on the call and really just a deep, deep appreciation for all the work that you all put into the campaign for the two-plus years that we all worked together.

We can assume Wicks was on at the beginning of the call and heard everything Skolnik said about the goal of the call being to “push the president and push his administration” because she references her “L.A. peeps.” She wouldn't know her “L.A. peeps” were on the line unless she was on to hear everyone introduce themselves before Skolnik spoke:

I was the field director in California so I hear my L.A. peeps out there, so it’s exciting to hear those voices.

Ms. Wicks talks about how everyone can bring others into the United We Serve-Serve.gov effort and make them a “part of this administration”:

And as part of my role here is working on service, and so when we were thinking about how do we take a lot of this energy that’s out there, how do we translate folks who have just been engaged in electoral politics and engage them in really the process of governing, of being part of this administration in a little bit of a different way because politics is one thing and governing is something totally separate, we really saw service as the platform by which we can do that.

Wicks then talks about the four main areas she wants everyone to focus on, starting with health care:

So we focus on the four main areas: One is health care. Obviously, that’s a big issue.

After going through her laundry list, Ms. Wicks then refers everyone to the central clearing house for “national service,” the Serve.gov website that funnels activists to ACORN:

So those are the four areas that we focused on, and we’re managing the whole thing through Serve.gov, which is a new Web site that Nell and I can talk to you about here in a second.

***

NELL ABERNATHY – UNITED WE SERVE: 21:50 – 28:30

Again, the context here is that Ms. Abernathy is sure she's speaking only to a group of pro-Obama supporters:

This will sound very familiar to many of you, we’ve basically been working to do this using the same tools we found so successful in the campaign.

Ms. Abernathy then directs everyone to the ACORN-related Serve.gov website:

So accessibility has been a main thing for us and we created Serve.gov, which is a Web site very similar to some of the Web tools we used on the campaign in that you can go in and type your zip code and in return service opportunities would come up.

Ms. Abernathy doesn't discuss any specific issues. Instead she says Yosi Sergant of the NEA will talk about “specific ways WE feel the art community is critical to this…”:

I think Yosi is on and is going to talk about some of the specific ways which we feel the art community is critical to this; both what’s already going on and some opportunity for future partnership.

We also know Ms. Abernathy has been on the call since the beginning because, like Buffy Wicks, she references the Los Angeles callers – therefore she heard Skolnik's opening statement:

I want to echo again what Michael said about feeling truly humbled in the presence of some of the real taste-makers across the country. And I lived in L.A. for a long time, so I have a particular soft spot for you folks out there.

***

President Obama with Yosi Sergant

Yosi Sergant: –28:45 – 39:00

Sergant also believes he is talking to people and organizations who support and helped to elect President Obama — and he's excited about the opportunity they now all have to “set the table”:

Hello everybody. It’s really good to hear so many familiar voices. Welcome to your government. …

The very fact that the telephone call is happening to me is a really bold statement. And I think it’s reflective of all the hard work that went down during the campaign, all the time and energy that each and every one of you put in, myself included, it’s paying off.

This is what we fought for. We fought for a chance to be at the table and not only at the table but we’re setting the table.

Sergant spends nine minutes ginning up this pro-Obama group to get involved in national service, gives them examples of how to go about it, and then, like everyone else, pushes the ACORN-related Serve.gov site:

The Corporation for National Services is available to all of you to turn on your community, to act as the message spreaders of this program. So how do we do that? There are three really quick and easy steps. One would be to look at Serve.gov. What Serve.gov really is, is it’s a place where people can go and find out about service opportunities in their neighborhoods.

At the end of his pitch Sergant then gets to what appears to be the specifics Ms. Abernathy and Ms. Wicks referred to earlier:

Pick — I would encourage you to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know, there’s four key areas that the Corporation [The Corporation for National and Community Service]has identified as the areas of service.

Always, health care first.

But let's back up a few seconds and look at the full context of how Sergant frames getting to the specifics; he speaks of how this is just the beginning, of still trying to figure out what things look like legally, and of learning the language in order to “speak with each other safely.”:

Really I want to emphasize, and I know that other people have brought it up already, but I want to just hearken back to it really quickly in that this is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally, we’re still trying to figure out the laws of putting government Web sites on Facebook and the use of Twitter.

This is all being sorted out. We are participating in history as it’s being made. So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely and we can really work together to move the needle and to get stuff done.

Pick — I would encourage you to pick something ….

***

Conference Call Rewards:

Sergant then turns the call over to Thomas Bates from “Rock the Vote,” who offers up an example of local environmental activism involving a garbage sculpture. Within days after this call Rock the Vote would launch a “health care design contest.”

A mere two days after the call a group of 21 art organizations endorsed health care reform.

Of those 21 organizations, “16 of the groups and affiliated organizations received nearly $2 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the 150 days before the conference call.”

***

At the end of the call, things open for a Q&A. One of the artists listening in, a Ms. Manne, asks a specific question about specific partisan policies:

I think for the people that are on the inside of government to talk for a minute about Organizing For America and the differences between Organizing For America and Serve.gov and what we can do to help on critical advocacy issues like health care reform, cap and trade policy, if that should help move policies through the government, because this is a really important role that our creative community can also play.

Even though she and everyone else have spent the last 40 minutes ginning up a group of Obama-supporting artists to rally around health care, Nell Abernathy begs off answering a specific policy question, but *wink* – *wink* can get that information to their “beard,” Mr. Skolnik:

Yeah, I can address that a little bit, and the reason only a little bit is largely because in my role at a federal agency, I’m precluded from going too far down the specific steps what people can do to advocate. …

I could get that information to Michael and he could get it out. We can’t sort – [A]s a representative of the Corporation, I’m not capable of giving you more guidance than just sending you to the right person.

QUESTION: If Ms. Abernathy is “precluded from going too far down the specific steps to advocate” with the questioner, Ms. Manne, why is it okay for Ms. Abernathy to do exactly that with Skolnik? If her role at a federal agency makes that kind of partisan behavior inappropriate on this call, how is it appropriate to “get that information” to Skolnik off the call?

Skolnik then wraps up the call and closes with one last push towards health care and United We Serve/Serve.gov:

So what I had hoped in bringing this group together with the great hosts, which again, I want to thank for reaching out to their communities was that we could begin to bring together our community in the same enthusiasm, with the same enthusiasm and with the same energy that we all saw in each other during the campaign, and we could continue to work together on issues as important as United We Serve and Service and begin here and continue to work together on other issues that we feel are important, as we mentioned some of them, health care and others[.]

***

When you are the NEA, United We Serve and The White House Office of Public Engagement – when you are required to represent the government in a non-partisan capacity, it can only be a partisan act to take part in a conference call set up by the White House and the NEA with the idea of bringing together pro-Obama supporters from the artistic community to push priority number one: health care.

At the beginning of the call, Skolnik, the supposed independent moderator, admits he was asked by the White House and NEA to round everyone up and makes clear that one of the goals of the call is to “push the president and push the Administration.”

In this environment, it doesn't matter if the word “reform” is used after the words “health care,” or not. It doesn't matter if the phrase “public option” is used or not. George Will put it best:

“[T]he Obama administration is tightening the cinch on subsidized artists, conscripting them into the crusade to further politicize the 17 percent of the economy that is health care.

Almost as disturbing is how eager these artists are to be turned into propagandists.

from Commentary Magazine, 2009-Sep, by Michael J. Lewis:

The Art of Obama Worship

Of all the images hurled forth by the last presidential election, none will live longer than Shepard Fairey’s poster of a red, white, and blue Barack Obama, gazing significantly into the distance, resting atop the single word Hope. It had already been embossed into the national consciousness as the definitive image of Obama even before it was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and appeared as the cover of Time’s “Person of the Year” issue. His poignant mien seemed to encapsulate all his personality and promise, an expression that was at once solemn, pensive, yearning, and ever so slightly sorrowful. With good reason the critic Peter Schjeldahl termed it “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’”

Campaign posters are discarded like yesterday’s newspaper the morning after an election, but not in the case of Obama. If anything, the demand for posters bearing his image has only grown. A recent New York Times front-page story highlighted the trend of amateur artists’ trying their hand at painting the new president. In one three-month period, 787 Obama paintings were auctioned on eBay, showing the new president in every possible pose, and a few impossible ones: standing commandingly before the White House, cradling a basketball and wearing a Washington Wizards uniform, gamely wrestling a bear on Wall Street, even flying naked on the back of a unicorn.

What is striking about these paintings is not their quality, about which the less said the better, but their consistent tone. They belong to that class of objects known as “devotional art.” Such objects are not only intended as votive offerings, to serve as the focus of veneration; the actual process of making them is itself an act of piety, a consideration that all but places them outside the realm of aesthetic judgment.

Obama is hardly the first president whose physical likeness has been the subject of devotional art. Yet the others who achieved this status did so only after they had accomplished something great, like Washington, or had been martyred, like Kennedy, or in the case of Lincoln, both. Obama’s iconic status is of a different nature, an artifact not of his presidency but his identity—a youthful man of mixed race and remarkable attractiveness upon whom the greatest of expectations have come to rest. This means that the role played by art, and by artists, has been different in Obama’s campaign and presidency from any other in American history.

Whether this development is good for American politics or for American art is another matter.

The Politicization of Art

A political campaign, like any social conflict, is fought in the realm of ideas and images. In an exceptionally well-run campaign, there is harmonious resonance between the ideas a candidate puts forth and the visual rhetoric surrounding him. Posters, leaflets, advertisements, even the precise form of bunting and flags—all collectively serve as the tangible embodiment of a platform. But the shaping of this imagery is usually relegated to advertising specialists and the graphic artists they employ, not to visual artists. In fact, for much of the 20th century, most advanced modern artists remained deliberately aloof from partisan politics. The subordination of art to ideology in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany served to discredit political art as “kitsch” (in Clement Greenberg’s memorable formulation), while the rise of abstraction brought prestige to art that had no other content beyond its own formal properties. Such was the attitude known as formalism. This is not to say that formalist artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko lacked political convictions; they had them in abundance, but they did not make their art an instrument of a partisan agenda.

This moratorium on political art collapsed, like so much else, during the Vietnam War. Many of the fashionable art movements of the next generation found their inspiration and creative energy in political causes. Environmentalism helped bring about Earth Art, with its sculptural interventions into the landscape; feminism inspired the feminist art that flared up in the mid-1970s; shortly thereafter came the AIDS epidemic, which formed the central subject of much performance art during the next decade. As these movements flourished, they helped dislodge the traditional hierarchy that accorded pride of place among the arts to painting and sculpture.

The newly prestigious fields tended to be conceptual, installation, or performance art (particularly the last). It was there that career-making gambits might be made. With no historical pedigree to rest on, these new media were more likely to justify themselves by their engagement with the present. And by their open-ended nature and reliance on words (anathema in formalist art), they were eminently suited for the making of political statements.

And so the politicization of art climaxed in the so-called art wars of the late 1980s, with a huge populist backlash against government funding of self--consciously transgressive art designed to offend religious and culturally conservative sensibilities. But as the political content of art rose, it became increasingly difficult to see what aesthetic residue remained. A distinct weariness toward strident political art soon arose and was expressed in the universally bad press earned by the Whitney Museum’s controversial 1990 Biennale, the most important modern-art exhibit in the United States and one intended to represent the very latest in art-world fashion. Its most notorious feature was the button given to each visitor at the entrance, featuring an innocuous word or phrase, such as imagine or to be. Only every hundredth or so button spelled out the complete phrase: I can’t imagine wanting to be white.

Such humorless stridency had already lost its novelty, and during the following years contemporary art drifted toward less confrontational fare. For one thing, the Clinton presidency made for a less satisfying target for leftist artists than Nixon’s or Reagan’s. The artist celebrities of the era, such as Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney, won fame not for their consciousness-raising but for their giddily apolitical spectacles. And so the trend might have continued were it not for the 2000 election, or more properly speaking, 9/11.

Given all the concern in the art community about confronting urgent sociopolitical problems, from the status of women to the fate of the environment, it was distinctly chary about responding to the terrorist attacks of that day. Surely it was not for lack of visual material; September 11 was rife with enough imagery to prompt a dozen Goyas to make new -Disasters of War. But this was not to be. The tremulous rage that performance artists had routinely aimed at Jesse Helms or Reagan was nowhere to be found. Nor was there any noteworthy attempt to humanize the victims, perhaps out of fear that it might dehumanize their killers.

Only one artist hazarded a monumental work on the attacks: Eric Fischl, whose bronze sculpture Tumbling Woman was installed in Rockefeller Center a year later. Its subject was the most heartrending sight of 9/11, the multitude of victims driven by the flames to leap from the World Trade Center towers, their private agony played out on the world’s most public stage. And yet Fischl worked assiduously to remove any sense of poignancy or dignity from the figure, showing her landing ridiculously on her head, with all the bathos of an unsightly spill in the tub. Thus the one significant monumental artistic response to 9/11 ended in dehumanizing the victims. (Following an explosion of outrage in a city still raw from the event, the statue was whisked away within days.)

Most other post-9/11 art suffered from the same moral incoherence. Typical was Ron English, the artist famous for his illegal billboards that parodied corporate advertisements. In 2002 he managed to sneak a billboard into New York City, with the message “Jihad Is Over! (If you want it),” a play on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s celebrated “War Is Over” ad in the New York Times. The billboard was baffling to New Yorkers, who presumably felt the sign would be more properly placed in Kabul or Tehran than on East 14th Street.

This is not to say that 9/11 did not call forth a volcano of moral rage among artists—only that this rage found no outlet until 2003, when it came to be directed at George W. Bush. Among all the scatological, puerile, and corrosive caricatures of Bush that began to be shown at that time, one looks in vain for even one corresponding image of Osama bin Laden or Mohamed Atta. For example, In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman’s intensely personal graphic memoir of the 9/11 attacks, contains not a single depiction of bin Laden, while we are treated to scurrilous images of President Bush toppling the Statue of Liberty and a gleeful Dick Cheney slitting the throat of the American eagle on whose back he is riding. [See my review in the December 2004 Commentary [converted from footnote by the AMPP Ed.]].

The jubilee of Bush-baiting culminated in the summer of 2004, when the Republican Convention was held in New York. Across the city, galleries and museums opened their doors to art commenting on the upcoming election. While a few elder statesmen joined in (Richard Serra, otherwise a rigorous formalist, exhibited an Abu Ghraib image labeled “Stop Bush”), most of the artists were young and clearly elated at their first opportunity to take a public stand. This helps explain but hardly excuses the unvaryingly sophomoric tone of the work: for instance, Chris Savido’s Bush Monkeys, a portrait of the president composed of swimming monkeys in a marsh; and Joan Linder, whose artist’s statement speaks of her “attempt to express the complexity and variety of contemporary life” and whose contribution consisted of paintings of administration officials in their underwear. Even Shepard Fairey, later to create the iconic Obama image, contributed a poster of Bush embracing a bomb and trying to remember if it was “hug a bomb, drop a baby” or the other way around.

For all the vitriol directed at Bush, there was little corresponding enthusiasm for John Kerry. Only Elizabeth Peyton’s anomalous John Kerry, April 1971, a portrait based on a photograph taken during Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Vietnam War, offered a positive exhortation. Given the near monolithic support for Kerry within the arts community, the absence of work depicting him was startling. Evidently it was more professionally rewarding, or emotionally satisfying, to affect a stance of knowing contempt for Bush than one of credulous enthusiasm for Kerry. But then again, ever since art had begun to concern itself again with contemporary politics in the late 1960s, it had done so essentially from a critical standpoint.

There was no precedent, no corpus of work or aesthetic doctrine, that might serve as a model for an art of political enthusiasm free of irony or cynicism. Even in 1972, when American artists were nearly unanimous in their backing of George McGovern, they preferred to express their support in negative rather than positive terms. Andy Warhol’s campaign poster Vote McGovern did not actually depict the candidate but rather a silk-screened photograph of Richard -Nixon tinted a bilious yellow and green. It is the surrender of this attitude of ironic detachment that is the most conspicuous development in the political art of 2008.

Art, Race, and Politics

On November 18, 1993, Time magazine published a special issue entitled “The New Face of America,” the cover of which showed a computer-generated face distilled from multiple races, a statement of the multi-racial makeup of the United States, as well as a prophecy of a racially blended American future. At a time of self-consciousness about race (both the Crown Heights riot and the Rodney King beating took place in 1991), it seemed to suggest a distant Utopian America that was no longer perpetually Balkanized into racial camps. The image was widely discussed and reproduced at the time (even affecting collective public conceptions of beauty) and so became part of the visual conventional wisdom. When Obama first entered the national consciousness, he surely benefited, if indirectly, from what might be called the subliminal authority of the familiar.

From the beginning, the Obama campaign invested much thought in its visual strategy. To portray him as a radically transformative deliverer, a figure of redemptive promise, was a natural course of action, his appearance comfortably matching his rhetoric. The challenge lay in the other direction, to reassure those leery of a messianic figure with a hazy resume and an oracular verbal style that he nonetheless stood in the mainstream of American political history. In consequence, throughout the campaign Obama was festooned with patriotic devices. Some of these worked well graphically, such as the campaign logo created by the designer Sol Sender. This reworked the American flag into an O, a white sun rising in a blue sky and a road of red stripes rising up to meet it. The image struck the right note—balancing patriotism with aspirations for the future—but many of the other campaign devices misfired badly.

As soon as Obama clinched the nomination, his campaign acted as if his election were a foregone conclusion and sought to convey subconsciously that he was already presiding. In June 2008, he briefly appeared behind a podium decorated with a revised presidential seal with his campaign motto “Yes We Can” rendered into Latin (Vero possumus). Although it was laughed out of existence within a week, it did not prevent him from delivering his acceptance speech at Denver before a Styrofoam facsimile of a Greek Doric temple. This time the intention was to evoke Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech before the Lincoln Memorial, although once again the gesture met with some derision (especially when commentators learned that it was dreamt up by the designer of Madonna’s concert sets).

But if these ceremonial trappings fell flat (as did the contrived “Office of the President Elect”), the campaign scarcely needed any extraneous props. Its great asset was the physical presence of Obama himself, who was young and handsome and who photographed attractively (not everyone who is good-looking in person does), his lanky build easily absorbing the pounds the camera adds. It was inevitable that the campaign, and a sympathetic media, would find a surfeit of effective images of their candidate.

Yet the image created by Shepard Fairey was of a higher order altogether, not only for what it said but also for the language it used to say it. Born in 1970, Fairey belongs to the artistic generation that came of age long after the modern movement lost momentum and coherence and at a time when the furious identity art of the 1980s was beginning to seem tired. During his time at the Rhode Island School of Design (he graduated in 1992), the work he found most exciting was anarchic in tendency, especially the graffiti art produced by self-taught painters like Jean-Michel Basquiat, who prowled the streets at night with cans of spray paint. Fairey was particularly taken with how so-called guerrilla artists could cut out simple cardboard stencils of a design and inundate a city with hundreds of identical images. Fairey’s insight was to see that such street art had advertising potential.

Fairey was still a student when he achieved notoriety for a street-art campaign of his own devising, which disseminated stickers showing the professional wrestler André the Giant (like Warhol, Fairey draws his source material from the easily recognized artifacts of popular culture). By the late 1990s, the self-proclaimed street artist was already working for Wall Street, helping such corporate clients as Pepsi and Netscape devise “guerrilla” marketing campaigns. It was Fairey’s aura of populism along with his experience in the mass dissemination of images through novel channels (appropriately termed “viral” advertising) that made him a logical fit for the Obama campaign.

Of course, Fairey was not the only artist to root for Obama, who had pledged the creation of an Artists Corps, a new federal program that would be a “domestic Peace Corps for artists.” The response from the arts community was overwhelming, and 13 of its senior statesmen—including Serra, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and Ed Ruscha—joined forces to produce “Artists for Obama,” a limited-edition suite of prints available for a minimum donation of $20,000 to the Obama Victory Fund. But these artists belonged to the generation that deplored life drawing and figurative realism, and their support was largely ceremonial. Fairey, by contrast, belonged to a generation of younger artists that relished the instrumental use of images to effect action—or, in other words, propaganda.

Throughout the months leading up to the election, the Obama team insisted that Fairey’s poster was his own voluntary creation and had not been coordinated with the campaign itself. Later it came out that the campaign had indeed played a role in its design, most significantly in changing the word on the bottom from “Progress” (a term too redolent of progressivism and five-year plans) to the less objectionable “Hope.” But otherwise, the image is absolutely characteristic of Fairey’s work: a photograph is turned into a high-contrast image, eliminating the intervening middle tones until all that remain are strong areas of white and black. (Fairey used red, white, and blue to tint the middle tones, giving the sense that Obama is basking in reflected patriotic colors.) The use of extreme high contrast makes for bold and arresting graphic imagery, for which reason it was wildly in vogue during the 1960s, when it was used on everything from magazine covers to record albums to movie posters. But it also had the look of the stenciled graffiti that helped form Fairey’s visual language and that gives the Obama poster a kind of nervous spontaneity that lifts it above the conventional platitude of virtually every other campaign poster.

The high-contrast stenciled nature of Obama’s face seems to have had one other unintended consequence. By breaking his image down into a few simple planes, it seems to have persuaded viewers that it was an easy face to draw, thus helping to set in motion the fad for making drawings and paintings. In many cases, then, they are not so much drawing Obama but replicating the forms of the face on the poster.

It was not only amateurs who imitated Fairey’s example. Shawn Barber, an artist otherwise known chiefly for his heavily tattooed subjects, made a formal portrait for the Wall Street Journal’s inauguration issue that followed the formula quite closely: the head tilted back, unsmiling lips tightly pressed, and the eyes focused on some distant realm. Here the Encyclopedia Britannica’s description of devotional art is useful: “an all-powerful, remote, and mysterious being, painted as a flat, formalized head or figure whose stern gaze dominated the interiors of temples, churches, and sanctuaries.”

Something similar might also be said of the Obama painting made by Ron English (he of the “Jihad Is Over” billboard), who for once indulged his penchant for reworking familiar images without his customary irony. He grafted Obama’s face onto Matthew Brady’s familiar photograph of Abraham Lincoln, a visual pun that works surprisingly well because of the two presidents’ similarly angular features.

English’s poster has sold well, but it was Fairey’s that proved career-making, turning him into an overnight celebrity and bringing him a contract for a book on the campaign. His newfound celebrity would not be trouble-free, however. Shortly after the election, it came out that Mannie Garcia, a freelance Associated Press photographer, had taken the photograph on which the poster was based in April 2006. Fairey, who had not secured permission for using the photograph, claimed it was “fair use” and promptly instituted a preemptive lawsuit against AP to forestall any charge of copyright infringement. The case is still pending. The revelation has tarnished Fairey’s reputation, particularly in view of the ruthlessness with which he has pursued violators of his own copyrighted images. (In particular, he has been criticized for taking graphic images that are in the public domain, making commercial products of them, and thereby depriving other artists of their use.) Fairey’s novel artistic -technique, it seems, contains its own rewards and punishments.

Power Worship

A work of art can possess great historical or social significance while also being aesthetically mediocre. Viewed as art, the spate of Obama images is negligible. Properly speaking, they belong not to the world of high art but to that of illustration and graphic art. For more than a generation, it has been fashionable to view such a distinction as arbitrary, but it retains its explanatory value. Works that are small in scale, intended for mass production, and meant to convey a lucid message tend to be eye-catching in outline, economical in composition, and free of complexity, ambiguity, or anything that might compromise the clarity of the message. Like book illustrations, they are secondary forms of art and exist to serve ideas created elsewhere. They are to be judged primarily on their -effectiveness, not on the visual pleasure they give.

But if their work is aesthetically negligible, the artists who painted Obama are of considerable historical importance. They represent the first corpus of critically successful artists who have made political art that is unashamedly sincere, free of irony, and with none of the stance of the cynical outsider that has characterized most American political art since the 1960s.

For the longest time, when dealing with the institutions of American society, it has been the reflex of American artists to deflate or puncture. These are the actions one performs on hollow things. But the thoroughly unironic art of Fairey and his ilk suggests some sense that American institutions are solid affairs and deserving of respectful treatment. On balance, this is a positive development. It abolishes the foolish notion that the progressiveness of artists can be gauged by the extent to which they are alienated from American life.

At the same time, there is something unsettling about images that offer little more political commentary than an uncomplicated adulation that borders on power worship. By showing the subjects removed from all political context, and in a beatific reverie, such art produces images that are aesthetically indistinguishable from the “dear leader” effigies that delighted the dictators of the 1930s or of our own day.

Of course, artists greater than Fairey, English, and Barber have shifted from denouncing tyrants to bleating at their feet—for instance, Jacques-Louis David, whose paintings helped send Louis XVI to the guillotine and who then went on to flatter Napoléon in some of the most obsequious paintings known to Western art. Such a choice between abject hero worship and dehumanizing agitprop shows once again, as it did 70 years ago, what happens when artists become courtiers and put themselves in the service of ideology. But to realize the dangers implicit in an art (or politics) that sorts its subjects into class enemies and anointed ones requires a knowledge of history that Fairey seems not to possess.

Whether Fairey himself understands this is unclear. One of his most popular “sampled” images, pried from the public domain, was an amiably grinning skull, which sold in large numbers until its source was revealed: the elite “death’s-head” division whose ruthlessness it symbolized, the S.S. Totenkopf Division.

Michael J. Lewis, a frequent contributor, recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete City of Refuge, a study of millennial communities. He teaches art at Williams College.

from NewsBusters.org, 2009-Aug-28, by Seton Motley:

Video: FCC 'Diversity' Czar on Chavez's Venezuela: 'Incredible...Democratic Revolution'

Editor's Note: Audio for the video at right is available here.

We have written often about Mark Lloyd, who has since his July 29 appointment been reveling in the position created just for him, "Chief Diversity Officer" at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

As we have repeatedly stated, Chief Diversity Officer Lloyd is virulently anti-capitalist, almost myopically racially fixated and exuberantly pro-regulation.

(It will come as no surprise to those who follow the work of the Media Research Center to learn that Lloyd was also at one time, prior to attending law school, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and producer for among other outlets NBC and CNN.)

Lloyd is in fact a Saul Alinsky disciple. In his 2006 book entitled Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America, he calls for an all-out "confrontational movement" against private media. He wants leftist activists - through incessant political pressure - and the government - through the creation of a totally untenable operating environment of fees, fines and regulations - to work together to force the commercial broadcasters out, to be replaced by public broadcasters.

And in his tome, Lloyd had this to say about the First Amendment:

"It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

"[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance."

Nice, eh? Note how Lloyd views the freedoms of speech and the press as just two of a number of "communications policies." Ones that he appears to view as less than equal - and in fact impediments to - the others he seeks to see implemented in the interest of promoting "democratic governance."

Note Lloyd's use of the word "democratic" to describe the "governance" he seeks to promote. It's the same word he uses to describe the work Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela.

As we see here in a video (at right above) from the June 10, 2008 National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) in Minneapolis, Minnesota discovered by the intrepid people of the Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck program, who used it in conjunction with their graciously having me on their airwaves on Wednesday.

What Lloyd says about Chavez is more than a mite frightening:

"In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution - a democratic revolution. To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela.

"The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled - worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government - worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.

"And we've had complaints about this ever since."

"The property owners and the folks who then controlled (read: OWNED) the media rebelled" in 2002 against Chavez's "incredible...democratic revolution." You bet they did - they were watching Chavez seize their property and nationalize their industries.

Lloyd then expresses disdain for the fact that there were some senior officials in the Bush Administration who gave a wink and a nod to the attempted ouster. How dare we in any way intervene to prevent Chavez's full-on Communist takeover?

And this is where Lloyd gets really dangerous given his new gig: "But he (Chavez) came back with another revolution (in 2006), and then began to take very seriously the media in his country."

Well let's see; what does Lloyd mean by this? How exactly did Chavez "beg(i)n to take very seriously the media in his country" when he "came back with another revolution?"

NGOs Warn of Restrictions in Pending Venezuela Law

Associated Press - May 7, 2009

Prominent Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations warned Thursday that a bill being drafted by lawmakers loyal to President Hugo Chavez could be used to financially strangle groups that criticize the government.

Chavez clamps down on broadcast media

Irish Examiner - Friday, July 10, 2009

President Hugo Chavez's government is imposing tough new regulations on Venezuela's cable television while revoking the licenses of more than 200 radio stations.

Report: Venezuela's Hugo Chávez aggressively seizing control of media

Miami Herald - August 14, 2009

An unclassified report lists examples of Venezuelan government efforts to crack down on or seize control of media outlets to stifle criticism.

How's that for a chronology of authoritarian censorship?

Ridiculously exorbitant fees and fines on broadcasters could certainly be "used to financially strangle groups that criticize the government," could they not? That is, when the government's not simply "revoking the licenses" of stations that don't toe the Party line. Or better still, "seiz(ing) control of media outlets to stifle criticism."

This entire censorious evolution - from fines, to license rescissions to outright seizures - took place in just over three months. This is Lloyd's definition of Chavez "tak(ing) very seriously the media in his country," as a part of leading an "incredible..democratic revolution."

Please view the Media Research Center and other like-minded entities here in the U.S. as akin to the "Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations" sounding the alarm about the governmental hammer about to fall on dissenting media - in our case conservative and Christian talk radio. We're the ones who've "had complaints about this" backdoor approach to silence the Right from its very inception.

As we draw closer to its execution, we work to ensure that we too do not suffer a Venezuelan fate.

Seton Motley is Director of Communications for the Media Research Center and Contributing Editor for NewsBusters.org.

from the Wall Street Journal's Political Diary, 2009-Sep-8, by John Fund:

CNN Reports, CNN Decides

The health care wars are heating up, with advocacy groups pouring millions into cable-TV advertising. But CNN has deemed one commercial opposing ObamaCare as too controversial to air.

The conservative Independent Women's Forum is spending $2 million on ads in eight states represented by Senators undecided on the Democratic bill. The ad features breast-cancer survivor Tracy Walsh warning that government-run health care, especially in Britain, has a bad record in detecting and treating breast cancer. "If you find a lump, you could wait months for treatment, and potentially life-saving drugs could be restricted. Government control of health care here could have meant that 300,000 women with breast cancer here might have died."

Such rhetoric has unhinged portions of the liberal media. The Daily Beast sneeringly suggested that the IWF ad was equivalent to an argument linking health-care reform to the Holocaust. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow accused the ad's makers of inventing "a secret plot to kill hundreds of thousands of American women with breast cancer."

CNN's reasons for rejecting the ad are more restrained. It called the 300,000 figure for possible deaths conjectural and alarmist. But what is truly alarming is just how bad cancer survival rates in Britain are. The medical journal Lancet finds that the five-year survival rate from breast cancer in the U.S. is 83.9%, but only 69.8% in Britain. If one extrapolates that difference in survival rates, IWF concludes that 350,000 additional breast-cancer patients wouldn't have survived five years if the U.S. survival rate had equaled that of Britain.

Statistics are tricky things, and one can argue with extrapolations. But it would be absurd not to notice the poorer results of the British system for a variety of diseases. TV commercials supporting ObamaCare, meanwhile, claim the Democratic plan would cover virtually all of the 47 million Americans now without insurance, a real stretch given Congressional Budget Office projections that show the bill would spend $1 trillion and barely dent the problem of the uninsured.

Free speech in America should be focused on letting all sides have their say absent slanderous or absurdly false claims. In rejecting the breast-cancer ad, CNN is creating an uneven playing field in the most important public policy argument of this decade.

from the Media Research Center via the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Aug-18, by Tom Blumer:

Shhh! Gallup Reports That Conservatives Outnumber Libs in All 50 States; Media Plays Dumb
Media ignores stunning news--again.

You know this is important polling news, because the establishment media is pretending it doesn't exist.

You can't find a relevant reference to it in searches on "Gallup" at the New York Times, AP.org, the Washington Post, or the LA Times. A Google News search on "Gallup conservatives outnumber liberals" (not in quotes) comes up with all of eight results.

The news isn't just that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals nationwide. That's old hat. The big news from Gallup is that conservatives outnumber liberals in every state in the union, including supposedly uberliberal Vermont and Massachusetts.

Note the Gallup story's clearly impertinent headline, accompanied by an absolutely wrong subheadline (HTs to LifeNews.com, CNS News [linked by Drudge], and an e-mailer):

Political Ideology: "Conservative" Label Prevails in the South

Conservatives outnumber liberals in nearly every state, but not in D.C.

The strength of "conservative" over "liberal" in the realm of political labels is vividly apparent in Gallup's state-level data, where a significantly higher percentage of Americans in most states -- even some solidly Democratic ones -- call themselves conservative rather than liberal.

...Despite the Democratic Party's political strength -- seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country -- more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal. While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level. Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

The margins may not be "statistically significant," but the reported result still shows conservatives on top in HI (+5), VT (+1) and MA (+1). I also have to wonder how you can have a 5-point or more margin of error in a poll of 160,000 people.

As to how Gallup's online report was organized, the answer is "not well." Sorry guys, it's not exactly news that the conservative label prevails in the South, so why did you emphasize and lead with that obvious point? The news is that conservatism prevails at least slightly in each and every state; the District of Columbia, despite Democrats' fondest wishes, is not a state. It was also "clever" of Gallup to save its 50-state table for Page 2 of its three-page report.

It's hard not to wonder if someone at Gallup did what they did with the headline and subheadline to help ensure that establishment media outlets ignored this stunning news. I would suggest that they didn't have to work that hard; the media would have ignored it anyway.

A final bit of good news: The poll was taken over a spread-out period from January through June. I don't think anyone would want to bet against the percentage of self-identifying conservatives being higher at the end of the polling period than it was in the beginning.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-May-16, p.A10:

Ink-stained Politicians
Newspapers shouldn't get—or want—a government bailout.

President Obama deserves credit for finally identifying an industry he doesn't want to rescue -- ours. Pressed about a bailout for struggling newspapers, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said last week that while it's sad for cities to lose their daily papers, any public assistance "might be a tricky area to get into." He added, "I don't know what, in all honesty, government can do about it."

That wisdom apparently doesn't extend to Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who held a hearing on the future of newspapers -- and how the federal government can help. "If we take seriously this notion that the press is the fourth estate, or the fourth branch of government," Mr. Kerry said in a prepared statement, it's time we consider its importance to democracy. Talk about a Freudian slip. Newspapers becoming the "fourth branch of government" is exactly what people most fear from any hand extended to save an independent press.

Mr. Kerry is especially worried about the Boston Globe, which admires him greatly and was recently threatened with closure in a showdown between unions and its owner the New York Times Co. In its most recent endorsement of Mr. Kerry last October, the Globe enthused that "The case for reelecting John Kerry would be strong under any circumstances . . . [but] the country needs his voice more than ever."

Meanwhile, Maryland Senator Benjamin Cardin has introduced legislation to allow newspapers to convert into nonprofits. Under his Newspaper Revitalization Act, advertising and subscription revenue would get tax-exempt status, making the papers akin to public broadcasters. Writing in the Washington Post in March, Mr. Cardin was cautious to note that this deal "is targeted at local newspapers serving communities, not large newspaper conglomerates." But the plan's details could handicap local papers in making judgments on politicians.

Newspapers that took the deal would be able to continue with news reporting as well as editorial and opinion pieces, but they would no longer be able to endorse candidates for office. In other words, the federal subsidy is combustible enough to jeopardize the integrity of political endorsements, but not enough to endanger critical reporting pieces. Of course, a publication or network's reporting can play favorites whether or not the owner endorses any candidate. Think National Public Radio, which was built by government subsidies and whose reporting tends to favor the cause of bigger government.

Mr. Kerry called newspapers an "endangered species," and everyone knows the newspaper business model has to change. But other times in history have also seen waves of newspaper closures, without calls for a federal rescue. Papers closed in the 1960s as people began to get their post-work update from the nightly TV news. The Boston Post, which folded in 1956, was once one of the largest papers in the country, with more than one million readers.

Among those who appeared at Mr. Kerry's hearing hat-in-hand were Dallas Morning News publisher and executive vice president of A.H. Belo, James M. Moroney III. He endorsed a proposal by Montana Democrat Max Baucus and Maine Republican Olympia Snowe that would allow newspapers and other businesses to offset their net operating losses over five years instead of two, as well as greater antitrust flexibility for the industry.

After that, Mr. Moroney suggested, Congress should consider establishing a "consent for content" principle to get online sources to pay "fair compensation" for content they pick up and then sell advertising on. So, although most newspapers are giving away their content free online, the feds should guarantee them a stipend from anyone who gets someone to pay for it. There's a winning business model.

The larger story here is that newspapers are enduring the familiar process of economic "creative destruction," in this case brought on by the Internet. Advertisers are fleeing to search engines, while barriers to entry in publishing have crashed. Despite the pain this causes to certain companies, this is not much different than any other industry buffeted by new technology or business strategies. The shipping industry changed radically with the advent of containerization. Wal-Mart's state-of-the-art inventory management transformed retailing. Apple's iTunes has revolutionized the music industry.

Some new business model will emerge for journalism, if not for all newspapers, and in the meantime the business of reporting the news isn't vanishing. It is taking new forms and adapting, with newspapers growing their audiences online even as the sources of their revenue shift. The industry is currently debating how to charge customers for content, and no doubt many experiments will be tried. No matter who emerges victorious, the journalism business will be stronger and more credible if it avoids the government's embrace.

Now, about those bailouts for insurers, auto makers, Goldman Sachs . . .

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-26, by Peter R. Kann:

Quality Reporting Doesn't Come Cheap
The decline of newspapers is a tragedy for democracy. How can it be stopped?

Imagine yourself the proprietor of a venerable and profitable business whose success is based on the quality of your distinctive product, the brand loyalty of your customers, and the fair price they are willing to pay for the value you provide.

Then you hire some bright young managers who develop a new and improved version of your product that can be distributed faster and accessed more conveniently than the old one. The new version—essentially a repackaging since core components are the same—appeals to traditional and new customers. No mystery there, since unlike the older version, for which you still charge, the new one is given away for free.

Consequently, your total customer base grows but your revenues do not. Your profits shrink as the free version lures customers from the paid one. You begin to wonder whether there might be a little flaw in your new business model, whether perhaps you should have charged for the new and improved version, but all the experts now tell you it is too late for that.

So it was that newspaper proprietors, seduced by the allure of a new distribution medium called the Internet, gave young Web disciples license to take their preciously crafted product—news—and repackage it with all manner of bells and whistles from interactivity to instant updates to historical archives and then give it away for free to the very same people and more who still were expected to pay for the traditional product on sheets of inky newsprint. Something was wrong with the logic.

Indeed, a business analyst landing here from Mars logically might question why an unwieldy newsprint product, stale as soon as it rolls off the press and not updated till another sun rises, should not be free whereas the new Internet product, offering all the same news plus more and evolving as does the news around the clock, should not be worth a pretty price? An even wiser Martian might conclude that customers should be given a choice, or offered a combination, but that they should be expected to pay for both.

Based on a nearly 60-year habit of reading them and some 50 years working for them, newspapers still are my preferred way to access and absorb news, but that is not nearly so true of my children and will be even less so for theirs. More and more people clearly prefer to get their news online and, not surprisingly, prefer to get it for free. Good for them, but not so good for the increasingly impoverished publishing companies selling (or these days giving away) news, for the steadily diminishing cadre of reporters and editors who produce it, or for the future of news as we have come to know it.

The start of this downward spiral predated the Internet by some decades as publishers relied more and more on advertising as their primary revenue source, chased larger and larger audiences to appeal to those advertisers, and displayed less and less confidence they could attract those audiences by charging full and fair value for the publications they produced. Thus, well before the advent of the Web, publishers were discounting subscriptions, providing all sorts of peripheral premiums, and giving away more and more copies to maintain artificial circulation bases.

At the simplest level, while consumers expected to pay $1.50 or $2 (or more at Starbucks) for a mediocre cup of coffee, they were offered a quality newspaper for 50 cents, or sometimes even less. That advertising still rolled in was a testament to a booming economy and to limited alternatives, particularly in our many monopoly newspaper markets.

If publishers were at fault here for chasing ever larger audiences, editors and even reporters all too often were complicit. The list of modern journalistic flaws and failings is long, but surely includes the blurring of traditional lines between news and opinion and news and entertainment, predatory pack journalism, an undue emphasis on conflict rather than context, pessimism and cynicism (as differentiated from appropriate skepticism and criticism), social orthodoxy, elitism, flea-like attention spans, and more. Yes, the traditional newsprint medium was becoming less appealing, but its messages also were becoming less enlightening.

In any case, by the time Internet editions arrived, the prevailing philosophy in most publishing companies already was that customers could not be expected to pay much for content, that it was easier simply to rely on advertising. The new Internet editions were merely the ultimate extension of that trend: free news to the consumer, total reliance on the advertiser.

But that didn't quite work out as expected. Online advertising, given virtually unlimited supply and also given clever new competitors like search sites, has been nothing like publishers posited. Online edition ad rates and online edition ad revenues are only small fractions of those in traditional print. And as print advertising continues its steady decline, online advertising cannot come close to compensating.

The print editions still have customers willing to pay for at least a discounted subscription, but there are fewer of the customers as free online editions peel them away from print. And so the publishers are left to juggle their twin products—the old one in inexorable decline and the new one in commercial denial—and pray the future may be somehow different.

Actually, it is the present that might have been different. At the dawn of the era of online editions this newspaper, like all the others, was faced with a free or pay choice. At the time, I was chairman of Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, and virtually alone we chose to charge for our online content. The reasons for this have been the subject of much ensuing speculation.

Allow me to explain: As a predominantly business newspaper the Journal's content was distinctive and very largely unduplicated. That content arguably had a much higher degree of essentiality to customers than general news or entertainment. And while the Internet was a new medium, Dow Jones had generations of experience at electronic delivery of news through newswires and news retrieval businesses. So the brave world did not seem so entirely new.

More important than any of that, however, was a tradition and culture that always had placed high value on news and that always had expected customers to pay full and fair value for news however, whenever or wherever it was delivered. So the decision to charge for an online edition was less courageous than it was consistent. Why should we give all our valuable content and more away for free in some new distribution channel while charging several hundred dollars a year for it in another? The only rational response was not to do so. The result is that the Journal has two successful paid editions, print and online, for sale separately or together. And others in the industry who once scoffed at such a quaint business model now seem envious.

Suppose back when online editions were first launched that several other leading newspapers had made the same decision. Yes, the Journal was different, but it wasn't the only publication with quality content, unique strengths and a strong journalistic tradition. Perhaps the New York Times, the Washington Post and one or two others. A precedent would have been set by the industry leaders, a trend would have begun, and an industry inhabited largely by lemmings would have followed the leaders down a perhaps risky but at least rational route rather than following them over a cliff.

It's now argued that it is too late for publishers to reverse course. Online edition customers have had a decade and more to enjoy the free news publishers are providing and, as in any business, it is far harder to begin charging once customers have been conditioned to expect something for nothing. So it is late in the day for the industry to change and doing so would be risky and painful.

Online edition customer bases would shrink sharply, at least at the outset. Online advertisers would be upset and demand lower rates. Marketing emphasis would need to be redirected to who is reading a publication, in print and online, rather than simply how many. News products themselves, print and online, would need to improve. But what this decision really comes down to is picking a poison, and at least the choice to begin charging offers some hope of cleansing the system and beginning down a road to recovery.

The reason any of this matters has little to do with the plight of newspaper publishers or even with the future of newspapers. The real threat is to the future of news—informative, relevant, reliable news of the wider world around us. And that is disappearing as newspapers, whose reporting staffs still produce most of the news, no longer can afford to do so. As their news budgets and staffs continue to shrink, the key question is what can fill that gap?

Television does not begin to fill it. To the extent broadcast networks ever tried they now have abdicated to so-called cable news channels. These, in turn, now devote most of their resources to covering celebrities, crimes and sundry social trivia and to prime-time programming that pretends to be analysis and informed opinion while mostly offering the spectacle of extremist heads yelling at each other. There are few resources and even less commitment to covering significant news beyond floods and fires.

The Internet is not filling news vacuums either. There are hundreds upon hundreds of online sites and blogs that claim to provide news, but virtually none of them even pretend to pursue the traditional news role of newspapers, which is to invest in professional staffs dispersed around a community and across the country or the globe to cover, analyze, and only then comment on, events. Actually, all they do is comment.

As to all the free online editions of our newspapers, their business model does not begin to cover the cost of significant news reporting. So the online editions with growing audiences—largely cannibalized from print audiences—rely on the poor print editions for almost all the news they give away. Sadly, there is less and less of that, and the ultimate loser, of course, is the public.

Mr. Kann, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was until 2007 chairman of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jul-10, by Jonathan V. Last:

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's . . . Obama

You can't get away from him. Nearly 18 months after Obamania swept the nation following the Iowa caucuses, our president is everywhere -- from Us Weekly to the nightly news. He's been rendered into an action figure and his likeness gazes out upon the world from T-shirts everywhere. He's the subject of guerrilla art campaigns and formal art installations. Washington's P&D Souvenir Factory, which specializes in snowglobes and collectible spoons commemorating our nation's capital, recently changed its name to "Obama Biden Collectible Merchandises."

And then there are the comic books.

It started innocently enough. In September 2008, the independent publisher IDW put out comic-book biographies of the two presidential candidates. They were handsome and told in a straightforward manner. The issue about Mr. Obama was friendly toward the senator, but also clear-eyed. It described his use of marijuana and cocaine in high school and even included a section on the racialist musings of Jeremiah Wright and Mr. Obama's consequent decision to join Trinity United Church of Christ. And since there was a companion book about Sen. John McCain, IDW wasn't taking sides in the election.

A month later, another independent publisher, Image Comics, did take sides. In issue #137 of Savage Dragon, the titular character, a green-skinned, super-powered Chicago policeman, appears on the cover with a grinning Obama, proclaiming, "I'm Savage Dragon and I endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States!" Normally an obscure title, that issue of Savage Dragon sold out through four printings.

After the election, the new president put in a guest appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #583. The cover of the venerable series featured Obama in the foreground giving a big thumbs-up to Spidey. Released the week before the inauguration, the issue centered on Spider-Man defeating a plot to destroy Mr. Obama's swearing in. After Spider-Man saves the day, the buffed-up president says, "Thanks partner" and favors him with a fist-bump. Amazing Spider-Man usually sells about 70,000 copies a month. The Obama issue went to five printings and sold over 350,000 copies, making it the best-selling regular series book in a decade.

People noticed those numbers. Wizard, the lifestyle magazine for the comic-book/sci-fi crowd, put Mr. Obama on its cover the next month. The image, an oil painting by Alex Ross, depicts Mr. Obama ripping off his suit and tie to reveal a big red "O" emblazoned on his chest. He stares purposefully into the middle-distance, ready to fight evil and raise the capital-gains tax.

With brisk sales of that issue, Wizard ventured into Newsweek territory, putting Mr. Obama on the next issue's cover, too. This time he appeared with Michelle, the couple fist-bumping next to a headline blaring "Obama Power! Barack and Michelle Rule the World of Comic Books, Toys and More!" It was an act of pure merchandising -- the First Lady appears nowhere in the magazine.

By then, the floodgates had opened. There was another biography titled, simply enough, Obama, the Comic Book, published by Antarctic Press. Encouraged by the Savage Dragon sales, Image put Mr. Obama on the cover of two issues of Youngblood with a story about the new president riding herd over a team of superheroes and beating up the occasional bad guy himself. There was a second Obama appearance (and cover) in Savage Dragon. He showed up on the cover of The Greatest American Hero #3. Another comic-book trade publication, Tripwire, ran a cover featuring a Marvel character, the African-American version of Nick Fury, in the now-famous red-blue-and-cream Shepard Fairey "Hope" poster.

Sitting presidents have appeared in comic books before. In 1980, Jimmy Carter made a brief cameo in Uncanny X-Men #135. George W. Bush appeared momentarily in Ultimates #3 in 2002. Issue #309 of Action Comics saw President Kennedy play a prominent role pretending to be Clark Kent for a day in order to help Superman preserve his secret identity. (Unfortunately, the issue hit stands the week after Kennedy's assassination.)

But on the whole, when presidents have been part of comic-book plots, they have been figures of scorn. Alan Moore made Richard Nixon a despotic president-for-life in Watchmen. Ronald Reagan appeared in a number of '80s comics as a bumbling, warmongering fool -- though his presence was never important enough to be featured on a cover.

What's different about Mr. Obama's triumphant march through comics is (1) the sheer volume of his appearances, month after month; and (2) the worshipful attitude toward him. The main characters gape and stutter in his presence, overwhelmed by his magnificence. He's even drawn iconically. Where other presidents have been penciled either realistically or satirically, Mr. Obama mostly gets the superhero treatment with bulging muscles and jutting jaw line.

More Obama is on the way. In Drafted: 100 Days (published by DDP), he fights evil aliens as part of an intergalactic war. Dynamite Entertainment is putting out a four-issue series called Army of Darkness: Ash Saves Obama. Chicago-based publisher DDP has just begun a series titled Barack the Barbarian, in which our president, now a shirtless, ax-toting, he-man, is the protagonist. Bluewater Comics is scheduled to release yet another Obama biography this September, titled Political Power: Barack Obama.

Recently, Bluewater published a comic-biography about Michelle Obama, which is remarkable in its own way. There's been a long tradition in comics of earnest, fair-minded nonfiction. Over the years comics writers have crafted sober renderings of subjects ranging from the Lindbergh kidnapping to The 9/11 Commission Report. Even though they're overwhelmingly liberal as a group, comic-book writers have kept their politics out of these stories.

The Michelle Obama comic book is less a biography and more of a valedictory attack on Republicans. Bill O'Reilly is portrayed as a racist. Robert Bork is rendered as a ghoulish specter supposedly animating Mrs. Obama's professional life. Sarah Palin is depicted -- seriously -- snarling and holding aloft a bloody knife.

It would be nice to believe that the cult of comic-book Obama is just publishers cashing in on a fad. In an interview with a fan site about the glut of Obama comics, Chris Ward, who wrote the forthcoming Bluewater biography, (sort of) jokingly referred to the phenomenon as "a free ride on the Obama comic cash-in train."

The alternative is that the comic-book establishment finally feels liberated to let loose its political fantasies. Let's hope it's just commercialism. The last thing we need is comic books descending to the level of respectable mainstream journalism.

Mr. Last is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

from Commentary, 2009-May, by Jonathan S. Tobin:

An Ominous Turn in Elite Opinion

When Roger Cohen, the foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times, traveled to Iran in January and February, the country he found was a revelation. Unlike the images of raging crowds chanting “Death to America” and fanatical Islam familiar to the West, what Cohen claimed to have discovered was a land whose bazaars were rich with the fragrance of incense and whose people were “sensual” as well as “educated” and “tolerant.”

In a series of op-ed columns published in February and March, and at an appearance at a Los Angeles synagogue during which he was confronted by Iranian exiles, Cohen’s determination to debunk what he sees as the distorted reputation of the Islamic Republic was undaunted by outrage from Jews and other observers more mindful of Tehran’s record of tyranny at home and support for terrorism abroad. Though he acknowledged that Iran was an “unfree society,” Cohen believes confrontation with it—even over its drive to acquire nuclear weapons—is not merely misguided but wrong.

Despite the regime’s promulgation of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, he thinks the popular conception of Iran is overblown and lacking in “nuance.” Comparisons of the Iranian government and its leaders to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were, he wrote, absurd if not an insult to the six million victims of the Holocaust. The focus on Iran’s behavior and nuclear ambitions was, he said, a distraction for American foreign-policy planners who would be more usefully employed promoting recognition of the Hamas and Hizballah terrorist groups as legitimate players in the Middle East with whom the State of Israel—which, according to Cohen, is in no position to criticize Iran for human rights violations—ought to be made to negotiate concessions.

_____________

Roger Cohen was born in London in 1955 and is a naturalized American citizen now living in New York. Oxford-educated, he made his reputation as a savvy foreign correspondent for Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, and the Times. In his work for the Times op-ed page, Cohen still likes to play the old-fashioned foreign correspondent who ingenuously lands in a foreign clime and then relays his fresh-eyed impressions to his readers.

Yet for all of his experience in the field, Cohen’s accounts of his journey made it seem more like a trip to a latter-day version of Omar Khayyam’s Persia than to the Iran of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his telling, Iran’s fascinating people and “complex” political culture are, despite rough moments (such as murderous oppression of the Baha’is and the attempts of the Islamist mullahs to control every aspect of Iranian life), the closest thing to a democracy in the Muslim Middle East. Notwithstanding the admiration for the people of Iran he developed during his three weeks there, most of what Cohen wrote about his stay concerned the remnant of the country’s once thriving Jewish community, which numbered over 210,000 at the time of Israel’s inception in 1948. Over the following four years, some 70,000 immigrated to Israel. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, another 60,000 fled. There are just 20,000 in the country today.

One hears little about this community except when it becomes subject to terrible oppression, as in the 1999 arrests of thirteen Jews on false charges of spying on behalf of Israel. At least thirteen others have been executed since 1979 on a variety of pretexts, mostly having to do with the practice of Judaism or assisting emigration to Israel.

Nonetheless, according to Cohen, the Jews remaining in Iran are a generally happy lot. Rather than being intimidated by a repressive theocratic regime that has repeatedly jailed and executed religious minorities and has criminalized all contact with or support for Israel, the Jews to whom Cohen spoke claimed to be content.

In “What Iran’s Jews Say,” published on February 23, he quoted a 61-year-old antiques dealer in Isfahan who leads the service at one of the remaining synagogues in the city as saying he was not worried about the chants of “Death to Israel” that “punctuate” Iranian culture. “‘Let them say ‘Death to Israel,’ he said,” Cohen related. “‘I’ve been in this store 43 years and never had a problem. I’ve visited my relatives in Israel, but when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian.’”

Morris Motamed, who previously served as the token Jew allowed to sit in Iran’s toothless parliament, told Cohen that he was not a “Quisling.” While the “Death to Israel” chants “bothered” Motamed, he was just as bothered by the “double standards” that allowed other countries, including Israel, to have a nuclear bomb, but not Iran.

What Cohen did not write, though he admitted it in his Los Angeles talk, is that his interviews of Iranian Jews were conducted through a government-appointed translator and handler (Cohen does not speak Farsi) who he acknowledged would report to his masters in Tehran about both the journalist and those he met. Given the penalty for bucking the Islamist line about Israel for any Iranian, let alone a member of a despised minority, a less credulous journalist would not have taken the fruit of such interviews at face value. But Cohen not only reported the answers of his interlocutors as if they were a genuine reflection of Jewish opinion in Iran, he inflated them into a rationale for the Iran policy he wishes the United States to follow.

Cohen paid lip service to some basic and undeniable facts about his hosts: Iran has a brutal government that represses its people, engages in state-sponsored anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, aids terrorists abroad, and frequently threatens to destroy Israel. However, he views the continued existence of a cowed remainder of Iranian Jewry as of equal importance. The point, he wrote, is that the “sophistication and culture” of Iran counts for more “than all the inflammatory rhetoric”:

That may be because I’m a Jew and have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran. Or perhaps I was impressed that the fury over Gaza, trumpeted on posters and Iranian TV, never spilled over into insults or violence toward Jews. Or perhaps it’s because I’m convinced the ‘Mad Mullah’ caricature of Iran and likening of any compromise with it to Munich 1938—a position popular in some American Jewish circles—is misleading and dangerous.

Cohen’s warm words about Iran led many observers to accuse him of naïveté, of having been manipulated by Tehran and having been seduced by the country’s charms, as in this breezy description:

Try these images: brand-crazy consumers hunting for designer jeans, Internet cafes, an auto industry doing a lot better than Detroit, style, sensuality, and headscarves that take an awful lot of time, for some reason, that need adjusting, enough time to notice the hair beneath them and the face.

But Cohen was anything but naïve. The purpose of his columns was not so much to sing the praises of the mullahs but to undermine American solidarity with Israel, which has good reason to feel threatened both by Iran and its Hizballah and Hamas sub-agencies. Debunking the notion that Iran is a danger to world peace goes hand-in-hand with Cohen’s conviction that Israel is morally equivalent to Hamas and must, at all costs, be compelled into accommodation with its mortal enemies.

The moral outrage about Ahmadinejad and Hamas is misplaced, in his view, primarily because speaking too much about the vile nature of both the Iranian regime and its ally has the effect of bolstering sympathy for an Israel that he sees as morally equivalent to its foes. As he told his Los Angeles audience, “If it is possible that Hamas is sincere in its desire for Israeli extinction,” so is the desire of Israelis to trample and “lord it over” the Palestinians.

_____________

Indeed, Cohen seized on the willingness of Iranian Jews to prove to their overlords that they are loyal to the regime through attacks on Israel’s recent campaign in Gaza precisely because such sentiments mirror his own views. Though he touts himself as a supporter of Israel, he says virtually all acts of Israeli self-defense, including the counter-attack to halt missile attacks on its southern towns and construction of a fence to keep out suicide bombers, are “a bad thing.” Thus, the consensus of Israeli intelligence, as well as most serious observers of Iran elsewhere, that Tehran is moving inexorably toward a nuclear weapon—a weapon that, even if it isn’t used to annihilate the Jews of Israel, would provide a safety net for its equally annihilationist Hamas and Hizballah allies—is a perspective that must be refuted. The ability of Israel’s supporters to harp on these points is a danger to good relations with Iran and therefore must be squelched.

That is why the Jews remaining in Iran are such a useful tool for the Iranians and those who seek to exculpate them, such as Cohen. Cohen’s willingness to ignore the context of oppression and fear to portray these Jews as living in safety and relative freedom could, as he wrote on March 16, “blunt the [anti-Iran] hawks’ case.” Rather than seeing the need to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranian leaders as the key issue for diplomats, he believes the real worry is the chance that the world will take the issue seriously and actually try to act to stop them, a prospect he sees as an unalloyed disaster to be prevented at all costs. Iran’s threats against Israel are, he says, mere talk, while the regime’s decision to oppress but not kill the 20,000 Jews currently under their control is the happy reality. The Jew-hatred at the core of the Islamic Republic’s ideology—as well as that of Hamas—is, in Cohen’s formulation, meaningless.

If his intention had been to alter the terms of public discussion about relations with Iran, by the end of March Cohen would have had every reason to think the tide might be turning in his direction. President Barack Obama’s conciliatory message to Iran’s leaders broadcast on March 20 effectively signaled a sea change in American policy on Iran away from efforts aimed at containing Iranian-backed terror and stopping its program to develop nuclear weapons and toward a rapprochement that would, in Cohen’s view, inevitably lead to a cooling of U.S. relations with Israel. Candidate Obama’s pledge to talk to Iran last year may have been accompanied by promises of tough action if negotiations failed, but the current lack of interest in Washington for anything other than accommodation is readily apparent. The Obama administration may well be more interested in how to live with an Iranian bomb at this point rather than how to stop it.

Justifying such a policy of indifference to a nuclear Iran will require the administration to discount the fears of Israelis that the countdown towards an Iranian bomb begins the timetable for their destruction. Getting Americans to stop thinking about Iran as a rogue state led by a raving lunatic thirsting for Western as well as Jewish blood is a tall order, but it is precisely in this frame of reference that the significance of Cohen’s work should be viewed. The attention given the testimonials of Iranian Jews about the good intentions of their anti-Semitic rulers must be seen not as merely a slice of life in the Islamic Republic but, as Cohen admitted during his talk, as part of an effort to change the tenor of America’s national conversation about Iran. Indeed, if views such as Cohen’s are now to be given more credence than the anguished cries of alarm coming from Jerusalem about Iranian nukes, then a bipartisan consensus about stopping Iran may be, as the writer hopes, on its way out.

Seen in this light, Cohen’s work inevitably invokes memories of Times journalists who have served in the past as apologists for other tyrants—principally Walter Duranty, the paper’s Moscow bureau chief from 1922 to 1936, who helped tamp down American outrage about the regime of Josef Stalin. Duranty’s work whitewashed the Communists and Stalin (who, with good reason, praised Duranty’s writing) and included a flat-out denial of the existence of the terror famine that took the lives of millions in the Ukraine. This feat of journalistic malpractice earned him a Pulitzer Prize (an award that, despite the Times’s late acknowledgment of Duranty’s scandalous deceit, still has not been revoked by a feckless Pulitzer board).

Cohen, who spent considerable time covering the Balkan wars in the 1990s, is sufficiently aware of the danger of being labeled as a fellow traveler of a tyrant to deny that he is unaware of the nature of the Iranian government. Indeed, as he told his listeners in Los Angeles, he “did not spend years covering genocide in Bosnia to sit back and be told that I am an apologist for a genocidal regime.”

But his tactic is not so much as to cover up the facts about Iran’s crimes, as Duranty did of Stalin’s famine and purges, as it is to discount Iran’s behavior. As far as he is concerned, “obsessing” about Iran’s rhetoric about Israel, its terror ties, and its anti-Semitism constitutes a distraction that dangerously reinforces American backing for Israeli “intransigence” toward Hamas and a willingness to contemplate sanctions or even force in order to prevent the Iranian nuclear drive.

The truth about the Iranian government’s backing for terrorism around the globe and its domestic human rights abuses is not disputed. Rather, it is treated as merely another element that makes an evaluation of the regime one requiring more “gray” than the simplistic “black and white” that pro-Israel advocates are wont to use. Cohen’s concessions on these matters are designed to keep him from seeming like an open apologist for Iran, but whether he is open or covert in his apologia is a distinction without a difference. For if nothing Iran does is enough to merit action on the part of free nations; if even the possibility of its acquiring the ultimate weapon of mass destruction is insufficient to justify even a U.S. policy of “carrots and sticks” (a policy fit “for donkeys,” says Cohen, not the noble rulers of Persia) to entice Iran to back down, let alone the use of force; then what Cohen has done is to create a template that grants the Jew-haters in Tehran impunity to do anything they want.

_____________

In going to Iran and then producing columns that served to justify and rationalize the behavior of its government, Roger Cohen was not a foolish pilgrim manipulated by evil men who exploited his openhearted desire for understanding. Rather, he was a writer with an agenda to smash any hope for restraint of the Iranian regime and to split the U.S.-Israel alliance. Though he cannot be said to have lied on the scale of a Walter Duranty, in his determination to portray Tehran in a sympathetic light and disarm those who see its drive for nuclear weapons as an existential threat to the Jewish State as well as the West, Cohen sacrificed his credibility as a journalist. Even more, by using the helpless Jews of Iran as the linchpin of his campaign, Roger Cohen has behaved in a manner so shameful that his reputation as an apologist for those who threaten genocide may well live as long as Duranty’s infamy.

Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of COMMENTARY.

from Breitbart.com's Big Hollywood, 2009-May-25, by Kurt Schlichter:

‘Antichrist’: Lars von Trier Bores Me

Antichrist hasn’t even come out in the United States and I’m already bored.

If you haven’t heard about Antichrist yet, you will. It’s the latest movie from Danish art film director Lars von Trier, who has made a name for himself with critically-hailed movies that push the limits his audiences’ tolerance for bizarre sex, bloody violence and artistic pretension. One of his recent movies focused on an American town where slavery never ended, while another had pretty much an entire American village raping Nicole Kidman. A third film ends with the American authorities hanging Icelandic rock waif Bjork. Sensing some themes? By all accounts, Antichrist is a similarly delightful romp.

Naturally, the critics adore him, and combined with the fact that von Trier despises Americans, you would expect that he would get cut some slack by the French audience at Cannes last weekend when the festival screened Antichrist. Not so - the few cheers were apparently drowned out by a tsunami of boos when the lights went up. What happened?

Maybe, just maybe, people are starting to catch on to the fact that shocking art has become anything but. The problem for Mr. von Trier and those like him who specialize in transgressive art is that there’s really very little in the way of conventional morality left to transgress.

You can’t shock audiences who have seen everything. An artist paints a picture of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung? Whatever. A rapper busts a rhyme about shooting cops? Just keeping it real. A network crime show channels grisly autopsies right into our living rooms? Ho hum, pass the Pringles and dip.

Even mainstream movies are losing the power to shock. Ron Howard can’t even manage to pick a high profile fight with the Catholic Church by accusing it of mass murder in Angels & Demons. The Holy See shrugged its collective vestments and only a little more than half the audience of The Da Vinci Code confessed enough interest to show up opening week.

Antichrist apparently tries really hard to be shocking. There’s the title - that should kidney-punch those bourgeois audiences’ sensitivities, right? Uh, not really. Then how about some truly shocking content? According to the reports, there’s a graphic sex scene intercut with the death of the couple’s child. Sex and violence mixed together - there’s something we’ve never seen. Then the couple goes to a cabin in the woods to recover from their loss and begin to psychologically and physically torment one another. Sounds like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” meets “The Evil Dead.” Gotta do better than that, Lars.

Well, Willem Dafoe runs around naked then gets castrated. Yeah, that’s horrifying. Not the castration - in recent years, extreme vasectomy scenes have become the go-to shock effect for the truly transgressive auteur. Yawn. But the idea of the cadaverous Dafoe nude - that image will haunt your nightmares.

Now, there is a talking fox that whispers, “Chaos reigns.” I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean, but seems to be the only thing about this movie we haven’t seen a hundred times before. With reason, to be sure, but at least it’s fresh.

Poor Mr. von Trier. He and many of his ilk have made careers of trying to shock the rest of us out of our collective aesthetic stupor. And it worked. We’ve now seen it all. And we’re tired of it. What else you got, Lars?

I know - how about the further adventures of that talking fox? Maybe he can partner with a by-the-book cop and solve crimes. We haven’t seen that before.

from the Washington Times via the California Chronicle, 2009-May-5, by Christian Toto:

For Political Comedians, the Joke's Not on Obama

What's so unfunny?

That's what some comics -- citing the scarcity of satire directed at President Obama and his administration -- want to know.

Claiming that his peers are "panicky" about "being called a racist," stand-up legend Jackie Mason said too many once-fearless satirists are settling for "hero worship" of the new U.S. president.

The Great Presidential Comedy Drought of 2009 can't be chalked off to a lack of satirical fodder, said comic Jeffrey Jena, founder of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy blog. ("Looking at politics and life from the right side," proclaims its motto.)

"Letterman used to do a 'Bushism of the Week.' " Why hasn't he started one with Obama?" Mr. Jena said. "There's plenty of those moments, the 'Ohs, and 'Umms' or 'I don't speak Austrian.' "

"Late Show" host David Letterman was scathing in his mockery of President George W. Bush. But on his show recently, he scolded those who would mock the new president's reliance on the teleprompter for "political nitpicking," saying Mr. Obama is "at least out there trying" to cope with "impossible" political challenges.

"What really can you say wrong" about the determined new president, Mr. Letterman asked rhetorically while introducing a short film called "Teleprompter vs. No Teleprompter." The segment contrasted a clip of a fluent passage of rhetoric from a formal Obama address to Congress with one of a tongue-tied Mr. Bush trying to extemporize in a televised informal question-and-answer format.

Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show," another erstwhile scourge of presidential foibles during the Bush years, has morphed into a political loyalist, rising to the defense of Mr. Obama with angry rants against critics of the president such as CNBC's Jim Cramer and Internet news aggregator (and Washington Times columnist) Andrew Breitbart.

To some, like self-identified Christian comic Brad Stine, the kid-gloves treatment of Mr. Obama is blatant political cheerleading.

"Because their candidate was elected, they're hesitant to mock that thing which they approve of," Mr. Stine said.

Others see comics simply deferring to the sensitivities of audiences who aren't ready to a laugh at a president who's not just a political leader but a transcendent historical symbol of black achievement.

"In New York, nobody wants to hear anything anti-Obama," said Linda Smith, a stand-up comic, Obama booster and teacher at Caroline's School of Comedy in New York. "And even if they do, right-leaning comics must walk through a historical minefield to mock the first black president."

Radio and Fox News Channel talk show host Glenn Beck, who kicks off a six-city stand-up comedy tour on June 1 in Denver, suggested that both fear and political calculation are inhibiting factors. Comedians like Mr. Letterman are "either afraid, or they know the power of comedy as a weapon and they like using it as that," he said.

"We're now into biased comedy. We can't even laugh without a political agenda," said Mr. Beck, who cites "The Simpsons" as a show that skewers both sides without fear or favor.

Mr. Mason, for one, has no qualms about tweaking the new president, explaining that it's all a matter of striking the right tone.

"People love it. I don't do it with hate. Even liberals laugh at it," he said. "The truth of the matter is, if it doesn't sound like hate, and it sounds like a legitimate joke, it's OK."

Julia Gorin, an avowedly conservative comic, is also careful to create the right atmosphere. She said she begins the Obama part of her act by reminding audiences how her fellow comics have been taking flack for the lack of Obama jokes.

"That orients people the right way," Miss Gorin said. "I'll run into problems, sensitivities, without doing that."

Can the vacuum of uninhibited presidential satire create an opening within the comedy ranks for a new breed of right-leaning comics?

Comedian Nick DiPaolo said that although the new administration provides an opening for conservative humorists, that won't mean they suddenly start appearing on Mr. Letterman's couch.

Mr. DiPaolo, who mixes conservative-friendly material into his act, said the people behind the major entertainment shows "aren't going to let someone right of center jump into the arena."

Lee Camp, a left-leaning stand-up comic and Huffington Post contributor, questions whether the pool of right-leaning comics is big enough to take advantage of any opening created by the election of Mr. Obama.

Creative types tend to lean left, both in comedy and in other art forms, Mr. Camp said. Comics typically try to identify with the "everyman," while conservatives tend to favor big business, Mr. Camp said, which is a turnoff to the average comedy club habitue.

All bets are off, though, should the president have an intern malfunction or similar scandal. If that happens, right-wing comics will "be popping up everywhere," he said.

Mr. Beck said society needs comedians to skewer those in power, no matter the party affiliation.

"We deflate everybody. As a guy who's been deflated lately, it keeps you in check," Mr. Beck said. "Whoever the president is, they have to know that they're not a king."

from Commentary Magazine, 2009-May, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev:

I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed

When new information about Americans who had cooperated with the Soviet KGB began to emerge in the 1990s, no individual case generated as much controversy as that of the journalist I.F. Stone, who had long been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and a teller of truth to power before his death in 1989. Charges about Stone’s connections with the KGB have been swirling about for more than a decade, prompting cries of outrage among his passionate followers. Until now, the evidence was equivocal and subject to different interpretations. No longer.

In the early 1990s, one of us—Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer turned Russian journalist—was given authorized access to the files of the SVR (the successor spy agency to the KGB in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union) to pursue research for a book that was eventually published in 1998 under the title The Haunted Wood.¹ By the time of publication, Vassiliev, fearing retribution from hard-line Communists and nationalists angered by revelations of secrets, had moved permanently to Great Britain. He left his original notebooks, containing more than 1,100 pages of detailed notes and lengthy quotations, with friends in Moscow. They were filled with details about people and issues that did not fit the parameters of The Haunted Wood or whose significance Vassiliev did not then realize.

_____________

Retrieved by Vassiliev in 2002, the notebooks offer the most complete look at Soviet espionage in America we have yet had or will obtain until the likely far-off day when Russian authorities open the KGB’s archives for independent research, eclipsing even the several thousand KGB cables partially decoded by the U.S. National Security Agency in the Venona project and released in 1995. They are the basis for our new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America.² And they provide startling new evidence about Stone’s ties to Soviet intelligence.

_____________

Born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia in 1907 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Stone dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to become a journalist. After several years as the youngest editorial writer for a major metropolitan newspaper, the Philadelphia Record, he moved to the New York Post with instructions from its owner, J. David Stern, to transform the paper into a champion of New Deal liberalism. Stone was, however, more than just a New Deal liberal. His sympathy for Soviet communism was obvious. In June 1933, he declared that a “Soviet America” was “the one way out that could make a real difference to the working classes” and insisted that FDR’s New Deal was not reforming America but leading it to fascism, a view that then reflected the position of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).

In New York, Stone also became a contributor to the Soviet-aligned Nation and New Republic. He was a presence in the Popular Front, an effort by the CPUSA to make common cause with other left-wing groups. Although Stone had briefly been a member of the Socialist Party in the early 1930s, he soon had a reputation as a fervent pro-Communist, although he never joined the CPUSA. His biographer, Myra MacPherson, later conceded that Stone had possessed a romantic view of Communism and viewed “party members as lined up on the correct side of historical developments, unlike fascists or even members of the smaller left-wing sects.” While occasionally critical of aspects of Stalin’s purges, Stone felt that because of the battle against fascism, it was too important to risk fracturing the Popular Front by openly denouncing Stalin or the Soviet Union. He was a signer of the statement, published just days before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, defending the USSR and its progress toward democracy and denying it shared any commonalities with Nazi Germany.

After Stern finally fired him from the Post for his excessively pro-Soviet views, Stone moved to the Nation. Briefly shaken by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he momentarily pulled back from his Communist alliances, writing an angry denunciation of the agreement and taking part in a short-lived effort by several other disillusioned members of the Popular Front and former Communists to build a new radical group critical of the American Communist Party’s role as a tool of Soviet foreign policy.

In 1940 he moved to PM, the left-wing New York daily. There, he reverted to his earlier attitudes and became a stalwart of the paper’s pro-Communist faction. His uncritical support of Soviet and Communist policies continued until the Stalin era came to an end with the dictator’s death in 1953. A year earlier, Stone wrote The Hidden History of the Korean War, in which he promoted the falsehood that South Korea had sparked the war by invading the Communist North. A few years after PM folded in 1948, Stone created his own muckraking newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which gained a wide audience on the Left. Although he was occasionally critical of aspects of Soviet policy, it was not until the mid-1950s that he lost his illusions about the Soviet regime, writing a denunciation that cost his newsletter a substantial portion of its readership.

In the 1960s, Stone’s angry condemnation of American foreign policy found a receptive audience among both the old pro-Soviet left and the younger New Left. Stone learned classical Greek in his retirement and wrote a book on Socrates and Athens, part of his lifelong obsession with issues of dissent. When he died in 1989, his reputation as a fiercely independent curmudgeon seemed secure.

_____________

The first report of Stone’s possible ties to the KGB came in 1992, when Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB general, told a British journalist, “We had an agent—a well-known American journalist—with a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I myself convinced him to resume them. But in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia . . . he said he would never again take any money from us.”

Herbert Romerstein, a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, quoted an unidentified KGB source as saying that the journalist in question was Stone. The British journalist then interviewed Kalugin again, and he admitted that he had been referring to Stone but denied that Stone was a controlled agent. In a 1994 autobiography, Kalugin characterized Stone as a fellow traveler (someone with Communist Party beliefs but not membership) “who had made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet system” before the mid-1950s. When he was asked to reestablish contact with Stone, Kalugin wrote, KGB headquarters in Moscow “never said that [Stone] had been an agent of our intelligence service, but rather that he was a man with whom we had regular contact.”

Kalugin’s careful parsing of Stone’s precise relationship to the KGB and the hints he offered of an earlier relationship with Soviet intelligence made the discovery of Stone-related materials in the KGB cables deciphered by the Venona project in the mid-1990s the occasion for an uproar. Four cables mentioned Stone. Two were entirely benign. A 1943 message from the GRU, or Soviet military intelligence, merely reported that someone with GRU connections had been in Washington and talked with several correspondents, including Stone. A KGB message dated December 1944 mentioned Stone along with several other journalists who had contacts with military leaders.

The other two, both from 1944, were more suggestive. On September 13, the KGB New York station sent a message to Moscow that Vladimir Pravdin, a KGB officer working under cover as a correspondent for TASS, the Soviet news agency, had been trying to contact “Pancake” in Washington, but that Pancake had been refusing to meet, citing a busy schedule. Samuel Krafsur, an American KGB agent code-named “Ide” who worked for TASS in the building that housed Stone’s office, had tried to “sound him out but Pancake did not react.” An October 23 message then reported that Pravdin had succeeded in meeting with Stone:

P. [Pancake/Stone] said that he had noticed our attempts to contact him, particularly the attempts of Ide [Krafsur] and of people of the Trust [USSR Embassy], but he had reacted negatively fearing the consequences. At the same time he implied that the attempts at rapprochement had been made with insufficient caution and by people who were insufficiently responsible. To Sergey’s [Pravdin’s] reply that naturally we did not want to subject him to unpleasant complications, Pancake gave him to understand that he was not refusing his aid but one should consider that he had three children and did not want to attract the attention of the Hut [FBI]. To Sergey’s question how he considered it advisable to maintain liaison P. replied that he would be glad to meet but he rarely visited Tyre [New York].

While Stone earned a good living, the message added, “he would not be averse to having a supplementary income.”

Taken together, these messages were suggestive but not conclusive. Unquestionably, the KGB had wanted to establish a covert relationship with Stone and had been willing to pay him, but what exactly it had in mind was left unstated. Another implication was that Stone feared a connection with the KGB could attract FBI attention and jeopardize his career—but that otherwise, he was not averse to a relationship. There was no firm evidence that Stone had agreed to cooperate with the KGB, although Kalugin’s revelation that he had been ordered to reestablish contact with Stone in the 1960s made it clear that Stone must have had some understanding of who was cultivating him.

_____________

The controversy about Stone continued to simmer in the ensuing decade, fueled in part by charges by the conservative columnist Robert Novak and the controversialist Ann Coulter that he was a paid agent and a Soviet spy. In 2006, MacPherson’s biography of Stone charged that “neocons” had launched these slanderous attacks on him since they “have a vested interest in portraying Stone as a paid Kremlin stooge because he remains an icon to those who despise all that the far right espoused.” MacPherson also attempted to demonstrate that there was no reason to assume Pancake was Stone; that even if he had been Pancake, he had done nothing more than meet with a Soviet correspondent; and that his only reason for doing so with reluctance was the nefarious behavior of the FBI, which was terrorizing anyone who dared meet with a Russian.

MacPherson’s book set off a round of accusations. Paul Berman, a left-wing anti-Communist writer, dismissed her whitewashing of Stone, noting that Stone’s own writing displayed a long history of glorifying the Soviet Union until the 1950s and that the mere fact of Stone’s having had no access to official secrets and not having stolen anything for the USSR did not mean the KGB would not have valued his cooperation.

Eric Alterman, a onetime Stone protégé, called the Stone-KGB stories “smears,” “phony,” and “pathetic,” dismissing the whole contretemps as “an almost entirely bogus controversy over whether Stone ever willingly spied for the Russians or cooperated with the KGB in any way. He did not.”

KGB archival documents tell a different story.

_____________

The first mention of Stone comes in a KGB New York station report of April 13, 1936. It mentions “Pancake (Liberal’s lead)—Isidor Feinstein [as Stone was then known], a commentator for the New York Post.” “Liberal” was Frank Palmer, who was part of the same New York community of pro-Communist radical journalists. He had also been an agent of the KGB New York station for several years. This note indicated that Palmer had suggested his bosses look at Isidor Feinstein. The New York station further reported in May 1936: “Relations with Pancake have entered the channel of normal operational work. He went to Washington on assignment for his newspaper. Connections in the State Dep. and Congress.” By stating that its relationship with Stone had entered “the channel of normal operational work,” the KGB New York station was reporting that Stone had become a fully active agent. Over the next several years, documents recorded in Vassiliev’s notebooks make clear, Stone worked closely with the KGB.

_____________

One might ask why the KGB would recruit a journalist like Stone, then an editorial writer for the New York Post, with no access to government or industrial secrets. In fact, the KGB recruited a great many journalists. A 1941 internal KGB summary report broke down the occupations of Americans working for the spy agency in the prior decade. Twenty-two were journalists, a profession outnumbered only by engineers (forty-nine) and dwarfing economists (four) and professors (eight). While journalists rarely had direct access to technical secrets or classified documents in the way engineers, scientists, or government officials did, the espionage enterprise encompasses more than the classic spy who physically steals a document.

The KGB recruited journalists in part for their access to inside information and sources on politics and policy, insights into personalities, and confidential and non-public information that never made it into published stories. Certain journalistic working habits also lent themselves to intelligence tasks. By profession, journalists ask questions and probe; what might seem intrusive or suspect if done by anyone else is their normal modus operandi. Consequently, the KGB often used journalists as talent spotters for persons who did have access to sensitive information, and made use of them to gather background information that would help in evaluating candidates for recruitment.

The flexibility of their work also made journalists desirable as couriers and agent handlers (the liaisons between KGB officers and their American sources). There was also much less risk that a journalist having contact with a government official or engineer would attract the attention of security officials than would a KGB officer under Soviet diplomatic cover. And even if security officials did notice such a meeting, it would be much easier to provide a benign explanation for contact with a pesky American journalist than with a Soviet diplomat. Additionally, the KGB could use journalists for “active measures”—the planting of a story in the press or giving a slant to a story that served KGB goals.

Stone assisted Soviet intelligence on a number of such tasks: talent spotting, acting as a courier by relaying information to other agents, and providing private journalistic tidbits and data the KGB found interesting. In May 1936, for example, the KGB New York station told Moscow:

Pancake reported that Karl Von Wiegand works in Berlin as a correspondent for the Hearst agency “Universal Service.” He had been ordered to maintain friendly relations with Hitler, which was supposedly dictated by the fact that the German press was buying the agency’s information. Hearst is in a deal with German industry to supply the latter with a large consignment of copper. Wiegand does not agree with Hearst’s policy. He turned to Pancake’s boss for advice.

Commenting on Stone’s work as a KGB talent spotter and recruiter, the KGB New York station reported, “Pancake established contact with Dodd. We wanted to recruit him [Dodd] and put him to work on the State Dep. line. Pancake should tell Dodd that he has the means to connect him with an anti-Fascist organization in Berlin.” William A. Dodd, Jr., was the son of the U.S. ambassador to Germany and an aspiring Popular Front activist with political ambitions. The KGB did recruit him, and Stone briefly functioned as Dodd’s intermediary with the KGB, providing him with a contact in Berlin when he went to join his father at the embassy. Stone also passed on to the KGB some information Dodd picked up from the American military attaché in Berlin about possible German military moves against the USSR and the name of a suspected pro-Nazi embassy employee.

There is only one other reference to I.F. Stone’s cooperation with the KGB in the 1930s, a note listing him as one of the New York station’s agents in late 1938.

Stone next pops up in a 1944 KGB report on Victor Perlo (cover name “Raid”), head of a network of Soviet sources in Washington during World War II. “In 1942–43,” the report said, “R. [Raid/Perlo] secretly helped Pancake compile materials for various exposés by the latter.” (Perlo was at that time a mid-level economist at the advisory Council of National Defense.) Similarly, a 1945 report about Stanley Graze, a secret Communist and a valued KGB source, noted that in 1943 Graze’s wife had been “Pancake’s personal secretary, maintaining ties with the latter’s informants in government agencies.”

These 1944 and 1945 notes do not indicate that Stone was an active KGB agent or even in direct contact with it after 1938, and given Stone’s initial anger over the Nazi-Soviet Pact, it is likely that he broke relations with the KGB in late 1939.

Still, Stone had quickly reverted to a pro-Soviet position and, as his links to Victor Perlo and Mrs. Stanley Graze demonstrate, he remained in intimate touch with the Communist underground in Washington in World War II and continued to be viewed by the KGB in a benign light.

In this context, it is evident that Vladimir Pravdin’s October 1944 approach to Stone—which came to light in the Venona documents—was not an initial recruitment attempt but an effort to reestablish the agent relationship that the KGB had had with Stone in 1936-38.

Only one other document in Vassiliev’s notebooks bears on this question, and it has to do with Harry Truman. The Soviets knew little about Truman when he succeeded to the presidency, and in June 1945 Moscow Center told Pravdin, then chief of the New York KGB station:

Right now the cultivation of Truman’s inner circle becomes exceptionally important. This is one of the Station’s main tasks. To fulfill this task, the following agent capabilities need to be put to the most effective use: 1. In journalistic circles—Ide, Grin, Pancake . . . Bumblebee. Through these people focus on covering the principal newspaper syndicates and the financial-political groups that are behind them; their relationships with Truman, the pressure exerted on him, etc.

Of the four journalists listed, “Ide”/Samuel Krafsur and “Grin”/John Spivak were unambiguously KGB agents. However, “Bumblebee” was not. He was none other than Walter Lippmann, the most prominent opinion columnist of the day. Lippmann knew Pravdin only as a Soviet journalist with whom he traded insights and information.

As for Stone, given Pravdin’s effort to rerecruit him in 1944, he could not have been under the illusion that the Soviet was a mere working journalist. Still, because of Lippmann’s inclusion in the list, this message makes it impossible to determine the nature of Stone’s relationship to the KGB in 1945.

The documentary record shows that I.F. Stone consciously cooperated with Soviet intelligence from 1936 through 1938. An effort was made by Soviet intelligence to reestablish that relationship in 1944-45; we do not know whether that effort succeeded.

To put it plainly, from 1936 to 1939 I.F. Stone was a Soviet spy.

That Stone chose never to reveal this part of his life strongly suggests that he knew just how incompatible it would be with his public image as a courageous and independent journalist. His admirers, who have so strenuously denied even the possibility of such an alliance, have no choice now but to reevaluate his legacy.

Footnotes

¹Vassiliev's co-author was Allen Weinstein.

²They will soon be available at the Library of Congress, and scans of the notebooks and translations will be accessible on the website of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

About the Authors

John Earl Haynes is a historian at the Library of Congress. Harvey Klehr is Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University. Alexander Vassiliev is a journalist living in London. In somewhat different form, this article appears in their new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, out this month from Yale. Copyright © 2009 by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. Excerpted by permission of Yale University Press.

from the Media Research Center via the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-19, by L. Brent Bozell III:

We're Not All Socialists

As the Democrat-dominated House and Senate thoughtfully passed judgment on a 1,100-page "stimulus" bill that Sen. Frank Lautenberg admitted no one would read before the vote, the media elite were positively giddy. On the "NewsHour" on PBS, liberal analyst Mark Shields proclaimed "I think it's a monstrous success" for President Obama. That's correct, with an emphasis on the "monstrous."

Our news media have insisted on playing the White House soundtrack on this battle, to wit: the "stimulus" is vitally necessary, and by opposing it, Republicans are risking being flattened by the Great Obama Steamroller. A partisan victory is okay, but they'd much rather the vote for Obama's plans be unanimous.

Why, as Newsweek's cover proclaimed, "We're All Socialists Now." Inside, Newsweek's uber-elitist editor Jon Meacham scolded Sean Hannity and Rep. Mike Pence for stooping to call this Congressional pork-wagon "the European Socialist Act of 2009." Using the S-word in a negative context threatens to doom America to a "fractious and unedifying debate."

Meacham wasn't claiming Hannity and Pence were incorrect. It's that they use this word as a bad thing when they should be celebrating. He insists America's skiing down the socialist slope "toward a modern European state." Moreover, Newsweek asserted the socialism started last fall under President Bush, therefore the GOP should accept it.

The loyal opposition is not supposed to oppose as state power grows out of control. To be truly loyal, the opposition is expected to disappear.

Another sign came on "The Early Show" on CBS. Co-host Maggie Rodriguez was interrogating Republican House leader Eric Cantor about the failure to line up with the socialist Obama Corps: "But Congressman, it's clear that Americans are begging for help with foreclosures," she pleaded. "Corporations are begging for bailouts. Can the Republican Party accept that there are situations when large-scale government intervention is necessary?"

Cantor was attempting to explain that this monstrous "stimulus" was being pushed through without any Republican input, with virtually no public comment, in a humongous bill no one had even read. But all Rodriguez could do was protest these points as divisive: "But everyone [in the House GOP] opposed it. Why? Where's the bipartisanship?"

The media's drive for full-fledged socialism took a really wild turn on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." The former Clinton spokesman actually pressed ultraliberal Maxine Waters from the left, waving around an article by an economist named Nouriel Roubini insisting that we need to nationalize the banks: "Mr. Roubini and others say we're all Swedes now, that we should just do what they did when they faced their crisis. They nationalized the banks and they came out of it okay." We're now not only socialists, we're Swedish socialists.

A few days earlier, Obama head-faked on the we're-all-Europeans line, insisting America's not yet Sweden, when ABC's Terry Moran urged "Why not just nationalize the banks?" For her part, Congresswoman Waters insisted the drive toward socialism is being slowed by people who are behind the curve: "George, as you know, the word 'nationalization' scares the hell out of people. And so the debate has been opened up now, and that's good."

Once the "stimulus" bill passed, ABC helpfully aired pictures from a photo album the White House issued to mark Obama's skillful leadership moves. Subbing as anchor of ABC's evening newscast, Diane Sawyer praised Obama for serving cookies to Republicans: "I want to show everybody at home, because there is the President, it's Super Bowl night, and he's serving cookies to congressional leadership in the White House screening room." On cue, George Stephanopoulos picked up the syrupy narration: "These are just remarkable, Diane. We've never really seen anything like this before in real time."

If ABC and George Stephanopoulos were interested in dispelling the notion that George is taking dictation from his daily buddy-buddy phone calls with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, it's not showing up on the air. When you can glorify Obama for offering Republicans a cookie, and suggest it's unprecedented, as if no previous president, Republican or Democrat, had ever tried to entertain the opposing party, viewers cannot trust you as a careful keeper of the historical record. They can only suspect that you're going to offer them a poorly disguised campaign commercial.

A crucial part of Obama's "monstrous" success in ramming this partisan gravy train through Congress is a committed throng of Kool-Aid drinkers in the press who will greet every new socialist legislative ploy as a work of genius worthy of a Nobel Prize in economics.

The only ones Obama couldn't count on here were the obstereperous people who dared to insist they were not socialists and those cantankerous trouble-makers who insisted that maybe Congress should read a bill before it passes – especially when it's the single largest expansion of government control in the history of the Republic.

from NewsBusters.org, 2009-Feb-11, by Tim Graham:

A Big Lie: Newsweek Claims On Cover 'We Are All Socialists Now'

As the news magazines decline and fall into snarky opinion journals, Newsweek this week has a cover titled "We Are All Socialists Now." They're recalling Richard Nixon saying "We are all Keynesians now" in 1971. But conservatives uniformly would reply on a rebuttal cover, if there were one: "Speak for Yourself."

The "cover story," if you can call it that, is a brief editorial by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and former Washington bureau chief Evan Thomas, and it began by attacking Sean Hannity and Mike Pence for being in denial about Socialist America and threatening to foist on America an "fractious and unedifying debate" that refuses the terms of surrender:

The interview was nearly over. On the Fox News Channel last Wednesday evening, .Sean Hannity was coming to the end of a segment with Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. How, Pence had asked rhetorically, was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts going to put people back to work in Indiana? How would $20 million for "fish passage barriers" (a provision to pay for the removal of barriers in rivers and streams so that fish could migrate freely) help create jobs? Hannity could not have agreed more. "It is … the European Socialist Act of 2009," the host said, signing off. "We're counting on you to stop it. Thank you, congressman."

Meacham and Thomas don't rebut the notion that NEA-subsidized art or fish barriers aren't exactly a "stimulus" – they merely disparage all that troublesome ideological labeling:

There it was, just before the commercial: the S word, a favorite among conservatives since John McCain began using it during the presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber? Sadly, so do we.) But it seems strangely beside the point. The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries. That seems a stronger sign of socialism than $50 million for art. Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.

This is a remarkable declaration from the liberal media. They disparaged the Republicans as they told the voters that Obama would install socialism, and then when he begins to do that, media elites say well, "we are all socialists now" any way and demand that conservatives get on the bandwagon of "reality" instead of trying to resist:

If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today's world.

Liberals are forever whining about being called liberals – lamenting "20th century terms and tactics." How is it that socialism is the 21st century vogue, and free markets are a vestige of the past? The obvious answer is the election returns (and the strong socialist flavor of our media establishment). That does not mean in a free society that conservatives can't try to reverse the vogue, just as it happened in 1980 and 1994.

It's cute to argue that since this latest phase of socialism started under a lame-duck Republican president, that the time for "unedifying debate" is over, and that somehow conservatives weren't resisting socialism then. (Check your talk-radio transcripts, Newsweek.)

The only Newsweek cover that would be more obviously untrue would be "We Are All Objective Journalists Now."

Newsweek cover image above via Newscom.com.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center

from the Washington Times, 2009-Apr-17:

EDITORIAL: Let them drink tea
Tax-day coverage exposes media bias

Forget media bias. That's just slanting the news. The liberal press judges stories before investigating them. That's prejudice, which sums up how the anti-tax tea parties were covered this week.

Marc Cooper compared tax protesters to glue-sniffing lunatics in the Los Angeles Times. "Whip out your Lipton and don your tinfoil hat and join the protest against ... against ... against what exactly?", he ranted. MSNBC talking heads Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews dismissed the protesters as crackpots or stooges doing the bidding of GOP Svengalis.

Media Research Center President L. Brent Bozell III said that the media's dismissive attitude toward the big events surprised him. "There is nothing more American than demonstrating against oppressive government," Mr. Bozell told us. "But that basic concept, that basic idea was attacked by people who say they are news reporters. That I didn't expect to see."

Most of the liberal critics didn't bother to show up at any of the tea parties to see them for themselves. When we stopped by Wednesday's protest in Washington's Lafayette Park, it was crammed with regular hard-working Americans who wanted to voice their outrage against out-of-control government spending. Unlike most labor-union demonstrations, these activists weren't paid to be there to make the crowd look large. These people care about the future.

One tea-party activist from Silver Spring explained to us that, "We are spending more than we make. We are spending more than we can afford. We are spending money from people who are not even born yet - and that is immoral." This sentiment doesn't sound crazy to us. It is good old-fashioned common sense. No wonder Chris Matthews doesn't understand it.

from TownHall.com, 2009-Apr-16, by Hugh Hewitt:

The Most Busted Name In News: Susan Roesgen Brands CNN

Tens of thousands of Americans attended tea parties yesterday, and the vast trove of video, audio and print posts on the parties proves that they were indeed grassroots expressions of concern over the direction of the country and that the vast , vast majority of participants were mainstream Americans eager to communicate concern over the massive deficits proposed by President Obama, a spending spree which far, far exceeds even the significant amount of red ink spilled by President Bush.  The large crowds in California especially, which just got hammered with massive tax hikes to pay for out-of-control spending in the Golden State, were animated by a desire to send a message to Sacramento that its ways are deeply unpopular and that the deeply deceptive six ballot measures scehduled for a vote in May are facing a huge opposition.  Thousands of people showed up at scores of locations around the country, which made the gatherings big news deserving serious reporting.

As any fair reporting would have conveyed, the crowds were overwhelmingly middle class and the moods' celebratory.  Of course some extreme viewpoints glommed on at the fringes of the crowd and some unusual types showed up, but the massive numbers of ordinary, hard-working and tax-paying Americans deserved fair representation in the MSM, which of course they did not receive.

This biased coverage was nicely summed up by the hilarious and instantly archetypal "report" by CNN's Susan Roesgen, which begins with Susan plucking from the hundreds of available tea party participants one guy with an Obama/Hitler sign, and then follows this superb bit of news gathering with a contentious, argumentative interview with a man with a baby who wants to talk about the principles of Lincoln.  When Roesgen morphs into Robert Gibbs and begins to lecture the man about his eligibility for a tax refund and the amount of stimulus spending the state of Illinois is going to receive, Roesgen does more to end the media bias debate in this country than a dozen books by Bernard Goldberg. We can all rely on Roesgen and her producers to keep a close watch on the White House and the Democratic majorities in Congress, right?

It is indeed wrong and offensive to make comparisons of the president to Hitler, just as it was to do the same to President Bush, though I don't recall ever seeing a CNN reporter object to those outrages or call out such a protester.  By all means send me a link to such an exchange and I will post it as an update.  Bush was in office for eight years, and Obama for three months, so I expect that there must be at least 32 instances of a CNN "reporter" challenging an anti-Bush demonstrator on the offensiveness of their displays.

It was extremely unprofessional for "reporter" Roesgen to attempt to brand the tea parties by reference to that particular guy, but it got worse when Roesgen interrupts and hectors the participant she called on to explain his views, and then, clearly flustered, to brand the tea parties as the product of the "right wing Fox News" or to seek sympathy from the audience by calling the assembly "anti-CNN" and "not fit for family viewing."  I played the audio a number of times on my show yesterday because it is at once so hilarious and also so damningly revealing about Roesgen's politics and utter lack of professionalism.  She's an Obama-Pelosi apologist, and after yesterday's fit, she'll never be anything but that.  Get her a show on MSNBC with the other Obama apologists, but how can CNN continue to treat her as a "reporter?" The veil dropped and the public got all the confirmation it will ever need:  She's a lefty pretending to be an "objective" journalist, Olberman in a skirt.  CNN can't unbake that cake.

That's not even the most important revelation.  Roesgen demonstrated that she would intervene in a story to twist it --that's what made the few minutes so priceless.  There are lots of lefty journalists.  A few years back on my show Thomas Edsall, a very influential MSMer then at the Washington Post, candidly branded mainstream media as "overwhelmingly left" and put the ratio of liberal-to-conservative in the MSM at 15-to-25 to 1.  Very few honest folks dispute Edsall, but the increasingly obvious problem is that the liberal reporters are becoming less talented and less learned, and much more willing to manipulate the news.  Roesgen was just embarrassingly obvious about her limits and her "journalistic ethics," but she's hardly alone.  Every day on CNN, Wolf Blitzer --a smart professional who along with Anderson Cooper are struggling to uphold the last bits of CNN's reputation-- has to make it through the Situation Room carrying the burden of Jack Cafferty's sophomoric rants.  Cafferty was supposed to be a sort of light-weight Andy Rooney, but he's become a left-wing crank, an older male version of Roesgen.  Add in Rick Sanchez shouting out his own inanities and CNN has suddenly got a Murderer's Row of laughingstock "journalists." 

The old sort of bias at CNN --Christiane Amanpour being the most obvious of the leftwingers with mics at the network-- was at least concealed behind the faux sophistication of far flung travel and apparent learning.  Center-left and even pure left reporters are not the problem if they transparent about their politics and not tasked with objective reporting of the oppositions positions and platform.  On Tuesday I spent an hour with the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, a man of the left, but smart and experienced, and I suspect confident enough about his own talents to not feel obliged to disfigure the arguments of his opponents.  Sending lightweights out to report important but complicated stories fairly invites them to manipulate the news because they simply don't grasp what is being argued.  In over their heads they panic and start punching below the belt.  That doesn't happen with talented lefties.

That's a subset of reporters that certainly excludes Roesgen, Sanchez and Cafferty.  These are, simply put, not very bright people for whom ever unscripted moment is a cliff; certainly not professional, and not of any use to a network trying hard to set the "standard" for straight news gathering.

Yesterday was a huge opportunity for CNN to demonstrate that it could be an objective news gathering organization through the years of Obama.  It flunked the test, and lost millions of potential viewers to Fox on a more-or-less permanent basis.  Ratings suicide by stupidity.

Isn't there anyone in the executive suites of CNN watching the demise of the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and soon the Los Angeles Times?  Has the network given up and simply decided it needs to compete with MSNBC?  No serious news organization can afford to drive away a third to half of its potential customers.  By lurching so far to the left, CNN is risking not just the conservative cable watcher, but also the center-right and independent viewer, and even no doubt some Democrats who prefer their news straight.

But so deep is the bias that there doesn't seem to be anything that CNN could do to remedy it, except perhaps make Blitzer and Cooper pull 12 hour shifts with only Candy Crowley and Ed Henry reporting from the field.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin discovers Susan Roesgen "reporting" on a Bush-Hitler demonstrator.

from Politico.com, 2009-Apr-16, by Michael Calderone:

Fox teas up a tempest

On “America's Newsroom” Wednesday morning, Fox News host Megyn Kelly declared that “it's tea party time, from sea to shining sea.” A short while later, “anti-tax tea parties” rose to the top of the network's Hot List.

In between, Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins — who earlier this week donned colonial garb as he traced the history of the tea party movement — reported on a tea party protest in Washington's Lafayette Park. Meanwhile, Fox hosts Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren were all preparing for their own on-the-scene reports from tea parties around the country.

“Can't get to a tea party?” Fox's Bill Hemmer asked viewers the other day. “Fox Nation hosts a virtual tea party — you can check it out on the site, a location of a tea party in your area.”

Nobody's covering the tea parties quite like Fox — and that's prompting critics and cable news competitors to say that the network is blurring the line between journalism and advocacy.

“Fox appears to be promoting these events at the same time it is presenting them in a way that looks like reporting,” said Stephen Burgard, director of Northeastern University's School of Journalism.

Burgard called the practice “pseudo-journalism,” adding: “We have seen this before from Fox News Channel, but its role as galvanizer of opposition to President Obama's policies and leadership posture appears to be emerging.”

A Fox spokesperson said the network did not have an executive available to speak about its tea party coverage. A second Fox representative declined repeated offers to address the charge that it was blurring the lines between journalism and advocacy.

While tea party organizers say their movement is nonpartisan, the protests lean hard to the right: Newt Gingrich and Michelle Malkin are on board, as is Freedom Works, an organization run by former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey. And more than a dozen prominent Republicans were set to participate in tea party protests Wednesday, including South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and a slew of other Republicans from Congress.

While Fox has obsessively covered the tea party plans for days, CNN and MSNBC have given the protests scant mention. Indeed, MSNBC's on-air personalities have taken to mocking Fox for its tea party attention — reveling in double entendres and juvenile jokes.

On Tuesday's “Countdown,” Keith Olbermann played clips of Fox personalities talking up tea parties. “As ever,” he said, Fox was “showing both sides `fair and balanced' — supporting the tea baggers and sponsoring the tea baggers.”

Similarly, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said that “our colleagues at Fox News are not just reporting on tea bagging, they are officially promoting it."

from the Washington Times, 2009-Apr-17, by Amanda Carpenter:

Liberal actress says tea parties were racist

Liberal actress and political activist Janeane Garofalo, in all seriousness, said activists who attended tea parties are racists with dysfunctional brains in a recent prime-time television appearance.

"Let's be very honest about what this is about. This is not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don't know their history at all. It's about hating a black man in the White House," she said on MSNBC's "The Countdown" with Keith Olbermann Thursday evening. "This is racism straight up and is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. There is no way around that."

Olbermann did not once try to challenge her on those assertions.

The actress went on to describe the brain size of typical "right-winger, Republican or conservative or your average white power activist."

"Their synapses are misfiring. ... It is a neurological problem we are dealing with," she said. This isn't the first time she's offered this analysis, either. Ms. Garofalo said similar things about Alaskan GOP Governor Sarah Palin's brain last February in an interview with an environmental blog.

The actress went on to bash the GOP on MSNBC Thursday because it had "crystallized into the white power movement" as well as Fox News, which she said has captured the "Klan demo[graphic]."

"Who else is Fox talking to? Urban older white guys and their girlfriends who suffer from Stockholm Syndrome," she said.

Ironically, Ms. Garofalo is currently playing a role on the drama 24, which is aired by the Fox Broadcasting Company and is popular among conservative circles.

from the Guardian of London, 2009-May-18, by Ed Pilkington:

New York Times columnist caught in plagiarism row
Maureen Dowd's column features paragraph virtually identical to passage written by Talking Points Memo blogger

New York -- It is an axiom of the new digital media age that high-profile political columnists should generally avoid copying other people's words without attribution. Nobody wants to have the p-word hung around their necks.

It is a further axiom of the age that if a columnist is to borrow a paragraph unattributed, then at least they should ensure it doesn't belong to Josh Marshall. The man behind Talking Points Memo is one of the sharpest, most deadly bloggers around.

Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, has cause to ponder both these axioms today after she found herself sucked into a spat over plagiarism. In her column yesterday she launched an attack on Dick Cheney for the former US vice-president's stance on torture, but in the process merely seems to have inflicted ethical torture upon herself.

In the article, Dowd wrote: "More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

The paragraph is word-for-word identical to a section of a blogpost by Marshall last week, the only difference being that in place of "the Bush crowd was" he had written "we were". That's the kind of thing that doesn't slip by unnoticed.

Marshall has an enviable track record of investigative reporting.

Through the New York-based Talking Points Memo, or TPM to its many fans, he broke the story of the Bush administration's politicised sacking of federal lawyers in 2007; his Muckraker blog is a scourge of corrupt politicians.

Dowd's self-defence, posted through rival liberal blog the Huffington Post, is that she didn't read TPM at all last week. She had been given the idea of the paragraph talking to a friend whom she assumed had been speaking spontaneously.

"Clearly, my friend must have read Josh Marshall without mentioning that to me."

The mistake, corrected by the paper, is paradoxical for Dowd who in 1987 broke a major political plagiarism story. She revealed that then Delaware senator Joe Biden had copied speeches made by Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour party in the UK.

Her story placed Biden in such bad odour that he pulled out of the 1988 presidential race.

Two decades later Biden is vice-president - Cheney's replacement.

The plagiarism scandalette is a blip on an otherwise soaring career. Dowd has been described as the most powerful woman columnist in America, and she is certainly among the best connected and glamorous.

She is the author of two bestsellers – Bushworld and her take on the gender wars Are Men Necessary? - and won a Pulitzer prize for distinguished commentary in 1999.

from NewsBusters.org, 2009-Apr-20, by Ken Shepherd:

ABCNews.com Ignores Prop 8 Vote in Story on Beauty Pageant Gay Marriage Question

Let's get this straight [pardon the pun]: A beauty contest contestant with a conservative view on same-sex marriage upsets an openly gay blogger with her answer to his question about her thoughts on the issue. Yet in reporting the story, ABCNews.com paints her as the bad guy for offending the celebrity judge, while failing to mention that a majority of said beauty queen's fellow Californians agree with her views.

Welcome to the saga of Carrie Prejean, Miss California, whom ABCNews.com describes as having "floored" gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who went on to "skewer" the Miss USA runner-up for her honest answer in an angry video blog entry.

What caused celebrity judge Hilton to seethe so? Only Prejean's honest, politely-delivered answer. Quotes ABCNews.com's Luchina Fisher:

"I think it's great Americans are able to choose one or the other," she said. "We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what in my country, in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman."

While Prejean's answer was hardly the most articulate defense of traditional marriage, Hilton's angry rant -- calling her a "dumb bitch" -- on his blog was highly unprofessional for a public figure chosen to judge the competition.

What's more, Prejean's answer about Americans being "able to choose one or the other" could arguably be construed to mean that she thinks it's great that the gay marriage issue is left up to individual states to decide, regardless of her personal convictions.

While Fisher noted in her April 20 story that an angry Hilton insisted that he would have been happy with Prejean saying that gay marriage is "a question that each state should decide for themselves," Fisher left out of her article that a majority of Californians at the polls last November did just that, agreeing with Prejean by voting 52% in favor of Proposition 8.

Despite representing the majority of her state and answering in a gracious manner, Miss Prejean was not only trashed by Hilton, but by a pagaent official who made clear Prejean's conservative views were unwelcome on the platform, at least as far as the state pagaent organization was concerned:

Keith Lewis, who runs the Miss California competition, released a statement to the media in response to Prejean's answer last night.

"As co-director of the Miss California USA, I am personally saddened and hurt that Miss California believes marriage rights belong only to a man and a woman," said Lewis in a statement. "I believe all religions should be able to ordain what unions they see fit. I do not believe our government should be able to discriminate against anyone and religious beliefs have no politics [sic] in the Miss California family."

That a Miss USA pagaent judge and a Miss California USA official ganged up on a pagaent contestant for expressing a conservative political belief during the interview portion of a contest could have and arguably should have been the lede to Fisher's article.

Unfortunately Fisher and her editors opted for making an innocuous, ditzy answer from a beauty queen the perfect excuse for hyping the rant of a notorious gay drama queen.

Ken Shepherd is Managing Editor of NewsBusters

from the Media Research Center via the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-4, by L. Brent Bozell III:

Breathtakingly Bold Barack?

Honestly, now: Are we quite ready finally to declare the Era of Obama As Fiscally Conservative is over? Last year, Republicans warned that Barack Obama was ultraliberal – a socialist, in fact – but the media handlers typically presented this as a conservative smear. Instead, they painted Obama as an aspiring moderate-Republican deficit reducer. Take New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt last August: "Obama's aides optimistically insist he will reduce it [the deficit], thanks to his tax increases on the affluent and his plan to wind down the Iraq war. Relative to McCain, whose promised spending cuts are extremely vague, Obama does indeed look like a fiscal conservative."

How ridiculous does that sound now? John McCain probably would have been a moderate Republican president. But the idea that President Obama would turn out to be a stronger fiscal conservative than McCain should inspire a pink-faced laughing fit at the preposterousness of The New York Times.

Now that Obama's emphatic ultraliberalism is the elephant in the room, and liberals are cheering the reversal of everything Ronald Reagan tried to accomplish economically, the media still don't want to call it liberal. Instead, it's a pollster's list of positive adjectives: bold, ambitious, audacious, and even breathtaking.

Here's how Charles Babington of the Associated Press began his analysis: "Breathtaking in its scope and ambition, President Barack Obama's agenda for the economy, health care and energy now goes to a Congress unaccustomed to resolving knotty issues and buffeted by powerful interests that oppose parts of his plan." Obama is the giant with breathtaking ambition, while members of Congress are mere mortals unaccustomed to accomplishment. Obama's agenda is not described as liberal. Instead, it's a plan "to undo major elements of Ronald Reagan's conservative movement."

His AP colleague Liz Sidoti echoed the meaningless chatter: "Barack Obama is embracing the worst economic conditions in a generation as an opportunity to advance an audacious agenda that, if successful, could reshape the country for decades to come."

The wire service Agence France-Presse found the president bristling with action: "Obama also highlighted his audacious 3.55-trillion-dollar budget plan for 2010, which bristles with economic reforms and spending on healthcare, climate change and education in a bid to end America's worst economic crisis since the 1930s."

Then there was The Washington Post, the industry leader in budget salesmanship. In a front-page story, editor Karen DeYoung oozed Obama's withdrawal plan from Iraq came "just a day after he transformed the domestic political landscape with a breathtakingly bold budget plan." Two pages later, reporter Alec MacGillis somehow left out a cheerleader's purse full of exclamation points in a story on Vice President Biden's middle-class task force: "Commentators left and right have reacted with awe to the ambition and transformative potential of President Obama's economic blueprint."

Commentators on the right reacted with awe? Only at the shameless boosterism of the leg-tingling Obama press corps.

Later came a front-page Post story by Philip Rucker, which began, "President Obama's budget is so ambitious, with vast new spending on health care, energy independence, and services for veterans, that experts say he will need to hire tens of thousands of government workers to realize his goals." The Heritage Foundation suggests it means a quarter of a million new bureaucrats for the federal establishment.

As an adjective, "ambitious" is meant to be a positive word. But George Bush's toppling of Saddam Hussein was "ambitious," and the media didn't applaud its scope. In fact, they paraded the liberals around arguing the Iraq war was unsustainably swelling the deficit. The late Tim Russert pressed Bush in February of 2004: "How, why, as a fiscal conservative as you like to call yourself, would you allow a $500 billion deficit and this kind of deficit disaster?"

Today, a $500 billion deficit would sound like progress. Obama's budget aspires to reduce the projected 2009 deficit of $1.75 trillion by more than two-thirds, to $533 billion, by the end of his first term – which, if successful, would make it worse than the worst performance by President Bush.

It should be laughable for the White House to promote a "fiscal responsibility summit" days after they shoved through a $787 billion "stimulus" bill through Congress. But the gooey flood of positive adjectives from the press demonstrates that they are not government watchdogs. They're "breathtakingly bold" Obama enablers. The honesty deficit in our press just grows, and grows.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-2, by Bret Stephens:

Media Narratives Feed Terrorist Fantasies

For purposes of self-justification, Azam Amir Kasab, the only terrorist taken alive in last week's Mumbai massacre, offered that the murder of Jews in the city's Chabad House was undertaken to avenge Israeli atrocities on Palestinians. Two other terrorists cited instances of anti-Muslim Hindu violence as the answer to the question, "Why are you doing this to us?" before mowing down 14 unarmed people at the Oberoi Hotel. And if dead terrorists could talk, we would surely hear Abu Ghraib mentioned as among their reasons for singling out U.S. and British hostages.

One suspects the terrorists spent far too much time listening to the BBC World Service.

Let's hasten to add that by no means should the BBC alone be singled out. When it comes to terrorists and their grievances, nearly all the Western media have provided them with a rich diet on which to feed.

In the spring of 2005, Newsweek ran with a thinly sourced item about the Quran being flushed down a Guantanamo toilet. Result: At least 15 people were killed in Afghan riots.

Newsweek later retracted the story, which was the right thing to do but also, in its way, exceptional. Compare that to the refusal of French reporter Charles Enderlin and his station, France 2, to retract or even express doubt about his September 2000 report on Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli soldiers during an exchange of gunfire in the Gaza Strip -- an exchange Mr. Enderlin did not witness.

In an exhaustive piece in the June 2003 issue of the Atlantic, James Fallows observed that the evidence that the boy could not have been shot by an Israeli bullet is overwhelming, while the evidence that the entire incident was staged is, at the very least, impressive. In France, the story has been the subject of various lawsuits. In Israel, however, and throughout the Muslim world, Durrah became the poster child for a five-year intifada that took several thousand lives.

Maybe Durrah was somewhere in the minds of the Mumbai killers. If not, there was no shortage of other Israeli "atrocities" for them to choose from, mostly fictitious or trumped up and all endlessly cited in Western media reports: the "siege" of Gaza; the 2002 Jenin "massacre"; the 1982 massacres (by Lebanese Phalangists) in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut; the execution of Egyptian POWs in 1967.

All these fables have real-world consequences, and not only for Israelis. In July 2006, an American named Naveed Afzal Haq ambled into the offices of the Seattle Jewish Federation and shot six people, killing one. One of the survivors testified that Mr. Haq "stated that he was a Muslim, [and] this was his personal statement against Jews and the Bush administration for giving money to Jews, and for us Jews for giving money to Israel, about Hezbollah, the war in Iraq." Wherever did he get those ideas?

As it turns out, often from terrorist suspects themselves, offering their testimonials of Israeli or U.S. malevolence to a credulous Western media. In the Quran-in-the-toilet imbroglio, for instance, the Nation's Ari Berman filed a piece titled "Newsweek Was Right," which cited accounts by former Guantanamo detainees of how their captors abused the Holy Book. Unmentioned in any of this were the instructions contained in al Qaeda's "Manchester Document," obtained by British police in 2000, that told followers to "complain of mistreatment while in prison" and "insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security."

Or consider the tale of Ali Shalal Qaissi, the subject of a New York Times story in March 2006. Mr. Qaissi, founder of the Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons, claimed to be the black-hooded man standing on a box, attached to wires, ghoulishly photographed by the Abu Ghraib jailers. The Times thought enough of his story to put it on page one, until it turned out he wasn't the man. A March 18, 2006, "Editor's Note" tells us something about how these stories make it to print:

"The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr. Qaissi's account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge. Lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him. Human rights workers seemed to support his account."

Of course, it's always possible to fall for a well-told lie. But it's worth wondering why a media that treats nearly every word uttered by the U.S., British or Israeli governments as inherently suspect has proved so consistently credulous when it comes to every dubious or defamatory claim made against those governments. Or, for that matter, why the media has been so intent on magnifying genuine scandals (like Abu Ghraib) to the point that they become the moral equivalent of 9/11. Some caution is in order: Terrorists, of all people, might actually believe what they read in the papers.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-14:

Tax Me If You Can

We're constantly told that taxes don't matter to business and investors, but listen to that noted supply-side economist, Alec Baldwin. The actor recently rebuked New York Governor David Paterson for threatening to try to help close the state's $7 billion budget deficit by canceling a 35% tax credit for films shot in the Big Apple.

"I'm telling you right now," Mr. Baldwin declared, "if these tax breaks are not reinstated into the budget, film production in this town is going to collapse, and television is going to collapse and it's all going to go to California." Well, well. Apparently taxes do matter, at least when it comes to filming "30 Rock" in Manhattan.

Believe it or not, Mr. Baldwin's views are shared across the movie industry, which is pleading in state capitals across the country for most-favored-tax status. Hollywood productions are highly mobile and can film just about anywhere. So they have taken to shopping around the country -- and the world -- for the most lucrative tax avoidance deal.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America, nearly 40 states have corporate tax carve outs or generous cash rebates to lure movie studios to their states. In Michigan, producers negotiated a 40% tax credit on their production costs. A bipartisan bill introduced in the Texas legislature last week and supported by Governor Rick Perry would allocate $60 million into the Texas Film Incentive Program. Members of the Screen Actors Guild held a rally last week in front of the state capitol urging the tax breaks.

In some cases these state tax credits exceed a company's tax liabilities, which means that Disney, Dreamworks and others can get a net cash subsidy from state taxpayers. "In many states, today, movie producers actually pay a negative tax," says a Tax Foundation report on the subject.

The Hollywood studios are ruthless profit maximizers and are expert at playing state suitors against one another. In the midst of California's recent $42 billion budget showdown, producers threatened to leave the state if the legislature didn't offer more inducements. So lawmakers in Sacramento gave the industry a new $250 million deal to stay put.

The film "Annapolis," about the Naval Academy, was supposed to be shot in Maryland, but producers negotiated a better offer in Pennsylvania shortly before filming was set to begin. So they packed the trucks and drove up the interstate to save $10 million on their taxes. A film based on the John Grisham novel, "The Runaway Jury," is set in Mississippi but filmed in Louisiana thanks to tax incentives.

Of course, this is the same Hollywood film industry whose members fund causes and candidates that favor raising taxes on everyone else. The Motion Picture Production and Distribution industry last year gave $14 million in political contributions: 89% went to pro-tax Democrats. A few years ago, director Rob Reiner funded a successful California initiative to raise the state income tax rate to more than 10%. Unlike a film shoot, which can relocate on a moment's notice, your average small businessman in Encino is stuck paying the highest tax rate in the country -- at least until he gives up and moves to Reno.

We've got nothing against industries trying to reduce their tax liability. Shareholders expect nothing less. When we asked the Motion Picture Association to justify these tax breaks, a spokesman gladly pointed to studies showing that the industry is creating thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of new investment in the likes of Michigan and New York. Fair enough. This is called "dynamic analysis." The movie industry's tax machinations are irrefutable evidence that low tax rates do affect business decisions.

As a general principle, however, states shouldn't chase smoke stacks or film production crews with specific tax breaks. It makes much more sense for cities, states and the federal government to lower tax rates for everyone. New York City can survive without Alec Baldwin and "30 Rock," but it can't function without the thousands of small businesses that pay taxes without the benefit of lobbyists and loopholes.

from Gun Owners of America, 2008-Dec-17:

National Geographic TV Takes Aim At Your Guns

Gun Owners of America E-Mail Alert
8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151
Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408
http://www.gunowners.org

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

National Geographic Channel ran a show last night entitled, "Gun In America." According to the program, there are millions of misguided gun owners across the nation. Why? Because your guns are supposedly more likely to harm you than to help you in an emergency.

"As a society, we're totally out of control with weapons," said one Philadelphia cop who was interviewed during the show. "You need to limit access that people have to these type of firearms."

That was the basic thrust of the program. National Geographic recited the usual worn-out factoids that are peddled by the Brady Campaign. It only cited anti-gun cops. And for every person who was filmed stating he or she believed in a right to own firearms for self-defense, the program would cite "facts" to prove that such a hope was misplaced.

Gun owners should let the President and CEO of National Geographic know that the channel should stick to showing pictures of kangaroos and foliage -- images that we normally attribute to National Geographic's magazine -- and keep his personal, anti-gun views to his private conversations around the Christmas dinner table.

The National Geographic Channel presents itself as an educational, unbiased alternative. But "Guns in America" was hardly unbiased, as can be seen by the following agenda items that were pushed during the program:

1. "Guns in America" would have you believe that the guns in your home are 22 times more likely to kill a family member than to protect you. This statistic can (surprise, surprise!) be found on the Brady Campaign website, but its source has been highly discredited. The factoid originates with Arthur Kellerman, who has generated multiple studies claiming that guns are a net liability.(1) But Kellerman has been found guilty of fudging his data, and even the National Academy of Sciences has stated that his "conclusions do not seem to follow" from his data.(2)

The truth of the matter is actually quite encouraging for gun owners. Anti-gun researchers for the Clinton Justice Department found that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense, which means that each year, firearms are used more than 50 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.(3)

Isn't that strange? You would think anti-gunners wouldn't mind citing a study that was commissioned by the Clinton Justice Department! Apparently, the results of the study didn't fit their agenda.

2. "Guns in America" overstates the number of children who die by unintentional gunfire. The program would have viewers believe that a child dies by accidental gunfire, once every two days. But you can only reach that figure if you count violent-prone teens as "children."

In fact, when you look at the statistics involving younger children (ages 0-14), you see that kids have a greater chance of dying from choking on things like the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that you feed them.(4) Hmm, why doesn't National Geographic want to report on those killer peanuts?

3. "Guns in America" portrays twelve times as many negative uses of guns as positive uses -- even though in the real world, the truth is quite the opposite (as guns are used at least 50 times more often to save life than take life). The program does start with a dramatization of a legitimate self-defense story with an actual 911 call playing in the background. But after that, every dramatization is about drive-by-shootings or cops being shot or gang-related warfare.

The lesson for the viewer is: Guns are bad.

4. "Guns in America" only quotes anti-gun "authorities," thus leaving the impression that all law-enforcement support gun control. Never mind the fact that when one looks at polls of the police community, they overwhelmingly hold pro-gun attitudes:

* Should any law-abiding citizen be able to purchase a firearm for sport or self defense? -- 93% of law-enforcement said yes.(5)

* Do you believe law-abiding citizens should be limited to the purchase of no more than one firearm per month? -- 70.1% of law-enforcement said no.(6)

* Do you agree that a national concealed handgun permit would reduce rates of violent crime as recent studies in some states have already reflected? -- 68.2% of law-enforcement said yes.(7)

It's bad enough that a liberal teacher's union controls the education of our kids in the public schools, and that many of them are being brainwashed with politically correct thinking. We don't need supposedly neutral programs like National Geographic peddling the Brady Campaign's favorite factoids to an unsuspecting public.

ACTION: Please contact Tim T. Kelly, the President and CEO of National Geographic Ventures (which includes their television division), and urge him to steer the NatGeo channel away from politics. If the National Geographic Channel can't run a balanced program -- where they use real statistics -- then they just need to stick to filming those cute little animals that helped make their magazine so famous.

You can go to http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/contact to cut-and-paste the sample letter below into their webform. Since you will need to select a Topic, please choose "I have a complaint."
And for "Department," we would suggest selecting "Factual Questions" or "General."

---- Pre-written letter ----

Dear Mr. Kelly:

I will think twice before ordering the National Geographic magazine, because I don't want to help you fund any more anti-gun propaganda. Your Explorer show entitled "Guns In America" -- which has run several times this month -- was heavily slanted to the gun control position. The show used fallacious statistics without rebutting them, all in an effort to demonize firearms.

For example, "Guns in America" falsely claimed that guns in the home are 22 times more likely to kill a family member than to serve as protection. That is simply not true. The author of this study, Arthur Kellerman, has been discredited many times (by groups such as the National Academy of Sciences), so it's shameful that your channel would even cite his work.

Second, "Guns in America" overstates the number of children who die by unintentional gunfire. In fact, when you look at the statistics involving younger children (ages 0-14), you see that kids have a greater chance of dying from choking on things like the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that you feed them. Can I expect to see a show in the near future highlighting the danger of feeding children?

Third, "Guns in America" portrays twelve times as many negative uses of guns as positive uses -- even though in the real world, the truth is quite the opposite. According to statistics from the Clinton Justice Department in 2007, guns are used at least 50 times more often to save life than take life.

Finally, "Guns in America" only quotes anti-gun "authorities," thus leaving the impression that all law-enforcement support gun control. Never mind the fact that when one looks at polls of the police community, they overwhelmingly hold pro-gun attitudes. (Please see the poll results on the website for the National Association of Chiefs of Police.) Why were none of these authorities ever cited?

The National Geographic Society's purpose is "to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge while promoting the conservation of the world's cultural, historical, and natural resources." I would submit to you that pushing gun control is far afield from your stated purpose.

Sincerely,

--------------------------------

ENDNOTES:

(1) Arthur Kellerman has generated multiple studies that claim gun owners are more likely to be injured by their guns than to use those guns in self-defense. His results range from 3 to 22 to 43 times more likely to be injured by a gun in the home. His methodology has been debunked, however, many times over. (See endnote 2.)

(2) See http://www.gunowners.org/sk0701.htm . Also, see Charles F. Wellford, John Pepper, Carol Petrie, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (National Research Council of the National Academies, 2004), p. 118.

(3) See http://www.gunowners.org/sk0802.htm

(4) See "Children Accidental Death Rates (Ages 0-14)," Gun Control Fact Sheet (2004) at http://www.gunowners.org/fs0404.htm

(5) National Association of Chiefs of Police, 20th Annual Survey Results (Survey questions sent to Chiefs of Police and Sheriffs in the United States: 2008).

(6) National Association of Chiefs of Police, 15th Annual Survey Results (Survey questions sent to Chiefs of Police and Sheriffs in the United States).

(7) Ibid.

from Forbes.com, 2009-Mar-6, by Dirk Smillie:

A Great Right Hope

Christopher Ruddy's conservative media empire is booming. Now, can it save the Republican party?

Christopher Ruddy wasn't invited to President Barack Obama's dinner with conservative columnists at George Will's Maryland home in early January. Maybe he should have been.

Ruddy's conservative flagship, Newsmax, whose 90,000 circulation flatlined during the Bush years, has climbed to 130,000, eclipsing political peers Weekly Standard (81,000) and New Republic (100,000). Unique visitors to Ruddy's Web site, Newsmax.com, has doubled in the past year, to 3.8 million a month. That's a bigger readership than the Drudge Report.

It has taken a decade, but Newsmax is now a news powerhouse and a must-read on the conservative media circuit. The West Palm Beach,Fla.-based company did $24 million in sales last year (up from $19 million in 2007), coming evenly from subscriptions and advertising income. Two health newsletters aimed at aging boomers bring in about $4 million. Ruddy's Financial Intelligence Report, with 12,000 subscribers, brings in another $1.2 million.

Among Newsmax's regular readers are Newt Gingrich, John Templeton Jr. and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent Democrat who calls the breadth of Ruddy's Web site "impressive." Says former Clinton political strategist Dick Morris, whose column appears on the site: "Newsmax is the most influential Republican-leaning media outlet in the country." Why? It taps "what Republicans in the heartland are really thinking."

Newsmax views the world "through the eyes of Ronald Reagan," says Ruddy, but is untethered to Republican politics. Newsmax has blasted Bush for years over his handling of the Iraq war and ripped a Republican Congress for huge spending hikes. "Let's face it," says Ruddy, "Bush was a horrible global statesman. Bill Clinton filled that void. If you read Clinton's book, Giving, you'd think it was written by Newt Gingrich. It's all about the value of public/private partnerships, microfinance and entrepreneurship. These are things that any Republican would want."

Raised in suburban Long Island, Ruddy earned a master's degree in public policy from the London School of Economics, signed on as a journalist first at the New York Post, then as a national correspondent for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, owned by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Ruddy started Newsmax with Scaife in 1998 with a $25,000 investment and raised another $15 million from 200 private investors. The duo has since bought those 200 out. Privately held Newsmax is now owned by Ruddy, with a 60% stake; Scaife holds the remaining 40% as silent partner.

Newsmax scored a golden scoop by making Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin its September 2008 cover story days before she became McCain's running mate. It also delivered surprisingly dispassionate cover stories on Bill Richardson and Bill Clinton. Talk about strange bedfellows--Ruddy, Scaife and Clinton have become occasional lunch chums. "Clinton is a moderating force in the Democratic party," says Ruddy.

Not that Ruddy is about to do lunch--or dinner--with the current president. "Obama suffers from a Robin Hood complex," says Ruddy. "His style is moderate but his substance is radical. Obama's bipartisanship is a lie."

Even so, Ruddy knows he has Obama partly to thank for the fact that he is a rising voice of a vanquished ideology. As he puts it: "Our Reagan credentials are intact."

from the Boston Globe, 2009-Apr-4, by Robert Gavin and Robert Weisman, with Beth Healy and Brian McGrory contributing:

Times Co. threatens to shut Globe; seeks $20m in cuts from unions
Paper reported to face $85m loss this year, as recession, Internet economy batter news industry

The New York Times Co. has threatened to shut The Boston Globe unless the newspaper's unions swiftly agree to $20 million in concessions, union leaders said yesterday.

Executives from the Times Co. and Globe made the demands Thursday morning in an approximately 90-minute meeting with leaders of the newspaper's 13 unions, union officials said. The possible concessions include pay cuts, the end of pension contributions by the company, and the elimination of lifetime job guarantees now enjoyed by some veteran employees, said Daniel Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Globe's biggest union, which represents more than 700 editorial, advertising, and business office employees.

The concessions will be negotiated individually with each of the unions, said Totten and Ralph Giallanella, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 259, which represents about 200 drivers who deliver the newspaper.

"We all know the newspaper industry is going through great transition and loss,"' said Giallanella. "The ad revenues have fallen off the cliff. Just based on everything that's going on around the country, they're serious."

Totten said the Times Co. officials wanted the concessions within 30 days or else the paper would be shuttered, but Giallanella said officials did not mention a specific timetable.

Catherine Mathis, a Times Co. spokeswoman, declined to comment last night. Globe publisher P. Steven Ainsley also declined to comment.

The newspaper industry, which had already been struggling as readers and advertisers moved to the Internet, has been hard hit by the recession, and the Globe is no exception. The newspaper's advertising revenues have declined sharply in recent years; once robustly profitable, it is now losing money.

This week, the Globe newsroom completed cutting the equivalent of 50 full-time jobs. But the deteriorating economy has made the Globe's financial outlook much worse. Management told union leaders Thursday that the Globe will lose $85 million in 2009 unless serious cutbacks are made, according to a Globe employee briefed on the discussions. Last year the paper lost an estimated $50 million, the employee said.

The Times Co. is seeking concessions from the unions because the New York company, which is also suffering from the recession, can no longer subsidize the Globe's losses, said the Globe employee who is not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity. The Times Co. posted a net loss of $57.8 million in 2008.

In recent months, the Times Co. has taken steps to raise cash. It has been shopping its stake in the Red Sox, and recently sold most of its headquarters in New York, while leasing back the office space. It received $250 million from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, agreeing to pay 14 percent interest. It also suspended shareholder dividends to save about $130 million. New York Times shares closed at $5.05 yesterday, up 1.8 percent, but have fallen 74 percent in 12 months.

Several major newspaper companies have filed for bankruptcy reorganization in recent months, and several have threatened to shut down operations unless they receive major concessions from workers. Hearst Corp. of New York in February threatened to shut or sell the San Francisco Chronicle if it could not cut costs. Last year, Advance Publications, controlled by the Newhouse family, threatened to shut the Star-Ledger of Newark if enough employees did not accept buyouts. Enough did.

Last year, Blethen Maine Newspapers said in a court filing it might have to close the Portland Press Herald and two Central Maine newspapers if it wasn't able to sell them, but no timetable was given. The company has still not concluded a sale.

Some companies have already closed unprofitable publications. Hearst recently shut down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer after it failed to find a buyer, and E.W. Scripps Co. shuttered the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

Lou Ureneck, chairman of the journalism department at Boston University's College of Communications, said he believed the Times Co. is hoping to get the concessions and keep publishing the Globe. But he said the Times Co. management seems to have decided that the flagship New York Times newspaper is its top priority and it will no longer subsidize its New England newspaper group, which has underperformed the company as a whole.

"The New York Times Co. has its back up against the wall, and it's looking at ways to survive," Ureneck said. "The Globe has become a drag on earnings at The New York Times Co. at a time when it can't afford it."

Ureneck said a shutdown of the Globe would be a catastrophe for the community. "It's a crucial part of life in Boston," he said. "This city would be diminished by the loss of The Boston Globe. I can't even imagine it."

The Globe is the 14th-largest paper in the country and by far the region's circulation leader.

Local leaders yesterday expressed shock at the possibility of the Globe's closure and trepidation over a future without it.

"I believe in good government, and I believe good government depends on a strong paper, and the Globe has served that role in Massachusetts for a long time," said Governor Deval Patrick, who had a Globe paper route while a student at Milton Academy. "It's hard to imagine starting the day or doing this current job without the Globe."

Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston said the city would lose a vital institution.

"The Globe helped build Boston," Menino said last night. "The Globe holds people accountable on the issues, and that's important. We might not like it sometimes. Sometimes we don't agree. But they ask the tough questions - backed up with real data."

The Boston Globe began publishing in 1872 when a half-dozen local businessmen, led by Jordan Marsh department store founder Eben Jordan, pooled $150,000 to launch the newspaper, according to a company history. The first issue, appearing March 4, 1872, cost four cents.

In August 1873, Jordan hired General Charles H. Taylor, a 27-year-old newspaperman and Civil War veteran, as a temporary business manager. Taylor helped pull the paper out of financial trouble and became a partner with Jordan, the only remaining investor. Taylor was later named publisher, and members of the Taylor family continued publishing the paper for over a century - during which it became the dominant newspaper in New England - until 1999. It was sold to The New York Times Co. on Oct. 1, 1993, for $1.1 billion.

The Globe has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes, including eight under the Times Co. ownership.

In recent years, the Globe, like papers throughout the country, has cut jobs in both newsroom and business operations as print circulation and advertising have declined. Even though many papers, including the Globe, reach more readers than ever through the Internet, newspaper websites are not generating enough advertising revenues to make up for the decline in print advertising.

A number of newspaper companies, weighed down by debt, have filed for bankruptcy protection in recent months. They include the Tribune Co., which publishes the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Hartford Courant; Philadelphia Newspapers, which publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer; Star Tribune Holdings, which publishes the Minneapolis Star Tribune; Journal Register Co., which publishes the New Haven Register in Connecticut; and, this week, Sun-Times Media Group, which publishes the Chicago Sun-Times.

Stephen Burgard, director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, said cost-cutting newspapers are moving from job freezes, buyouts, and layoffs to pay cuts and suspension of pension contributions. He said some benefits, such as lifetime employment guarantees, are unusual in the current environment.

"The newspaper is telling the unions that radical changes have to be made or the newspaper is no longer viable," said Burgard. "The question is whether it's a negotiating ploy. In this situation, the request on the part of the management is not unusual or out of the ordinary."

Union leaders said they are taking the threat seriously.

In addition to pay cuts, the Times Co. is also asking to cut its contributions to healthcare and 401(k) plans, according to the employee briefed on the discussions.

Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild, said management should lead by example and take additional cuts in pay and jobs. The Times Co. recently said nonunion managers would take a 5 percent pay cut through December, but receive an additional 10 vacation days this year.

Giallanella, of the Teamsters Local 259, said it will be easier to sell concessions to his members if they see management sharing the burden.

"I don't think we have any choice but to make these serious decisions and do our best to work through this," he said. "Hundreds of jobs are at stake, and the future of The Boston Globe."

from the Washington Post, 2010-Jan-22, by Paul Farhi:

Liberal talk-radio station Air America files for bankruptcy, will go off the air

Air America, the liberal talk-radio network that helped boost the careers of Al Franken and Rachel Maddow, said Thursday that it was declaring bankruptcy and going off the air.

The company, founded in 2004 and based in New York, strove to provide left-leaning commentary and call-in programs as an alternative to such popular conservative radio talkers as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.

It was troubled almost from the start. The company had difficulty lining up affiliates and attracting a sizable audience. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection just 30 months after its inception and was resold to an investor group in early 2007 for $4.25 million.

Charlie Kireker, one of Air America's principal owners and its chairman, said in a memo to employees Thursday that the company was done in by "a perfect storm" of plunging ad revenues, intense competition, high debt and poor prospects for new financing. A search for new investors, he said, has been fruitless. The company declined further comment.

Air America's chief executive is Bennett Zier, who previously founded and headed Redskins owner Daniel Snyder's broadcasting company, Red Zebra, and was the top executive of Clear Channel Broadcasting's cluster of eight major stations in the Washington area. The company's programming director, Bill Hess, is also a longtime Washington radio executive.

Since last summer, Air America has been heard in the Washington area on WZAA (1050 AM). Its audience has been so small that Arbitron, which compiles radio ratings, was unable to detect any listeners for WZAA during several weeks in December.

Franken was one of Air America's earliest program hosts; he left the network in 2007 to launch his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota. Maddow, another host, made the transition to television and hosts a nightly show on MSNBC. Ron Reagan Jr., Arianna Huffington and Montel Williams have also had Air America programs.

Ana Marie Cox, who has hosted a one-hour program on Air America on Saturday and Sundays for the past year, said on Thursday that news of the network's demise took her by surprise. She said that the programming, as well as Air America's Web site, had begun to improve of late but that people hadn't caught up to it.

"I'd gotten used to people saying: 'Oh, Air America. Is that still around?'" Cox said. "One of my standard jokey responses was, 'Well, my paycheck still clears.' I guess that will stop."

The network, she said, had tried to incorporate more humor and move away from being an "angry" liberal version of conservative talk radio, which can be argumentative and aggressive. "I think the progressive or liberal audience likes a different type of discussion," she said.

Kireker said in his memo that Air America will carry reruns of earlier programs until it goes off the air at 9 p.m. Monday.

from MarketWatch.com, 2009-Mar-31, by Jon Friedman:

Fifth newspaper to file for bankruptcy
Commentary: Chicago Sun-Times will still operate its properties

NEW YORK -- The news is getting worse in the newspaper industry.

The Sun-Times Media Group, which presides over the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers, has filed for bankruptcy. It's the fifth newspaper publisher in recent months to seek protection from creditors.

The company said it filed for Chapter 11 protection in a Delaware court on Tuesday. It will continue to operate its newspapers and online assets. See full story.

The media entity has retained Rothschild Inc. to assist it with a possible sale of the properties.

"We firmly believe that filing for Chapter 11 protection and exploring the potential sale of assets or new investment in the company offers us the best opportunity to protect our respected media properties for the long-term," Jeremy Halbreich, the company's interim chief executive, said in a press release.

Once, filing for bankruptcy was a stigma for a company. But the newspaper industry is so beaten down now that hardly anyone blinks any more. No longer regarded as a last resort, such a move is considered to be a way of life in the industry.

You can say it's a shame or even a tragedy. But it's simply a case of reality intruding.

from the Associated Press, 2009-Feb-27, by Catherine Tsai, with Dan Elliott and Colleen Slevin contributing:

Rocky Mountain News publishes final edition

DENVER — On the day his newspaper published its final edition, Rocky Mountain News Editor John Temple advised a gathering of Colorado journalists to focus on local news and suggested creating online content that niche audiences might pay for.

"It's not realistic to think in this day and age that people are going to have one information source and you're going to be it. You try, you die," Temple told the Colorado Press Association convention on Friday.

"If you're not experimenting, then I think you're in trouble," said Temple, who also held the titles of publisher and president.

The E.W. Scripps Co., which owns the News, announced Thursday that the Friday edition would be the newspaper's last after nearly 150 years in business.

"Goodbye, Colorado," read the headline on a 52-page commemorative edition wrapping the regular newspaper Friday. "STOP THE PRESSES," read the front-page headline inside.

Mike Simonton, a bond analyst at Fitch Ratings, said a number of other newspapers could close by the end of 2010, and those that survive will be focused on local news with smaller staffs and less printed content.

Four owners of 33 U.S. daily newspapers have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the past 2 1/2 months, and a number of other newspapers are up for sale.

"We think this downturn is incremental to a very severe longer-term pressure from the Internet," Simonton said. "Many of the newspaper groups are in dire financial situations. We believe there will be more newspaper group bankruptcies and more newspapers closing over the next two years."

Scripps said the News lost $16 million last year. In December, the company put the News up for sale, along with its 50 percent stake in the Denver Newspaper Agency, which handled business operations for the News and its rival, The Denver Post, under a joint operating agreement. No viable buyer came forward.

Under the JOA, approved in 2001, the newspapers shared business operations while keeping their newsrooms separate. Both papers published every weekday. The Post, owned by MediaNews Group Inc., published Sunday editions while the News handled the Saturday edition.

On Friday, The Post prepared to publish a Saturday print edition for its readers and for News subscribers, who will now get The Post for the length of their subscriptions.

Post Editor Greg Moore said his newspaper didn't consider an online-only edition for the first Saturday. After Scripps' Dec. 4 announcement that the News was for sale, he said, "we knew this might happen. ... So I've had a lot of time to prepare for this."

William Dean Singleton, chairman and publisher of The Post and CEO of MediaNews, has said he would like to keep at least 80 percent of News subscribers. Simonton said that was a realistic goal since those subscribers have shown they value a printed product.

The Post has hired 10 News staffers, including columnists, and is picking up features and comics that the News published.

"We're going to make a play to get all those readers over time, and to keep them," Moore said.

The overlap in readership for the newspapers is roughly 14,000, according to the Denver Newspaper Agency. There were no immediate plans to raise ad, subscription or newsstand prices.

The Saturday edition of The Post will include a new home section called "Inside and Out" and features on things to do on the weekend, Moore said.

Singleton, who is also chairman of the board of The Associated Press, has said Denver could support only one newspaper. He said Thursday he was confident his newspaper would survive.

The state Senate paused Friday morning to lament the closing of the News and applauded one of its statehouse reporters, Ed Sealover, who had stepped into the chamber.

Republican state Sen. Shawn Mitchell, one of the Senate's most vocal debaters, said he wouldn't even try to be eloquent.

"It's sad. I'm sad. Goodbye Rocky Mountain News," he said.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors announced Friday it was canceling its annual convention, scheduled for April, so newspapers can save money and focus on surviving the recession. The last time the group canceled was during the final months of World War II in 1945.

Temple said despite the tough times, the news still matters to people.

"I'm not pessimistic about the future of journalism at all," he said.

from the Associated Press, 2009-Feb-24, by Michael Liedtke:

Troubled San Francisco paper in danger of closing

SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Chronicle joined the lengthening list of imperiled newspapers Tuesday as its owner set out to purge the payroll and slash other expenses in a last-ditch effort to reverse years of heavy losses.

If it can't reduce expenses dramatically within the next few weeks, the Hearst Corp. said it will close or sell the Chronicle, northern California's largest newspaper with a paid weekday circulation of 339,430.

Hearst didn't specify a savings target or a deadline for wringing out the expenses. A Hearst spokesman didn't immediately respond to messages Tuesday.

But management made it clear that the cost-cutting will require a significant number of layoffs.

"Our current situation dictates that we accomplish these cost savings quickly," Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega wrote in a memo to the staff. "Business as usual is no longer an option."

The Chronicle has given Hearst financial headaches since the New York-based company bought the newspaper in a complex deal valued at $660 million. The late 2000 acquisition proved to be ill-timed. Shortly after Hearst took control, the San Francisco Chronicle was hard hit by a high-tech bust that caused its advertising revenue to shrivel.

The newspaper's losses have been piling up ever since, despite previous job cuts and other austerity measures that were designed to stanch the bleeding. Now the 14-month-old recession, coupled with more advertising options on the Internet, has apparently pushed the 144-year-old newspaper to the breaking point.

Having lost more than $50 million last year, the Chronicle is off to an even worse start this year, said Hearst, as advertisers clamp down on their marketing budgets and increasingly divert more money to the Internet.

Given the challenges facing the Chronicle, Tuesday's grim warning hardly came as a surprise, said Kevin Fagan, who has been a reporter at the newspaper for 16 years.

"The mood here is more upbeat than you would expect," Fagan said. "There has been a lot of gallows humor but reporters are still doing what they do — write stories." He said the newsroom of about 275 employees is still clinging to hope that the paper will survive because there still appear to be ways to lower the sprawling operation's overhead.

Several other newspapers around the country are facing a fate similar to the San Francisco Chronicle's.

Just last month, Hearst laid out plans to close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if a buyer isn't found before April. A similar fate awaits The E.W. Scripps Co.'s Rocky Mountain News in Denver and Gannett Co.'s Tucson Citizen in Arizona unless buyers are found for those papers.

But there would still be at least one large daily newspaper left in those other big cities where publishers are mulling a shutdown.

The only other daily newspaper in San Francisco — a city with a population of about 800,000 — is the Examiner, which is given away for free. Hearst owned the San Francisco Examiner, but sold it for just $100 and even provided the new owners with a $67 million subsidy as a condition for completing the Chronicle acquisition. The Examiner changed hands in 2004, and is now owned by the Anschutz Co.

from the Washington Post, 2008-Dec-9, p.D1, by Frank Ahrens:

Debt-Saddled Tribune Co. Files for Bankruptcy Protection

Media giant Tribune Co. yesterday became the first major newspaper or chain in several decades to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as the debt-saddled company fights sharply dropping advertising revenue and an ongoing recession.

The move will allow Tribune to stay in business while it seeks better terms from its creditors. The company stressed that all of its businesses, which include eight major daily newspapers and 23 television stations, will continue their day-to-day operations while Tribune restructures its debt.

According to Tribune's bankruptcy filing in a Delaware court yesterday, the company has $12.9 billion in debt and $7.6 billion in assets.

Tribune's largest creditor is J.P. Morgan Chase, which is owed $8.6 billion. Merrill Lynch is second, at $1.6 billion, and Deutsche Bank is third, at $900 million.

Chicago-based Tribune owns properties in most of the nation's largest cities. Its holdings include the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times; cable television superstation WGN in Chicago; the Baltimore Sun; and WDCW-50 in Washington, a CW affiliate. The company also owns Major League Baseball's Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field, which are for sale and outside of bankruptcy protection.

Real estate mogul Sam Zell engineered an employee-owned transition of Tribune to private status in December 2007 with $8.2 billion in new loans, layering on top of the $5 billion in debt already being carried by the company. Even then, Tribune was reporting declining ad revenue and newspaper circulation.

This placed the company in a perilous position when the economic crisis and credit crunch exploded in late summer. Plummeting Tribune profits put the company in danger of being unable to meet its debt covenants, according to a source close to the company who spoke on condition of anonymity because Tribune is privately held.

"Their newspapers are profitable," newspaper analyst John Morton said. "But their profits have dropped so much and they're so heavily leveraged that they've been put in a hole."

Or, as Tribune said in a release yesterday: "We simply have too much debt."

In November, Tribune reported a $124 million third-quarter loss, compared with an $84 million profit in the same period of last year.

To cut costs, Tribune has mandated hundreds of layoffs across the company. Those who did not take their severance in a lump sum could be hurt by the bankruptcy. "All ongoing severance payments, deferred compensation and other payments to former employees have been discontinued and will be the subject of later proceedings before the [bankruptcy] court," stated an internal Tribune document sent to employees yesterday.

The future of the employee stock-ownership plan is unclear, the company said.

The "vast majority" of retirement and pension plans are safe under the restructuring, the company said yesterday, but some may not be, given the number and complexity of the various plans offered during Tribune's 161-year history.

"Over the last year, we have made significant progress internally on transitioning Tribune into an entrepreneurial company that pursues innovation and stronger ways of serving our customers," chief executive Zell said in a statement yesterday.

"Unfortunately, at the same time, factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm -- a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt."

Newspapers have been losing average daily circulation since 1987, though advertising revenue remained high. But the rise of the Internet and other options for news, information and reader time have sent readers and advertisers away from newspapers in the past half-decade, crippling them.

Despite the hard times, the most recent newspaper bankruptcy of note may have been that of The Washington Post -- in 1933.

Morton said Tribune is only the most prominent and first of several other newspaper companies to face potentially severe debt problems.

Morton noted that the Pennsylvania-based Journal Register chain of smaller papers recently borrowed about $500 million to buy newspapers "in, of all places, Michigan." The Journal Register is putting properties up for sale and its stock is trading for pennies per share.

Morton also pointed to McClatchy Co., the nation's second-largest newspaper chain, which took on $3.5 billion in new debt and assumed $2 billion in existing debt when it bought the Knight Ridder chain in 2006. Since that purchase, shares of McClatchy have plummeted from $48 per share to close yesterday at $2.46.

And yesterday, the New York Times reported that its parent company will put its new Manhattan skyscraper up as collateral as it seeks $225 million in loans to offset a "cash-flow squeeze."

from the Times of London, 2008-Dec-10, by Christine Seib:

New York Times considers asset sale
The NY Times publisher also confirmed it plans to raise $225m from a sale and leaseback of its Manhattan headquarters

The New York Times Company (NYTC) has confirmed that it plans to raise $225 million from a sale and leaseback of its Manhattan headquarters.

The publisher of the New York Times also said that it was considering disposing of assets. It is currently talking to lenders about replacing part of the company's $800 million credit lines that expire over the next two years.

Given the deteriorating financial environment, most companies are struggling to replace credit lines except at vastly increased rates, so are instead looking at alternative ways of raising cash.

James Follo, chief financial officer of the NYTC, said that the company had no need to replace the entire value of its credit lines because its borrowings were currently only $400 million and were unlikely to hit the $800 million limit.

He said that the sale and leaseback of the 8th Avenue building, of which the NYTC owns a mortgage-free 58 per cent share, was a "unique opportunity to borrow at attractive rates in today's market."

Mr Follo said that the company was looking at other financing alternatives, such as a public offering or private share placement.

He warned investors, however, that it could be difficult to offload assets as America's recession worsens.

The NYTC's comments came a day after Tribune Company, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after struggling to meet repayments on its $13 billion debts. The company has $7.6 billion in assets.

Today Standard & Poor's, the ratings agency, cut its rating on Tribune to reflect the default on its debt obligations. The agency lowered Tribune's corporate credit rating to D.

The US advertising industry is bracing itself for the first two consecutive yearly declines in advertising spending since the Great Depression.

Media companies have also been hit by declining sales. Matthieu Coppet, a UBS analyst, has forecast an 8.7 per cent fall in advertising spending, mainly in local advertising, in 2009 compared to this year.

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, the advertising business, does not expect a recovery until 2010, with the most severe difficulties to be felt in the first half of next year.

"The real world won't change for the better until 2010 when greed has overcome fear yet again," Mr Sorrell said.

from 24/7 Wall Street, 2009-Jan-12, by Douglas A. McIntyre:

Twelve Major Media Brands Likely To Close In 2009

No one working in the media industry will ever have seen a year as bad as 2009 will be. The sharp slide in advertising began in 2008, and, based on the worsening economy, there is no reason to think that advertising will improve.  Most Wall St. analysts have predicted a harsh year for the ad business.  If the downturn deepens and unemployment rises above 10% most predictions about media, no matter how negative, will have been unexpectedly optimistic.

The most endangered of the media sectors is the newspaper industry. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver's Rocky Mountain News have already been slated for closing if they do not find buyers. They won't. The Miami Herald is on the block. Due to the remarkably poor real estate environment in South Florida, this property is unlikely to find a new home. National newspaper chains Journal Register and Gatehouse have been delisted from the NYSE and are likely to try to auction off their operations. McClatchy (MNI), the third largest chain in the country, will struggle to make its debt service.   Scores of papers, large and small, will fold this year. Newspaper expert Alan Mutter recently wrote that any paper in a major city with two dailies is in tremendous trouble.

The magazine industry is not in much better shape although its very sharp downturn did not begin until last year.  Conde Nast recently closed Men's Vogue and cut back the frequency and online operations of Portfolio.  Media giant Meredith recently closed Country Home.  Two months ago, PC Magazine said it would close its print edition and operate only online. According to MIN, at least a dozen major magazines had ad page decreases of more than 20% last year including US News & World Report, Rolling Stone, Boating, Gourmet, Ladies Home Journal, More, and Smart Money. A number of these magazines also had sharp page drops in their January editions. With advertising expenditures likely to fall throughout the year, it is hard to imagine how many men's magazines, car publications, food, and shelter magazines will be able to stay afloat in segments of the industry which are already crowded.

A year ago, most analysts expected that the online marketing business would be largely recession-proof. It is now clear that this is not true. Gawker owner Nick Denton expects online ad revenue to drop by double digits. Even if that does not turn out to be true, web properties which are losing money now won't all make it to the end of 2009. Denton has already closed ValleyWag.  Retail website eLuxury.com is closing. 8020 Media, started by CNET founder Halsey Minor, has been shuttered.

Public discussion of media property closures is rampant.  The criteria for determining what is meant by the terms “closing or folding” has become complicated in the last three years.  Increasingly, many companies "close" an operation by merging it into something different or killing its "old media" operation and moving that business online.  For example, this was done by The Christian Science Monitor when it closed the print form of the paper and moved all of its content to its website.

For the purposes of this analysis "fold" means that a property no longer exists in its current state. If the Miami Herald becomes part of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, it has folded even if its name survives. If Entertainment Weekly shuts it print edition and keeps only EW.com open, Entertainment Weekly has, in effect, folded

The Miami Herald is already for sale. It is owned by McClatchy, a company which simply may not make it.  McClatchy had operating income of $40 million last quarter, but its debt service was $34 million. In addition, McClatchy revenue dropped 16% for the quarter. Based on the figures the company has posted over the last several months, the top line is dropping more rapidly, especially at its Florida and California properties. Classified sales are down over 30% in these regions. For the six months ending last September, daily circulation at the Miami paper was down 11.8% to 240.000. A large daily newspaper operation that covers a huge metro area is simply too expensive to run with this enormous audience loss. The Herald won't be sold. There is too much risk here for a buyer. The most likely fate of the paper is that it will be merged with the Ft. Lauderdale paper or some other media in south Florida.

A number of media reports say that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune will file for Chapter 11 early this year. Creditors may take the paper over, but what will they do with it as the industry falls apart? Go online? Maybe, but that would involving firing most of the current staff. The only other realistic arrangement would be a sale of the paper's assets to the neighboring St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Press could significantly reduce the costs of running two papers which are so geographically close to one another. The Star-Tribune lost 4.3% of its daily circulation in the last measurement period and 8.6% of its Sunday circulation. The numbers for St. Paul were up slightly. A combination of these properties might be a template for mergers in other regions including Dallas/Fort Worth and LA/San Diego. Two years ago,  hardly anyone would have imagined putting two competitors together.

The New York Daily News operates in the most competitive newspaper market in the US and it is not clear that any of the properties in this fight makes a dime. New York City is home to both The New York Post and The New York Times. The Newark Star Ledger is competition from New Jersey and Newsday competes from Long Island. The Daily News is owned by billionaire Mort Zuckerman who also owns the money-losing magazine, US News. Circulation at The Daily News dropped 7.2% in the last measurement period to 762,595. Some newspaper analysts put the annual loss for the paper in 2008 at over $30 million. It does not help that Zuckerman's main business is real estate and that he is writing checks to keep US News in business as well.  A second NYC paper at risk is The New York Observer. It has carried a very modest amount of advertising over the last three month. It probably employs at least 50 people and has to cover the printing costs of about 60,000 copies a week. An annual subscription is under $30. The paper's website, observer.com, has a very small audience of 764,000 visitors each month. It is another property with an owner in the real estate business.

The San Francisco Chronicle is owned by the privately-held Hearst Corporation which has said it will sell or close its paper in Seattle within the next 60 days. Media experts say that the Chronicle has lost money for several years. The faltering California economy will only make this worse. Because of the digital culture of northern California, there is a small chance that the paper could move completely online. More likely, it would be merged into the local MediaNews Group papers which include the dailies in San Jose and Oakland. It is not out of the question that print papers around SF will become multiple geographic editions of one newspaper. It may be what they have to do to survive.

According to MIN, Playboy has lost advertising pages each of the last four years, falling from 685 pages in 2004 to 463 pages last year. In the September quarter, Playboy's parent company lost $2.7 million on revenue of just over $70 million. This revenue figure was down from almost $83 million in the same period the year before. The firm has a modest cash position of $25 million. Playboy's publishing operations do not make money. Its entertainment and licensing businesses do. Playboy's comment about print emphasized falling sales: "Advertising revenues decreased $1.0 million, or 16%, for the quarter and $3.5 million, or 19%, for the nine-month period." Playboy's major enemy is the amount of adult material that is available online, most of it much more provocative than what the magazine can publish and still keep its advertising. But, Playboy is still one of the most recognized brands in the world. Moving completely online with both ad supported and subscription servers gives it a more realistic chance of success than most magazines would have.

Entertainment Weekly made only $10 million last year according to The New York Post. That number has decreased rapidly. Last year the magazine lost 20% of its advertising pages compared with the year before.  This year will be a remarkably hard year for any recovery of this lost income. Time, Inc. the magazine's owner, is under tremendous pressure to make money. Many analysts believe that Time Warner's share price is being held down by weak results at Time and AOL. The magazine operations are not in a position to keep troubled publications in a "turnaround" mode. Entertainment Weekly's website, EW.com, is one of the most complete online operations of its kind, with broad and strong coverage of music, TV, film, and music. Quantcast shows it having 5.7 million unique visitors and 65 million pageviews last month. If the entire operation were moved online, it could have large profit margins again.

SmartMoney is the personal finance magazine which is jointly owned by Hearst and Dow Jones. It is unlikely that either company wants to support the losses at the publication which are almost certain to grow substantially over the next year. The property is in a crowded field which includes Money, Kiplinger's, and the personal finance sections of several large publications and newspapers from BusinessWeek to The Wall Street Journal. Smart Money's ad pages fell 30% last year to 503 compared with the year before. In 2004, the figure was 784 pages. The January 2009 issues were down another 24%. This magazine will close.

Gourmet will probably not see the end of the year. Its parent company, Conde Nast, can no longer rely on the huge profits of the newspaper portion of the Newhouse family business. The magazine operation needs to go on a diet.  Conde Nast reaches the "food" market several ways. It owns Gourmet, Bon Appetite, and epicurious.com.  Conde Nast simply owns too many titles in this category.  From 2004 to 2008, Gourmet's ad pages have dropped from 1,364 to 955, with a 24% drop last year.  January's ad pages were down another 32% according to MIN. Gourmet can survive since it has a competitive audience of web visitors to its food site, but it will have to migrate totally to its website.

For this analysis there is not enough access to data to say whether all four major car magazines (Automobile, Motor Trend, Car & Driver, and Road & Track) will make it through the year. The troubles of the automobile industry will surely affect them all. 

Answers.com is a very large web property that many people haven't heard of. According to comScore, the answers.com websites had almost 25 million unique visitors in October, making it No. 34 among the top 50 websites in the US. But, the company makes little if any money on all of that traffic. In the third quarter, Answers Corp, which is a public company, had revenue of only $3.6 million and an operating loss of $112,000. That is a astonishingly low revenue-yield-per-visitor. Most of the firm's revenue comes from online advertising. Answers Corp has $9 million in cash. The company calls itself a "leading answers engine."

Eons.com is a social network and information website for baby boomers. Unfortunately, it is not growing the way most social networks are. Quantcast shows its audience is currently well below where it was in the late summer of last year. In March 2007, the company raised $22 million lead by led by Charles River Ventures. Recently, it has become clear that social networks are poor media for advertising. The valuations of very large properties, particularly Facebook, have crumbled. Eons runs a tremendous amount or remnant display advertising which means that its revenue is certainly very modest. Even in a better economic climate social networks would be struggling to bring in advertising revenue with the smaller one would be fighting to survive.

PlanetOut has been one of the premiere sites for gays and lesbians for years. Its parent company, which has the same name, has been struggling to sell its businesses. The firm's shares have dropped from a 52-week high of $6.20 to $.50. PlanetOut's market cap is down to $2 million. Last week the company was sold to Here Media. The deal is too late to save the website. Compete.com shows that its audience has declined 25% over the last year to a fairly small 61,000 unique visitors. That is not enough traffic to keep a media and ecommerce site alive.

Douglas A. McIntyre began his career at Time, Inc. He was the president of Financial World Magazine for twelve years. He was also the president of Switchboard.com when it was the No.10 website in the US according to MediaMetrix. His father was in the newspaper industry for 50 years.

from Zogby International, 2008-Nov-18:

Zogby Poll: Almost No Obama Voters Ace Election Test

Survey finds most Obama voters remembered negative coverage of McCain/Palin statements but struggled to correctly answer questions about coverage associated with Obama/Biden

UTICA, New York -- Just 2% of voters who supported Barack Obama on Election Day obtained perfect or near-perfect scores on a post election test which gauged their knowledge of statements and scandals associated with the presidential tickets during the campaign, a new Zogby International telephone poll shows.

Only 54% of Obama voters were able to answer at least half or more of the questions correctly.

The 12-question, multiple-choice survey found questions regarding statements linked to Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his vice-presidential running-mate Sarah Palin were far more likely to be answered correctly by Obama voters than questions about statements associated with Obama and Vice-President–Elect Joe Biden. The telephone survey of 512 Obama voters nationwide was conducted Nov. 13-15, 2008, and carries a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percentage points. The survey was commissioned by John Ziegler, author of The Death of Free Speech, producer of the recently released film "Blocking the Path to 9/11" and producer of the upcoming documentary film, Media Malpractice...How Obama Got Elected.

"We stand by the results our survey work on behalf of John Ziegler, as we stand by all of our work. We reject the notion that this was a push poll because it very simply wasn't. It was a legitimate effort to test the knowledge of voters who cast ballots for Barack Obama in the Nov. 4 election. Push polls are a malicious effort to sway public opinion one way or the other, while message and knowledge testing is quite another effort of public opinion research that is legitimate inquiry and has value in the public square. In this case, the respondents were given a full range of responses and were not pressured or influenced to respond in one way or another. This poll was not designed to hurt anyone, which is obvious as it was conducted after the election. The client is free to draw his own conclusions about the research, as are bloggers and other members of society. But Zogby International is a neutral party in this matter. We were hired to test public opinion on a particular subject and with no ax to grind, that's exactly what we did. We don't have to agree or disagree with the questions, we simply ask them and provide the client with a fair and accurate set of data reflecting public opinion." - John Zogby

"After I interviewed Obama voters on Election Day for my documentary, I had a pretty low opinion of what most of them had picked up from the media coverage of the campaign, but this poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace," said Ziegler.

Ninety-four percent of Obama voters correctly identified Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter, 86% correctly identified Palin as the candidate associated with a $150,000 wardrobe purchased by her political party, and 81% chose McCain as the candidate who was unable to identify the number of houses he owned. When asked which candidate said they could "see Russia from their house," 87% chose Palin, although the quote actually is attributed to Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey during her portrayal of Palin during the campaign. An answer of "none" or "Palin" was counted as a correct answer on the test, given that the statement was associated with a characterization of Palin.

Obama voters did not fare nearly as well overall when asked to answer questions about statements or stories associated with Obama or Biden -- 83% failed to correctly answer that Obama had won his first election by getting all of his opponents removed from the ballot, and 88% did not correctly associate Obama with his statement that his energy policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry. Most (56%) were also not able to correctly answer that Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground.

Nearly three quarters (72%) of Obama voters did not correctly identify Biden as the candidate who had to quit a previous campaign for President because he was found to have plagiarized a speech, and nearly half (47%) did not know that Biden was the one who predicted Obama would be tested by a generated international crisis during his first six months as President.

In addition to questions regarding statements and scandals associated with the campaigns, the 12-question, multiple-choice survey also included a question asking which political party controlled both houses of Congress leading up to the election -- 57% of Obama voters were unable to correctly answer that Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.

For content, contact: John Ziegler at talktozig@aol.com.

For more information on Ziegler's upcoming documentary film, Media Malpractice...How Obama Got Elected, please visit www.HowObamaGotElected.com, where there is a video of Obama voters on election day being asked many of the same questions.

For methodology, contact: Fritz Wenzel, 315-624-0200 ext. 229 or 419-205-0287 or fritz@zogby.com.

To view the survey results, please visit http://www.zogby.com/news/wf-dfs.pdf.

(11/18/2008)

from the New York Times, 2008-Jun-27, by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt:

Your Brain Lies to You

FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer's hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man's curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don't remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like “I think I read somewhere” or even with a reference to a specific source.

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.

In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the evidence that supported their initial position.

Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about Coke — or about a presidential candidate.

Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication of the study of students' impressions of evidence about the death penalty, researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs.

In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes's ideal.

Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-8, by Daniel Henninger:

Top 2009 Resolution: Don't Be Stupid
Bernard Madoff revealed our thoughtless ways.

Back in olden times, mankind found it useful to live by mottoes. A motto reduces the helpful lessons of life to three or four words, maybe two, as in the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. Or, apropos now: Look before you leap.

The most famous motto in our time has been Google's Don't Be Evil. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but here's a motto for the next four or five years: Don't Be Stupid.

It would not have occurred to me to posit Don't Be Stupid as a motto for our times had not 2008 ended with the Bernard Madoff story. Up to then, we were all preoccupied with the economic meltdown that began in mid-September with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other household gods of global finance.

The economic crisis, originating in the subprime mortgage lending phenomenon, was said to be complex. Madoff's story, however, was simple. For years, uncounted numbers of the most sophisticated people here and in Europe conveyed to Mr. Madoff tens of billions of dollars because this solitary investor, unlike virtually every other professional investor, achieved returns in excess of 10% annually in all economic seasons.

Together, subprime and Madoff have produced the Year of What Were They Thinking? As the New Year separated from the spent canister of 2008, conventional wisdom held that financial lessons had been learned. Boards of directors would exercise greater oversight. Sober investment management would replace bonus-baby overreaching. Due diligence would return from exile. Mania would give way to Protestant virtue.

Maybe.

I'm still mesmerized by the virtually uncountable number of intelligent individuals worldwide who were revealed as dumb in 2008. What happened to them? What if mass dumbing down is now the norm?

Avarice explains a lot of bad behavior. So does the Federal Reserve's free-money interest rates, inducing a mania of moral hazard. More intriguing to me than the standard theory of manias and bubbles is the supersized human error rate of the past several years. The decline and fall of so many American financial institutions in one year can't be written off to "mistakes." These were cataclysmic mistakes.

Only one other area of modern life produces this unprecedented error rate: the World Wide Web. Could it be that in the world of money, the information highway was the road to ruin -- www.Stupid.com?

Illuminated screens are fun -- and pernicious. People have long believed that if they see or hear something on TV, it must be true. This credulity has transferred exponentially to the PC screen, the cell-phone screen and email. Sophisticated people send fake news stories or photographs from the Web to everyone on their distribution list, until someone debunks it. Then it happens again. Something about information on screens reduces skepticism.

Modern technology, which is essentially infinite button-pushing, also fills one's days with tiny errors surfing the Web, texting or punching TV controllers. It is a trail of constant error. One gets desensitized to errors because, like mice in a maze, another "out" from one's misstep is just another click away.

That we make these unending miscues with the small stuff may not matter, but rewiring the brain to accommodate relentless error may soften us up to making slovenly mistakes with things that do matter. The habits beneath due diligence fall away as we play in the Web's surf.

The modern investor class, whether at Citigroup, Lehman or retirees at home, have become Googling zombies. Financial-industry workers, as elsewhere, chase data through thousands of screen changes, even as they are overwhelmed by emails. They do it because accessing new screens is more fun than the drudgery of time spent on one task. It used to be called "focus."

This undifferentiated world of work and play is increasingly thoughtless. As in, thought-less. Accessing such massive amounts of variable information wouldn't matter if workers were taking time to stop and produce useful thought about the numbers or words on their screens. Who has time to do that, or even wants to? Keep clicking.

As the subprime mania raged through the world's trading rooms -- and this mess was a screen-driven phenomenon -- time-pressed investment managers stared at the illuminated numbers and assumed the data and models were, you know, OK, because surely somebody else, somewhere, must have taken the time to check it out. The one man who understood humanity's slack focus better than anyone was Bernard Madoff.

Looking out at the events transpiring through the world nowadays, it might be nice if people lived by their understanding of Don't Be Evil. Next January is likely to be better, though, if most of us just keep it simple. Don't be stupid.

from Technology Review, 2008-Nov/Dec, by Simson L. Garfinkel:

Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth
Why the online encyclopedia's epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy.

With little notice from the outside world, the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word "truth."

Why should we care? Because Wikipedia's articles are the first- or second-ranked results for most Internet searches. Type "iron" into Google, and Wikipedia's article on the element is the top-ranked result; likewise, its article on the Iron Cross is first when the search words are "iron cross." Google's search algorithms rank a story in part by how many times it has been linked to; people are linking to Wikipedia articles a lot.

This means that the content of these articles really matters. Wikipedia's standards of inclusion--what's in and what's not--affect the work of journalists, who routinely read Wikipedia articles and then repeat the wikiclaims as "background" without bothering to cite them. These standards affect students, whose research on many topics starts (and often ends) with Wikipedia. And since I used Wikipedia to research large parts of this article, these standards are affecting you, dear reader, at this very moment.

Many people, especially academic experts, have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted, because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted. Nevertheless, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. The reason is that Wikipedia's community of more than seven million registered users has organically evolved a set of policies and procedures for removing untruths. This also explains Wikipedia's explosive growth: if the stuff in Wikipedia didn't seem "true enough" to most readers, they wouldn't keep coming back to the website.

These policies have become the social contract for Wikipedia's army of apparently insomniac volunteers. Thanks to them, incorrect information generally disappears quite quickly.

So how do the Wikipedians decide what's true and what's not? On what is their epistemology based?

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth," states Wikipedia's official policy on the subject.

Verifiability is one of Wikipedia's three core content policies; it was codified back in August 2003. The two others are "no original research" (December 2003) and "neutral point of view," which the Wikipedia project inherited from Nupedia, an earlier volunteer-written Web-based free encyclopedia that existed from March 2000 to September 2003 (Wikipedia's own NPOV policy was codified in December 2001). These policies have made Wikipedia a kind of academic agora where people on both sides of politically charged subjects can rationally discuss their positions, find common ground, and unemotionally document their differences. Wikipedia is successful because these policies have worked.

Unlike Wikipedia's articles, Nupedia's were written and vetted by experts. But few experts were motivated to contribute. Well, some wanted to write about their own research, but Larry Sanger, Nupedia's editor in chief, immediately put an end to that practice.

"I said, 'If it hasn't been vetted by the relevant experts, then basically we are setting ourselves up as a frontline source of new, original information, and we aren't set up to do that,'" Sanger (who is himself, ironically or not, a former philosophy instructor and by training an epistemologist) recalls telling his fellow Nupedians.

With experts barred from writing about their own work and having no incentive to write about anything else, Nupedia struggled. Then Sanger and Jimmy Wales, Nupedia's founder, decided to try a different policy on a new site, which they launched on January 15, 2001. They adopted the newly invented "wiki" technology, allowing anybody to contribute to any article--or create a new one--on any topic, simply by clicking "Edit this page."

Soon the promoters of oddball hypotheses and outlandish ideas were all over Wikipedia, causing the new site's volunteers to spend a good deal of time repairing damage--not all of it the innocent work of the misguided or deluded. (A study recently published in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery found that 11 percent of Wikipedia articles have been vandalized at least once.) But how could Wikipedia's volunteer editors tell if something was true? The solution was to add references and footnotes to the articles, "not in order to help the reader, but in order to establish a point to the satisfaction of the [other] contributors," says Sanger, who left Wikipedia before the verifiability policy was formally adopted. (Sanger and Wales, now the chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, fell out about the scale of Sanger's role in the creation of Wikipedia. Today, Sanger is the creator and editor in chief of Citizendium, an alternative to Wikipedia that is intended to address the inadequacy of its "reliability and quality.")

Verifiability is really an appeal to authority--not the authority of truth, but the authority of other publications. Any other publication, really. These days, information that's added to Wikipedia without an appropriate reference is likely to be slapped with a "citation needed" badge by one of Wikipedia's self-appointed editors. Remove the badge and somebody else will put it back. Keep it up and you might find yourself face to face with another kind of authority--one of the English-language Wikipedia's 1,500 administrators, who have the ability to place increasingly restrictive protections on contentious pages when the policies are ignored.

To be fair, Wikipedia's verifiability policy states that "articles should rely on reliable, third-party published sources" that themselves adhere to Wikipedia's NPOV policy. Self-published articles should generally be avoided, and non-English sources are discouraged if English articles are available, because many people who read, write, and edit En.Wikipedia (the English-language version) can read only English.

Mob Rules
In a May 2006 essay on the technology and culture website Edge.org, futurist Jaron Lanier called Wikipedia an example of "digital Maoism"--the closest humanity has come to a functioning mob rule.

Lanier was moved to write about Wikipedia because someone kept editing his Wikipedia entry to say that he was a film director. Lanier describes himself as a "computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author." He is good at all those things, but he is no director. According to his essay, he made one short experimental film in the 1990s, and it was "awful."

"I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me," Lanier wrote. "Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again."

Since Lanier's attempted edits to his own Wikipedia entry were based on firsthand knowledge of his own career, he was in direct violation of Wikipedia's three core policies. He has a point of view; he was writing on the basis of his own original research; and what he wrote couldn't be verified by following a link to some kind of legitimate, authoritative, and verifiable publication.

Wikipedia's standard for "truth" makes good technical and legal sense, given that anyone can edit its articles. There was no way for Wikipedia, as a community, to know whether the person revising the article about Jaron Lanier was really Jaron Lanier or a vandal. So it's safer not to take people at their word, and instead to require an appeal to the authority of another publication from everybody who contributes, expert or not.

An interesting thing happens when you try to understand Wikipedia: the deeper you go, the more convoluted it becomes. Consider the verifiability policy. Wikipedia considers the "most reliable sources" to be "peer-reviewed journals and books published in university presses," followed by "university-level textbooks," then magazines, journals, "books published by respected publishing houses," and finally "mainstream newspapers" (but not the opinion pages of newspapers).

Once again, this makes sense, given Wikipedia's inability to vet the real-world identities of authors. Lanier's complaints when his Wikipedia page claimed that he was a film director couldn't be taken seriously by Wikipedia's "contributors" until Lanier persuaded the editors at Edge to print his article bemoaning the claim. This Edge article by Lanier was enough to convince the Wikipedians that the Wikipedia article about Lanier was incorrect--after all, there was a clickable link! Presumably the editors at Edge did their fact checking, so the wikiworld could now be corrected.

As fate would have it, Lanier was subsequently criticized for engaging in the wikisin of editing his own wikientry. The same criticism was leveled against me when I corrected a number of obvious errors in my own Wikipedia entry.

"Criticism" is actually a mild word for the kind of wikijustice meted out to people who are foolish enough to get caught editing their own Wikipedia entries: the entries get slapped with a banner headline that says "A major contributor to this article, or its creator, may have a conflict of interest regarding its subject matter." The banner is accompanied by a little picture showing the scales of justice tilted to the left. Wikipedia's "Autobiography" policy explains in great detail how drawing on your own knowledge to edit the Wikipedia entry about yourself violates all three of the site's cornerstone policies--and illustrates the point with yet another appeal to authority, a quotation from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

But there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people's written words: many publications don't do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right. For instance, Dun and Bradstreet gets the information for its small-business information reports in part by asking those very same small businesses to fill out questionnaires about themselves.

"No Original Research"
What all this means is hard to say. I am infrequently troubled by Wiki's unreliability. (The quality of the writing is a different subject.) As a computer scientist, I find myself using Wikipedia on a daily basis. Its discussions of algorithms, architectures, microprocessors, and other technical subjects are generally excellent. When they aren't excellent and I know better, I just fix them. And when they're wrong and I don't know better--well, I don't know any better, do I?

I've also spent quite a bit of time reviewing Wikipedia's articles about such things as the "Singularity Scalpel," the "Treaty of Algeron," and "Number Six." Search for these terms and you'll be directed to Wikipedia articles with the titles "List of Torchwood items" and "List of treaties in Star Trek," and to one about a Cylon robot played by Canadian actress Tricia Helfer. These articles all hang their wikiexistence upon scholarly references to original episodes of Dr. Who, Torchwood, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica--popular television shows that the Wikipedia contributors dignify with the word "canon."

I enjoy using these articles as sticks to poke at Wikipedia, but they represent a tiny percentage of Wikipedia's overall content. On the other hand, they've been an important part of Wikipedia culture from the beginning. Sanger says that early on, Wikipedia made a commitment to having a wide variety of articles: "There's plenty of disk space, and as long as there are people out there who are able to write a decent article about a subject, why not let them? ... I thought it was kind of funny and cool that people were writing articles about every character in The Lord of the Rings. I didn't regard it as a problem the way some people do now."

What's wrong with the articles about fantastical worlds is that they are at odds with Wikipedia's "no original research" rule, since almost all of them draw their "references" from the fictions themselves and not from the allegedly more reliable secondary sources. I haven't nominated these articles for speedy deletion because Wikipedia makes an exception for fiction--and because, truth be told, I enjoy reading them. And these days, most such entries are labeled as referring to fictional universes.

So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia's entry on the subject, "the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree." But in practice, Wikipedia's standard for inclusion has become its de facto standard for truth, and since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.

That standard is simple: something is true if it was published in a newspaper article, a magazine or journal, or a book published by a university press--or if it appeared on Dr. Who.

Simson L. Garfinkel is a contributing editor to Technology Review and a professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.

from the Washington Post, 2008-Nov-9, p.B6, by Deborah Howell:

An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

My assistant, Jean Hwang, and I have been examining Post coverage since Nov. 11 of last year on issues, voters, fundraising, the candidates' backgrounds and horse-race stories on tactics, strategy and consultants. We also have looked at photos and Page 1 stories since Obama captured the nomination June 4.

The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts' views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, said, "There are a lot of things I wish we'd been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.

The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that.

McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.

Our survey results are comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both. The project also calculated that in that time, 57 percent of the stories were about the horse race and 13 percent were about issues.

Counting from June 4, Obama was in 311 Post photos and McCain in 282. Obama led in most categories. Obama led 133 to 121 in pictures more than three columns wide, 178 to 161 in smaller pictures, and 164 to 133 in color photos. In black and white photos, the nominees were about even, with McCain at 149 and Obama at 147. On Page 1, they were even at 26 each. Post photo and news editors were surprised by my first count on Aug. 3, which showed a much wider disparity, and made a more conscious effort at balance afterward.

Some readers complain that coverage is too poll-driven. They're right, but it's not going to change. The Post's polling was on the mark, and in some cases ahead of the curve, in focusing on independent voters, racial attitudes, low-wage voters, the shift of African Americans' support from Clinton to Obama and the rising importance of economic issues. The Post and its polling partner ABC News include 50 to 60 issues questions in every survey instead of just horse-race questions, so public attitudes were plumbed as well.

The Post had a hard-working team on the campaign. Special praise goes to Dan Balz, the best, most level-headed, incisive political reporter and analyst in newspapers. His stories and "Dan Balz's Take" on washingtonpost.com were fair, penetrating and on the mark. His mentor, David S. Broder, was as sharp as ever.

Michael Dobbs, the Fact Checker, also deserves praise for parsing campaign rhetoric for the overblown or just flat wrong. Howard Kurtz's Ad Watch was a sharp reality check.

The Post's biographical pieces, especially the first ones -- McCain by Michael Leahy and Obama by David Maraniss -- were compelling. Maraniss demystified Obama's growing-up years; the piece on his mother and grandparents was a great read. Leahy's first piece on McCain's father and grandfather, both admirals, told me where McCain got his maverick ways as a kid -- right from the two old men.

But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

The Post had good coverage of voters, mainly by Krissah Williams Thompson and Kevin Merida. Anne Hull's stories from Florida, Michigan and Liberty University, and Wil Haygood's story from central Montana brought readers into voters' lives. Jose Antonio Vargas's pieces about campaigns and the Internet were standouts.

One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama's running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission. However, I do not agree with those readers who thought The Post did only hatchet jobs on her. There were several good stories on her, the best on page 1 by Sally Jenkins on how Palin grew up in Alaska.

In early coverage, I wasn't a big fan of the long-running series called "The Gurus" on consultants and important people in the campaigns. The Post has always prided itself on its political coverage, and profiles of the top dogs were probably well read by political junkies. But I thought the series was of no practical use to readers. While there were some interesting pieces in The Frontrunners series, none of them told me anything about where the candidates stood on any issue.

from the Media Research Center via the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Nov-26, by L. Brent Bozell III:

Liberalism = Genius?

If there is a dreadfully overused word in the giddy countdown to the Obama inauguration, it is "smart." Not just "smart," but also its stronger cousins like "Brilliant" and "Genius." These words have been offered shamelessly for nearly every person assigned a role by President-Elect Obama. They are assembling an "all-star cabinet." This was not an honor for those having attended all the right schools, but a tribute to people who have all the "right" ideas. Liberals are smart because they're liberals. Conservative beliefs are honed from having been dropped on your head as an infant.

Last week, Newsweek almost comedically compared Obama to Lincoln, hailing the strength of his "humility." How could anyone stay humble with all these hyper-flattering cover stories about whether you're Lincoln or you're Franklin Roosevelt? Nobody asked: But what if he turns out to be another ineffective Jimmy Carter? Then again, not to worry. Just as Time turned Obama into FDR on its cover, they comically projected Carter as Gary Cooper in "High Noon" in the hostage-crisis spring of 1980.

Back in June of 2001, Newsweek headlined an article on an upcoming Bush foreign policy trip with these words: "See George. See George Learn Foreign Policy." He was painted like a president who couldn't prove he was smarter than a fifth-grader on TV. Newsweek did attempt a historical comparison. European pols heard Bush advocating missile defense, and one participant joked, "He was like Reagan....without the charisma." Newsweek concluded school wasn't working yet for Bush: "Still a student in a most demanding and unforgiving school, he needs all the teachers he can get."

That dismissive attitude toward Republican politicians will long outlive the Bush presidency, just as it outlasted Reagan's. Nine days after the election, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham denounced Sarah Palin in the snobbiest of tones on NBC's "Today" as someone who should "be going into a kind of policy Berlitz course, which one would think would be a relatively sound thing to do." Plugging Meacham's biography of Andrew Jackson, NBC's Matt Lauer added the colorful tale that Jackson threatened to kill his own vice president, so Meacham caustically added, "I don't know if Senator McCain has thought that along the way."

Meanwhile, Newsweek's writers are exploring the inspiring depths of humility of their blessed Barack: "Obama has unusual detachment for a politician. He observes himself as a kind of figure out of literature." Does that sound humble? Or does it sound astoundingly arrogant? Reagan living in his own movies put him in Fantasy Land, but Obama seeing himself as the Embodiment of Hope on the library shelf is somehow grounded. The Obama-crazed media are hallucinating.

On ABC's "Good Morning America," co-host Robin Roberts couldn't stop gushing about the Obama cabinet picks: "Some would say it's a team of rivals, a la President Lincoln, or is a better comparison a team of geniuses as FDR did?" George Stephanopoulos unsurprisingly agreed: "We have not seen this kind of combination of star power and brain power and political muscle this early in a cabinet in our lifetimes."

Smelling salts all around, please.

If this proposed incoming Obama administration wasn't so stuffed with Clintonites, starting with Hillary, that line might have sounded insulting to Bill Clinton. Sixteen years ago, all these same tributes were being offered to Bill Clinton's superior intelligence, Bill Clinton's grace under pressure, and a superior incoming Clinton staff. Even Stephanopoulos was ogled back then over the charisma of his "power whisper."

But looking back, how well did Bill Clinton display a foreign policy genius that made the world a less violent place? Are the mass murders in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebrenica something that every Clinton fan in the media has wiped clean from their brains? Have they all forgotten the Americans killed at the Khobar Towers, or aboard the U.S.S. Cole, our lost diplomats at the embassies of Kenya and Tanzania? Did the overflowing international compassion of Clinton melt the hearts of al-Qaeda into retirement? Why, then, does every media liberal assume that History will open her arms and beckon Obama forward as an early entry into the Pantheon of Presidential Greatness?

Conservatives and Republicans have a very important role to play now in holding this alleged Team of Geniuses accountable. This disgraceful "news" media won't, period. They will line up to serve Obama only slightly less explicitly than Chris Matthews, who typically blurted out that his new job as a television host was to insure President Obama's success. We say "blurted out" because Matthews tends to...blurt. But give him credit for one thing: the courage to admit the attitude of servitude that his colleagues so piously deny.

from the Washington Post, 2008-Nov-17, p.C1, by Howard Kurtz:

A Giddy Sense of Boosterism

Perhaps it was the announcement that NBC News is coming out with a DVD titled "Yes We Can: The Barack Obama Story." Or that ABC and USA Today are rushing out a book on the election. Or that HBO has snapped up a documentary on Obama's campaign.

Perhaps it was the Newsweek commemorative issue -- "Obama's American Dream" -- filled with so many iconic images and such stirring prose that it could have been campaign literature. Or the Time cover depicting Obama as FDR, complete with jaunty cigarette holder.

Are the media capable of merchandizing the moment, packaging a president-elect for profit? Yes, they are.

What's troubling here goes beyond the clanging of cash registers. Media outlets have always tried to make a few bucks off the next big thing. The endless campaign is over, and there's nothing wrong with the country pulling together, however briefly, behind its new leader. But we seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking.

"The Obamas' New Life!" blares People's cover, with a shot of the family. "New home, new friends, new puppy!" Us Weekly goes with a Barack quote: "I Think I'm a Pretty Cool Dad." The Chicago Tribune trumpets that Michelle "is poised to be the new Oprah and the next Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis -- combined!" for the fashion world.

Whew! Are journalists fostering the notion that Obama is invincible, the leader of what the New York Times dubbed "Generation O"?

Each writer, each publication, seems to reach for more eye-popping superlatives. "OBAMAISM -- It's a Kind of Religion," says New York magazine. "Those of us too young to have known JFK's Camelot are going to have our own giddy Camelot II to enrapture and entertain us," Kurt Andersen writes. The New York Post has already christened it "BAM-A-LOT."

"Here we are," writes Salon's Rebecca Traister, "oohing and aahing over what they'll be wearing, and what they'll be eating, what kind of dog they'll be getting, what bedrooms they'll be living in, and what schools they'll be attending. It feels better than good to sniff and snurfle through the Obamas' tastes and habits. . . . Who knew we had in us the capacity to fall for this kind of idealized Americana again?"

But aren't media people supposed to resist this kind of hyperventilating?

"Obama is a figure, especially in pop culture, in a way that most new presidents are not," historian Michael Beschloss says. "Young people who may not be interested in the details of NAFTA or foreign policy just think Obama is cool, and they're interested in him. Being cool can really help a new president."

So can a sense of optimism, reflected on USA Today's front page. "Poll: Hopes soaring for Obama, administration," the headline said, with 65 percent saying "the USA will be better off 4 years from now."

But what happens when adulation gives way to the messy, incremental process of governing? When Obama has to confront a deep-rooted financial crisis, two wars and a political system whose default setting is gridlock? When he makes decisions that inevitably disappoint some of his boosters?

"We're celebrating a moment as much as a man, I think," says Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham, whose new issue, out today, compares Obama to Lincoln. "Given our racial history, an hour or two of commemoration seems appropriate. But there is no doubt that the glow of the moment will fade, and I am sure the coverage will reflect that in due course."

One of the few magazines to strike a skeptical tone is the London-based Economist, which endorsed Obama. "With such a victory come unreasonably great expectations," its lead editorial says.

Web worship of Obama is nearly limitless. On YouTube alone, the Obama Girl song, "I've Got a Crush on Obama," has been viewed 11.7 million times. Even an unadorned video of the candidate's election night speech in Chicago has drawn 3.5 million views.

I am not trying to diminish the sheer improbability of what this African American politician, a virtual unknown four years ago, has accomplished. Every one of us views his victory through a personal lens. I thought of growing up in a "Leave It to Beaver" era, when there were no blacks in leading television roles until Bill Cosby was tapped as the co-star of "I Spy" in 1965. When the Watts riots broke out that year, the Los Angeles Times sent an advertising salesman to cover it because the paper had no black reporters. The country has traveled light-years since then.

It is hard to find a precedent in American history. Ronald Reagan was a marquee star because of his Hollywood career, but mainly among older voters, since he made his last movie 16 years before winning the White House in 1980. Jack Kennedy was a more formal figure after winning the 1960 election -- "trying to look older than he was, because he thought youth was a handicap in running for president," Beschloss says -- but quickly took on larger-than-life dimensions.

"The Kennedy buildup goes on," James MacGregor Burns wrote in the New Republic in the spring of 1961. "The adjectives tumble over one another. He is not only the handsomest, the best-dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; he confounds experts with his superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipotent."

Soon afterward, Kennedy blundered into the Bay of Pigs debacle.

The media would be remiss if they didn't reflect the sense of unadulterated joy that greeted Obama's election, both here and around the world, and the pride even among those who opposed him. Newspapers were stunned and delighted at the voracious demand for post-election editions, prompting The Washington Post and other papers to print hundreds of thousands of extra copies and pocket the change. (When else have we felt so loved lately?) Demand for inaugural tickets has been unprecedented. Barack is suddenly a hot baby name. Record companies are releasing hip-hop songs, by the likes of Jay-Z and Will.I.Am, with such titles as "Pop Champagne for Barack." Consumers, the Los Angeles Times reports, are buying up "Obama-themed T-shirts, buttons, bobblehead dolls, coffee mugs, wine bottles, magnets, greeting cards, neon signs, mobile phones and framed art prints."

A barrage of Obama-related books are in the works. Newsweek's quadrennial election volume is titled "A Long Time Coming: The Historic, Combative, Expensive and Inspiring 2008 Election and the Victory of Barack Obama." Publishers obviously see a bull market.

MSNBC, which was accused of cheerleading for the Democratic nominee during the campaign, is running promos that say: "Barack Obama, America's 44th president. Watch as a leader renews America's promise." What are viewers to make of that?

There is always a level of excitement when a new president is coming to town -- new aides to profile, new policies to dissect, new family members to follow. But can anyone imagine this kind of media frenzy if John McCain had managed to win?

Obama's days of walking on water won't last indefinitely. His chroniclers will need a new story line. And sometime after Jan. 20, they will wade back into reality.

from the Weekly Standard, 2008-Nov-24, posted 2008-Nov-17, by Philip Terzian:

Slouching Toward Washington
The lurid foolishness of the Transition.

You may have noticed that some presidential Transitions are more equal than others.

Here is my theory: When a Democrat is succeeded by a Republican in the White House, it is seen as a civic regression, the triumph of dirty politics over clean statesmanship (see Willie Horton, the October Surprise, Lee Atwater, etc.). But when a Democrat replaces a Republican, it's a national rebirth, a celebration of renewal and the natural order of things.

An expatriate Briton, now deceased, liked to tell the story of dining one evening in early 1969, on the eve of Richard Nixon's first inaugural, at the Rive Gauche, a fashionable Georgetown restaurant favored by Jackie Kennedy and friends, long since gone. As their meal progressed, he and his companion observed that the place was swiftly filling up with people they didn't know, or even recognize, total strangers. And then it hit them: The Republicans had arrived!

Of course, this mixture of alarm and condescension--Tip O'Neill to Ronald Reagan: "You're in the big leagues now" (1981)--is very different from the tone currently surrounding Barack Obama, or the arrival of Bill Clinton--"Bill and Al's Excellent Adventure," the Washington Post (1992)--a decade-and-a-half ago. Certainly as far as the media are concerned, a Democrat-to-Republican Transition is an ominous thing, as the black clouds and killer insects descend on the nation's capital; a Republican-to-Democrat Transition, by contrast, is a tribute to life, an Ode to Joy on the Mighty Wurlitzer of political Washington.

Certainly the Obama Transition has made for painful reading in some quarters--the heroic imagery, the weepy essays, the learned predictions and confident visions, the bad music and fawning profiles--but it is not as though we haven't endured all this before. Remember "The Conversation," the lifelong bull session between and among Bill and Hillary Clinton and their far-flung, high-octane friends, all of whom were now hurtling toward the cabinet, or the Supreme Court or, at the very least, a Renaissance Weekend?

In fact, the origins of heroic Transition are earlier still. Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency was so catastrophic that, in retrospect, we tend to forget the circumstances under which he took office in 1976-77. After eight years of Republican rule, featuring the dead weight of the Vietnam war, the oil embargo, and the Watergate scandal, it was, so far as the press was concerned, as if a great menacing army had besieged the body politic since Nixon's election and been thrown back, at long last, into retreat, perhaps forever.

Yet Barack Obama is not the first presidential aspirant to have written a self-aggrandizing memoir (see Why Not the Best? by Jimmy Carter) and, as I write, I have before me my cherished edition of The Miracle of Jimmy Carter by Howard Norton and Bob Slosser ("Here is Jimmy Carter--man of faith and politics--as seen by two veteran newsmen").

Before the Gerald Ford/Jimmy Carter Transition, the ten-week interval between election and inauguration was a relatively casual affair, featuring farewell interviews for the outgoing team, extended postelection vacations for the winners, and a steady, reassuring drip-drip-drip of senior appointments.

Carter and his team institutionalized the process. Indeed, it was during this time that the term "transition" gained widespread currency, was frequently capitalized ("he's with Transition"), and occupied extensive office space in downtown Washington. Now it's an industry unto itself, with a federal budget, official czars (John Podesta for Obama), designated jobs ("she's in charge of Transition for HUD"), and even academic parasites, such as Professor Paul C. Light of New York University, whose specialty is Transition.

Like the current awakening, the Carter Transition had cultural, as well as political, significance. I possess a 1977 print, mounted and framed, by an artist named Don Northcutt, of Billy Carter's shabby gas station in Plains, Georgia. I retain it as a talisman of media coverage of incoming presidents. Before he was a hopeless alcoholic and public embarrassment, Billy Carter was seen in the press as a wise fool, the fun-loving flip side of his sober brother Jimmy, whose connection to the common people was celebrated (by CBS's Eric Sevareid, among others) by proximity to Billy and other rustic members of the Carter family.

This was, of course, before the age of the Internet and YouTube, but during the Transition, the world beat a figurative path to Carter's ranch house in Plains, the peanut-processing plant run by Billy, his motorcycling sister Gloria and faith-healing sister Ruth, and the front parlor of his wisecracking mother, Miss Lillian. You could read poetry in celebration of Carter's universality by James Dickey (Men are not where he is / Exactly now, but they are around him / around him like the strength / Of fields. The solar system floats on / Above him in town-moths) or accounts of his come-from-nowhere election (see How Jimmy Won by Kandy Stroud of Women's Wear Daily). Norman Mailer rediscovered the native strength of America in the soil of Plains, and the British journalist Henry Fairlie swooned when Carter casually mentioned Clarendon's History of the Rebellion in an interview.

Every Republican-to-Democrat Transition has its historic theme--for Clinton it was the apotheosis of the Baby Boom; for Obama, of course, it is race (Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: "[O]n Nov. 4, 2008 .  .  . the American Civil War ended")--and in Carter's case it was the symbolic re-admission of the South into the Union. Carter's religion, as well, was a recurrent theme. The president-elect was a Southern Baptist, and for many Americans, this was the first time they had heard of being "born again" or seen an evangelical. Whereas George W. Bush's evangelical Protestantism has been regarded as the creed of a zealot, pushing secular America toward theocracy, media coverage of Carter's "faith," by contrast, was politely curious.

Mississippi-born John Osborne of the New Republic, it is true, was briefly obsessed with finding out whether Carter's Baptist credentials involved a literal belief in heaven and hell, but when it was discovered that the Plains Baptist Church, whose most prominent parishioner was Jimmy Carter, was still strictly segregated (no blacks allowed), the reaction was muted--not exactly the response, say, George W. Bush would enjoy under similar circumstances.

How could it be otherwise? For not only was Carter, in Transition, embraced and surrounded by the aforementioned Mailer and Leonard Bernstein and Clay Felker and Susan Stamberg and Shirley MacLaine and Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd and Paul Simon and Walter Mondale, but the whole Republican-to-Democratic journey out of the wilderness was consecrated, at opportune moments, by the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr.--Daddy King, as Carter referred to him--who offered blessings on election night, throughout the Transition, and for the heartiest souls, at sunrise before the Lincoln Memorial on Inaugural Morning.

Of course, this is all amusingly quaint three decades later, and during the Carter Transition, nobody mentioned gas lines or Iran or inflation or national malaise or anticipated a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. During the Clinton/Bush Transition in 2000-01, the phrase "War on Terror" was nowhere heard, or even pronounced.

This may seem astonishing in retrospect, but reassuring as well. Especially now, in the middle of the Bush/Obama Transition, when the prose is particularly lurid, and America slouches toward another Bethlehem to be reborn.

Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

from the Weekly Standard, 2008-Nov-17, posted 2008-Nov-8, by John Podhoretz:

The One and Only
Barack Obama won't need special effects to walk on water.

George M. Cohan, the song-and-dance man, is invited to the Oval Office by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is an old man, and thrilled beyond words to discover his president is a fan. FDR asks Cohan to tell him the story of his life, and thus begins Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney's glorious 1942 musical.

The face of the actor who plays Roosevelt is obscured. We hear his voice, but he is photographed from the back, from the side, over his shoulder. The effect is to raise FDR's status to that of a divinity, the Hollywood equivalent of the Lord telling Moses: "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live .  .  . thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen."

I suspect the treatment of Barack Obama in Hollywood will follow along the lines of this model. Not only is Obama already a figure of worship, he easily fits an already established Hollywood model: the calm and benevolent black governmental authority figure. Over the past 20 years there has hardly been a courtroom scene in which an African American is not the wise presiding judge. Never have fictional presidents been given such glowing treatment as Morgan Freeman's in the asteroid movie Deep Impact and Dennis Haysbert's on the television series 24.

But Obama is real, not fictional, and any effort to mimic or mime him, or even to offer a fictionalized representation of him in the form of a black president comparable to him, might seem disrespectful to those in Hollywood who are ready to serve him, bathe him, and anoint him with oil. He is, after all, The One, as Oprah Winfrey, perhaps the most powerful person in show business, declared him.

Among presidents in the past century, only one other--John F. Kennedy--has received such unambiguously worshipful treatment from Hollywood--and that was only after he was dead. Bill Clinton might have gotten such treatment, but as his administration began in 1993, a delegation of Hollywood potentates visited James Carville in the White House to give him their advice and counsel on what their beloved new president must do.

Their high-handed and astoundingly naïve and foolish advice on health care so enraged Carville that he began to scream at them. Carville told Maureen Dowd that "they started telling me how many degrees they had. Somebody blurted out, 'I have a Ph.D. in communications from U.C.L.A.' Well, wowee-kazowee!" This led the writer-producer Gary David Goldberg to liken his populist interlocutor to "Anthony Perkins playing Fidel Castro on acid."

Clinton's relationship with Hollywood never quite recovered from that: The injured sense among the assembled that the new young president they so wanted to love would allow them to be abused by this .  .  . Louisianan .  .  . led directly to the ambiguous portrait of Clinton offered in the film The American President and the television show The West Wing.

In the former, Clinton is a popular chief executive who is afraid to do what is right (meaning what is left) until he falls in love with an environmentalist who sets him straight. And in The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin took the sloppy but politically prudent Clinton, put him in a washing machine, pulled him out, and ironed him flat into the flawless and always principled Jed Bartlet.

Even if Barack Obama proves to be a disappointment to Hollywood, it simply will not have the vocabulary to translate him into something more along the lines of what they would prefer, as they did with Clinton. Expressing dissatisfaction with a black leader? That would be a betrayal of hope, of change.

The election of Obama will have one other effect on Hollywood. Once again, as was true when Clinton came to office, the evil city of coal-hearted pols will be wondrously transmuted into a sunny place populated by young, dreamy idealists who only want to make the world a better place.

There will be television series and movies about group houses filled with anorexic models playing House, Senate, and White House staffers, falling in like and in love and in sorrow, all residing within the becalmed shadow of the White House's master, who will look upon them and make it known to them that he is well pleased.

But he will never be seen.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic.

from The Guardian of London, 2008-Nov-1, by Harold Evans:

Mad about The One
The US media have been captivated by Obama, at the expense of their curiosity and scepticism

It's fitting that the cynicism "vote early and vote often" is commonly attributed to Chicago's Democratic boss, mayor Richard Daley, who famously voted the graveyards in 1960 to help put John Kennedy in the White House. In this 2008 race, it's the American media that have voted very early and often. They long ago elected the star graduate of Chicago's Democratic machine, Barack Obama.

I am not talking of editorials in newspapers, though Obama has the preponderance of the endorsements over John McCain. Obama certainly deserves the credit for recruiting impressive advisers and running a more efficient campaign machine than any one in the US's political history.

What's troubling to anyone old-fashioned enough to care about standards in journalism is the news coverage in mainstream media. Forget the old notions of objectivity, fairness, thoroughness, and so on. The nastiest rumours on both sides haven't been published, but the coverage has been slavishly on the side of "the one".

It has not just been anti-Republican. It goes without saying that after eight years of George Bush's macho blunders, the disenchantment of even the conservative outlets was bound to show. Researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism report that in the six weeks since the Republican convention, McCain, once the darling of the media, got four times as many negative stories as positive ones. Meanwhile, Obama got twice as many positive stories as McCain. The website Politico has also acknowledged that it had loaded the dice against McCain: 100 stories were more favourable to Obama than McCain; 69 were the opposite.

But the press bias towards Obama doesn't represent a simple revulsion for the Republican party. It was on display in the Democratic primaries with the persecution of Hillary Clinton. Worst of all, in the primaries, the press let the Obama campaign get away with continuous insinuations below the radar that the Clintons were race-baiters. Instead of exposing that absurd defamation for what it was - a nasty smear - the media sedulously propagated it.

Clinton made the historically correct and uncontroversial remark that civil rights legislation came about from a fusion of the dreams of Dr Martin Luther King and the legislative follow-through by President Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times misrepresented that as a disparagement of King, twisting her remarks to imply that "a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change". This was one of a number of manipulations on race by the Obama campaign, amply documented by the leading Democratic historian, Princeton's Sean Wilentz. Clinton came close to tears in a coffee shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which many thought helped her to win an upset victory there. MSNBC television gave a platform to the Chicago congressmen, Jesse Jackson Jr, where he questioned her tears and claimed that she'd not shed any tears for the black victims of Katrina, and that she'd pay for that in the South Carolina primary, where 45% of the electorate would be African-Americans.

In fact, MSNBC ran a non-stop campaign for Obama propelled by the misogyny of its anchors, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and David Shuster. Chelsea Clinton joining Clinton's campaign prompted Shuster to report she was "pimping" for her mother.

Obamania has not been deflated one bit by the non-stop talkers on rightwing radio. They offer vituperation in place of enlightenment; paranoia in place of policies, and as such have little influence with the crucial independents.

On the web, the rightwing Drudge Report highlights anything that favours McCain, the Huffington Post does the same for Obama, and the more independent Slate has said only one of its staff intends to vote for McCain, the other 55 for Obama. Fox News has the vehement Sean Hannity paired with the mildly liberal Alan Colmes, not a fair match, but it has been more willing to investigate than CNN. In the Democratic primaries, there was a pattern on CNN where the short news videos of Clinton rarely let you hear what she was saying, but the short news videos of Obama let his words come through. I mentioned this to a CNN editor who said, "Oh, that's our young video editors, they just find Obama more exciting."

The young and affluent liberals have been captivated by Obama's charisma, the unstated notion that electing a black man will be absolution for the years of discrimination and prejudice, and the expectation that Obama's undoubted appeal to the outside world will repair America's image. All understandable, but these emotions have been allowed to swamp the commonplace imperatives of journalism: curiosity and scepticism.

All the mainstream national outlets were extraordinarily slow to check Obama's background. And until it became inescapable because of a video rant, they wouldn't investigate the Reverend Jeremiah Wright connection for fear of being accused of racism. They wouldn't explore Obama's dealing with the corrupt, now convicted, Chicago businessman Tony Rezko. They haven't investigated Obama's pledge to get rid of the secret ballot in trade union affairs. After years of inveighing against "money in politics", they've tolerated his breach of the pledge to restrict himself to public financing as McCain has done (to his cost). Now the LA Times refuses to release a possibly compromising video, which shows Obama praising Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi at a 2003 banquet, saying its promises to its source prevent it from doing so.

The British press is notorious for political distortions, which more or less balance out. But the American press likes to think of itself as more superior and detached than it actually is. In 2000, the mainstream media did a great deal to elect George Bush by portraying Al Gore as a boastful liar.

Let's hope the consequences of electing "the one" will be as wondrous as the press has led the voters to believe.

• Harold Evans is former editor of the Times and the Sunday Times, and author of The American Century

from ABC News, 2008-Oct-24, by Michael S. Malone:

Media's Presidential Bias and Decline
Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense ... indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story ... but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide -- especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes ... and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power ... only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country.

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.

from the Wall Street Journal's Political Diary, 2008-Oct-14, by John Fund:

Is the Media Biased Against Stories About Media Bias?

If a respected journalist says something controversial at a media conference filled with reporters and bloggers but no one reports it, what is one to make of that?

Mark Halperin, an editor at large for Time magazine and coauthor of the campaign field guide "The Way to Win," was one of several speakers at yesterday's conference on the 2008 election sponsored by Time and CNN in New York. During his panel discussion, Mr. Halperin was asked if the media had been too soft on Mr. Obama. To the surprise of the largely liberal audience, his answer was yes. He went on to say that through the subtle choice of which stories to cover and where to deploy investigative resources, the national media had handed Mr. Obama "hundreds of millions in free publicity." He attributed the positive coverage in part to the historic nature of Mr. Obama's candidacy. But he also noted that only a few hands had gone up in the crowded room when the audience had been asked how many had voted for George W. Bush.

He quickly tempered his remarks by noting that John McCain had similarly been the beneficiary of positive media coverage in his 2000 campaign. "It is interesting that the media's favorite candidates in both parties both won their party's nominations this year," he observed. He called on reporters to look at their 2008 coverage of candidates after the election, in hopes that in the future "they do a better job treating people equally."

Mr. Halperin's comments were pithy, well argued and controversial. Yet, almost 24 hours after they were made, it appears none of the bloggers and reporters present for the event have chosen to report on them -- perhaps providing validation for his core statement about how bias is reflected in the choice of which stories to report and which to ignore.

from Fox News, 2008-Oct-28:

LA Times Refuses to Release Tape of Obama Praising Controversial Activist
Video of farewell party for alleged PLO worker shows Obama toasting 'friend and dinner companion' with questionable past.

The Los Angeles Times is refusing to release a videotape that it says shows Barack Obama praising a Chicago professor who was an alleged mouthpiece for the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was a designated terrorist group in the 1970s and '80s.

According an LA Times article written by Peter Wallsten in April, Obama was a "friend and frequent dinner companion" of Rashid Khalidi, who from 1976 to1982 was reportedly a director of the official Palestinian press agency, WAFA, which was operating in exile from Beirut with the PLO.

Click here to read the original LA Times story: 'Palestinians See a Friend in Barack Obama.'

In the article -- based on the videotape obtained by the Times -- Wallsten said Obama addressed an audience during a 2003 farewell dinner for Khalidi, who was Obama's colleague at the University of Chicago, before his departure for Columbia University in New York. Obama said his many talks with Khalidi and his wife Mona stood as "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

Khalidi is currently the Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. A pro-Palestinian activist, he has been a fierce critic of American foreign policy and of Israel, which he has accused of establishing an "apartheid system" of government. The PLO advocate helped facilitate negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in the early '90s, but he has denied he was ever an employee of the group, contradicting accounts in the New York Times and Washington Times.

The LA Times told FOXNews.com that it won't reveal how it obtained the tape of Khalidi's farewell party, nor will the newspaper release it. Spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said the paper is not interested in revisiting the story. "As far as we're concerned, the story speaks for itself," she said.

In recent months Obama has distanced himself from the man the Times says he once called a friend. "He is not one of my advisers. He's not one of my foreign policy people," Obama said at a campaign event in May. "He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel's policy."

But on the tape, according to the Times, Obama said in his toast that he hoped his relationship with Khalidi would continue even after the professor left Chicago. "It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table ... [but around] this entire world."

A number of Web sites have accused the Times of purposely suppressing the tape of the event -- which former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn reportedly attended.

Sullivan said she would not give details of what else may be on the tape, adding that anyone interested in the video should read the newspaper's report, which was its final account.

"This is a story that we reported on six months ago, so any suggestion that we're suppressing the tape is absurd -- we're the ones that brought the existence of the tape to light," Sullivan said.

The Los Angeles Times endorsed Obama for president on October 19.

from the New York Post, 2008-Oct-22, by Kirsten Powers:

Biden's Bungles: A Blatant Bias

Barack Obama's choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden's propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to "gird your loins" because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden's statements.

There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden's remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts.

So what gives?

The stock answer is: "It's just Biden being Biden." We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it's not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.

Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States "drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon," nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn't take it as evidence that he's clueless.

And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting.

The outakes of his Sunday remarks don't begin to capture the magnitude of what he said. After warning the crowd that there would be some sort of international incident - Biden could think of four or five scenarios - he told the donors: "We're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

What does that mean? Obama's election would provoke an international incident because of his inexperience and even Obama's biggest supporters won't be reassured by his response?

Then there were Biden's predictions on the economy: "I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? . . . Why is this thing so tough? . . . I'm asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point, because you're going to have to reinforce us.

"There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision.' "

Biden is teling us that, at a time when Americans need to feel confidence in their government, they will be going "Oh my God." Not a great message.

Needless to say, if Sarah Palin said this about a McCain administration, the media world would be exploding.

Whether you believe Biden is exaggerating, as he is known to do, or is providing real insight, the double standard in the media does even more damage to their lagging brand.

Part of the problem is their "Obama love," but we're also seeing the media elite's belief - prejudice - that anyone with an R behind their name is dumb. So, if they say something dumb, they must be dumb. A Democrat, like Biden, can make wildly inaccurate or outrageous comments and they are ignored because the TV and press insiders feel they "know who he really is."

On the stump recently, Sen. Biden declared he had "three words" for what the nation needs: "J-O-B-S." [Actually, he said “[...] a three letter word, ’jobs‚, j-o-b-s” -AMPP Ed.]

Lucky for him, his name isn't Dan Quayle, or that would have followed him for the rest of his career.

from Powerline Blog, 2008-Oct-23, by Paul Mirengoff:

A strange new disrespect

It was entirely predictable (and we predicted) that the mainstream media and the liberal pundits associated with it would not only turn against John McCain once he became the Republican nominee, but also attempt to demonize him. The decent thing for those liberals who had praised McCain so much in the past would have been to maintain their respectful posture but express their preference for Obama based on policy grounds. But there was never any hope that the liberal pundit class would act decently. The past respect was founded largely on McCain's willingness to stick it to Republicans. Once McCain became the Republican standard bearer, it was inevitable that these liberals would withdraw that respect.

Hoping to cover up their raw partisanship, liberal MSMers attempt to show that McCain has changed fundamentally. Lacking anything terribly concrete on which to base this claim -- like, say, breaking a promise to fund his campaign through public financing -- liberal pundits have resorted to crass intellectual dishonesty.

The latest example comes (again predictably) from Joe Klein. He tries to show that McCain has changed by pointing to the Senator's views of two anti-Vietnam activists, Dave Ifshin and Williams Ayers. Ifshin (with whom I attended high school) protested the war by traveling to Hanoi and making anti-war tapes which were played to McCain while he was a prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton. Ifshin later felt great remorse over this conduct. When McCain came to Congress, Ifshin reached out to him and, thanks to McCain's graciousness, the two men were reconciled.

Klein contends that, by now criticizing Obama for his association with Bill Ayers, McCain has betrayed his ideal of ending the divisions associated with the Vietnam war. But Ifshin deeply regretted his conduct during that war and said so. As Jason Moaz reminds us, Ayers has insisted he has no regrets about his terrorist activities except that he did not "do more."

Is Joe Klein so blinded by partisanship and Obama worship that he can't grasp the distinction between the repentant Ifshin (who never engaged in terrorism) and an unrepentant terrorist? Or is he deliberately trying to sneak one past his readers? In the end, it more or less boils down to the same thing.

from Fox News, 2008-Oct-17:

Obama Pulling Away in Newspaper Endorsement Race

Barack Obama picks up the support of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, adding to his list of newspaper endorsements that's nearly three times as many as John McCain's.

Barack Obama has attracted the support of nearly three times as many newspapers as John McCain, according to a round-up from Editor and Publisher, as the endorsement season hits a frenzied pitch.

Obama picked up the backing of several major dailies on Friday, including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, which has never endorsed a Democratic nominee for president.

But in endorsing Obama, his home-town newspaper wrote that it has observed his political rise from the front lines and can vouch for his ability.

"We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president," the newspaper wrote. "We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready."

The Washington Post emphatically endorsed him Friday as "the right man for a perilous moment."

The Post described Obama as a candidate of "supple intelligence" and presidential temperament, while saying McCain's running mate choice of Sarah Palin helped clinch the paper's decision.

The Post called McCain's selection "irresponsible" and said Palin is "not ready to be president."

The Los Angeles Times said Obama "represents the nation as it is, and as it aspires to be."

The San Francisco Chronicle also endorsed Obama in its Friday edition, describing him as a "portrait of calmness and deliberation" throughout the financial crisis.

Not counting the Chicago Tribune, Editor and Publisher has tallied Obama's endorsement haul at 50 and McCain's at 16. The newspapers reach a circulation of 5.8 million for Obama and 1.5 million for McCain.

The Republican nominee has racked up some prominent endorsements over the past several weeks.

The New York Post in September endorsed McCain, saying "McCain's lifelong record of service to America, his battle-tested courage, unshakeable devotion to principle and clear grasp of the dangers and opportunities now facing the nation stand in dramatic contrast to the tissue-paper-thin resume of his Democratic opponent, freshman Sen. Barack Obama."

McCain was also endorsed by the Union Leader in New Hampshire, the Boston Herald and the Examiner newspapers in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

Obama has picked up the most endorsements in California, including those of the Sacramento and Fresno Bee newspapers, the San Jose Mercury News and the Oakland Tribune.

Other major endorsements for Obama include those of The Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Toledo Blade, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Nashville Tennessean.

from the Wall Street Journal, excerpted from Best of the Web, 2008-Oct-7, by James Taranto:

The 'Fact Checking' Fad
It's opinion journalism thinly disguised as straight reporting.

In a September 1984 campaign speech, Walter Mondale, the Democratic presidential nominee and former vice president, asked, "Do you really want Jerry Falwell to pick the next two judges to the Supreme Court?" What reminded us of this was a story from yesterday's New York Times, written by Patrick Healy, which begins as follows:

There is no way, of course, that Senator Barack Obama would ever nominate three controversial figures from his past to serve on the United States Supreme Court: the convicted felon Antoin Rezko; the former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers; or Mr. Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Yet the names and faces of the three men appear in a new television advertisement--running in Michigan and Ohio this week and nationally on Fox News on Monday, at a total cost of $500,000--arguing that Mr. Obama's judgment about his associates shows that he cannot be trusted to pick justices for the Supreme Court.

We wondered if the Times had thought it necessary back in '84 to point out that only the president has the power to make nominations to the federal bench, that Falwell was not running for president, that there was no way he would end up holding any office that would put him in the line of presidential succession, and, therefore, that the premise of Mondale's question was false.

Nope. Times reporter Fay Joyce merely quoted Mondale, apparently confident that her readers would be smart enough to distinguish political hyperbole from fact.

So why, a generation later, does the Times begin an article by rebutting an assertion that the ad in question (watch it here) does not even make? Because 2008 is the year in which "fact checking" of political ads and statements became a full-blown journalistic fad. May it soon go the way of streaking and Mexican jumping beans.

The "fact check" is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment. The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog ends each assessment with between one and four "Pinocchios," just like movie reviewers giving out stars.

Like movie reviewing, the "fact check" is a highly subjective process. If a politician makes a statement that is flatly false, it does not need to be "fact checked." The facts themselves are sufficient. "Fact checks" end up dealing in murkier areas of context and emphasis, making it very easy for the journalist to make up standards as he goes along, applying them more rigorously to the candidate he disfavors (which usually means the Republican).

Example: USA Today has a "reality check" of a McCain ad whose script runs as follows:

Narrator: "Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are . . .

Obama: ". . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians."

Narrator: "How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals: too risky for America."

The USA Today headline reads "Quote From Obama Taken Out of Context." In a way this is a tautology, since a quotation by definition is taken out of its original context (and placed in a new one). But of course the phrase out of context usually connotes "used in a misleading way." Is that the case here? Here is a longer version of the Obama quote, per USA Today:

"We've got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there."

One the one hand, Obama was making a broader argument, which the McCain ad ignores: that America should send more troops to Afghanistan. On the other hand, Obama clearly did assert that America is "air-raiding villages and killing civilians" (the subsequent clause makes that undeniable), though one could argue about whether he was asserting or merely worrying that we are "just" doing so.

USA Today's "reality check" quotes another news organization's "fact check":

After Obama made that statement, the Associated Press produced a "fact check." It concluded that "Western forces (in Afghanistan) have been killing civilians at a faster rate than the insurgents have been killing civilians."

This certainly raises more questions than it answers. Given that the enemy in Afghanistan does not distinguish itself from the civilian population, how many of the putative civilians who have died in attacks by the West were actually enemy combatants? And on what basis does one assign blame for civilian casualties when the West attacks terrorists who are hiding among civilians?

A look at the original AP "fact check" shows that it is based on numbers from . . . the Associated Press! The AP admits that "tracking civilian deaths is a difficult task," but it takes its own numbers as definitive, although it apparently makes no effort to deal with the questions we raised in the preceding paragraph.

In any case, the AP's dubious numbers are hardly relevant to the truth of the McCain ad's assertion about what Obama said. And why is it necessary for USA Today to have an opinion on the latter point anyway? Why not just report what the McCain ad said, report what Obama said, and let the reader make up his own mind?

Somehow these reportorial "checks" almost always seem to come out in Obama's favor. Is that because he is the more honest candidate, or because he is the candidate reporters find more attractive? Here's an example that strongly suggests the latter, again from the Associated Press:

Corsi's book claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president and includes innuendoes and false rumors--that he was raised a Muslim and attended a radical black church.

Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his campaign picks apart the book's claims on the Web site FightTheSmears.com.

It is a "false rumor" that Trinity United is a "radical black church"? It's hard to see how anyone could believe this even as a matter of opinion, but for the AP to present it as fact makes a mockery of journalism.

from National Review Online, 2008-Oct-4, by Stanley Kurtz:

NYT's Ayers-Obama Whitewash

As others have noted, today’s New York Times carries a story on the relationship between Barack Obama and unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers. The piece serves as a platform for the Obama campaign and Obama’s friends and allies. Obama’s spokesman and supporters’ names are named and their versions of events are presented in detail, with quotes. Yet the article makes no serious attempt to present the views of Obama critics who have worked to uncover the true nature of the relationship. That makes this piece irresponsible journalism, and an obvious effort by the former paper of record to protect Obama from the coming McCain onslaught.

The title of the article when it first appeared on the web last night was, "Obama Had Met Ayers, but the Two Are Not Close." That was quickly changed to, "Obama and the ‘60's Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths." Perhaps the first headline made the paper’s agenda a bit too obvious. Even so, the new title simply parrots the line of Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt that the two first met through an early "education project" and since have simply "encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood." Or, as New York Times reporter Scott Shane puts it at the head of his article, since an initial lunchtime meeting in 1995, "their paths have crossed sporadically...at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project (i.e. the Chicago Annenberg Challenge) and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors."

There is nothing "sporadic" about Barack Obama delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of many years to fund Bill Ayers’ radical education projects, not to mention many millions more to benefit Ayers’ radical education allies. We are talking about a substantial and lengthy working relationship here, one that does not depend on the quality of personal friendship or number of hours spent in the same room together (although the article greatly underestimates that as well).

Shane’s article buys the spin on Ayers’ supposed rehabilitation offered by the Obama campaign and Ayers’ supporters in Chicago. In this view, whatever Ayers did in the 1960's has somehow been redeemed by Ayers’ later turn to education work. As the Times quotes Mayor Daley saying, "People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life." The trouble with this is that Ayers doesn’t view his terrorism as a mistake. How can he be forgiven when he’s not repentant? Nor does Ayers see his education work as a repudiation of his early radicalism. On the contrary, Ayers sees his education work as carrying on his radicalism in a new guise. The point of Ayers’ education theory is that the United States is a fundamentally racist and oppressive nation. Students, Ayers believes, ought to be encouraged to resist this oppression. Obama was funding Ayers’ "small schools" project, built around this philosophy. Ayers’ radicalism isn’t something in the past. It’s something to which Obama gave moral and financial support as an adult. So when Shane says that Obama has never expressed sympathy for Ayers’ radicalism, he’s flat wrong. Obama’s funded it.

Obama was perfectly aware of Ayers’ radical views, since he read and publically endorsed, without qualification, Ayers’ book on juvenile crime. That book is quite radical, expressing doubts about whether we ought to have a prison system at all, comparing America to South Africa’s apartheid system, and contemptuously dismissing the idea of the United States as a kind or just country. Shane mentions the book endorsement, yet says nothing about the book’s actual content. Nor does Shane mention the panel about Ayers’ book, on which Obama spoke as part of a joint Ayers-Obama effort to sink the 1998 Illinois juvenile crime bill. Again, we have unmistakable evidence of a substantial political working relationship. (I’ve described it in detail here in "Barack Obama’s Lost Years."

The Times article purports to resolve the matter of Ayers’ possible involvement in Obama’s choice to head the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, yet in no way does so. Clearly, the article sides with those who claim that Ayers was not involved. Yet the piece has no credibility because it simply refuses to present the arguments of those who say that Ayers almost surely had a significant role in Obama’s final choice.

Steve Diamond has made a powerful case that, whoever first suggested Obama’s name, Ayers must surely have had a major role in his final selection. Diamond has now revealed that the Times consulted him extensively for this article and has seen his important documentary evidence. Yet we get no inkling in the piece of Diamond’s key points, or the documents that back it up. (I’ve made a similar argument myself, based largely on my viewing of many of the same documents presented by Diamond.) How can an article that gives only one side of the story be fair? Instead of offering both sides of the argument and letting readers decide, the Times simply spoon-feeds its readers the Obama camp line.

The Times also ignores the fact that I’ve published a detailed statement from the Obama camp on the relationship between Ayers and Obama at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. (See "Obama’s Challenge.") Maybe that’s because attention to that statement would force them to acknowledge and report on my detailed reply.

Shane’s story also omits any mention of the fact that access to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge records was blocked. What’s more, thanks to a University of Chicago law student’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, we now know that access to the documents was blocked by an old Obama associate, Ken Rolling, on the day I first tried to see them. And as a result of my own FOIA, we also have evidence that Rolling may have been less than fully forthcoming on the question of Ayers’ possible role in elevating Obama to board chair at Anneberg. In fact, Rolling seems to have been withholding information from a New York Times reporter. I’ve made this material public in a piece called, "Founding Brothers." How could a responsible article on the topic of Obama, Ayers, and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge ignore the story of the blocked library access and the results of the two FOIA requests? How could a responsible paper fail to aggressively follow up on the questions raised by those requests, and by the documents and analysis presented by Steve Diamond?

Most remarkably of all, Shane seems to paper over the results of his own questioning. On the one hand, toward the end of the piece we read: "Since 2002, there is little public evidence of their relationship." And it’s no wonder, says Shane, since Ayers was caught expressing no regret for his own past terrorism in an article published on September 11, 2001. Yet earlier in Shane’s article we learn that, according to Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt, Obama and Ayers "have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005." Very interesting. Obama’s own spokesman has just left open the possibility that there has indeed been phone and e-mail contact between the two men between 2002 and 2004, well after Ayers’ infamous conduct on 9/11. Yet instead of pursuing this opening, Shane ignores the findings of his own investigation and covers for Obama.

The New York Times in the tank for Obama? You bet. And sinking deeper every day.

from the Washington Post, 2008-Oct-17, p.A25, by Charles Krauthammer:

Who's Playing the Race Card?

Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association -- with total strangers, mind you -- but worse: guilty according to the New York Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

But should you bring up Barack Obama's real associations -- 20 years with Jeremiah Wright, working on two foundations and distributing money with William Ayers, citing the raving Michael Pfleger as one who helps him keep his moral compass (Chicago Sun-Times, April 2004) and the long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud specialist ACORN -- you have crossed the line into illegitimate guilt by association. Moreover, it is tinged with racism.

The fact that, when John McCain actually heard one of those nasty things said about Obama, he incurred the boos of his own crowd by insisting that Obama is "a decent person . . . that you do not have to be scared [of] as president" makes no difference. It surely did not stop John Lewis from comparing McCain to George Wallace.

The search for McCain's racial offenses is untiring and often unhinged. Remember McCain's Berlin/celebrity ad that showed a shot of Paris Hilton? An appalling attempt to exploit white hostility at the idea of black men "becoming sexually involved with white women," fulminated New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. He took to TV to denounce McCain's exhumation of that most vile prejudice, pointing out McCain's gratuitous insertion in the ad of "two phallic symbols," the Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Except that Herbert was entirely delusional. There was no Washington Monument. There was no Leaning Tower. Just photographs seen in every newspaper in the world of Barack Obama's Berlin rally in the setting he himself had chosen, Berlin's Victory Column.

Herbert is not the only fevered one. On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek fell over themselves agreeing that the "political salience" of the Republican attack on ACORN is, yes, its unstated appeal to racial prejudice.

This about an organization that is being accused of voter registration fraud in about a dozen states. In Nevada, the investigating secretary of state is a Democrat. Is he playing the race card, too?

What makes the charges against McCain especially revolting is that he has been scrupulous in eschewing the race card. He has gone far beyond what is right and necessary, refusing even to make an issue of Obama's deep, self-declared connection with the race-baiting Rev. Wright.

In the name of racial rectitude, McCain has denied himself the use of that perfectly legitimate issue. It is simply Orwellian for him to be now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism. What makes it doubly Orwellian is that these charges are being made on behalf of the one presidential candidate who has repeatedly, and indeed quite brilliantly, deployed the race card.

How brilliantly? The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a racist. Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause of African Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can.

And Obama has shown no hesitation in doing so to McCain. Weeks ago, in Springfield, Mo., and elsewhere, he warned darkly that George Bush and John McCain were going to try to frighten you by saying that, among other scary things, Obama has "a funny name" and "doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills."

McCain has never said that, nor anything like that. When asked at the time to produce one instance of McCain deploying race, the Obama campaign could not. Yet here was Obama firing a preemptive charge of racism against a man who had not indulged in it. An extraordinary rhetorical feat, and a dishonorable one.

What makes this all the more dismaying is that it comes from Barack Obama, who has consistently presented himself as a healer, a man of a new generation above and beyond race, the man who would turn the page on the guilt-tripping grievance politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

I once believed him.

from the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania, 2008-Oct-15, by Andrew M. Seder:

Secret Service says "Kill him" allegation unfounded

SCRANTON – The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled “kill him” when presidential hopeful Barack Obama's name was mentioned during Tuesday's Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.

The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Obama's name a man in the audience shouted “kill him."

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.

“I was baffled,” he said after reading the report in Wednesday's Times-Tribune.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.

Slavoski said more than 20 non-security agents were interviewed Wednesday, from news media to ordinary citizens in attendance at the rally for the Republican vice presidential candidate held at the Riverfront Sports Complex. He said Singleton was the only one to say he heard someone yell “kill him.”

“We have yet to find someone to back up the story,” Slavoski said. “We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.”

Hackett said he did not hear the remark.

Slavoski said Singleton was interviewed Wednesday and stood by his story but couldn't give a description of the man because he didn't see him he only heard him.

When contacted Wednesday afternoon, Singleton referred questions to Times-Tribune Metro Editor Jeff Sonderman. Sonderman said, “We stand by the story. The facts reported are true and that's really all there is.”

Slavoski said the agents take such threats or comments seriously and immediately opened an investigation but after due diligence “as far as we're concerned it's closed unless someone comes forward.” He urged anyone with knowledge of the alleged incident to call him at 346-5781. “We'll run at all leads,” he said.

from the Associated Press, 2008-Oct-15, by Eileen Sullivan:

Secret Service looking into Obama threat at rally

WASHINGTON — The Secret Service is looking into a second allegation that a participant at a Republican political rally shouted "kill him," referring to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

The Scranton Times-Tribune reported that someone in the crowd shouted "kill him" after the mention of Obama's name during a rally Tuesday for GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin in Scranton, Pa.

Last week, The Washington Post reported a similar incident during a Palin rally in Clearwater, Fla. The Secret Service investigated that allegation and found no indication that "kill him" was ever said, or if it was said, that the remark was directed at Obama.

Listening to tapes of that rally, the Secret Service heard "tell him" or "tell them," but agents never heard "kill him," Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

In both the Clearwater and the Scranton instances, the Service only learned of the alleged threats through media reports.

"We would ask that anyone overhearing threatening language bring it to the attention of the Secret Service or other law enforcement at the event immediately," Zahren said.

The Secret Service cannot prevent or police poor behavior at public events, Zahren said, but the agency draws the line at threatening language.

"We do not have the luxury of discounting such language as simply bad taste or bad behavior without further investigation," he said.

So far, the Secret Service has not found anyone else who heard "kill him" Tuesday except for the Times-Tribune reporter.

Shouts of "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar," and even "off with his head" have rung from the crowd at Republican rallies.

The anti-Obama taunts and jeers are noticeably louder when McCain appears with Palin, a big draw for GOP conservatives. She accused Obama last week of "palling around with terrorists" because of his past, loose association with a 1960s radical. [This editorial mischaracterization in a news story! Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn were both terrorists and Obama was substantively involved with both of them. -AMPP Ed.]

from Fox News, 2008-Oct-16, by Jennifer Lawinski, with the Associated Press contributing:

Late-Night Comics Skewer Republicans 7-to-1, Study Finds

If you're a fan of Jay Leno or David Letterman, you may already know this: You have to listen to seven Republican jokes for every one the late-night comedians tell about Democrats.

John McCain returned to "Late Show With David Letterman" Thursday night, apologizing for canceling an appearance three weeks ago, but should the onetime media favorite have been preparing for an ambush?

A study shows the Kings of Late Night are not equal-opportunity destroyers this year when it comes to telling jokes about the candidates for president and vice president -- they're hammering Republicans a stunning seven times more often than they skewer Democrats.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs, a media analysis group, kept a tally of jokes told about the presidential contenders on the "Late Show" and "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" in the five weeks after McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate and vaulted the little-known Alaska governor into the national spotlight.

The total: Republicans, 286. Democrats, 42.

"Generally the Republicans get targeted much more often than Democrats, but this election is driving it off the charts," said CMPA Executive Director Donald Rieck.

Letterman and Leno told 106 jokes about McCain and 180 about Palin in the 25 shows that aired between Aug. 29, when McCain chose her, and Oct. 2, the date of the vice presidential debate.

Barack Obama, who may be Leno's guest next week, was targeted only 26 times -- barely once a night. His gaffe-prone running mate, Joe Biden, who is scheduled to appear on Leno Thursday night, was hit only 16 times, not even one-tenth the number of jokes told about Palin over the five-week period.

McCain's date with Letterman Thursday came after he canceled a scheduled appearance in September, leaving the late-night comedian hopping mad.

"I screwed up," McCain told Letterman on the set when asked about the cancellation. He jokingly said he asked his son in the Marine Corps to FedEx his flak jacket in preparation for the visit Thursday.

Although Letterman said he was "willing to put this behind us," he came after McCain hard with questions. He asked whether Sarah Palin was his first choice as vice president.

"Absolutely," McCain answered.

Letterman repeatedly pressed McCain on her qualifications, asking if he was confident she could lead the country in a time of crisis.

"In all due respect, one of the people I admired most was an obscure governor of a southern state called Arkansas and he turned out to be a fairly successful president," McCain said, complimenting Bill Clinton. "Ronald Reagan was a cowboy, no experience in international affairs. I think she has shown leadership."

The Republican candidate canceled his previous appearance so he could go to Washington to deal with the economic crisis. While recording his show, Letterman learned that McCain was still in New York, doing an interview on the CBS Evening News, and he spent much of his show skewering the Republican who stood him up.

Palin also has taken a big hit from the late-night comedians -- and from Saturday Night Live, where Tina Fey's parody of the vice presidential candidate has skyrocketed the show's ratings. It is rumored that Palin will make an appearance on SNL on Oct. 25.

"Palin's just a bonanza for these guys," said Rieck. "You have a woman who shoots wolves from a helicopter; whether she's a Democrat or Republican, that's just a bonanza. Biden's kind of boring compared to that, isn't he?"

Obama is almost as boring to comedians as Biden, said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

"He is kind of a comedian's worst nightmare," Thompson said. "He doesn't do anything. He doesn't fall down like Gerald Ford did. He's not filled with scandal and isn't a sexual player like Clinton was. He doesn't misspell words like Dan Quayle did.

"The size of his ears is about all they have to work with."

Tim Graham, director of media analysis for Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, said the comedians' tendency to avoid mocking Obama comes from a fear of being called racist.

"There is a racial minefield that they're trying to avoid," Graham said. "I think they see Obama as a historic figure, and because he's a historic figure it's like making jokes about Martin Luther King."

Palin, like President Bush, has been pegged as dumb by the comedians, Graham said.

"All of the prejudices that the liberal media elite have towards the hockey mom from Alaska are clearly coming through with these New York-based and LA-based comedians, probably as strong as or more strongly than they're coming across in the news media," he said.

Should Obama win the presidency, his get-out-of-jokes-free card from the late-night comedians will expire, said Thompson, leaving him just as vulnerable as McCain and Palin have been during the election.

"He is by no means a comedian's dream-come-true the way Bill Clinton was," he said. "But you can't be in that office without delivering material people can work with.

"I am convinced that when comedians die and go to heaven, Bill Clinton is still president. When Monica Lewinsky came along, the jokes wrote themselves."

from Fox News, 2008-Oct-17:

McCain, Biden Earn Different Treatment in Late Night Appearances

John McCain showed up for "The Late Show" and Joe Biden showed up for "The Tonight Show" Thursday night -- but the tone of questions from hosts David Letterman and Jay Leno was just a skosh different.

The tone of the questions from the kings of late night was just a tad different Thursday night when Joe Biden and John McCain made their respective appearances with Jay Leno and David Letterman.

It turns out the hosts of the "Late Show" and "The Tonight Show" have not been entirely balanced in the way they dole out their political put-downs and wisecracks. A tally kept by the Center for Media and Public Affairs showed they've skewered Republicans over Democrats by a margin of seven-to-one in recent weeks.

Thursday night's must-see late night was no outlier.

See if you notice any familiar threads in the hosts' questions:

Letterman to McCain:

"And for your part, when they go down the list, when they chronicle some of these things that are being hollered out from the crowd, regarding Barack Obama -- 'traitor, treason, terrorist' -- and so on and so forth -- and worse, as a matter of fact ... But, Senator, you yourself in previous campaigns have been the victim of some pretty nasty campaign abuse. So do you feel because of that or just because of your humanity you have a responsibility to lift your purpose here?"

"Now, I didn't know that Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska. I never heard of her. I mean, I knew Alaska was a state, and I knew they must have a governor. But I'd never heard of her ... And the question is, if she had been a man, would you also have selected him as a man?"

"And what is the process when it comes time to pick that position. How do you do that? Is it you and a committee? Is it just you going through your phonebook? I mean, honestly, I don't ... how do you select a vice president? You knew about her. But the rest of America, sadly, didn't really know about her."

"Here's my point of view on this. And again, I really don't know anything. ... When this happened, I thought to myself, wow ... you try to take the best care of your children that you can for their future. Present and future. And I kind of felt like that's the responsibility to a huge extent of our administration. So the person, man or woman, who is in charge of that, has got to do the same. And I was just wondering if the thoughtfulness of that process included your selection of vice president."

"If I were to run upstairs, wake you up in the middle of the night and say, "John, is Sarah Palin really the woman to lead us through the next four, eight years? Through the next 9/11 attack?"

"She's the one, I think who says that Barack Obama pals around with terrorists. Has she in fact said that at rallies? ... But did you not have a relationship with Gordon Liddy?"

"Have people talked to you about taking (Palin) off the ticket? Did that ever happen? ... Did people in the party ever mention that? Did you ever hear any discussion?"

Leno to Biden:

"Can I call you Joe? Is that okay?"

"Let me ask you, McCain has been here many times over the last 10 or 15 years, and you know him very well. I saw, last night, odd facial expressions I have never seen before. I'm not being a wise guy. I mean, it seemed different. Did he seem different to you? You've known him a long time."

"This Joe the plumber guy, I don't know ... I think more people are afraid of plumbers than terrorists, actually. ... But it seems awful convenient and all -- I'm a little suspicious, but that's me, you know, worried about taxes. Does it seem real?"

"Well, it must be more difficult -- when you started back in the '70s, they didn't cover it like they do. It's, like, every ... It's 24 hours a day. It's every second. Every word you utter is on -- how do you?"

"Well, you were also the star of the highest-rated TV show of the year, with you and your costar, Sarah Palin. Any more specials planned?"

"Did she wink at you?"

"So what's your opinion of Sarah Palin? ... Go ahead. Qualified?"

"Let me ask you -- this is kind of a serious question. You've been in the Senate for 35 years. You're a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Is vice president a step down power-wise?"

"So where do you get the call? Is it like that prize-winning thing where the van pulls up with the big check?"

from Fox News, 2008-Oct-17:

Feeling Plumber Fatigue, Media Turn on 'Joe'

Like Sarah Palin, it didn't take long for "Joe the Plumber" to go from political sensation to political target.

Two nights ago, "Joe the Plumber" was a symbol of the American dream. By Friday morning, you would have thought he was convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Did you know he owes back taxes? Or that he's not actually a licensed plumber? And his first name's not even really Joe, but Samuel?

The "shocking" revelations spurred a litany of plumber putdowns in newspapers and liberal blogs across the country.

"Looks like there's a crack in Joe the Plumber's story," Democratic activist Bob Mulholland told the San Francisco Chronicle in a story that topped their Web site Friday morning.

"Joe the Plumber's story sprang a few leaks," The Associated Press reported.

But does it really matter?

No, Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher doesn't have a plumbing license, but his employer does. His back taxes total less than $1,200. Not exactly Wesley Snipes.

John McCain's campaign argues that Joe the Plumber is still as relevant today as he ever was (meaning, two days ago), and wishes the media would stop hating on him.

"The same thing happened with Governor Palin," McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds told FOX News. "She was a threat to Barack Obama, and Barack Obama's campaign and his allies in the media attacked her background, attacked her standing -- just like they're doing with an everyday average voter that asked Barack Obama a question."

Wurzelbacher was catapulted into the most instant and unexpected kind of stardom after he asked Obama some critical questions about his tax policy in Ohio over the weekend. The video, which included Obama's response -- and now a Republican rallying cry -- that he wants to "spread the wealth around," went viral. McCain took up the cause of Joe at the final presidential debate.

The two candidates invoked his name more than two-dozen times, while Joe himself watched in shock.

"We've really gotta hand it to Joe," Sarah Palin said at a rally in Ohio Friday. "Somehow he got Barack Obama to finally state his intentions in plain language."

But as is the case with many celebrities -- and Wurzelbacher cheekily said he feared becoming another Britney Spears -- his story and relevance was at first heralded, then scrutinized, then neutralized, only on a remarkably accelerated timeline.

The opposition research to Joe (it's uncertain when being a voter turned one into the opposition) seemed to begin instantly. Allegations on the Internet range from claims that he is not a registered voter to suspicions that he was a Republican plant to rumors that he's related to notorious banker Charles Keating, namesake of the Keating Five scandal that embroiled McCain in the 1980s.

And hats off to the Toledo Blade for digging up his divorce records to find he made $40,000 in 2006, nothing near the $250,000 he hoped to make by one day buying his boss' company and possibly becoming susceptible to Obama's proposed tax increases.

Daily Kos called him a "right wing loon." A blog on The Huffington Post pondered him carrying the mantle of the "Angry White Man." At least one Web site used the term "Plumbergate."

FOX News contributor Howard Wolfson, former Hillary Clinton spokesman, had at it when Joe the Plumber was broached as a topic on air Friday morning.

"He's not a plumber, his name's not Joe and he would actually get a tax cut under Barack Obama," he said. "What it says is that John McCain's campaign didn't vet Joe the Plumber."

The Ohio press later reported that Wurzelbacher does appear to be registered to vote -- as a Republican. And the Daily Kos even corrected The Huffington Post's claim that he was related to Charles Keating.

The jury's still out on whether he's a GOP spy.

Granted, Joe the Plumber didn't do himself any favors when he told CBS News' Katie Couric that Obama gave a "tap dance ... almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr."

Former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who plans to interview Wurzelbacher on his FOX News show Saturday night, tried to put the plumber phenomenon in perspective.

"What he represents is not so much plumbing," Huckabee said. "What he represents is a guy who really just wants the government to leave him alone."

If the media are any example, good luck with that, Joe.

from the Wall Street Journal's Political Diary, 2008-Oct-7, by John Fund:

Must-Not See TV
Too Much Truth for the Web

One of the funniest and most politically searing comedy sketches in years has vanished from the Web site of NBC's Saturday Night Live. Visitor comments asking about its disappearance are also being scrubbed from the Web site. The sketch -- a harsh indictment of the housing meltdown that led to last week's bailout bill -- was clearly too much truth for someone to handle.

The seven-minute sketch featured a mock news conference of Democratic Congressional leaders on the bailout bill, during which Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank inadvertently acknowledge that it was Congress that blocked reform and effective oversight of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Then SNL comic Kristen Wiig, playing Speaker Pelosi, introduces a parade of "victims" of the housing crisis. These "real Americans" include two jobless deadbeats who bought houses with no down-payment and a preppy couple who can't flip the dozen time-share condos they bought as a speculative investment.

They were followed by actors portraying the real-life couple of Herbert and Marion Sandler. They explained how they built a mortgage company that specialized in subprime mortgages, which they sold to Wachovia Bank for $24.2 billion in 2006 -- one of the worst acquisitions by any company ever. It helped precipitate the collapse of Wachovia last week.

The Sandlers were hustled off the stage by "Speaker Pelosi" after they said they couldn't understand why they were invited to a news conference of "victims" since they had done so well out of the housing crisis.

They were followed by financier George Soros, identified as "Owner, Democratic Party." The actor portraying Mr. Soros informs the group that the $700 billion bailout package "basically belongs to me" and that he has decided to short the U.S. dollar. That will trigger a devaluation "either Tuesday or Wednesday. I haven't decided which yet. It will depend on how I feel."

The brutally wicked sketch must have caused tremors in left-wing circles. The Sandlers and Mr. Soros have all been prime financial backers of independent political groups that have secured huge influence in the Democratic Party and helped fuel the rise of Barack Obama.

The Sandlers, for example, were major donors to the left-wing radio network Air America as well as the liberal housing lobby ACORN, a major player in pressuring banks into making more subprime mortgages. They also donated $2.5 million to MoveOn.org, the liberal group that insulted General David Petraeus as "General Betray Us" last year. Mr. Soros contributed a like amount. In turn, Eli Pariser, the head of MoveOn.org, was quite candid after the 2004 election about the influence this left-wing cabal hoped to exercise: "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we are going to take it back."

No doubt the Sandlers and Mr. Soros were displeased with the Saturday Night Live sketch. Herbert Sandler told the Associated Press that its portrayal of him as a predatory lender was "crap." "We are being unfairly tarred. People have been telling us to speak out for some time, but we didn't think it was appropriate. That was clearly a mistake."

I suspect that some of the people the Sandlers have spoken to -- or complained to -- are the corporate overseers of NBC. That may explain why the bailout sketch has been airbrushed from the network's Web site and will likely never be shown again.

That's a shame, because rarely has political satire been more timely, pointed and, in many respects, so truthful.

from the Washington Post, 2008-Sep-14, p.B1, by Donald Luskin:

Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line

"It was the worst of times, and it was the worst of times."

I imagine that's what Charles Dickens would conclude about the current condition of the U.S. economy, based on the relentless drumbeat of pessimism in the media and on the campaign trail. In the past two months, this newspaper alone has written no fewer than nine times, in news stories, columns and op-eds, that key elements of the economy are the worst they've been "since the Great Depression." That diagnosis has been applied twice to the housing "slump" and once to the housing "crisis," to the "severe" decline in home prices, to the "spike" in mortgage foreclosures, to the "change" in the mortgage market and the "turmoil" in debt markets, and to the "crisis" or "meltdown" in financial markets.

It's a virus -- and it's spreading. Do a Google News search for "since the Great Depression," and you come up with more than 4,500 examples of the phrase's use in just the past month.

But that doesn't make any of it true. Things today just aren't that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression -- or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

Overall, the pessimists are up against an insurmountable reality: In the last reported quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation. That's virtually the same as the 3.4 percent average growth rate since -- yes -- the Great Depression.

Why, then, does the public appear to agree with the media? A recent Zogby poll shows that 66 percent of likely voters believe that "the entire world is either now locked in a global economic recession or soon will be." Actually, that's a major clue to what started this thought-contagion about everything being the worst it has been "since the Great Depression": Politics.

Patient zero in this epidemic is the Democratic candidate for president. As it would be for any challenger, it's in his interest to portray the incumbent party's economic performance in the grimmest possible terms. Barack Obama has frequently used the Depression exaggeration, including during a campaign speech in June, when he said that the "percentage of homes in foreclosure and late mortgage payments is the highest since the Great Depression." At best, this statement is a good guess. To be really true, it would have to be heavily qualified with words such as "maybe" or "probably." According to economist David C. Wheelock of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, who has studied the history of mortgage markets for the Fed, "there are no consistent data on foreclosure or delinquency going all the way back to the Depression."

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) database, which allows rigorous apples-to-apples comparisons, only goes back to 1979. It shows that today's delinquency rate is only a little higher than the level seen in 1985. As to the foreclosure rate, it was setting records for the day -- the highest since the Great Depression, one supposes -- in 1999, at the peak of the Clinton-era prosperity that Obama celebrated in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention late last month. I don't recall hearing any Democratic politicians complaining back then.

Even if Obama is right that the foreclosure rate is the worst since the Great Depression, it's spurious to evoke memories of that great national calamity when talking about today -- it's akin to equating a sore throat with stomach cancer. According to the MBA, 6.4 percent of mortgages are delinquent to some extent, and 2.75 percent are in foreclosure. During the Great Depression, according to Wheelock's research, more than 50 percent of home loans were in default.

Moreover, MBA data show that today's foreclosures are concentrated in that small fraction of U.S. homes financed by subprime mortgages. Such homes make up only 12 percent of all mortgages, yet account for 52 percent of foreclosures. This suggests that today's mortgage difficulties are probably a side effect of the otherwise happy fact that, over the past several years, millions of Americans of modest means have come to own their own homes for the first time.

Here's another one not to be too alarmed about: Obama is flat-out wrong when he frets on his campaign Web site that "the personal savings rate is now the lowest it's been since the Great Depression." The latest rate, for the second quarter of 2008, is 2.6 percent -- higher than the 1.9 percent rate that prevailed in the last quarter of Bill Clinton's presidency.

Full disclosure: I'm an adviser to John McCain's campaign, though as far as I know, the senator has never taken one word of my advice. He's been sounding a little pessimistic on the economy of late, too. And to be fair, he isn't immune to the Depression-exaggeration virus, either. At a campaign news conference in July, my fellow adviser Steve Forbes warned that Obama was seeking "the biggest tax increase since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression." Factual? Almost certainly not.

But at least Forbes wasn't dissing the economy -- he was dissing Obama. And Obama's infection by the Depression-exaggeration bug goes way back. His first outbreak came on Oct. 2, 2002, in his famous speech opposing the invasion of Iraq, delivered when he was an Illinois state senator. He said that the invasion was "the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from" a litany of economic troubles including "a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression."

Quite an exaggeration. When state senator Obama made that remark, the Standard & Poor's 500 had just dropped 11 percent for the month of September 2002. But stocks dropped twice that much in October 1987. Since the Great Depression, the stock market has had bigger one-month drops on four occasions. Obama's pessimism on stocks then happened to be as ineptly timed as it was factually incorrect. Exactly one week later, stocks hit bottom, and over the next five years the S&P 500 more than doubled, surging to new all-time highs.

So much for Obama's hyperbole about our terrible economy. But what about the media's?

A housing "slump," a housing "crisis"? A "severe" price decline? According to the latest report from the National Association of Realtors, the median price of an existing home is up 8.5 percent from the low of last February. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median price of a new home is up 1.3 percent from the low of last December. Home prices may not be at all-time highs -- and there are pockets of continuing decline in some urban areas -- but overall they've clearly stopped going down and have started to recover. So why keep proclaiming a "crisis" after it's over?

"Turmoil" in the debt markets? Sure, but we've seen plenty worse. According to the FDIC, there have been a total of 13 bank failures in 2007 and so far into 2008. There were 15 in 1999-2000, the climax of the Obama-celebrated era of Clintonian prosperity. And in recession-free 1988-89, there were 1,004 failures -- almost an order of magnitude more than today. Since the Great Depression, the average number of bank failures each year has been 94.

Despite highly publicized losses in subprime mortgage lending, bank equity capital -- the best measure of core financial strength -- is now $1.35 trillion, more than the $1.28 trillion level of mid-2007, before the "turmoil" even began.

Financial market "crisis" and "meltdown"? Yes, from all-time highs last October, the S&P 500 has fallen 20 percent. But that's nothing by historical standards. Stocks have often fallen more than that over comparable spans of time. They fell more than twice that much in 1974 -- which was truly the worst drop since the Great Depression. Even the present 20-percent loss isn't what it seems. The damage has been heavily concentrated in the financial sector -- banks, investment firms and mortgage companies. If you exclude that sector, stocks are off 14.8 percent.

Some economic indicators -- export growth and non-defense capital goods orders such as industrial machinery, for example -- are running at levels associated with brisk expansion. Others are running at middling levels, such as the closely followed Institute for Supply Management manufacturing index. But it's actually difficult to find many that are running at truly recessionary levels.

There have been 11 recessions since the Great Depression. And we're nowhere close to being in the 12th one now. This isn't just a matter of opinion. Words -- even words as seemingly subjective as "recession" -- have meaning.

In a new working paper, economist Edward Leamer of UCLA's Anderson School of Management shows that changes in the unemployment rate, payroll jobs and industrial production almost precisely explain every recession as officially determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research. At present, only the unemployment rate exceeds the recession threshold. The other two factors are far from it. According to Leamer's paper, we'll only fall into recession "if things get much worse."

This would suggest that anyone who says we're in a recession, or heading into one -- especially the worst one since the Great Depression -- is making up his own private definition of "recession." And probably for his own political purposes.

McCain campaign adviser and former U.S. senator Phil Gramm was right in July when he said that our current state "is a mental recession." Maybe he was out of line when he added that the United States has become "a nation of whiners." But when it comes to the economy, we have surely become a nation of exaggerators.

Yet Gramm was pilloried for his remarks, and McCain had to distance himself from his adviser by joking that in a McCain administration, Gramm would be ambassador to Belarus. What does it say about our nation that it has become political suicide to state the good news that our economy is not in recession?

Whatever the political outcome this year, hopefully this will prove to be yet another instance of that iron law of economics and markets: The sentiment of the majority is always wrong at key turning points. And the majority is plenty pessimistic right now. That suggests that we're on the brink not of recession, but of accelerating prosperity.

Maybe this will turn out to be the best of times -- at least since the Great Depression.

Donald L. Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an economics consulting firm based in Menlo Park, Calif.

from the Boston Globe, 2008-Sep-17, by Jeff Jacoby:

Enough of the Palin feeding frenzy

IN POLITICS, cheap shots and invective are occupational hazards. But when have we seen anything to match the frenzy of rage and contempt set off by the nomination of Sarah Palin?

Virtually from the moment John McCain selected her, Palin has been under assault. There has been legitimate criticism, of course. But there has also been a gusher of slander, much of it - like the slur that she isn't the real mother of her infant son, Trig - despicable.

For someone who has been in the national spotlight for only three weeks, Palin has been the victim of an astonishing array of falsehoods. Voters have been told that she slashed funding in Alaska for special-needs children. That she tried to ban books from Wasilla's public library. That she was a member of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party. That she links Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11. That she backed Pat Buchanan for president. That she doesn't want students taught about contraception. That she called the war in Iraq "a task from God." All untrue.

Hillary Clinton's supporters complain that coverage of her campaign was tainted by sexism, such as the Washington Post story that focused on her cleavage, or Mike Barnicle's description of her on MSNBC as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court."

Obama too has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous comment - the Fox News segment that captioned a picture of his wife "Obama's Baby Mama," for example, and the infamous New Yorker cover showing the Obamas as terrorists in the Oval Office.

But the left's onslaught against Palin has been of a different order of magnitude.

"Ideologically, she is their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread," columnist Cintra Wilson wrote in Salon. "She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism."

On the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, commentator Heather Mallick was even cruder. Palin appeals to "the white trash vote" with her "toned-down version of the porn actress look," she wrote. "Husband Todd looks like a roughneck. . . What normal father would want Levi 'I'm a [bleeping] redneck' Johnson prodding his daughter?"

From radio talk-show host Randi Rhodes came the smutty suggestion that the governor of Alaska has an unhealthy interest in teenage boys: "She's friends with all the teenage boys," Rhodes told her audience last week. "You have to say no when your kids say, 'Can we sleep over at the Palins?' No! NO!"

The smears and sneers have been without end. One liberal congressman likened Obama to Jesus - and Palin to Pontius Pilate. A Democratic state chairman declared scornfully that Palin's "primary qualification seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion." A University of Chicago professor seethed: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

The national media, meanwhile, have only further eroded what remained of their reputation for objectivity.

For months they refused to mention the infidelity of John Edwards, yet they leaped with relish onto Bristol Palin's pregnancy. Ravenous for any negative morsel on the GOP running mate, they deployed legions of reporters to Alaska, who have produced such journalism as the 3,220-word exposé in Sunday's New York Times that upon winning office, Palin - gasp! - fired opponents and hired people she trusted.

Yet the more she has been attacked, the more her support has solidified. In the latest Fox News poll, Palin's favorable/unfavorable ratio is a strong 54-27. She is named by 33 percent of respondents as the candidate who "best understands the problems of everyday life in America," more than those naming Obama (32 percent), McCain (17), or Joe Biden (10). Among independent voters, Palin's lead over Obama on this measure widens to 13 points. In a recent Rasmussen poll, 51 percent of voters said the press was trying to hurt Palin through its coverage, versus just 5 percent who thought it was trying to help - a 10-1 disparity.

Millions of Americans, not all of them conservative, instinctively identify with Palin. That is why the left's scorching assault, so ugly and unhinged, is backfiring. The longer it goes on, the more it undermines the Democratic ticket - and the more support it builds for McCain, and his refreshingly normal running mate.

from PowerLine Blog, 2008-Sep-11, by John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff:

The Press: Mad As Hell, and Not Going to Take It Any More

Howard Kurtz's column in the Washington Post is surprisingly blunt and surprisingly revealing. The mainstream media, Kurtz says, are mad. Their anger, though, is oddly unidirectional:

The media are getting mad.

Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.

Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there's anything new about that).

There certainly isn't. Barack Obama has been manipulating the press for years. His manipulation didn't make the media mad, though, because reporters were willing accomplices who have been trying to get Obama elected. It's the thought that John McCain could be manipulating them that has the media seeing red:

News outlets are increasingly challenging false or questionable claims by the McCain campaign, whether it's the ad accusing Obama of supporting sex-ed for kindergartners (the Illinois legislation clearly describes "age-appropriate" programs) or Palin's repeated boast that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere (after she had supported it, and after Congress had effectively killed the specific earmark).

But the two examples Kurtz cites are ads that are indisputably true. Obama did support sex education down to kindergarten. Kurtz thinks that's OK, because the sex education for five-year-olds would be "age appropriate." He's entitled to that opinion, but my opinion, and that of most voters, is that any sex education for kindergartners is a terrible idea. In any event, whether you think teaching five-year-olds about sex is a good idea or a bad idea, the ad is true.

Likewise with the ad that says Governor Palin killed the Bridge to Nowhere: it's a simple fact that no one, including the Democratic Party in Alaska, thought to deny until Palin was selected to run for Vice-President. We wrote about it here. As the Anchorage Daily News reported on March 12, 2008:

Palin ruffled feathers when she announced - without giving the delegation advance notice - that the state was killing the Ketchikan bridge to Gravina Island, site of the airport and a few dozen residents.

If Kurtz or other members of the media want to criticize some other aspect of Palin's record they are welcome to do so, but the suggestion that she didn't kill the famous bridge is ridiculous.

That's not to say that there is no false advertising in the air this campaign season. We wrote here that Barack Obama's oft-repeated claim, in a television ad and elsewhere, that he "reach[ed] out to Senator Lugar...to help lock down loose nuclear weapons" is flatly untrue. It was Sam Nunn who "reached out to Senator Lugar" in 1991. Obama's minor amendment to the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act in 2006 had nothing to do with "locking down loose nuclear weapons;" on the contrary, it specifically excluded them. Obama's amendment has turned out to be a bad idea, too. But these and other falsehoods by Obama aren't what the press is "getting mad" about, and reporters have no intention of reporting on them.

While noting that the media in general are "getting mad," Kurtz himself is mad about the "lipstick on a pig" flap:

The lipstick imbroglio is evidence that the Drudge/Fox/New York Post axis can drive just about any story into mainstream land. Does anyone seriously believe that Barack Obama was calling Sarah Palin a pig?

I'm not sure what Obama had in mind, but I find it odd that in pages of outrage devoted to the supposed excesses of the McCain campaign, Kurtz finds no room to mention the fact that prominent Democrats (not anonymous emailers, who are much worse) have said that Governor Palin is Pontius Pilate and that her primary qualification seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion.

The truth is that Sarah Palin has been the object of the most vicious and concerted smear campaign in modern American history. But that fact doesn't cause the media (or Howard Kurtz) to get mad.

It's not too hard to diagnose why, as Kurtz correctly says, "the media are getting mad." They're getting mad because their candidate is losing. They've spent years building him up and covering for his mistakes and shortcomings, and he is such a stiff that he can't coast across the finish line. I'd be mad too, I guess, but I think I'd have the decency not to take it out on Sarah Palin.

PAUL adds: I'm not getting mad, but I find the nature of this campaign increasingly dismaying. Obama has been lying about McCain all along, from the nonsense about fighting in Iraq for 100 years to the claim (based on a joke) that McCain thinks the middle class extends to people making up to $5,000,000 a year.

Meanwhile, I think Kurtz is correct about the "lipstick" remark. The answer to his question, "does anyone seriously believe that Barack Obama was calling Sarah Palin a pig" may be "yes," but in my opinion it should be "no." And it's off-putting to hear Republican women like former Gov. Swift trying to parlay Obama's phrase (which, unhappily, has become common political jargon recently) into an identity politics "gotcha." This is the kind of thing I expect from Democrats, not Republicans.

To be sure, Obama lacks credibility when he complains about the "gotcha," having been the beneficiary of, and perhaps a party to, a similarly invalid identity politics play against Bill Clinton. Many in the media also lack credibility since, as John points out, their sense of outrage runs in only one direction.

UPDATE: At the Corner, Mark Steyn weighs in:

Howie feels the press is being "manipulated" by the McCain campaign.

Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved "manipulating" the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin's amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.

But, if you were really savvy, you'd "manipulate" the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You'd not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.

from the Weekly Standard, 2008-Sep-22, by William Kristol:

Mad Libs
Palin Derangement Syndrome overwhelms the media.

The liberal media are angry. Very, very angry. How do we know? Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's chronicler of all things media, says so:

The media are getting mad. Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches. Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there's anything new about that).

Of course, politicians are always trying to manipulate the media. And the liberal media are always allowing themselves to be manipulated by liberal politicians. So why the foot-stamping snit by liberal journalists? Not because "the press is being manipulated." Rather, because the American people are resisting manipulation by the media.

For, as Kurtz goes on to say, the media "are increasingly challenging false or questionable claims by the McCain campaign." In other words, the media are going after McCain. In his piece Kurtz cites two allegedly false claims from McCain ads that are in fact basically true--or, at least, no more one-sided than dozens of other campaign ads. Back when Barack Obama was coasting toward victory, normal campaign exaggerations ("You know, John McCain wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps as long as 100 years") didn't fill the media with loathing for Obama. Now the McCain camp's exaggerations do.

Why? Because McCain is doing well. And because Sarah Palin is surviving--even flourishing--in the midst of the liberal media onslaught.

When the media get mad, they don't just pout. They pounce. How? By any means necessary. The day of Kurtz's article, September 11, ABC's Charlie Gibson conducted his first interview of Sarah Palin. Gibson asked: "You said recently, in your old church, 'Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.' Are we fighting a holy war?"

Palin responded, "You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote."

"Exact words," Gibson triumphantly retorted.

Not so fast. As Palin explained, quite eloquently, what she was saying was in the spirit of Lincoln: "Let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side." The tape of Palin's church appearance bore out her interpretation and revealed Gibson's mischaracterization. "Pray for our military men and women," she had said, "who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God." Gibson had made it sound as if Palin were claiming to know God's will, rather than praying that U.S. actions might be in accord with God's will and in a cause worthy of God's blessing.

No doubt the mere fact of Palin's asking for any kind of blessing on our troops and our national leaders at some backwoods Alaska church was sufficiently distracting to the scripters of Gibson's questions that they didn't look closely at the wording. God knows (so to speak) what they believe at a place like that! Why, their kids probably even enlist in the Army to fight our enemies.

Speaking of enemies: Within hours of the ABC interview, the Washington Post distorted straightforward remarks made by Palin that same day to U.S. soldiers deploying to Iraq. She praised them for going over to help "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans." Palin clearly meant that our soldiers would be fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq--a group connected to the al Qaeda central command responsible for 9/11. The Post claimed to believe that Palin was asserting a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11--as if she thought soldiers now heading to Iraq were going to fight Saddam's regime--and triumphantly noted that even the Bush administration no longer asserted such a connection (it never did, in fact).

Palin's remarks should have been unexceptional: We've been fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq for several years now. But the media are desperate to try to make her look foolish. In the same interview, she praised Ronald Reagan for having won the Cold War. What a gaffe, some media watchdogs barked. The Soviet Union didn't collapse until three years after Reagan left office! Gotcha!

Not a chance. Sarah Palin is quickly proving to be more than a match for the mad, mad media. Having foolishly started a war with her that they can't win, the liberal media would be well advised, for once, to implement their own favorite war-fighting strategy: cut and run.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Sep-16, by William Mcgurn:

The Times They Are A-Changing

If the editors of the New York Times changed the paper's line on Iraq and no one called them on it, would it make a noise? Like the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest?

Something of the kind seems to have happened to the Times use of "civil war" to describe the conflict in Iraq. In the fall of 2006, the Times began insisting Iraq was in a civil war. And in the year that followed, the paper's editorials routinely castigated George W. Bush for refusing to acknowledge it.

Here's a small sample:

Nov. 29, 2006: "At this point, it's hard to tell who is more out of touch: President Bush, who continues to insist that Iraq has not descended into civil war, or Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki . . ."

Jan. 11, 2007 (the day after the president announced the surge): "The nation needs an eyes-wide-open recognition that the only goal left is to get the U.S. military out of this civil war in a way that could minimize the slaughter of Iraqis and reduce the chances that the chaos Mr. Bush unleashed will engulf Iraq's neighbors."

March 27, 2007: "As disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach makes far more sense than Mr. Bush's denial of Iraq's civil war . . ."

July 8, 2007: "One of Mr. Bush's arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. The war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out."

Oct. 23, 2007: "If [the Bush administration] doesn't now move quickly [on Turkey's threat to cross the border to attack Kurdish rebels], Iraq's disastrous civil war could spiral into an even bigger disaster -- a regional war."

And these are only a smattering of what by my count are at least 16 editorials from November 2006 to November 2007 all unequivocally asserting an Iraqi civil war.

As someone who was in Mr. Bush's speechwriting shop at the time, I remember the horrible stories coming out of Iraq -- Sunni men kidnapped and killed by Shia death squads; Shia innocents murdered by Sunnis; Kurds being driven from their homes, and so on. The violence was real, it reflected religious divisions, and on the face of it, civil war was a reasonable description.

So why did the president resist the characterization? The answer is that he resisted using "civil war" for the same reason the Times likely embraced it: It was a loaded term.

If the conflict in Iraq was really a civil war, the implication was, first, that the United States had no place being there; second, that it was hopeless. That's one reason at least five of the editorials that used the words "civil war" also used the word "unending" or "unwinnable." If you find yourself in the middle of a civil war that is unwinnable, logic allows for only one conclusion: Pull out.

This, in fact, is the same logic that MoveOn.org invoked in the ad the Times infamously ran the day Gen. David Petraeus testified before Congress. Remove the inflammatory "General Betray Us" language, and the MoveOn argument was pretty much what the Times had been saying: The U.S. was in the middle of an "unwinnable religious civil war," and our leaders were in denial.

MoveOn.org and the Times, of course, weren't alone. In what Keith Olbermann described as a "Walter Cronkite moment," NBC News in November 2006 also branded Iraq a civil war. On air later that same evening, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell cited experts who were saying that calling the conflict a civil war "could further erode public support for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq."

Yet now NBC too has stopped using civil war. Which earlier this year prompted Ed Gillespie, a senior White House staffer, to send a letter to NBC News President Steve Capus. "Is it still NBC News's carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war?" Mr. Gillespie asked. "If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?"

Good question, and one worth asking the Times. The fact is, though some of its columnists call Iraq a civil war, the Times hasn't run an editorial saying so since last November. Could that editorial silence be the Gray Lady's way of admitting a mistake? If I were the president, I think I'd take that as a "yes."

from the Independent of London, 2008-Aug-4, by Guy Adams:

Guy Adams' US Media Diary: The 'scoop' the US papers ignored

That old cliché about everything being bigger in America seems especially pertinent when attempting to describe the sheer scale of the crisis currently afflicting the US newspaper industry, which makes all Fleet Street's woes look like a summer picnic.

Last week, The Los Angeles Times decided to flog its historic downtown offices, on top of sacking 150 of its 870 journalists. So did The Chicago Tribune. Almost every title in the land is now shedding staff; a hundred New York Times hacks have been offered voluntary redundancy; Newsweek recently announced cuts. It's a bloodbath out there, as US media companies attempt to claw a pound of flesh from haemorrhaging readerships.

Consider, against this backdrop of falling circulation and a failing industry, the decision of every mainstream paper in America to ignore the juiciest political story of the month (and possibly the year): the discovery by National Enquirer hacks of John Edwards, in the corridors of a Beverly Hills hotel, where his alleged mistress and alleged love child were also staying, at half past two on the morning of Tuesday, 22 July.

Since Edwards was, until recently, hoping to be president and will almost certainly have a prominent role in any Barack Obama administration, his marital integrity is a matter of public interest. It could yet become an election issue. Yet neither the highfalutin NYT, nor the Tribune, nor even the LA Times, on whose patch the whole sordid business occurred, have yet stepped up to the plate to report it. Their old-fashioned reticence seems quaint, in this day of kiss'n'tell and chequebook journalism. But it's also depressing: one of the reasons America's newspapers are dying is their perceived pomposity. Readers say they are too timid to rock the boat; right-wingers complain (with some justification) that they conspire to suppress damaging stories about Democrats. The general public thinks they have simply become boring.

The Edwards story could be selling truckloads of newsprint. It is attracting enormous traffic online, and has been devoured by viewers of Fox, the only TV network to report it. In ignoring the affair, newspapers are sacrificing potential readers and repeating the mistakes of the 1990s, where they loftily decided against reporting Bill Clinton's many bedroom misdeeds, allowing internet sites to claim the Monica Lewinsky "scoop."

The editor of the LA Times, Tony Pierce, has higher concerns, though. He recently sent staff an edict. "There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair," it read. "Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumours or salacious speculations."

I can't pretend to know what Mr Pierce does with his 870 journalists. But if he'd asked just one of them to check out these "salacious rumours" regarding John Edwards the LA Times might have a few more readers, and fewer of the 870 staffers might have to be cut from its bloated payroll.

Speaking of bloated payrolls, it was instructive to read the LA Times on Wednesday, 24 hours after an earthquake hit the city, causing exactly zero injuries, and (much to the disappointment of TV's rolling news channels) failing to seriously damage one building.

Photos on the front page (headline: "Why we rolled with the punch") revealed that some shampoo bottles had been knocked off the shelf of a K-Mart, and a window was smashed at a building in Pomona. But the real fun was to be had underneath the inside page report. There, an extended joint by-line listed all the reporters who had been dispatched by Mr Pierce to cover the tremor. It carried a total of 39 names, neatly demonstrating that everything really is bigger in the US – even the number of men it takes to skin a cat.

Cheerier news pervades the TV industry thanks to a series of runaway hits, including a soon-to-be-released season two of Gossip Girl, and the new, somewhat darker second series of Mad Men, which launched to approving reviews on Sunday. It is no longer news that most of the finest talents in UK telly are now heading across the pond to cash in. Almost every hit programme now boasts some form of British talent, either behind or in front of camera. One moment you'll see Cat Deeley on So You Think You Can Dance?, the next, Hugh Laurie in Heroes. I even spotted June Sarpong on the LA party circuit the other night.

Inevitably, Ant'n'Dec have joined in, making their US TV debut last month, fronting an ABC game-show called Wanna Bet? It's safe to describe their reception as mixed. The New York Times called the duo "British comedians" (possibly a compliment) but Kevin McDonough, influential syndicated TV reviewer for (among others) The Chattanooga Times has just dubbed them "pathetic," "boring" and "unoriginal."

Nothing quite so thrills as an actor getting all political. Jon Voight, whose by-line declares him "well-known for his humanitarian work," pops up in The Washington Times with a thoughtful essay headlined "my concerns for America". Space does not permit an extended analysis of his rhetoric, but the gist of the op-ed piece can be summed up in two words: "vote McCain".

"The Democratic party in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way," reads one passage. "It seems to me that if Mr Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralise this country and help create a socialist America."

How human evolution took us from Voight to his daughter Angelina Jolie, in a single generation, I will never know.

The lovely but bonkers Ms Jolie has agreed to donate the estimated $10m (£5m) proceeds from selling pictures of her and Brad Pitt's newborns to charity. They were bought by People magazine in the US (and Hello! in the rest of the civilised world) following an intense bidding war. She grows ever higher in our estimation.

from McClatchy Newspapers via the San Jose Mercury News, 2008-Aug-1, by Lisa Zagaroli:

Birth certificate of child linked to ex-Sen. John Edwards lists no father

The birth certificate of a child whom a tabloid newspaper claims was fathered by former Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina doesn't identify the child's father.

The document, obtained through a routine records request, shows that Frances Quinn Hunter was born last Feb. 27 to Rielle Hunter, a videographer who worked on Edwards' presidential campaign last year.

But the space for the name of the father is blank, although the child was born more than two months after Hunter identified Andrew Young, Edwards' campaign finance director, as the father of her then unborn child. Young claimed paternity in a statement from his lawyer that was posted on the political blog mydd.com.

Edwards withdrew from the presidential race in January, but he remained a major figure in the presidential contest throughout the primary season as analysts tried to guess whether he would endorse Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. He unveiled his support for Obama on May 14 at a nationally televised rally in Michigan.

Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina, was expected to play a major supporting role in the general election as Obama tries to win North Carolina, which no Democratic presidential candidate has done since 1976.

The National Enquirer first claimed that Edwards had a sexual relationship with Hunter last October, when he was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Edwards flatly denied the allegation. In December, the tabloid newspaper reported that she was pregnant.

The Enquirer's allegations, if unresolved, are likely to hurt Edwards's ability to participate in the presidential campaign. They have been the subject of heated commentary on the Internet and have become fodder for jokes by late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, raising questions about Edwards' prospects for a possible post in an Obama administration.

McClatchy Newspapers obtained the birth certificate Thursday through a routine public records request to the Santa Barbara County, Calif., Recorder's Office, which provided an "informational copy" for a fee of $17. A certified copy, which can be used to establish identity for legal transactions, is available only to family members and government agencies.

Asked Thursday why no father was listed on the birth certificate, Hunter's attorney, Robert Gordon of New York, said, "A lot of women do that."

Reminded that he and Hunter had publicly identified her child's father two months earlier to the National Enquirer, Gordon said, "That's a personal matter between them."

He declined to comment further.

The birth certificate shows that the girl was born at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, Calif., to Rielle Jaya James Druck, also known as Rielle Hunter. Hunter, 44, was a videographer on Edwards' presidential campaign last year.

With unmarried couples, California state law requires both parents to sign a "Declaration of Paternity" form before the father's name is put on the birth certificate. If the father isn't present, his name may be added to the birth certificate later, after proper forms are obtained from the Department of Vital Records.

The Enquirer last week said that Edwards had visited Hunter and the child at a Beverly Hills hotel, and then was confronted by its reporters as he was leaving in the middle of the night. The newspaper claimed that Edwards ran and hid in a restroom to elude its reporters.

At a July 23 speech in Houston, Edwards responded to a reporter's question about the Enquirer story by calling it "tabloid trash."

On Wednesday, Edwards declined to answer questions about the allegations.

About a dozen reporters and photojournalists attended a speech that Edwards gave to an AARP Foundation symposium in Washington on poverty and aging. Afterward, he avoided reporters, exiting through a side area used by the kitchen staff at Washington's historic Hotel Monaco.

Edwards emerged near the rear of the hotel with two men. When a reporter approached him, Edwards said, "Can't do it now, I'm sorry" and quickly walked past.

Asked about the reported late night episode at the Beverly Hilton, Edwards said "sorry" and got into a waiting car with the other men. Asked twice more to address the Enquirer story, Edwards was silent until the car doors closed.

The Enquirer first alleged last October that Edwards had had a sexual relationship with a woman who had been hired to create a documentary about him. A December story in the Enquirer claimed that she was pregnant and living in a gated community in Chapel Hill, N.C., not far from Young and his family.

That story said:

"In a statement issued to The Enquirer through her attorney, Rielle said: 'The fact that I am expecting a child is my personal and private business. This has no relationship to nor does it involve John Edwards in any way. Andrew Young is the father of my unborn child."'

Young, who lived in Chapel Hill at the time with his wife and children, was a fundraiser for Edwards' campaign. According to Federal Election Commission records, he was earning about $3,200 every two weeks before he left the Edwards campaign last fall. In 2004, Edwards included Young and his wife in a list of people whose contributions he acknowledged in his book "Four Trials."

A December statement attributed to Young's Washington attorney, Pamela J. Marple, said, "As confirmed by Ms. Hunter, Andrew Young is the father of her unborn child. Senator Edwards knew nothing about the relationship between these former co-workers, which began when they worked together in 2006. As a private citizen who no longer works for the campaign, Mr. Young asks that the media respect his privacy while he works to make amends with his family."

Marple didn't return phone calls seeking comment Thursday, and Young couldn't be located for comment.

Edwards, who met his wife Elizabeth in law school, denied the story in October.

"It's completely untrue, ridiculous," he said. "I've been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years and, as anybody who's been around us knows, she's an extraordinary human being, warm, loving, beautiful, sexy and as good a person as I have ever known. So the story's just false."

from the Times of London, 2008-Jul-27, by Sarah Baxter:

Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy

Gotcha: Senator John Edwards, whose wife has cancer, has been caught in a sex scandal that ends his vice-presidential hopes

Washington -- SCRATCH John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.

Every supermarket shopper knows that the preternaturally youthful former senator for North Carolina may have fathered a love child with a film-maker while Elizabeth, his saintly wife, is dying of cancer. There are sensational new details on the National Enquirer website, although most of the media have done their best to ignore them.

The tabloid magazine cornered Edwards, 55, leaving a Los Angeles hotel where Rielle Hunter, his alleged mistress, and her baby were staying, at 2.40am last Tuesday. He ran down a hallway and dived into the men's bathroom. A hotel security guard confirmed the encounter. “His face just went totally white,” the guard said.

The story has been bubbling away for months, but so far there has been not a word about it in the mainstream newspapers, even though Edwards was John Kerry's running mate in 2004 and has been tipped for a prominent job in an Obama administration – if not vice-president, then attorney-general or antipoverty tsar.

Edwards volunteered recently: “I'm prepared to consider seriously anything, anything [Obama] asks me to do for our country.”

He can stop waiting by the telephone. News of the “gotcha” rapidly circulated on the internet via the Drudge Report and has been buzzing on the blogs. The Enquirer's story appears to be well sourced.

According to the magazine, Edwards arrived at the Beverly Hilton on Monday at 9.45pm after attending a meeting on homelessness in Los Angeles and was dropped off at a side entrance. Two rooms were allegedly booked for Hunter in a friend's name.

Edwards emerged hours later and was confronted by journalists from the Enquirer. His usual spokesmen and defenders have scurried for cover behind a wall of “no comment”, while the details of the story have gone unchallenged.

Even so, Tony Pierce, editor of the Los Angeles Times, issued an edict to the paper's own bloggers to stay off the subject. “Because the only source has been the National Enquirer, we have decided not to cover the rumours or salacious speculations,” he wrote.

Mickey Kaus, a blogger for Slate magazine, leaked the memo. He noted: “This was a sensational scandal that the Los Angeles Times and other mainstream papers passionately did not want to uncover when Edwards was a formal candidate and now that the Enquirer seems to have done the job for them it looks like they want everyone to shut up while they fail to uncover it again.”

The New York Times has not deigned to touch the story, although it recently ran thousands of words on a relationship between McCain and a female lobbyist, which appeared to be based more on innuendo than fact.

Byron York, a conservative journalist, finally broke the silence in The Hill, a reputable, non-partisan congressional newspaper. “The media looks down on the National Enquirer but you look at the Edwards story and say, `Wow! There appears to be a lot of knowledge there'. It is darned fishy,” York said.

Edwards appeared at a press conference on poverty in Houston shortly after the Enquirer story broke. All he would say was: “I don't talk about these tabloids. They're tabloid trash and just full of lies.” There was no explicit denial.

York believes sympathy for Edwards's wife may partly account for the media blackout. “She's a very high-profile wife and she's suffering from cancer. But if the story is true, this was going on when he was running for president.”

If Edwards is the father of Hunter's child, he may also be responsible for an elaborate cover-up which would call into question his political integrity as well as his fidelity. An aide to Edwards had previously claimed via a lawyer that he (the aide) was the father.

Hunter's existence was first mentioned by Newsweek in 2006, when the magazine claimed that the little-known film-maker had been commissioned by the millionaire candidate to make behind-the-scenes web videos of his presidential campaign after they “met in a New York bar”.

Hunter, a former aspiring actress, was paid $114,000 (£57,000) for her work. Months later, a writer on The Huffington Post website wondered what had happened to the videos, which had vanished from Edwards's campaign site. The headline read, “Edwards mystery: innocuous videos suddenly shrouded in secrecy”.

As the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination gathered pace in October last year, the Enquirer claimed that Hunter was the candidate's mistress. “It's completely untrue. Ridiculous,” Edwards said. “I've been in love with the same woman for 30 years.” Two months later the magazine revealed that Hunter, a 43-year-old divorcee, was six months pregnant.

The story took a bizarre turn when she claimed that Andrew Young, a long-time aide to Edwards and a married family man, was the father of her child. Young's lawyer acknowledged his paternity.

Hunter moved from New York to the same gated community in North Carolina as Young and his wife and young children, raising speculation that he was really her minder. Young has not commented on the latest allegations.

The National Enquirer may publish photographs corroborating Edwards's presence at the hotel this weekend. A reporter for The Washington Post said yesterday: “To be quite honest, we're waiting to see the pictures. That said, Edwards is no longer an elected official and he is not running for office now. Don't expect wall-to-wall coverage.”

The Clinton Connection

Roger Altman, who has a controlling stake in the National Enquirer, is a former official in Bill Clinton's administration. Some wags believe the magazine poured resources into the love child story to scupper John Edwards's chances of beating Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination.

Were the latest revelations timed to finish him off as a potential running mate? Despite the rumours, it is not likely. Few people think Clinton is still on Barack Obama's shortlist.

David Perel, the Enquirer's editor-in-chief, said the magazine's parent company had “nothing to do with the editorial side, which I run”.

“We stayed on the story,” he said. “We did it the old-fashioned way with lots of legwork. We did what the [big] news organisations used to do. We knocked on doors, ran down leads and talked to people.”

from Gawker.com, 2008,Jul-28, by Alex Pareene:

John Edwards' Wikipedia Page Strangely Love Child-Free

After all this Mickey Kaus blathering about MSM gatekeepers censoring the news and preventing the reader from learning "what happened yesterday" (or, at this point, last week), it's wonderful to see the citizen-journalists and crowdsourced new guardians of information acting just as ridiculously about this supposed John Edwards scandal. As you'll recall, the National Enquirer caught John Edwards sneaking into a hotel late one night to visit former staffer Rielle Hunter and her child. When they confronted him on his way out, he hid in a bathroom. Fox News confirmed the visit. But none of this meets Wikipedia's high standards of notability! You won't find Rielle or the Beverly Hilton even mentioned on the Edwards entry.

Despite the fact that the basic facts of the evening seem to be proven, Wikipedia's power-mad power-users are immediately deleting any and all mention of the John Edwards lovechild scandal the second any other user adds it. You could go over there and add "In July of 2008, Edwards was confronted at a Beverly Hills hotel by National Enquirer reporters searching for evidence of his participation in an extra-martial affair"—all true and verified by more "reliable" sources!—and it wouldn't last two minutes. (Actually you couldn't add that. The entry has been locked.) It's not notable enough for them, apparently. Though this is. And hell, so is this!

But no, the details of the probable end of the political aspirations of one of the 2000s most visible Democratic politicians are just not as notable as the fictional history of the Wookee homeworld.

(Kudos, of course, to the enterprising editor who buried mention of this scandal in this unread entry on a book by Rielle Hunter's ex-boyfriend Jay McInerney.)

from Conservative Pulse, 2008-Jul-28, by Austin Cassidy:

Edwards sex scandal still hasn't surfaced in the `mainstream' press

The John Edwards “love child” scandal has been making rounds on the Internet for the past week, ever since it was first reported in the National Enquirer. For whatever reason, perhaps because the original source was the Enquirer or perhaps media bias, the mainstream press has refused to pick it up in any major way.

The Edwards affair is, for the moment, festering primarily on blogs and now in the foreign press. London's Sunday Times picked up on the story this weekend and moved it one step closer to becoming “legitimate” news. Still, the mainstream American newsmedia is holding back.

Fox News has confirmed that Edwards was in fact skulking around the hotel at 3am on the night in question, but even they are not running with the story as you would expect. With a criminal complaint now filed, the police will have to interview Edwards and the hotel security guards to find out exactly what happened.

Somehow, against all the odds, this story is being successfully suppressed. Even Wikipedia shows no mention of the scandal at all. Edwards' biographical article was repeatedly edited to remove any reference of it and then locked by Wikipedia editors until further notice.

So my question is, what horrible thing does John Edwards have to do to actually get the mainstream media to take notice?

3 Comments For This Post

  1. Catherine Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 8:28 pm

The media blackout on this story in the USA looks like a concerted, secretive effort to protect Edwards. It reminds me that he was at a Bilderberg conference in 2004 - a by-invitation-only conference of world political, financial, and MEDIA leaders - where conspiracy theorists claim that Edwards was “vetted” and “approved” by the others in attendance as a part of a potential presidential ticket. While I sure don't want the label “conspiracy theorist”, I have to ask: Doesn't a concerted, secretive effort to protect a crony from exposure of an embarrassing affair and elaborate cover-up thereof fit the definition of a “conspiracy”?

BTW, I love the internet, and I'm never paying for a paper newspaper again until I can find one that carries stories exposing Democrats as equally as it does Republicans.

[...]

from Time Magazine, 2007-May-30, by Robert Shrum, excerpted from this:

Kerry's Regrets About John Edwards

[...]

Kerry talked with several potential picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable after his conversations with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again. [...]

from the American Thinker via Investor's Business Daily, 2008-Jul-23, by William Tate:

Putting Money Where Mouths Are: Media Donations Favor Dems 100-1

The New York Times' refusal to publish John McCain's rebuttal to Barack Obama's Iraq op-ed may be the most glaring example of liberal media bias this journalist has ever seen. But true proof of widespread media bias requires one to follow an old journalism maxim: Follow the money.

Even the Associated Press — no bastion of conservatism — has considered, at least superficially, the media's favoritism for Barack Obama. It's time to revisit media bias.

True to form, journalists are defending their bias by saying that one candidate, Obama, is more newsworthy than the other. In other words, there is no media bias. It is we, the hoi polloi, who reveal our bias by questioning the neutrality of these learned professionals in their ivory-towered newsrooms.

Big Media applies this rationalization to every argument used to point out bias. "It's not a result of bias," they say. "It's a matter of news judgment."

And, like the man who knows his wallet was pickpocketed but can't prove it, the public is left to futilely rage against the injustice of it all.

The "newsworthy" argument can be applied to every metric — one-sided imbalances in airtime, story placement, column inches, number of stories, etc. — save one.

An analysis of federal records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 ratio over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans .

Two-hundred thirty-five journalists donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans — a margin greater than 10-to-1. An even greater disparity, 20-to-1, exists between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain.

Searches for other newsroom categories (reporters, correspondents, news editors, anchors, newspaper editors and publishers) produces 311 donors to Democrats to 30 donors to Republicans, a ratio of just over 10-to-1. In terms of money, $279,266 went to Dems, $20,709 to Republicans, a 14-to-1 ratio.

And while the money totals pale in comparison to the $9-million-plus that just one union's PACs have spent to get Obama elected, they are more substantial than the amount that Obama has criticized John McCain for receiving from lobbyists: 96 lobbyists have contributed $95,850 to McCain, while Obama — who says he won't take money from PACs or federal lobbyists — has received $16,223 from 29 lobbyists.

A few journalists list their employer as an organization like MSNBC, MSNBC.com or ABC News, or report that they're freelancers for the New York Times, or are journalists for Al Jazeera, CNN Turkey, Deutsche Welle Radio or La Republica of Rome (all contributions to Obama). Most report no employer. They're mainly freelancers. That's because most major news organization have policies that forbid newsroom employees from making political donations.

As if to warn their colleagues in the media, MSNBC last summer ran a story on journalists' contributions to political candidates that drew a similar conclusion:

"Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left."

The timing of that article was rather curious. Dated June 25, 2007, it appeared during the middle of the summer news doldrums in a non-election year — timing that was sure to minimize its impact among the general public, while still warning newsrooms across the country that such political donations can be checked.

In case that was too subtle, MSNBC ran a sidebar story detailing cautionary tales of reporters who lost their jobs or were otherwise negatively impacted because their donations became public.

As if to warn their comrades-in-news against putting their money where their mouth is, the report also cautioned that, with the Internet, "it became easier for the blogging public to look up the donors."

It went on to detail the ban that most major media organizations have against newsroom employees donating to political campaigns, a ban that raises some obvious First Amendment issues. Whether it's intentional or not, the ban makes it difficult to verify the political leanings of Big Media reporters, editors and producers. There are two logical ways to extrapolate what those leanings are, though.

One is the overwhelming nature of the above statistics. Given the pack mentality among journalists and, just like any pack, the tendency to follow the leader — in this case, Big Media — and since Big Media are centered in some of the bluest of blue parts of the country, it is highly likely that the media elite reflect the same, or an even greater, liberal bias.

A second is to analyze contributions from folks in the same corporate cultures. That analysis provides some surprising results. The contributions of individuals who reported being employed by major media organizations are listed in the nearby table.

The contributions add up to $315,533 to Democrats and $22,656 to Republicans — most of that to Ron Paul, who was supported by many liberals as a stalking horse to John McCain, a la Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos with Hillary and Obama.

What is truly remarkable about the list is that, discounting contributions to Paul and Rudy Giuliani, who was a favorite son for many folks in the media, the totals look like this: $315,533 to Democrats, $3,150 to Republicans (four individuals who donated to McCain).

Let me repeat: $315,533 to Democrats, $3,150 to Republicans — a ratio of 100-to-1. No bias there.

Tate is a former journalist, now a novelist and the author of "A Time Like This: 2001-2008." This article first appeared on the American Thinker Web site.

from MSNBC.com, 2007-Jun-25, by Bill Dedman:

Journalists dole out cash to politicians (quietly)
News organizations diverge on handling of political activism by staff

BOSTON - A CNN reporter gave $500 to John Kerry's campaign the same month he was embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq. An assistant managing editor at Forbes magazine not only sent $2,000 to Republicans, but also volunteers as a director of an ExxonMobil-funded group that questions global warming. A junior editor at Dow Jones Newswires gave $1,036 to the liberal group MoveOn.org and keeps a blog listing "people I don't like," starting with George Bush, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition, the NRA and corporate America ("these are the people who are really in charge").

Whether you sample your news feed from ABC or CBS (or, yes, even NBC and MSNBC), whether you prefer Fox News Channel or National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker, some of the journalists feeding you are also feeding cash to politicians, parties or political action committees.

MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

The donors These companies had newspeople giving money to politicians, parties or PACs. Click on a company to see details and what the journalists had to say. Television: ABC News ABC affiliate in Boston, WCVB ABC affiliate in Wichita, KAKE CBS News CBS affiliate in Boston, WBZ CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, KCBS CBS affiliate in Memphis, WREG CNN CW affiliate in Chicago, WGN CW affiliate in Los Angeles, KTLA Fox News Channel Fox affiliate in Omaha, KPTM Fox affiliate in Minneapolis, KMSP Fox affiliate in Washington, D.C., WTTG MSNBC MTV News NBC News PBS affiliate in New York, Thirteen Independent station KTVK, Phoenix Online: MSNBC.com Salon.com Magazines: The Atlantic Monthly Business Week The Economist Forbes Inc. The New Yorker Newsweek Rolling Stone Time U.S. News and World Report Vanity Fair Newspapers: McClatchy Newspapers D.C. bureau The Wall Street Journal The New York Times Los Angeles Times New York Daily News The Washington Post The Chicago Tribune San Francisco Chronicle Newsday The Boston Globe The Star-Ledger, Newark Star Tribune, Minneapolis Detroit Free Press The Oregonian The Miami Herald The San Diego Union-Tribune The Sun, Baltimore San Jose Mercury News Boston Herald South Florida Sun-Sentinel Fort Worth Star-Telegram The Hartford Courant Richmond Times-Dispatch Contra Costa Times Riverside Press-Enterprise The Palm Beach Post The Commercial Appeal, Memphis The Des Moines Register The Honolulu Advertiser The Blade, Toledo Lexington Herald-Leader The Morning Call, Allentown The Daytona Beach News-Journal Albany Times Union The Washington Times San Gabriel Valley Newspapers The New York Sun The Lincoln Journal Star The Macon Telegraph New Hampshire Union Leader Corpus Christi, Texas, Caller-Times National Catholic Reporter York, Pa., Daily Record Muskegon, Mich., Chronicle Fort Wayne, Ind., News-Sentinel Martha's Vineyard Times, Mass. Radio: Air America CBS Radio National Public Radio NPR affiliate in Washington, WAMU WWJ News Radio, Detroit Wire services: Bloomberg News Dow Jones Newswires Reuters Non-English news: La Stampa, Turin, Italy New Delhi Television The Korea Daily News Pakistan TV Oriental Daily Click here to see the full list of donors and their explanations

The donors include CNN's Guy Raz, now covering the Pentagon for NPR, who gave to Kerry the same month he was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq; New Yorker war correspondent George Packer; a producer for Bill O'Reilly at Fox; MSNBC TV host Joe Scarborough; political writers at Vanity Fair; the editor of The Wall Street Journal's weekend section; local TV anchors in Washington, Minneapolis, Memphis and Wichita; the ethics columnist at The New York Times; and even MTV's former presidential campaign correspondent.

`If someone had murdered Hitler ...'

There's a longstanding tradition that journalists don't cheer in the press box. They have opinions, like anyone else, but they are expected to keep those opinions out of their work. Because appearing to be fair is part of being fair, most mainstream news organizations discourage marching for causes, displaying political bumper stickers or giving cash to candidates.

How the analysis was conducted

Traditionally, many news organizations have applied the rules to only political reporters and editors. The ethic was summed up by Abe Rosenthal, the former New York Times editor, who is reported to have said, "I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus."

But with polls showing the public losing faith in the ability of journalists to give the news straight up, some major newspapers and TV networks are clamping down. They now prohibit all political activity — aside from voting — no matter whether the journalist covers baseball or proofreads the obituaries. The Times in 2003 banned all donations, with editors scouring the FEC records regularly to watch for in-house donors. In 2005, The Chicago Tribune made its policy absolute. CBS did the same last fall. And The Atlantic Monthly, where a senior editor gave $500 to the Democratic Party in 2004, says it is considering banning all donations. After MSNBC.com contacted Salon.com about donations by a reporter and a former executive editor, this week Salon banned donations for all its staff.

What changed? First came the conservative outcry labeling the mainstream media as carrying a liberal bias. The growth of talk radio and cable slugfests gave voice to that claim. The Iraq war fueled distrust of the press from both sides. Finally, it became easier for the blogging public to look up the donors.

As the policy at the Times puts it: "Given the ease of Internet access to public records of campaign contributors, any political giving by a Times staff member would carry a great risk of feeding a false impression that the paper is taking sides."

But news organizations don't agree on where to draw the ethical line.

Giving to candidates is allowed at Fox, Forbes, Time, The New Yorker, Reuters — and at Bloomberg News, whose editor in chief, Matthew Winkler, set the tone by giving to Al Gore in 2000. Bloomberg has nine campaign donors on the list; they're allowed to donate unless they cover politics directly.

Donations and other political activity are strictly forbidden at The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN and NPR.

Politicking is discouraged, but there is some wiggle room, at Dow Jones, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. (Compare policies here.)

NBC, MSNBC and MSNBC.com say they don't discourage or encourage campaign contributions, but they require employees to report any potential conflicts of interest in advance and receive permission of the senior editor. (MSNBC.com is a joint venture of NBC Universal and Microsoft; its employees are required to adhere to NBC News policies regarding political contributions.)

Many of the donating journalists cover topics far from politics: food, fashion, sports. Some touch on politics from time to time: Even a film critic has to review Gore's documentary on global warming. And some donors wield quiet influence behind the scenes, such as the wire editors at newspapers in Honolulu and Riverside, Calif., who decide which state, national and international news to publish.

The pattern of donations, with nearly nine out of 10 giving to Democratic candidates and causes, appears to confirm a leftward tilt in newsrooms — at least among the donors, who are a tiny fraction of the roughly 100,000 staffers in newsrooms across the nation.

The donors said they try to be fair in reporting and editing the news. One of the recurring themes in the responses is that it's better for journalists to be transparent about their beliefs, and that editors who insist on manufacturing an appearance of impartiality are being deceptive to a public that already knows journalists aren't without biases.

"Our writers are citizens, and they're free to do what they want to do," said New Yorker editor David Remnick, who has 10 political donors at his magazine. "If what they write is fair, and they respond to editing and counter-arguments with an open mind, that to me is the way we work."

The openness didn't extend, however, to telling the public about the donations. Apparently none of the journalists disclosed the donations to readers, viewers or listeners. Few told their bosses, either.

Several of the donating journalists said they had no regrets, whatever the ethical concerns.

"Probably there should be a rule against it," said New Yorker writer Mark Singer, who wrote the magazine's profile of Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, then gave $250 to America Coming Together and its get-out-the-vote campaign to defeat President Bush. "But there's a rule against murder. If someone had murdered Hitler — a journalist interviewing him had murdered him — the world would be a better place. As a citizen, I can only feel good about participating in a get-out-the-vote effort to get rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don't regret it."

Conservative-leaning journalists tended to greater generosity. Ann Stewart Banker, a producer for Bill O'Reilly at Fox News Channel, gave $5,000 to Republicans. Financial columnist Liz Peek at The New York Sun gave $90,000 to the Grand Old Party.

A few journalists let their enthusiasm extend beyond the checkbook. A Fox TV reporter in Omaha, Calvert Collins, posted a photo on Facebook.com with her cozying up to a Democratic candidate for Congress. She urged her friends, "Vote for him Tuesday, Nov. 7!" She also gave him $500. She said she was just trying to build rapport with the candidates. (And what builds rapport more effectively than $500 and a strapless gown?)

'You call that a campaign contribution?'

Sometimes a donation isn't a donation, at least in the eye of the donor.

"I don't make campaign contributions," said Jean A. Briggs, who gave a total of $2,000 to the Republican Party and Republican candidates, most recently this March. "I'm the assistant managing editor of Forbes magazine."

When asked about the Republican National Committee donations, she replied, "You call that a campaign contribution? It's not putting money into anyone's campaign."

(For the record: The RNC gave $25 million to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004.)

A spokeswoman for Forbes said the magazine allows contributions.

Briggs also is listed as a board member of the Property and Environment Research Center, which advocates "market solutions to environmental problems." PERC has received funding from ExxonMobil, and tries to get the industry's views into textbooks and the media. The organization's Web site says, "She exposes fellow New York journalists to PERC ideas and also brings a journalistic perspective to PERC's board. As a board member, she seeks to help spread the word about PERC's thorough research and fresh ideas."

Americans don't trust the news or newspeople as much as they used to. The crisis of faith is traced by the surveys of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. More than seven in 10 (72 percent) say news organizations tend to favor one side, the highest level of skepticism in the poll's 20-year history. Despite the popularity of Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann, two-thirds of those polled say they prefer to get news from sources without a particular point of view.

`My readers know my views'

George Packer is The New Yorker's man in Iraq.

The war correspondent for the magazine since 2003 and author of the acclaimed 2005 book "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq," Packer gave $750 to the Democratic National Committee in August 2004, and then $250 in 2005 to Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett, an anti-war Democrat who campaigned unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress from Ohio.

In addition to his reported pieces, Packer also writes commentary for the magazine, such as his June 11 piece ruing Bush's "shallow, unreflective character."

"My readers know my views on politics and politicians because I make no secret of them in my comments for The New Yorker and elsewhere," Packer said. "If giving money to a politician prejudiced my ability to think and write honestly, I wouldn't do it. Fortunately, it doesn't."

There are more who gave Not every donor is identified There appear to be far more than 144 donating journalists, but MSNBC.com limited its search to: — Federal candidates, PACs and parties in the records of the Federal Election Commission, not the separate state campaign records. — The period January 2004 through the first quarter of this year. — Donors in news jobs, not corporate executives or publishers, who are allowed by nearly every news organization to donate. Campaigns are spotty about reporting the occupation and employer of donors. The law requires only that campaigns make a good-faith effort to request the information from donors. Our first search of the records used job titles: "editor," "anchor" and so on. Because often no job title is reported, we also searched using the names of news companies. Smaller companies were not checked; for example, we checked only the company names of the 200 largest newspapers, out of more than 1,400 dailies in the nation. Small donations may not be in the records. Many candidates report only donations of $200 or more. Reporting of smaller donations is optional but is becoming more common with electronic filing of campaign reports to the FEC. Then, with a list of about 300 apparent journalists, we tried to contact them all. The list published here includes only those who either confirmed that they made the donation or did not respond. Many journalists who changed jobs since the donations were not contacted and are not included here. The final list represents a tiny percentage of the working journalists in the nation. Daily newspapers alone employ about 60,000 full-time journalists. Approximately 30,000 work in television news jobs and 10,000 in radio news. Click here to see the full list of donors and what they had to say.

His colleague Judith Thurman wrote the New Yorker's sympathetic profile of Teresa Heinz Kerry, published on Sept. 27, 2004. Ten days later, the Democratic National Committee recorded Thurman's donation of $1,000. She did not return phone calls.

Their editor, Remnick, said that the magazine's writers don't do straight reporting. "Their opinions are out there," Remnick said. "There's nothing hidden." So why not disclose campaign donations to readers? "Should every newspaper reporter divulge who they vote for?"

Besides, there's the magazine's famously rigorous editing. The last bulwark against bias slipping into The New Yorker is the copy department, whose chief editor, Ann Goldstein, gave $500 in October to MoveOn.org, which campaigns for Democrats and against President Bush. "That's just me as a private citizen," she said. As for whether donations are allowed, Goldstein said she hadn't considered it. "I've never thought of myself as working for a news organization."

Embedded in Iraq, giving to Kerry

Guy Raz does work for a news organization.

As the Jerusalem correspondent for CNN, he was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq in June 2004, when he gave $500 to John Kerry.

He didn't supply his occupation or employer to the Kerry campaign, so his donation is listed in federal records with only his name and London address. Now he covers the Pentagon for NPR. Both CNN and NPR forbid political activity.

"I covered international news and European Union stories. I did not cover U.S. news or politics," Raz said in an e-mail to MSNBC.com. When asked how one could define U.S. news so it excludes the U.S. war in Iraq, Raz didn't reply.

Margot Patterson not only covered the war and gave money to stop it — she also signed a petition against it.

Covering the war, opposing the war

Patterson has covered the Iraq war and anti-war movements for the National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly newspaper in Kansas City.

She gave to anti-war Democrats: $2,100 to Sen. Claire McCaskill, $1,000 to Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, $250 to Howard Dean and $800 to the Democratic Party.

And she signed a petition and paid to have it published as "KC Metro Citizens Oppose War On Iraq!"

Patterson said the danger isn't the journalist who reveals a bias by making a campaign contribution, but journalists who quietly hold to their biases.

"I feel my responsibility as a journalist is to be fair to the people and issues involved and to be as accurate as possible," she said. "When I see my country embark on a course of action that I think disastrous to its future and fatal to its citizens, I think it my duty to do my utmost to stop it."

She didn't disclose her political activities to her readers, or her editor, Tom Roberts. He said he wasn't sure about campaign contributions, but "a reporter signing a petition crosses the line to activism."

'The Ethicist'

At this point, we need a journalism ethicist. How about Orville Schell? He favorably reviewed Eric Alterman's book "What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News." And this Feb. 9, while he was still dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, Schell gave $1,000 to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Or we could ask Randy Cohen, who writes the syndicated column "The Ethicist" for The New York Times. The former comedy writer gave $585 to MoveOn.org in 2004 when it was organizing get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bush. Cohen said he understands the Times policy and won't make donations again, but he had thought of MoveOn.org as no more out of bounds than the Boy Scouts.

"We admire those colleagues who participate in their communities — help out at the local school, work with Little League, donate to charity," Cohen said in an e-mail. "But no such activity is or can be non-ideological. Few papers would object to a journalist donating to the Boy Scouts or joining the Catholic Church. But the former has an official policy of discriminating against gay children; the latter has views on reproductive rights far more restrictive than those of most Americans. Should reporters be forbidden to support those groups? I'd say not." (Update: The newspaper in Spokane, Wash., The Spokesman-Review, decided on Thursday to drop Cohen's column, which had been scheduled to begin running in the paper on Saturday, because of his donation. The editor explains that if Cohen had been employed by the paper when he made the donation to MoveOn.org, he would have been suspended, at least.)

Tom Rosenstiel hasn't given anyone a dime. The former media critic for The Los Angeles Times and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, he co-wrote the classic book "The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect."

Journalists have sometimes gone too far, Rosenstiel said, in withdrawing from civic life. "Is it a conflict of interest for the food editor to be the president of the PTA? Probably not," he said. "You don't want to make your journalists be zoo animals."

Planet Journalism

But giving money to a candidate or party, he said, goes a big step beyond voting. "If you give money to a candidate, you are then rooting for that candidate. You've made an investment in that candidate. It can make it more difficult for someone to tell the news without fear or favor.

"The second reason," Rosenstiel said, "it would create — even if you thought you could make that intellectual leap and not let your personal allegiance interfere with your professionalism — it creates an appearance of a conflict of interest. For journalists, that's a real conflict.

"Giving money, you're not doing the profession of journalism any good. All of the ethics of journalism are about trust. They don't come from Planet Journalism. They come from the street."

Rosenstiel said that even opinion journalists, such as columnists and arts critics, should not make donations, because there's a difference between having opinions and being captive of a particular party or faction. Major newspapers, he said, have mostly gotten the message. You won't find any journalists in the recent FEC records from The Washington Post, where executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. is so famously politically agnostic that he doesn't vote, though he doesn't prohibit his reporters from doing so. At least, you'll find no Post journalists other than Stephen Hunter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, who gave to the Republican Party in 2004. (The film critic at The New York Times, Manohla Dargis, gave to Democrats when she was at the L.A. Times. She finds Michael Moore's new film "persuasive.")

Is it legal for companies to restrict donations? After all, the U.S. Supreme Court has classified campaign contributions as a form of speech. In the best-known case, in a state court, the News Tribune newspaper in Tacoma, Wash., reassigned to the night copy desk its education reporter, socialist and gay-rights activist Sandy Nelson, after she helped launch a ballot initiative for a nondiscrimination ordinance. In its 1997 decision (Nelson v. McClatchy Newspapers), the Washington state Supreme Court said the newspaper can enforce conflict-of-interest codes to preserve "the appearance of objectivity." The reporter's right to free speech, the court wrote, was trumped by the newspaper's right to freedom of the press, to control its own news operations.

The San Francisco Chronicle transferred the editor who handled letters to the editor, William Pates, after his donations to Kerry were disclosed by a Web site in 2004. The Newspaper Guild objected, and after a time on the sports copy desk, he's back in charge of deciding which letters get published.

Networks of influence

Fox News Channel is alone among the four major TV networks in placing no restrictions on campaign contributions. But there were surprises in the records for those who think everyone at Fox is a Republican. Researcher Codie Brooks, of Brit Hume's "Special Report," gave $2,600 last year to the Senate campaign of Harold Ford Jr., the Memphis Democrat. She said she raised much of the money from friends. "A lot of Fox employees have contributed to Democratic candidates," she said. "I know I'm not the only one."

At the Fox station in Washington, WTTG, anchor Laura Evans gave $500 in August to Democrat John Sarbanes, who was elected to the House from suburban Maryland. She initially told MSNBC.com that the donation was made by her husband, lobbyist Mike Manatos.

But the records show that her husband had already given the legal limit to Sarbanes. When asked about those records in a follow-up interview, she said, "I hadn't talked to my husband. He reminded me that he had actually talked to me about this, because he had maxed out, could we write a check in my name. I said, sure. Now I remember having this conversation. It's within Fox policy, it was OK for me to do it."

Evans has also taken stands in line with Rep. Sarbanes' votes opposing President Bush's troop buildup in Iraq. On her blog on WTTG's Web site, she commented recently on the congressional debate: "Everyone's trying to save face here ... all the while people are dying. Didn't voters in November speak loud and clear, saying they're tired of the fighting and want an end in sight?"

At ABC News, "Primetime" correspondent Mary Fulginiti gave $500 this February to Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential candidate. The legal correspondent had been a white-collar defense attorney until she joined ABC in November. She said the donation "is not a reflection of my political views," although she had given regularly to Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. "Look, I've made a mistake here," she said. "I'm a legal analyst — this is all new to me. I have been politically active in the past. This is when I was just starting out at ABC. I was still thinking as a lawyer."

At NBC News, which says donations require approval of the senior editor, “Dateline” correspondent Victoria Corderi gave $250 in 2005 to Democratic Senate candidate Josh Rales in Maryland. "In a word, yikes!" she said when asked about the donation. Her husband wrote the check, she explained, when a friend threw a fundraising party. "I'd not even thought to consider that since my name is on our checks that I would appear in public records as a contributor."

MSNBC TV host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican member of Congress from Florida, gave to a Republican congressional candidate from Oregon last year. In addition to anchoring an evening newscast, "Scarborough Country," and a morning talk show on MSNBC, he provides political commentary for MSNBC, CNBC and NBC's "Today Show."

At CBS News, "Sunday Morning" correspondent Serena Altschul gave $5,000 to the Democratic Party in 2004. And producer Edward Forgotson gave $1,000 to Patrick Kennedy last June, two weeks after the Rhode Island congressman pleaded guilty to driving under the influence. Until September, the CBS policy discouraged, but allowed, contributions; now it forbids them, a spokeswoman said.

An ABC anchor in Wichita, Susan Peters, gave $600 to America Coming Together. At the CBS station in Memphis, anchor Markova Reed gave to a Democratic House candidate. And in Boston, host and former anchor Liz Walker gave $4,000 to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats; the station said this was allowed, because at the time she was hosting a public affairs show. Now that she's back doing news segments, she can't donate.

At the Fox TV station in Omaha, reporter Calvert Collins learned that there's no such thing as a private, personal donation. And there's no such thing as a personal page on Facebook, either.

`Vote for him Tuesday, Nov. 7!'

Collins, a 23-year-old reporter for Fox station KPTM in Omaha, said that her father actually wrote the check for $500 to Jim Esch, the Democrat who lost a House race last fall.

"I had told my dad that I was friends with this man. He said, 'Would you like me to make a donation?' I said, 'That's up to you, but don't do it in my name.'"

The reporter also posted a photo of herself with Esch on her Facebook page, with the note, "Vote for him Tuesday, Nov. 7!" After the photo was posted on a Nebraska political blog, she apologized but explained that "it is part of my job to build rapport with candidates and incumbents during election season."

"I foolishly wrote, in jest, to vote for him, and forgot completely that that was on there," Collins told MSNBC.com. "When my boss heard about it, I immediately removed it."

"In a way, I'm glad this happened to me at age 23, and not 33," Collins said, "and I will learn from it." (Update: TV reporter who supported candidate is out.)

If you don't trust the mainstream media, perhaps you prefer to get your news from, say, MTV News.

The concept of staying off the field of battle was a completely new one to MTV's "Choose or Lose" presidential campaign correspondent in 2000 and 2004. Gideon Yago, whose first appearance on MTV was on the game show "Idiot Savants," gave $200 to Wesley Clark's 2004 presidential campaign, $500 to the Democratic Party, and $500 to America Coming Together. MTV advertised his reports as unbiased.

"I don't understand. Things that I do as a private citizen?" Yago asked. " I mean, what the f---, man?"

Yago said he always tried to be fair. "We're not a traditional news network in the sense of NBC or Fox or CBS," he said.

He said his reporting in Iraq for MTV prompted him to give $250 to VoteVets, which is running ads criticizing President Bush's handling of Iraq. "After my second trip to Iraq in 2004, I felt the conventional news media was not doing a good enough job of conveying the horrors and the failures of the war in Iraq," Yago said. "I was never told by my boss or anyone that we couldn't give to a campaign."

`People I don't like'

Although donations are banned for journalists at Dow Jones — if they would be considered newsworthy, the policy says — several staffers at The Wall Street Journal made donations. Senior special writer Henny Sender said she was just back from Asia and didn't know the Journal's rules when she gave $300 to Kerry in 2004. The editor of the Weekend Journal, Eben Shapiro, gave $1,000 to Democratic Victory 2004. He said the donation was actually the purchase of art at a fundraiser, and when he was reminded of the paper's policy, he got a refund. Credit markets editor Billy Mallard at Dow Jones Newswires gave $200 to MoveOn.org in October and said he "thought MoveOn.org was OK because it wasn't the Republican Party or Democratic Party." Once MSNBC.com called, Mallard said, he realized that it was a partisan group and asked for a refund.

The tally of donors doesn't include a group that gave money to defeat President Bush by paying to hear the Boss. In 2004, Bruce Springsteen and other musicians raised money for MoveOn.org and America Coming Together at a series of 34 concerts billed as "Vote for Change." The ticket buyers included an MSNBC.com producer and more than 20 other journalists. Although all of the purchase price went to the effort to defeat Bush that fall, the intent may have been entirely musical, so those donors are not on our list unless they made other contributions.

One of the Springsteen fans appears to be a blogging editor at Dow Jones, Samuel J. Favate Jr., who gave $1,036 to America Coming Together in 2004. He didn't return phone calls. Favate rewrites press releases for Dow Jones Newswires in New Jersey, which may explain his views that corporate America is "really in charge." On his personal blog, Favate rails against the Iraq war, for gun control and for a tax audit of Christian psychologist James Dobson. After MSNBC.com left him a message asking about the blog and his donation, Favate's name disappeared from the blog. A previous blog listed Favate's "people I don't like," starting with George Bush. ("You can be sure that I will be adding to this list from time to time, so try not to piss me off.") That blog went dark the day after MSNBC.com called.

Make your own list How to look up campaign contributions You don't have to be Bob Woodward to find political donors on the Internet. You can search the official records at the Federal Election Commission site or use private sites such as this one, which sometimes allow more flexible searching for occupations and employers. Try all forms of an employer name, such as "The Oregonian" and "Oregonian." Try occupation words such as "reporter" or "producer." But beware that not all the people listed under a news company's name are in the news departments. And campaigns sometimes report incorrect information. Candidates are required to try to report occupations and employers. They're not required to get it right. MSNBC.com found several journalists who were listed for contributions they didn't make. — The chief military correspondent for The New York Times, Michael R. Gordon, didn't really give $2,000 to Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. The money came from Michael L. Gordon, an investment adviser. The campaign apparently just searched the Web for the donor's name and reported the first occupation it found. (An amended report has been filed, but the false information may live forever on the Internet.) — Reporter Richard Roesler of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., did not give to a candidate in Pennsylvania. — New York Times business writer Geraldine Fabrikant said that half of a contribution to Rudy Giuliani by her husband, intended for him and his business partner, was wrongly attributed to her. — Fraser Smith, the news director at WYPR radio in Baltimore, didn't give to the Democratic Party. — Longtime TV political reporter Mark Davis in Hartford said he did not support any congressional candidates. — And political reporter Virginia Nuckols at The Virginian-Pilot reimbursed the Republican Party of Virginia for a train trip — she didn't donate.

Dow Jones spokesman Howard Hoffman said it doesn't monitor employee blogs, "and we're not overly concerned about what Sam did or didn't do on his blog exercising his free-speech rights."

On the job at Newsday, which forbids donations, section designer and artist Rita Hall tried to slip an anti-Bush line into a personal column she wrote. Hall gave $210 to Hillary Clinton in March 2006. "Dig deeper," she said. "I gave $2,000 to Kerry. I'm not allowed to do this. I know it's against the rules. I'll probably get fired. They're looking for any excuse to cut staff here."

Hall said she wrote a column about her son, who won the "Top Chef" competition on the Bravo network. "In passing I mentioned that I was interested in finding people who hated Bush as much as I did. They took that out. My view is: You're still going to have an opinion whether you admit to it or not. If you don't admit to it, you're being dishonest. Let's be transparent."

Hall didn't disclose her donations to her editors — or the readers of Newsday.

The new bumper sticker

Several of the journalists reasoned that their activism is acceptable precisely because the public would not know — unless they go to the trouble to search the FEC records.

"A lot of us want to be politically active. But marching in a war protest isn't an option, being a recognizable person, so we give with our checkbook," said Alix Kendall, the morning anchor for Fox station KMSP in Minneapolis, who gave $250 in September to the Midwest Values PAC, which passed the money on to Democratic candidates. "I don't think that working for a news organization I give up my rights. I interview plenty of people that I don't agree with, but I also ask questions to get the other side."

Senior editors, who every day are accused of a bias one way or another, may be more sensitive to appearances. Several editors said they are thinking of tightening their policies, lest they keep handing ammunition to critics.

At the Muskegon Chronicle, a daily newspaper in Michigan, reporter Terry Judd gave $1,900 to the Democratic National Committee in six contributions from 2004 through 2006; and $2,000 to Kerry in March 2004. "You caught me," Judd said. "I guess I was just doing it on the side."

His editors said they're not sure there is an "on the side."

"This information makes us want to think farther and more deeply about what we encourage and discourage in reporters," said the metropolitan editor, John Stephenson. "We have always historically said, you guys can have any political beliefs you want. Just don't wear your hearts on your sleeve or your bumper.

"Truthfully, this sort of thing may be the new bumper."

Correction: One of the names was included in error in the list of newspeople who contributed to political campaigns ("The list: Journalists who wrote political checks") on June 21. Joe Cline, a graphic artist at The San Diego Union-Tribune, is in the advertising department, not in news. His name has been removed. Because Cline had given to Republicans, the adjusted tally is 143 journalists: 125 giving to Democrats and liberal causes, 16 to Republicans, and two to both parties.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-May-30, by John Fund:

The Obama Gaffe Machine

For months, Barack Obama has had the image of an incandescent, golden-tongued Wundercandidate. That image may be fraying now.

As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him "a one-man gaffe machine."

Take the Auschwitz flub, where Mr. Obama erroneously claimed last weekend in New Mexico that his uncle helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp. Reporters noted Mr. Obama's revised claim, that it was his great uncle who helped liberate Buchenwald. They largely downplayed the error. Yet in another, earlier gaffe back in 2002, Mr. Obama claimed his grandfather knew U.S. troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka – even though only Russian troops entered those concentration camps.

That hardly disqualifies Mr. Obama from being president. But you can bet that if Hillary Clinton had done the same thing it would have been the focus of much more attention, especially after her Bosnia sniper-fire fib. That's because gaffes are often blown up or downplayed based on whether or not they further a story line the media has attached to a politician.

When John McCain claimed, while on a trip to Iraq in March, that Sunni (as opposed to Shiite) militants in Iraq are being supported by Iran, coverage of the alleged blunder tracked Democratic attacks on his age and stamina. (In fact, Iran may well be supplying both Sunni and Shiite militants.) Dan Quayle, tagged with a reputation as a dumb blond male, never lived down his misspelling of "potatoe."

Mr. Obama, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, has largely been given a pass for his gaffes. Many are trivial, such as his suggestion this month that America has 57 states, and his bizarre statement in a Memorial Day speech in New Mexico that America's "fallen heroes" were present and listening to him in the audience.

Some gaffes involve mangling his family history. Last year in Selma, Ala., for example, he said that his birth was inspired by events there which took place four years after he was born. While this gaffe can be chalked up to fatigue or cloudy memory, others are more substantive – such as his denial last April that it was his handwriting on a questionnaire in which, as a state senate candidate, he favored a ban on handguns. His campaign now contends that, even if it was his handwriting, this doesn't prove he read the full questionnaire.

Mr. Obama told a Portland, Ore., crowd this month that Iran doesn't "pose a serious threat to us," saying that "tiny countries" with small defense budgets aren't much to worry about. But Iran has almost one-fourth the population of the U.S. and is well on its way to developing nuclear weapons. The next day Mr. Obama had to reverse himself and declare he had "made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave."

Last week in Orlando, Fla., he said he would meet with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez to discuss, among other issues, Chávez's support of the Marxist FARC guerrillas in Colombia. The next day, in Miami, he insisted any country supporting the FARC should suffer "regional isolation." Obama advisers were left explaining how this circle could be squared.

In a debate last July, Mr. Obama pledged to meet, without precondition, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba. He called President Bush's refusal to meet with them "ridiculous" and a "disgrace."

Heavily criticized, Mr. Obama dug in rather than backtrack. He's claimed, in defense of his position, that John F. Kennedy's 1961 summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna was a crucial meeting that led to the end of the Cold War.

Not quite. Kennedy himself admitted he was unprepared for Khrushchev's bullying. "He beat the hell out of me," Kennedy confided to advisers. The Soviet leader reported to his Politburo that the American president was weak. Two months later, the Berlin Wall was erected and stood for 28 years.

Reporters may now give Mr. Obama's many gaffes more notice. But don't count on them correcting an implicit bias in writing about such faux pas.

Over the years, reporters have tagged a long list of conservative public figures, from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, as dim and uninformed. The reputation of some of these men has improved over time. But can anyone name a leading liberal figure who has developed a similar media reputation, even though the likes of Al Gore, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have committed substantial gaffes at times? No reporter I've talked to has come up with a solid example.

It's clear some gaffes are considered more newsworthy than others. But it would behoove the media to check their premises when deciding just how much attention to pay to them. The best guideline might be: Show some restraint and judgment, but report them all.

from the Los Angeles Times Top of the Ticket blog, 2008-Jul-24, by Andrew Malcolm:

Barack Obama not so sure what Senate committee he's on

Maybe it's simple fatigue from the grueling pace of campaigning for American votes in the United States for 18 months and then campaigning for American votes all over the Middle East and Europe for nearly a week. He might need four years to rest up.

Or maybe it's simply Barack Obama's advancing age. After age 28, you know, the body and mind start to go. And in only 13 years Obama will be 60. And endured two teenage girls.

The freshman Illinois senator slipped up again Wednesday on his foreign field trip. In a news conference answering a local reporter's question about what he'd done to protect Israel's security, Obama cited a bill "we passed" just last week tightening sanctions against Iran in the Senate Banking Committee -- "my committee."

Of course, everyone but Obama knows that isn't Obama's committee. If Obama was the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, he would have been getting preferential loan interest rates from Countrywide Financial like the real banking committee chairman, Sen. Chris Dodd, who has endorsed Obama, who isn't even on that committee. (See the video below.) [view here. -AMPP Ed.]

Some blogs like WakeUpAmerica and HotAir interpreted Obama's misstatement as intentional attempts to overstate his efforts. That would indeed be shocking in the middle of a political campaign.

This is the whole Obama news conference quote: “Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee -- which is my committee -- a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon.” Frankly, he certainly doesn't sound very uncertain there about who did what.

This gaffe follows one in Oregon back in May when Obama said he'd visited 57 states with one more to go. That was the same day he suggested a recent typhoon might have killed 100 million people in Burma, which he later corrected to 100,000. Previously, he talked about conferring with the president of Canada, which doesn't have one.

And then in May the Illinois senator bounced onto the stage before an enthusiastic crowd at a Midwestern primary rally and exclaimed, "Thank you, Sioux City!" The crowd fell silent because all these years those people thought they'd been living in Sioux Falls, which is in South Dakota, not Iowa. Obama realized his mistake and corrected himself. And everyone was relieved.

Marc Ambinder, the political blogger at TheAtlantic.com, wondered online then if the very same serial gaffes would be so quickly and easily dismissed as quite obviously and simply fatigue-related had they been made by an older candidate, say, someone in their 70s in a different political party. Or would they ignite suspicions of senility? It's a good question.

Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic ex-Senator Sam Nunn keep talking about Czechoslovakia, which disappeared as a country 15 years ago. And Hillary Clinton often told a now-famous tale, later also blamed on fatigue, about undergoing sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia, which had been filmed and showed no such thing. McCain is 71. Nunn is 69. Clinton is 60.

Fortunately, these folks have staff who can scurry around after the stumble and straighten things out. Obama's office late Wednesday offered that the senator had meant to say, "my legislation." Nice try.

The country can only hope that when that 3 a.m. call comes in the White House next year, it doesn't concern Czechoslovakia or Obama isn't too tired.

from the New York Times, 2008-Jul-15, by Bill Carter, with Richard Pérez-Peña and Jeff Zeleny contributing reporting:

Want Obama in a Punch Line? First, Find a Joke

What's so funny about Barack Obama? Apparently not very much, at least not yet.

On Monday, The New Yorker magazine tried dipping its toe into broad satire involving Senator Obama with a cover image depicting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and his wife, Michelle, as fist-bumping, flag-burning, bin Laden-loving terrorists in the Oval Office. The response from both Democrats and Republicans was explosive.

Comedy has been no easier for the phalanx of late-night television hosts who depend on skewering political leaders for a healthy quotient of their nightly monologues. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and others have delivered a nightly stream of jokes about the Republican running for president — each one a variant on the same theme: John McCain is old.

But there has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.

“We're doing jokes about people in his orbit, not really about him,” said Mike Sweeney, the head writer for Mr. O'Brien on “Late Night.” The jokes will come, representatives of the late-night shows said, when Mr. Obama does or says something that defines him — in comedy terms.

“We're carrion birds,” said Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on the Comedy Central channel. “We're sitting up there saying `Does he seem weak? Is he dehydrated yet? Let's attack.' ”

But so far, no true punch lines have landed.

Why? The reason cited by most of those involved in the shows is that a fundamental factor is so far missing in Mr. Obama: There is no comedic “take” on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh, like allegations of Bill Clinton's womanizing, or President Bush's goofy bumbling or Al Gore's robotic persona.

“The thing is, he's not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson's monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman. “He's not a comical figure,” Mr. Barry said.

Jokes have been made about what Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton really thought about Mr. Obama during the primaries, and about the vulgar comments the Rev. Jesse Jackson made about him last week. But anything approaching a joke about Mr. Obama himself has fallen flat.

When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you're allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”

Despite audience resistance, Mr. Stewart contended, his show had been able to develop a distinctive angle on Mr. Obama.

Noting that the senator seems to emphasize the historic nature of his quest, Mr. Stewart said, “So far, our take is that he's positioning himself to be on a coin.”

There is no doubt, several representatives of the late-night shows said, that so far their audiences (and at least some of the shows' writers) seem to be favorably disposed toward Mr. Obama, to a degree that perhaps leaves them more resistant to jokes about him than those about most previous candidates.

“A lot of people are excited about his candidacy,” Mr. Sweeney said. “It's almost like: `Hey, don't go after this guy. He's a fresh face; cut him some slack.' ”

Justin Stangel, who is a head writer for “Late Show With David Letterman,” disputed that, saying, “We always have to make jokes about everybody. We're not trying to lay off the new guy.”

But Mr. Barry said, “I think some of us were maybe too quick to caricature Al Gore and John Kerry and there's maybe some reluctance to do the same thing to him.”

Of course, the question of race is also mentioned as one reason Mr. Obama has proved to be so elusive a target for satire.

“Anything that has even a whiff of being racist, no one is going to laugh,” said Rob Burnett, an executive producer for Mr. Letterman. “The audience is not going to allow anyone to do that.”

The New Yorker faced a different kind of hostility with its cover this week, which the Obama campaign criticized harshly. A campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement that “most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive — and we agree.”

Asked about the cover at a news conference Monday, Mr. McCain said he thought it was “totally inappropriate, and frankly I understand if Senator Obama and his supporters would find it offensive.”

The cover was drawn by Barry Blitt, who also contributes illustrations to The New York Times's Op-Ed page. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said in an e-mail message, “The cover takes a lot of distortions, lies, and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are.

“It's a lot like the spirit of what Stephen Colbert does — by exaggerating and mocking something, he shows its absurdity, and that is what satire is all about,” Mr. Remnick continued.

Mr. Colbert said in a telephone interview that a running joke on his show has been that Mr. Obama is a “secret Muslim”; the New Yorker cover, he said, was consistent with that. “It's a completely valid satirical point to make — and it's perfectly valid for Obama not to like it,” he said.

Mr. Colbert said he had been freer to poke fun at Mr. Obama than other late-night hosts because “my character on the show doesn't like him. I'm expected to be hostile to him.”

Mr. Stewart, who is also an executive producer of “The Colbert Report,” said the Obama campaign's reaction to the New Yorker cover seemed part of what is now almost a pro forma cycle in political campaigns. “Nothing can occur without the candidate responding,” he said.

Bill Maher, who is host of a politically oriented late-night show on HBO, said, “If you can't do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you do it?”

One issue that clearly has some impact on writing jokes about Mr. Obama is a consistency among the big late-night shows. Not only are all the hosts white, the vast majority of their audiences are white. “I think white audiences get a little self-conscious if race comes up,” Mr. Sweeney of Mr. O'Brien's show said.

Things might be somewhat different if even one late-night host was black. Black comics are not having any trouble joking about Mr. Obama, said David Alan Grier, a comedian who, starting in October, will have a satirical news magazine show on Comedy Central, “Chocolate News.”

“I tell jokes on stage about him,” Mr. Grier said, reciting a few that would not ever get onto a network late-night show (nor into this newspaper).

But he said of the late-night hosts, “Those guys really can't go there. It's just like the gay comic can do gay material. It comes with the territory.” Still, he said, he has no sympathy for the hosts. “No way. They've had 200 years of presidential jokes. It's our time.”

Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the ABC late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” said of Mr. Obama, “There's a weird reverse racism going on. You can't joke about him because he's half-white. It's silly. I think it's more a problem because he's so polished, he doesn't seem to have any flaws.”

Mr. Maher said that being sensitive to Mr. Obama was in no way interfering with his commentary, though on HBO he has more freedom about content than other comedians. “There's been this question about whether he's black enough,” Mr. Maher said. “I have this joke: What does he have to do? Dunk? He bowled a 37 — to me, that's black enough.”

Mr. Kimmel said, “His ears should be the focus of the jokes.”

Mostly the late-night shows seem to be in a similar position.

Mr. Burnett of the Letterman show said, “We can't manufacture a perception. If the perception isn't true, no one will laugh at it.”

Mr. Sweeney said, “We're hoping he picks an idiot as vice president.”

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jul-22, by William Mcgurn:

Humanizing al Qaeda, Demonizing the Bush Team

David Addington and Omar Khadr are two names that will forever be linked to the war on terror.

Mr. Addington is chief of staff to Vice President Richard Cheney and a former colleague of mine. He's the son of a West Point man who earned a bronze star in World War II and went on to become a general. Before coming to the White House, David put in stints at the CIA, at a congressional intelligence committee, and at the Pentagon -- all giving him an expertise on intelligence and national security issues only a handful of others can match.

Then there's Mr. Khadr. He is the son of a man who helped found and finance al Qaeda, and who died in a 2003 gun battle with Pakistani troops near the Afghan border.

So close were the family ties that the Khadrs lived for a while in the bin Laden family compound in Jalalabad, Afghanistan; and when Mr. Khadr's sister was married, bin Laden was an honored guest. Mr. Khadr himself went through weapons training at an al Qaeda training camp, and was captured in 2002 after a battle in which he is alleged to have killed a Special Forces medic. Ultimately he was brought to Guantanamo, where he awaits trial before a military commission for war crimes.

Guess who gets the sympathy in the press?

A few days ago, Mr. Khadr's attorneys released a videotape from February 2003 of their client being questioned by visiting Canadian officials. At first he was hopeful, but he quickly became sullen and withdrawn when he realized the Canadians were not going to get him out. The tape shows the young man, then 16, crying for his mother, and complaining about treatment for the wounds he suffered while fighting alongside al Qaeda.

The response has been illuminating. The Montreal Gazette calls him "a victim," "not a villain." Closer to home, our headlines run along the lines of "Tape shows 'frightened boy,'" "Teen on video: 'Help me, help me'" or "Teenage detainee pleads for help, tells of torture on video; Rights group seeks immediate release." About the only one willing to say anything unpleasant about Mr. Khadr is the soldier who lost an eye in the same firefight in which Mr. Khadr is alleged to have thrown the grenade that killed Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer.

It would be easy to denounce the treatment of David Addington and Omar Khadr as an example of moral equivalence. But moral equivalence would be a step up for David.

While the operative for al Qaeda is humanized, the counsel for the vice president is demonized. Such is the temper of the times that Rep. William Delahunt (D., Mass.) felt free to joke during recent hearings that he was sure al Qaeda was watching -- and was "glad they finally have the chance to see you."

And so it goes. Reasonable people can disagree with David, and many did. But the aim here is not reasonable debate. The aim is to close debate by shouting accusations so often that they become accepted.

Thus memos that are mostly about a commander-in-chief's legal authority are now routinely described as "torture memos." Thus the drumbeat for hearings on "war crimes." And thus the Washington Post column on David's congressional testimony, where he is described "hunched" and said to have "barked," "growled" and "snarled" -- language you would use to describe an animal.

For these purposes, David makes a convenient villain. For one thing, outside the Beltway he is relatively unknown, which feeds the aura of conspiracy; one documentary presented his photo as though it were a rare shot of the Yeti.

More to the point, David does not leak to the press, in sharp contrast to many of his adversaries. I am thinking in particular of the "former high-ranking administration lawyer" who figures so prominently (and so anonymously) in the New Yorker profile that did so much to cast David as some sort of cartoon.

In his own book, Jack Goldsmith -- former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and perhaps David's greatest critic -- put it this way: "Our sharp disagreement over the requirements of national security law and the meaning of the imponderable phrases of the U.S. Constitution was not a fight between one who loves the Constitution and one who wants to shred it." Mr. Goldsmith went on to say that "whether and how aggressively to check the terrorist threat, and whether and how far to push the law in so doing, are rarely obvious" -- and that for all their fights, David is a man is who acted "in good faith" to serve his country.

It's a tribute to our society that even amid a terrible war we are capable of seeing the humanity of an enemy raised and trained to hate and kill us. Some of us are still waiting for that same presumption of humanity to be extended to the good men and women doing their imperfect best to keep us safe.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Aug-9, by Brian S. Wesbury:

Fair but Unbalanced
How the media promote false pessimism about the economy.

Not that it needed any help, but the already energized debate about journalistic bias was electrified when Rupert Murdoch, owner of the "fair and balanced" Fox News Channel, struck a deal to buy The Wall Street Journal.

I have no desire to take sides in this debate, or question anyone's integrity, but my role as a business economist gives me a unique view of this subject. I talk frequently with members of the print media, and I am a regular guest on business TV shows. Both venues stress debate and journalistic skepticism. In my view this tendency causes a great deal of confusion.

If one guest or expert is a "bull," then the other must be a "bear," to keep things fair. Or, if there is a single guest on air, the host often takes the other side of the issue in order to keep things balanced. Get some sparks between guests, a little argument here or there, and it's even better for the ratings. The bigger the audience, the better the show, that's the way the advertisers see it. It's basic supply and demand.

But this idea of presenting both sides of an issue, while entertaining, informative and seemingly balanced, may paradoxically create a warped perspective of the economy.

---

For example, the most recent Wall Street Journal economic forecasting survey, from July, shows that 49 out of 60 forecasters expect real GDP to grow at an average annual rate of 2%, or faster, in 2007. Of the remaining 11 forecasters, only two expect growth of less than 1%, and only one expects a recession. For 2008, the forecasters are even more optimistic, with none expecting recession.

There are at least a half-dozen other institutions publishing surveys, and all of them report very similar results among the 100 or so active professional forecasters. Except for two well-known economists (Nouriel Roubini at New York University, and Gary Shilling of A. Gary Shilling & Co.), who are not in many surveys, a super-duper majority of professional forecasting economists believe the economy will continue to expand during the next year and have believed so for the past four or five years.

Despite this, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken in late July found that 68% of Americans thought that the economy either was in recession already, or would experience a recession sometime during the next 12 months. Interestingly, this is not much of a change from the past. This same survey question has been polled at least five times since September 2002. Each time a robust majority of between 65% and 85% of respondents thought a recession either was under way or would occur within the year. Americans have been bearish on the economy for quite some time.

In short, over the past five years, forecasting economists from academia, consulting shops, financial services and industry have a perfect 5-0 record against a random sample of American citizens. It's important to understand that economists are not always right. Some even say that economists were put on earth to make weathermen look good.

In fact, some suggest that the experts don't know what they are talking about. They say that economists make the mistake of looking at aggregate data, for GDP or overall income, which hides serious dislocations for the middle class and those with lower incomes. Those who argue this point believe that unfair foreign competition and unfair distribution of income are leaving many Americans behind.

But this is hard to believe. The economy moderated last year, but the unemployment rate is still just 4.6%, almost a full percentage point below its 20-year average of 5.5%. Since the jobless rate first fell below 5% in December 2005, average hourly earnings have expanded at a 4.1% annualized rate--as good as any year during the late 1990s. And recent research shows that incomes for the bottom fifth of wage earners have risen faster in the past few decades than incomes at the top, hard work is being rewarded more by performance pay, and income volatility is no worse today than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.

Stranger still is a July poll by the American Research Group (ARG) in which 68% of respondents rated their own personal financial situation as "good, very good or excellent." This is a huge improvement from March 2003, when another ARG poll found only 46% of Americans were either "hopeful or happy" about their personal financial situation, while 46% were "worried or angry."

This begs the question: If the actual economic data, the views of professional economists and the self-proclaimed personal financial situation of a majority of Americans have improved this much, why are people so worried about the economy? Why do people assume they are the exception rather than the rule?

One answer is that people gather knowledge about the rest of the economy, the part they cannot see, from watching news. As a result, it could be that the format behind most business journalism skews perceptions and creates pessimism. To be very clear, I am not arguing that business news is purposefully biased. But what seems clear is that in the name of producing an entertaining product, and in an attempt to provide contrasting views, the true consensus of experts is rarely reported.

A randomly selected pairing of economists from The Wall Street Journal forecasting panel would pit two rather optimistic forecasters against each other in debate. But having two economists debate about whether GDP will grow 2.1% this year or 2.4% is downright boring. As a result, the producers of business news spice things up. They arrange for debates between a bullish economist and a bearish economist. And since they can't have Messrs. Roubini and Shilling on every hour of every day, they find equity short-sellers who make a living when things turn down, or political economists who are trying to score points.

---

While this is entertaining, and may bring in eyeballs, which sell commercials, this idea of "fair and balanced" debates leaves an impression that the experts are split 50/50, when in reality it's more like 80/20, or 90/10.

After all, the economy is closing in on six straight years of growth and the stock market is up more than 80% since its bottom in October 2002. It is true that the number of shares sold short on the Nasdaq rose to a record of 9.3 billion last week, but this only equals the number of shares that change hands on the Nasdaq (on average) every 4.9 days. There are way more bulls than bears. It's not a 50/50 world.

But if all the public sees is an endless stream of 50/50 debates, then it is really not that much of a surprise that people think the future is basically a coin toss. And a coin toss, especially in a time of war and terrorism, is not very good odds.

And that's too bad. The global economy may never have been as strong as it is today. The pace of technological achievement has boosted living standards for billions of people, and promises to do even more in the years to come. It's sad, really, that so many people can't enjoy it because they fret so much about the future.

Mr. Wesbury is chief economist for First Trust Portfolios, LP.

from FoxNews.com, 2008-Apr-1, by John R. Lott, Jr.:

The 'Recession' Is a Media Myth

During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn’t realize that the country was in a recession. Although the economy started shrinking in July 2000, most Americans through the entire year thought that the economy was fine.

But over the last half-year, the media and politicians have said we were in a recession even while the economy was still growing.

Gas prices are going up. The economy is slowing. Talk of recession is seemingly everywhere. While the majority of people rate their personal finances positively, consumer confidence in the economy has plunged to a 16-year low, well below what it was during the last year of the Clinton administration when we were in a recession.

A Nexis search on news stories during the three-month period from July 2000 through September 2000 using the keywords “economy recession US” produces 1,388. By contrast, the same search over just the last month finds 3,166. Or, even more telling, take the three months from July through September last year, when the GDP was growing at a phenomenal 4.9 percent. The same type of Google search shows 2,475 news stories.

Over 78 percent more negative news stories discussed a recession when the economy under a Republican was soaring than occurred under a Democrat when the economy was shrinking.

A little perspective on the economy would be helpful. The average unemployment rate during President Clinton was 5.2 percent. The average under President George W. Bush is just slightly below 5.2. The current unemployment rate is4.8 percent, almost half a percentage point lower than these averages.

The average inflation rate under Clinton was 2.6 percent, under Bush it is 2.7 percent. Indeed, one has to go back to the Kennedy administration to find a lower average rate. True the inflation rate over the last year has gone up to 4 percent, but that is still lower than the average inflation rate under all the presidents from Nixon through Bush's father.

Gas prices are indeed up 33 percent over the last year, but to get an average of 4 percent means that lots of other prices must have stayed the same or gone down. On other fronts, seasonally adjusted civilian employment is 650,000 people greater than it was a year ago. Personal income grew at a strong half of one percent in just February.

Despite all that, this last week, Barack Obama proclaimed “As most experts know, our economy is in a recession.” Hillary Clinton made similar staements last fall. Yet, as any economist knows, a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and we haven't even had one single quarter of negative growth reported. The economy slowed down significantly during the end of last year, but that was after a sizzling annual GDP growth rate of 4.9 percent in the third quarter.

Housing has obviously been a big drag on the economy, but many other sectors of the economy, such as exports, have been doing well, some extremely well. For example, aerospace exports increased by over 13 percent last year.

The media's focus on the negative side of everything surely helps explain people's pessimism. In a recent interview Fox's Neil Cavuto claimed this bias “is all part of the media's plan to get a Democrat in the White House.”

Indeed, research has indicated that media bias is real. Kevin Hassett and I looked at 12,620 newspaper and wire service headlines from 1985 through 2004 for stories on the release of official government releasing numbers on the unemployment rate, number of people employed, gross domestic product (GDP), retail sales, and durable goods.

Even after accounting for how well the economy was doing (e.g., what the unemployment rate was and whether it was going up or down), there was still a big difference in how positive or negative the headlines were. Democratic presidents got about 15 percent more positive headlines than Republicans for the same economic news.

Yet, the hysteria created by this coverage can have another cost. It creates pressure for government to “do something,” even if that rush to do something actually ends up hurting the economy. For example, Obama's promises last week “to amend our bankruptcy laws so families aren't forced to stick to the terms of a home loan” will only further drive down the value of mortgage-backed securities, making any unstable financial institutions that hold them even more likely to fail. In the long term, who is going to want to loan money when the contract can be rewritten at a later date?

The news media have generated a lot of fear. Ben Stein has a point when he says “The actual economic conditions are not that bad. I think if we have a recession, if we have a serious recession, a great deal will lie at the media's feet.” Hopefully a little perspective will enter the picture before even more harm is done.

John Lott is the author of Freedomnomics and a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jan-16:

The 'Wacko Vet Myth'

Most journalists consider it bad form to mention the race or ethnicity of a criminal defendant without a compelling reason. But racial and ethnic groups are not the only ones who take offense at such stereotypes. As early as World War I, the American Legion passed a resolution urging reporters "to subordinate whatever slight news value there may be in playing up the ex-service member angle in stories of crime or offense against the peace." In 2006, Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine bemoaned the "wacko-vet myth."

We learned of these complaints from an article in Sunday's New York Times -- a front-page piece that perpetuates that very stereotype. "Clearly, committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans," the paper explained. A platoon of Times reporters "found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war."

The Times didn't try to establish a causal relationship between war service and homicide. It didn't even try to establish a correlation. The 7,000-word article contained no statistics on the size of the veteran population, or on the prevalence of homicide either in the general population or among young men, who are disproportionately represented among active-duty and recently discharged service members.

Various commentators performed their own back-of-the-envelope calculations, including Ralph Peters of the New York Post, who estimates that if the Times figures are accurate, recent war vets are only about one-fifth as likely to be implicated in a homicide as the average 18- to 34-year-old.

The Times acknowledges that this is no scientific study. It says it probably undercounted the number of homicides by war veterans, since it based its count on news reports. It does claim to have found a large increase -- 89% -- in the number of homicides attributed to servicemen or recent vets since October 2001, compared with the previous six-year period.

But there's the real rub. The Times is purporting to test a media stereotype by measuring its prevalence in the media. As a Pentagon spokesman put it, that 89% spike could have resulted form "an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11." Or, to put it more bluntly, the Times hasn't necessarily proved that the stereotype is true -- only that it is a stereotype.

from Iranian Press TV of Tehran, 2008-Jan-13:

US war veterans prone to murder

A newspaper investigation reveals that 'murder' dominates US veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars even after returning home.

The extensive research conducted by New York Times shows over 121 US soldiers have been charged with murder after returning from the front.

According to the report, combat trauma and stress from overseas deployment pave the war for the killings which include shootings, stabbings, bathtub drowning and drunken driving crashes.

The research showed an 89 percent increase -- from 184 cases to 349 -- in the six years following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, adding that three-quarters of the suspects were still in the military at the time of the crimes.

The Paper underscored that neither the Pentagon nor the Justice Department keeps track of killings committed by veterans.

A Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist interviewed by the paper said "the connection between war and crime is unfortunately very ancient."

SBB/RA

from PowerLineBlog.com, 2008-Jan-13, by John H. Hinderaker:

Crazed Veterans Spark Nationwide Crime Wave

That's the theme of a front page article in today's New York Times: "Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles." The article reports on what must have been a major effort by the Times to comb through news reports from across the country, identifying and tabulating instances where servicemen who returned from Iraq or Afghanistan were charged with some form of homicide. The Times summarizes the results of its research:

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.

The Times article goes on just about forever--it is nine pages long on the web--but it consists almost entirely of anecdotes about a handful of the 121 alleged crimes. The stories are indeed sad, and some of the soldiers and veterans involved no doubt did suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Still, the Times' approach is astonishingly unsystematic, especially since the paper takes seriously the idea that the U.S. military may be responsible for the supposed crime wave:

At various times, the question of whether the military shares some blame for these killings gets posed.

When it is not recounting stories of crimes committed by servicemen, always from a point of view sympathetic to the idea that service in a theater of war was a contributing factor--"plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, [Mr. Sepi] often needed alcohol to fall asleep"--the paper waxes pretentious:

Decades of studies on the problems of Vietnam veterans have established links between combat trauma and higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, gun ownership, child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse — and criminality. On a less scientific level, such links have long been known.

“The connection between war and crime is unfortunately very ancient,” said Dr. Shay, the V.A. psychiatrist and author. “The first thing that Odysseus did after he left Troy was to launch a pirate raid on Ismarus. Ending up in trouble with the law has always been a final common pathway for some portion of psychologically injured veterans.”

Now put yourself in the place of a newspaper editor. Suppose you are asked to evaluate whether your paper should run a long article on a nationwide epidemic of murders committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan--a crime wave that, your reporter suggests, constitutes a "cross-country trail of death and heartbreak." Suppose that the reporter who proposes to write the article says it will be a searing indictment of the U.S. military's inadequate attention to post-traumatic stress disorder. Suppose further that you are not a complete idiot.

Given that last assumption, I'm pretty sure your first question will be: "How does the murder rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan compare to the murder rate for young American men generally?" Remarkably, this is a question the New York Times did not think to ask. Or, if the Times asked the question and figured out the answer, the paper preferred not to report it.

As of 2005, the homicide rate for Americans aged 18-24, the cohort into which most soldiers fall, was around 27 per 100,000. (The rate for men in that age range would be much higher, of course, since men commit around 88% of homicides. But since most soldiers are also men, I gave civilians the benefit of the doubt and considered gender a wash.)

Next we need to know how many servicemen have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. A definitive number is no doubt available, but the only hard figure I've seen is that as of last October, moe than 500,000 U.S. Army personnel had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Other sources peg the total number of personnel from all branches of the military who have served in the two theaters much higher, e.g. 750,000, 650,000 as of February 2007, or 1,280,000. For the sake of argument, let's say that 700,000 soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors have returned to the U.S. from service in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do the math: the 121 alleged instances of homicide identified by the Times, out of a population of 700,000, works out to a rate of 17 per 100,000--quite a bit lower than the overall national rate of around 27.

But wait! The national rate of 27 homicides per 100,000 is an annual rate, whereas the Times' 121 alleged crimes were committed over a period of six years. Which means that, as far as the Times' research shows, the rate of homicides committed by military personnel who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan is only a fraction of the homicide rate for other Americans aged 18 to 24. Somehow, the Times managed to publish nine pages of anecdotes about the violence wreaked by returning servicemen without ever mentioning this salient fact.

I've got a suggestion for the editors of the Times: next time, why don't they undertake a research project to identify all murders and other forms of homicide committed (or allegedly committed--no finding of guilt necessary!) by people who are, or recently have been, employed by newspaper companies? They could write a long article in which selected crimes allegedly committed by reporters, editors and typesetters are recounted in detail, accompanied by speculation about whether newspaper employment was a contributing factor in each case. No need to wonder whether reporters, editors and typesetters commit homicide at a rate any different from the rest of the population--a single murder is too many!

Here's another idea: the Times' story on veterans' crimes repeatedly focused on the role of alcoholism, which the paper associated with the stresses of military service. How about a survey that compares alcoholism rates among reporters and soldiers? Just on a hunch, I'll wager a dollar that the alcoholism rate for reporters is higher.

It's bad enough that the New York Times smears our military personnel when they are serving overseas. Can't they at least leave them alone once they return home?

from the Examiner, 2007-Oct-11, by Robert Cox:

Google bans anti-MoveOn.org ads

WASHINGTON - Internet giant Google has banned advertisements critical of MoveOn.org, the far-left advocacy group that caused a national uproar last month when it received preferential treatment from The New York Times for its “General Betray Us” message.

The ads banned by Google were placed by a firm working for Republican Sen. Susan Collins' re-election campaign. Collins is seeking her third term.

Earlier this week, Google told Lance Dutson, president of Maine Coast Designs, that the ads he placed for Collins had been removed and would not be allowed to resume because they violated Google's trademark policy.

Google's Web site states, “Google takes allegations of trademark infringement very seriously and, as a courtesy, we're happy to investigate matters raised by trademark owners.” That suggests Google acted in response to a complaint by MoveOn.org.

The banned advertisements said, “Susan Collins is MoveOn's primary target. Learn how you can help” and “Help Susan Collins stand up to the MoveOn.org money machine.” The ads linked to Collins' campaign Web site with a headline reading “MoveOn.org has made Susan Collins their #1 target.” The Collins Web site claims that MoveOn has contributed $250,000 to her likely Democratic opponent and has run nine ads against her costing nearly $1 million. The Web site also displays MoveOn.org's controversial “General Betray Us” ad.

Two weeks ago, MoveOn was forced to pay an additional $77,508 following media reports that The Times gave the group a substantial discount for the full-page display attacking Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the American forces in Iraq.

The newspaper initially said MoveOn was charged $64,575, the “standby” rate for advocacy groups with full-page, black-and-white displays that can run anytime during a one-week period.

MoveOn, however, had requested Monday, Sept. 10, the first day of Petraeus' testimony before Congress on the U.S. military surge in Iraq. Because the ad ran on the date requested, The Times later acknowledged that it should have charged MoveOn $142,083.

In a column on the controversy, Clark Hoyt, The Times' public editor, concluded that the advertisement violated The Times' own policy against accepting “opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.” President Bush called the advertisement “disgusting.”

Dutson said the Collins campaign's anti-MoveOn ads were intended to raise awareness nationally of how MoveOn and left-wing blogs like Daily Kos and FireDogLake have made the moderate Maine Republican their top 2008 Senate target. The same coalition supported Ned Lamont in the 2006 Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut against Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Lieberman then went on to win re-election as an independent after defeating Lamont in the general election.

Ronald Coleman, a lawyer and leading expert on online intellectual property disputes, noted that, as a private company, Google has the right to treat different advertisers differently.

But he called Google's removal of the Collins ads “troubling.” Coleman says that there is no such requirement under trademark law and that Google appears to be selectively enforcing its policy.

“In a recent ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the notion that there is anything like a cause of action under the Lanham Act, the statue governing trademark law in the United States, for so-called `trademark disparagement,' ” Coleman said. The courts have also rejected the notion that the use of a trademark as a search term is a “legally cognizable use” as a trademark use under federal trademark law, he added. Coleman is also general counsel for the Media Bloggers Association.

Google routinely permits the unauthorized use of company names such as Exxon, Wal-Mart, Cargill and Microsoft in advocacy ads. An anti-war ad currently running on Google asks “Keep Blackwater in Iraq?” and links to an article titled “Bastards at Blackwater — Should Blackwater Security be held accountable for the deaths of its employees?”

Google is the 800-pound gorilla of online advertising. Over the past year, the company has acquired YouTube and online ad giant DoubleClick, making it the dominant player in the area of Internet display advertising, ads on banners, videos and other non-text-based types of ads.

The Internet giant came under fire last year when it removed YouTube videos uploaded by conservative commentator Michelle Malkin and threatened to ban her from the popular video-sharing site.

A member of The Examiner's Board of Bloggers, Robert Cox is founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association, a New York-based nonpartisan group that provides training, counsel and other assistance designed to raise professional standards in the blogosphere.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Sep-16, by Leslie Sanchez:

The World According to Univision
Political bias at America's biggest Spanish-language TV network.

John Edwards has not taken a definitive position on abortion. Hillary Clinton's position on the issue is that "she will fight for the defense of children." And Barack Obama wants taxes to be "as low as possible."

Each of these statements is misleading, at best. Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton support "a woman's right to choose" and Mr. Obama wants to repeal the Bush tax cuts. But on Univision, a Spanish-language TV network with an average prime-time audience of about 3.5 million viewers, these and other slanted statements about the presidential candidates are commonplace.

These statements appeared on Univision's Web site, but like much of the network's reporting, they were missed by the mainstream media because they appeared only in Spanish. I have taken an extensive look at Univision and found that these are a tiny fraction of the biased views of American politics regularly presented by the network.

This is something all of us need to be concerned about. Last week, Democrats participated in a Univision-sponsored presidential debate held in south Florida. The candidates used the forum to reach out to Hispanic voters and many Democrats have noted that only one Republican--Sen. John McCain--has agreed to participate in a similar debate for GOP candidates originally scheduled for today. Their aim is to portray Republicans as biased against Hispanics.

---

But context matters. Faced with an onslaught of biased reporting, Republicans are right to have reservations about Univision. They should, however, engage the network, as it is far too important to be ignored. Late last month, Nielsen began comparing Univision to other broadcast networks in a single viewer sample, and found that it is the most-watched TV network (ahead of Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC) for viewers 18-34.

If their views were presented fairly, it's likely that Republicans would connect with Hispanic voters. That may be why the network's news coverage often downplays issues that make Hispanics dislike Democrats (abortion, same-sex marriage, taxes) and sensationalizes the immigration issue as a way of demonizing Republicans--even those who are not anti-immigrant.

Rudy Giuliani, who is attacked by some for making New York a "sanctuary city" for illegal immigrants during his time as mayor, was blasted as anti-inmigrante in a recent op-ed by star reporter Maria Elena Salinas on Univision's Web site. Apparently the mayor earned the label because he was tough on crime and supports border security, notwithstanding the fact that he carried 43% of New York City's Hispanic vote (a bloc that tends to be heavily Democratic) when he ran for re-election in 1997.

Republicans must engage and demand fairness from Univision, rather than let it propagandize the most conservative segment of the Hispanic population--the 40% who may speak English, but who are "Spanish-dominant" and consume their news in their native language. According to a July 2006 study of previous elections by the New Democratic Network, English-speaking Hispanics are more reliably Democratic, and "the movement towards Bush has come from the Spanish-dominant, as they have gone from 82%-18% Clinton-Dole in 1996 to 52%-48% Kerry-Bush."

Univision isn't alone. Bias is a problem throughout Spanish media. In South Carolina, Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican and supporter of the failed comprehensive immigration reform bill, was surprised to see a December 2005 headline in El Periodico Latino that, when translated, read: "BAD NEWS FOR IMMIGRANTS: Congressman Inglis will support President Bush's position on immigration." Of course, the Bush plan was the most pro-immigration proposal on the table.

---

Univision is the largest and most important part of the Spanish-language media, yet it features some of the most unbalanced political news coverage on television and it continues its leftward drift. Marcela Salazar, a former staffer for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was hired recently as the producer on Univision's new political show, "Al Punto," which is hosted by two left-wing journalists. A Democratic friend of mine, who works as a strategist for a Democratic presidential campaign, told me recently: "She'll do us a lot of good there."

As a group, Latinos are more pro-life and more supportive of traditional family values than non-Hispanic whites, less likely to divorce and three times as likely to have started a business in the past decade. Given that all of these are strong Republican identifiers, GOP strategists are asking themselves why they vote so lopsidedly Democratic.

The answer rests, in part, in the bias in the Spanish-language media. Republicans should counteract that by participating in Univision's debate, if only so they can speak over the heads of biased reporters and directly to the network's audience.

Ms. Sanchez, director of the White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001-2003, is author of "Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

from the New York Times, 2007-Sep-23, by Clark Hoyt, NYT Public Editor:

Betraying Its Own Best Interests

FOR nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq.

But I think the ad violated The Times's own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to.

On Monday, Sept. 10, the day that Gen. David H. Petraeus came before Congress to warn against a rapid withdrawal of troops, The Times carried a full-page ad attacking his truthfulness.

Under the provocative headline “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” the ad, purchased by the liberal activist group MoveOn.org, charged that the highly decorated Petraeus was “constantly at war with the facts” in giving upbeat assessments of progress and refusing to acknowledge that Iraq is “mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

“Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us,” MoveOn.org declared.

The ad infuriated conservatives, dismayed many Democrats and ignited charges that the liberal Times aided its friends at MoveOn.org with a steep discount in the price paid to publish its message, which might amount to an illegal contribution to a political action committee. In more than 4,000 e-mail messages, people around the country raged at The Times with words like “despicable,” “disgrace” and “treason.”

President George W. Bush called the ad “disgusting.” The Senate, controlled by Democrats, voted overwhelmingly to condemn the ad.

Vice President Dick Cheney said the charges in the ad, “provided at subsidized rates in The New York Times” were “an outrage.” Thomas Davis III, a Republican congressman from Virginia, demanded a House investigation. The American Conservative Union filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission against MoveOn.org and The New York Times Company. FreedomsWatch.org, a group recently formed to support the war, asked me to investigate because it said it wasn't offered the same terms for a response ad that MoveOn.org got.

Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?

The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.” Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was “rough,” he regarded it as a comment on a public official's management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.

By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”

How did this happen?

Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, told me that his group called The Times on the Friday before Petraeus's appearance on Capitol Hill and asked for a rush ad in Monday's paper. He said The Times called back and “told us there was room Monday, and it would cost $65,000.” Pariser said there was no discussion about a standby rate. “We paid this rate before, so we recognized it,” he said. Advertisers who get standby rates aren't guaranteed what day their ad will appear, only that it will be in the paper within seven days.

Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for The Times, said, “We made a mistake.” She said the advertising representative failed to make it clear that for that rate The Times could not guarantee the Monday placement but left MoveOn.org with the understanding that the ad would run then. She added, “That was contrary to our policies.”

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times and chairman of its parent company, declined to name the salesperson or to say whether disciplinary action would be taken.

Jespersen, director of advertising acceptability, reviewed the ad and approved it. He said the question mark after the headline figured in his decision.

The Times bends over backward to accommodate advocacy ads, including ads from groups with which the newspaper disagrees editorially. Jespersen has rejected an ad from the National Right to Life Committee, not, he said, because of its message but because it pictured aborted fetuses. He also rejected an ad from MoveOn.org that contained a doctored photograph of Cheney. The photo was replaced, and the ad ran.

Sulzberger, who said he wasn't aware of MoveOn.org's latest ad until it appeared in the paper, said: “If we're going to err, it's better to err on the side of more political dialogue. ... Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people.”

For me, two values collided here: the right of free speech — even if it's abusive speech — and a strong personal revulsion toward the name-calling and personal attacks that now pass for political dialogue, obscuring rather than illuminating important policy issues. For The Times, there is another value: the protection of its brand as a newspaper that sets a high standard for civility. Were I in Jespersen's shoes, I'd have demanded changes to eliminate “Betray Us,” a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier.

In the fallout from the ad, Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and a Republican presidential candidate, demanded space in the following Friday's Times to answer MoveOn.org. He got it — and at the same $64,575 rate that MoveOn.org paid.

Bradley A. Blakeman, former deputy assistant to President Bush for appointments and scheduling and the head of FreedomsWatch.org, said his group wanted to run its own reply ad last Monday and was quoted the $64,575 rate on a standby basis. The ad wasn't placed, he said, because the newspaper wouldn't guarantee him the day or a position in the first section. Sulzberger said all advocacy ads normally run in the first section.

Mathis said that since the controversy began, the newspaper's advertising staff has been told it must adhere consistently to its pricing policies.

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

from OpinionJournal.com, excerpted from Best of the Web, 2007-Jun-13, by James Taranto:

News Analysis: John Edwards Is Adorable!

Poynter.org reprints an article from Essentials, the Associated Press's internal newsletter, which begins with an editor's note explaining that the AP has embraced something called "accountability journalism," whose goal is "to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make."

Ron Fournier, whose byline frequently turns up on the AP's "news analyses," insists that such journalism is neither opinionated nor biased:

We can be provocative without being partisan. We can be truth-tellers without being editorial writers. We can and we must not only tell people what happened in politics today, but why it happened; what it might mean for our readers and their families; and what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders. Sometimes, they're just plain wrong.

Fournier is especially proud of the AP's Katrina coverage--but the examples he cites seem opinionated and partisan to us. Here's the lead paragraph of a Sept. 2, 2005, dispatch:

WASHINGTON (AP)--The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.

In just one paragraph, the "reporter" manages to endorse partisan views not just of Katrina but also of Iraq, the economy and even the Valerie Plame kerfuffle--and to describe what surely are his own opinions as "the public's view."

Then there's this, from Sept. 12, 2005:

WASHINGTON (AP)--The fatally slow response to Hurricane Katrina unleashed a wave of anger that could transform people's expectations of government, the qualities they seek in political leaders and their views of America's class and racial divides. It's a huge opportunity that neither party seems poised to exploit.

The factual content of this paragraph is zero; it is entirely opinion and speculation. And despite the nod toward nonpartisanship--"that neither party seems poised to exploit"--the ideological bias is clear. "America's class and racial divides" loom much larger in the liberal imagination than in most people's minds.

Fournier also offers this admonition to reporters:

Don't give equal weight to spin. Just because a public official says it doesn't mean you need to put it in your story or give his claim equal billing to what you know to be true. We have an obligation to write factual and fair stories, but we are not obliged to print attacks, spin or distortion under the cover of "fair comment."

Fair enough, but how well does Fournier follow his own advice? Last week he published an "analysis" titled "Turning Up the Authenticity." Fournier claims that "the public" is "particularly jaded toward Washington." But "Americans are also better educated and--thanks to the Internet--better informed than ever, which helps them spot a phony. They want the real deal."

And what is the "real deal"? Fournier goes on:

It will be interesting to see what this skeptical electorate thinks of former Sen. John Edwards, a Democrat who has apologized for his 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq--and now wears his mea culpa as a badge of honor.

"He was right," Edwards said Sunday night, pointing to Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois who opposed the war from the start. "And I was wrong."

Edwards is breaking an unwritten rule in Washington to never to [sic] acknowledge misjudgment, one that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton treats as gospel. He hopes to make her pay for refusing to apologize for her vote on Iraq.

"I think it is important for anybody who seeks to be the next president of the United States, given the dishonesty that we've been faced with over the last several years, to be honest (with) the country," the former North Carolina senator said.

Edwards was referring to Bush, whose credibility crumbled in the eyes of most voters after his 2004 re-election.

Couldn't Edwards's "mea culpa" be phony, an effort to pander to his party's far-left base? The possibility doesn't seem to have occurred to Fournier, who presents it instead as evidence of Edwards's honesty. Does the word gullible appear in the AP stylebook?

The AP's embrace of "accountability journalism" would seem to be a response to the proliferation of opinion, especially on the radio and online. You would think that given the glut of opinion, "mainstream media" organizations like the AP would emphasize what they are particularly good at, namely impartial reporting. But maybe they weren't that good at it to begin with.

from the Arizona Republic, 2007-Apr-10, by Dennis Wagner:

Producer: PBS dropped 'Islam vs. Islamists' on political grounds

The producer of a tax-financed documentary on Islamic extremism claims his film has been dropped for political reasons from a television series that airs next week on more than 300 PBS stations nationwide.

Key portions of the documentary focus on Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser of Phoenix and his American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a non-profit organization of Muslim Americans who advocate patriotism, constitutional democracy and a separation of church and state.

Martyn Burke says that the Public Broadcasting Service and project managers at station WETA in Washington, D.C., excluded his documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, from the series America at a Crossroads after he refused to fire two co-producers affiliated with a conservative think tank.

"I was ordered to fire my two partners (who brought me into this project) on political grounds," Burke said in a complaint letter to PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supplied funds for the films.

Burke wrote that his documentary depicts the plight of moderate Muslims who are silenced by Islamic extremists, adding, "Now it appears to be PBS and CPB who are silencing them."

A Jan. 30 news release by the corporation listed Islam vs. Islamists as one of eight films to be presented in the opening series.

Mary Stewart, vice president of external affairs at WETA, said Burke's documentary was not completed on time to be among 11 documentaries that will be aired beginning Sunday. Stewart said the picture may be broadcast by PBS at a later date.

"The film is a strong film," Stewart said. "I'm still hoping to see this in the Crossroads initiative."

Jeff Bieber, WETA's executive producer for Crossroads, gave a substantially different explanation. He said Burke's film had "serious structural problems (and) . . . was irresponsible because the writing was alarmist, and it wasn't fair."

"They're crying foul, and there was no foul ball," Bieber added. "The problem is in their film."

Federally funded films

The controversy involves a collection of documentaries financed with $20 million in federal grants from the corporation, which conceived Crossroads in 2004 to enhance public understanding of terrorism, homeland security and other crucial issues in the post-9/11 era. Independent filmmakers submitted 430 proposals. Full production grants were given to 21 of those, including Islam vs. Islamists, which received $700,000.

Subtitled Voices From the Muslim Center, Burke says his film "attempts to answer the question: 'Where are the moderate Muslims?' The answer is, 'Wherever they are, they are reviled and sometimes attacked' " by extremists.

Michael Levy, a spokesman for CPB, said the corporation set up the Crossroads project and provided funding, but turned over management and content control to PBS and WETA 13 months ago.

After that, Burke says in his Feb. 23 complaint letter, he "consistently encountered actions by the PBS series producers that violate the basic tenets of journalism in America."

PBS officials turned down interview requests.

Debate about bias

The dispute adds to a running debate about political bias in the nation's publicly funded television business. In 2004, filmmakers complained that CPB was pushing a right-wing agenda for the Crossroads series. A year later, CPB President Kenneth Tomlinson sought to eliminate what he saw as a liberal bias at PBS. He was forced to resign after an inspector general's report found that he violated federal rules and ethics standards in the process.

Burke's credits include Pirates of Silicon Valley, a movie about the founders of Microsoft, and The Hollywood Ten, a documentary about blacklisted leftists in the motion picture industry during the 1950s.

In the making of Islam vs. Islamists, Burke's co-producers were Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, and Alex Alexiev, the non-profit organization's vice president. Both men are neo-conservatives who have written on the threat of "Islamofascism" to the free world.

Before filming began last year, Burke says, Bieber asked him, "Don't you check into the politics of the people you work with?"

Bieber said PBS was concerned that the Center for Security Policy is an advocacy group, so its leaders could not produce an objective picture. Because of that, he suggested that Gaffney be demoted to adviser.

Burke, who did not honor the recommendation, says that funding was delayed and WETA began to interfere with his film until it was "expelled" from Crossroads.

Among Burke's examples of tampering:

• A WETA manager pressed to eliminate a key perspective of the film: The claim that Muslim radicals are pushing to establish "parallel societies" in America and Europe governed by Shariah law rather than sectarian courts.

• After grants were issued, Crossroads managers commissioned a new film that overlapped with Islam vs. Islamists and competed for the same interview subjects.

• WETA appointed an advisory board that includes Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. In an "unparalleled breach of ethics," Burke says, McCloud took rough-cut segments of the film and showed them to Nation of Islam officials, who are a subject of the documentary. They threatened to sue.

"This utterly undermines any journalistic independence," Burke wrote in an e-mail to WETA officials.

In an interview, McCloud said she showed a single video frame to a Muslim journalist who was not a Nation of Islam representative.

However, in a January e-mail, McCloud told Crossroads producers that she had spoken with Nation of Islam representatives and "invited them over to view this section." She also wrote that they were outraged "and will promptly pursue litigation."

Stewart, the WETA executive, said McCloud was admonished for "inappropriate" conduct.

Otherwise, however, Stewart said Crossroads producers have dealt with Islam vs. Islamists in a fair and professional manner.

James Taranto of OpinionJournal.com, in his Best of the Web of 2007-Apr-11, excerpts the above article, and notes:

We got an email yesterday from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which highlighted this article. The subject line read: "Muslim-Bashers Involved in Possible PBS Islam Doc," and the excerpt had Gaffney's and Alexiev's names in bold as well as the sentence above beginning "Both men are neo-conservatives . . ."

So according to CAIR, Gaffney and Alexiev are "Muslim-bashers" because they oppose "Islamofascism." By equating Islam and "Islamofascism" in this way, it is CAIR that is furthering the idea that Islam itself is the enemy.

from Canadian Press via the Vancouver Sun, 2007-May-1, by Tobi Cohen:

Canadian filmmaker demands U.S. public broadcaster air film or give it back

TORONTO (CP) - The Canadian producer behind a controversial documentary about the rift between moderate and conservative Muslims said he wants American public broadcasters to air the film as is or give him back the rights to the project.

Martyn Burke said he's had requests from networks in Canada, France, Denmark and the United States for permission to air his film "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Centre," but that it remains on the cutting-room floor of Washington's WETA - an affiliate of PBS.

"Either show it, or give it back. It's quite simple," he said in a telephone interview from New York City where he was preparing to screen the film for U.S. journalists on Tuesday.

The public broadcaster commissioned the film as part of its "America at a Crossroads" series but dropped it last month from its inaugural weeklong line-up.

The decision set off a wave of controversy after the film's producers, which include Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy - a conservative advocacy group - cited censorship as the real reason why the show was spiked.

While WETA contends the film is alarmist, one-sided and lacking in context and flow, spokesman Joe DePlasco said it's far from a complete write-off.

There was only room to air 11 documentaries during the series introduction, said DePlasco. Efforts are underway to bring the other 11 films that were initially approved for television as stand-alone features under the "Crossroads" banner, DePlasco added.

"As we've said all along, we're hoping that 'Islam vs. Islamists' can go out as a stand alone as well," he said.

"It's an extraordinarily important topic. There's some riveting stories and personalities in the film and once these guys agree to sit down and work with the larger team to complete the film, it will hopefully go out as a stand alone like the others."

Burke suggests the film was left out due to Gaffney and Alexiev's neo-conservative political views and because the PBS officials behind the series are biased towards conservative Muslims.

"It became apparent that what they wanted was one long apology for the Islamists," Burke said, noting great efforts were taken to edit the film more to their liking.

He said PBS officials argued that moderate Muslims featured in the documentary, like Tarek Fatah who hosts the Toronto-based current affairs program Muslim Chronicle, are not true Muslims.

"This is about Muslims fighting for the very soul of their community and their faith, said Fatah. "It's really unfortunate the only attempt made to show the huge problem that ordinary, moderate Muslims face at the hands of Islamists was censored."

The film was screened last week to a group of both Democrat and Republican politicians to positive reviews, said Burke.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-May-1, by Joel Mowbray:

Mad TV
U.S. taxpayers subsidize terrorist propaganda and Holocaust denial in the Arab world.

Testifying under oath recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice misled Congress in her strong defense of Al-Hurra, the taxpayer financed Arab TV network. It was unwitting, though. She herself was misled.

During the March 21 House Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) pressed Ms. Rice on the wisdom of providing a platform to Islamic terrorists, citing Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's Dec. 7 speech, which Al-Hurra aired live. The broadcast speech "went on for 30 minutes," she responded, "followed by commentary, much of which was critical of Nasrallah."

In fact, Mr. Nasrallah's speech was carried in its entirety, roughly an hour and eight minutes. The commentary that followed--a 13-minute phone interview with Wael Abou Faour, a member of Lebanon's governing coalition--was indeed critical of Mr. Nasrallah. He accused the Hezbollah leader of not being anti-U.S. and anti-Israel enough. While Mr. Nasrallah had claimed Lebanon's governing coalition was aligned with the U.S. and had backed Israel during the war last summer, Mr. Abou Faour said that Hezbollah was actually closer to the U.S and added that any Lebanese faction that assisted "the Israeli enemy" should not be allowed to engage in political discussion because "the only place they should be [is] in prison."

The secretary of state's testimony was without doubt delivered in good faith. But the same cannot be said of the information about the broadcast Al-Hurra provided to the State Department.

---

Unfortunately, there is no practicable way that Foggy Bottom, or anyone else for that matter, can effectively monitor Al-Hurra, which has come under fire since the publication of my story about it on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page in March. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the congressionally created independent panel charged with oversight, lacks the ability to conduct even basic auditing, as English transcripts are provided only on request--which rarely happens. Worse, there is no good channel for whistleblowers to communicate with the board without fear of retribution.

With an annual budget now over $70 million, Al-Hurra has for three years served as the centerpiece of America's aggressive post-9/11 courtship of the Arab world. Insiders maintain that the network was fulfilling its mission until it hired former CNN producer Larry Register last November. Mr. Register has not, to his credit, changed Al-Hurra's dedication to showcasing the full range of U.S. politics. The other side of the network, however, has been "gutted," in the words of one staffer. Even though Mr. Register has made some improvements since the March column, Al-Hurra still produces far fewer stories about Arab government corruption and human-rights abuses. (Mr. Register did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

---

Al-Hurra was intended to cut through the anti-West and anti-U.S. propaganda that permeates even mainstream Arab media. Stories in that vein no longer see significant airtime, and nowhere is this more apparent than Al-Hurra's new approach to the Holocaust--the treatment of which in Arab society embodies so much that is wrong in that critical region of the Muslim world.

It is precisely because of Arab society's persistent refusal to accept the existence of such a defining--and indisputable--event in modern history that Al-Hurra dared to do things Al-Jazeera would never fathom, such as interviewing Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and airing the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But that was under Mr. Register's predecessor, a Lebanese-born Muslim named Mouafac Harb.

Under Mr. Register, Al-Hurra covered the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran last December. But in a stark break from Mr. Harb's era, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the attendees at his conference were treated with unmistakable deference.

Al-Hurra's Dec. 12 report on the gathering included David Duke's praise for Mr. Ahmadinejad, and it took at face value the organizers' demand for Israel "to provide proof and evidence that certifies the occurrence" of the Holocaust. An official running the event was afforded the opportunity to show the open-mindedness of Holocaust deniers: "If we actually conclude with our experts through this meeting that the Holocaust is a real incident we will at that time admit its presence." (Transcript provided by a fluent Arabic-speaking U.S. government employee.)

Also broadcast unchallenged were the remarks of the infamous French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who informed Arab viewers: "Gas chambers and mass killings of the Jews, in the way that it is pretended (by the Jews), is completely untrue, and an historical lie."

The Al-Hurra reporter stationed in Tehran referred to those who believe Hitler killed six million Jews as "Holocaust supporters." He took a swipe at the handful of conference attendees who didn't deny the Holocaust, by noting that they "didn't enforce their statements with scientific evidence." In closing the piece, he referred to Israel as "the Jewish state on Palestinian lands."

---

Almost six weeks later, on Jan. 20, Al-Hurra aired a follow-up story on the Neturei Karta, the fringe group of ultraorthodox, anti-Zionist Jews who met with Mr. Ahmadinejad. There was obviously world-wide media fascination with the Jews who ventured to a Holocaust denial forum hosted by the man who wants to wipe Israel off the map. Responsible journalists, though, were careful to provide the necessary context, the most important of which is that the Neturei Karta is a marginal group with world-wide membership, according to its Web site, of "several thousand."

Responsible Al-Hurra was not.

The Neturei Karta were presented as mainstream Orthodox Jews, and Al-Hurra claimed that they number more than one million. The story's angle is clear from the anchor's introduction: "They always put Israeli officials in a bind, who can't seem to understand how Jews can oppose Zionism, or how a Jew can encourage Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his opposition to Israel." Various Neturei Karta members uttered outrageous falsehoods about supposed "Zionist" cruelty, including "torture, detention, [and the] burning of their synagogues." None of these libels were challenged, let alone debunked.

"There is no purpose in doing a soft feature of the Neturei Karta, except to pander to or bolster vicious Arab and Muslim propaganda about Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust," notes Mark Broxmeyer, chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

In fairness, there's no reason to suppose Mr. Register understood exactly what was being broadcast: He doesn't speak Arabic. Then again, there's no evidence that he bothered, or cared, to learn about the contents. Either way, Mr. Register clearly doesn't grasp Al-Hurra's mission.

Holocaust denial is rampant in the Arab world, even among the educated; there's a widespread embrace of conspiratorial explanations for world events, such as theories about Jews perpetrating 9/11, and notorious forgeries such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which is widely sold and read throughout the region. Arab media do not challenge this mindset, but usually indulge it.

Combating this nonsense should be ground zero in our quest to inject truth and information into the Arab world. If we can't do this, how will we ever be able counteract the jihadists who preach to the masses that America is waging war on Islam?

The person tasked with counteracting those jihadists, Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, is a stalwart supporter of Mr. Register. At an April 19 House Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee hearing, after two congressmen gave Ms. Hughes a bipartisan earful about Mr. Register, she responded that she has heard nothing but "high praise" and "rave reviews." Just last Friday, Ms. Hughes went to Al-Hurra's D.C.-area headquarters, signaling that she still backs Mr. Register. Meanwhile, five of the six BBG members--outgoing chairman Ken Tomlinson was the lone dissenter--are ardent Register partisans, voting 5-1 against investigating Mr. Register's questionable editorial decisions.

---

Key lawmakers don't share such exuberance. Reps. Dan Burton (R., Ind.) and Robert Wexler (D., Fla.) are circulating to fellow House Foreign Affairs Committee members a letter which asks Ms. Rice for an investigation into Al-Hurra. And Rep. Steve Rothman (D., N.J.), who sits on the panel responsible for funding Al-Hurra, has proposed live Internet streaming of the network, full online digital archives, and English transcripts for all programs.

Lack of active oversight and transparency has obviously contributed to the current mess at Al-Hurra. If someone outside Al-Hurra had been able to view the Nasrallah speech merely by going online, for example, Ms. Rice almost certainly would not have been fed false information.

But that's not enough. The people who already monitor the network--its employees--need to be empowered to report dubious decisions without fear of reprisal. Transparency will allow concerns to be investigated swiftly. Employees simply won't come forward, though, if they believe no one in power cares. For that reason, a clear signal must be sent by firing Mr. Register.

After all, if you can't get fired for using U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide a platform for Islamic terrorists and help further Holocaust denial, then wouldn't Congress and the Bush administration be communicating that pretty much anything goes?

Mr. Mowbray is an investigative writer based in New York City.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Mar-18, by Joel Mowbray:

Television Takeover
U.S.-financed Al-Hurra is becoming a platform for terrorists.

Fighting to create a secular democracy in Iraq, parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi had come to rely on at least one TV network to help further freedom: U.S. taxpayer-financed Al-Hurra.

Now, however, he's concerned. The broadcaster he had seen as a stalwart ally has done an about-face. "Until now, we were so happy with Al-Hurra. It was taking stands against corruption, for human rights, and for peace. But not anymore."

Stories that he believes cry out for further investigation, such as recent arrests of those accused of supporting the terrorists in Iraq, are instead getting mere news-ticker mentions at the bottom of the screen. And Arab voices for freedom, which used to have a home on Al-Hurra, are noticeably absent. "They're driving out the liberals," he complains.

Mr. Alusi is not the only one concerned about the recent changes at Al-Hurra. Ken Tomlinson, the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors--the congressionally-created panel charged with overseeing Al-Hurra, among other government-funded broadcasters--is currently demanding answers about the network's decision last December to broadcast most of a speech by Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah.

Sitting up straight and raising his index finger, he states emphatically, "It's the single worst decision I've witnessed in all my years in international broadcasting."

---

The airing of the Nasrallah speech is a sign of the network's new direction since it was taken over by a longtime CNN producer, Larry Register, last November. Launched in February 2004, Al-Hurra broadcasts three separate feeds: to Europe, Arab nations and one for Iraq. The network is supposed to be a key component of our public diplomacy to the Arab world. Its mission statement calls for it to showcase the American political process, and just as important, report on things that get little attention on other Arabic networks, such as human-rights abuses and government corruption.

Within weeks of becoming news director, Mr. Register put his own stamp on the network. Producers and on-air talent quickly understood that change was underway. Investigations into Arab government wrongdoing or oppression were no longer in vogue, and the ban on turning the airwaves over to terrorists was lifted. For those who had chafed under Mr. Register's predecessor--who curbed the desire of many on staff to make Al-Hurra more like al-Jazeera--the new era was welcomed warmly.

"Everybody feels emboldened. Register changed the atmosphere around here," notes one staffer. "Register is trying to pander to Arab sympathies," says another.

The cultural shift inside the newsroom is evident in the on-air product. In the past several months, Al-Hurra has aired live speeches from Mr. Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, and it broadcast an interview with an alleged al Qaeda operative who expressed joy that 9/11 rubbed "America's nose in the dust."

While a handful of unfortunate decisions could be isolated, these actions appear to be part of Mr. Register's news vision. Former news director Mouafac Harb, a Lebanese-born American citizen, was not shy about his disdain for terrorists and had a firm policy against giving them a platform. But Mr. Register didn't wait long to allow Hamas officials on the air to discuss Palestinian politics.

At a staff meeting announcing the reversal of the ban on terrorists as guests, Mr. Register "bragged" about his personal relationship with Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, a top Hamas official, according to someone who was present. Contacted on his cell phone for comment, Mr. Register declined, indicating that he couldn't spare even two minutes anytime in the coming days.

---

Perhaps it is because Mr. Register is so casual in his attitude to terrorists that interviewers now toss softball questions to fiery anti-Western guests, while also taking digs at one of America's closest Middle Eastern allies, Israel.

The new Al-Hurra was on full display Feb. 9, when riots broke out following Israel's implementation of security measures that limited access to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

In roughly two hours of breathless live "breaking news" coverage--which outdistanced al-Jazeera by 30 minutes--Al-Hurra's Muslim guests vilified Israel, and one spun conspiracy theories about the Jewish state's "plans" to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque. No doubt the Islamic talking heads were egged on by the Al-Hurra anchors asking questions such as, "Do you think that the timing of these actions is as innocent as Israel pretends?" (Translations were provided by a fluent Arabic-speaking U.S. government official.)

This powder keg of a panel included Ikrima Sabri, imam of the Al Aqsa Mosque, who is best known for his tenure as Yasser Arafat's hand-picked mufti of Jerusalem. During the broadcast, Mr. Sabri accused Israel of firing guns and throwing bombs into the mosque, then refusing to allow medical care for the wounded.

Mr. Sabri's propaganda should not have come as a surprise. Just weeks before 9/11, Mr. Sabri delivered a passionate Friday sermon, broadcast nationally on official Palestinian Authority radio. He prayed for the destruction of Israel, Britain and the United States.

If anyone should be savvy about people like Mr. Sabri, it ought to be Mr. Register. With two decades of experience at CNN, including three years running the Jerusalem bureau, he should know that live TV is the wrong venue for firebrands or guests prone to outrageous commentary.

Complicating matters is that once someone is on Al-Hurra live, Mr. Register lacks the basic requirement to stay on top of unfolding coverage; he doesn't speak Arabic. Had Mr. Register been able to understand Mr. Nasrallah's Dec. 7 speech, perhaps he would have rushed to cut away early on. Before the five-minute mark, Mr. Nasrallah told the audience to stop their celebratory gun-firing, explaining, "the only place where bullets should be is the chest of the enemies of Lebanon: the Israeli enemy."

---

Former Broadcasting Board of Governors member Norman Pattiz understands the perils of turning over the airwaves to the likes of Mr. Nasrallah. Though he wouldn't comment on anything relating to recent months--he left the board last year, before Mr. Register's arrival--Mr. Pattiz said bluntly, "Simply handing a microphone over to a terrorist and letting them spew is not what I would call good journalism."

Though Mr. Pattiz is a well-known Democrat who feuded constantly with Mr. Tomlinson, a Republican, the two men had one area of agreement: Mr. Harb, Al-Hurra's original news director. Sounding remarkably similar to Mr. Tomlinson, Mr. Pattiz said, "The direction Al-Hurra launched in is the direction in which it should continue to go, because it was very successful."

Mr. Alusi, the Iraqi parliamentarian, agrees. "Al-Hurra should have the role of transporting democracy, and to help Iraqis understand freedom," he says. "If you have a good product, you must sell it in a good way. The United States is a very good product."

Mr. Mowbray is working on a book about the struggle for the heart of Islam in America.

from PowerLineBlog.com, 2007-Jun-11, by Joel Mowbray:

Anatomy of a "resignation"

Joel Mowbray (jdmowbra@erols.com) follows up his series of reports on the government funded Al Hurra television network with analysis of the resignation of Larry Register:

In the long, sordid saga of the Larry Register era at Al Hurra, which ended Friday with the news director's "resignation," what was most troubling was not all that he had done, but rather what finally did him in.

Register's masters at the State Department and the network's oversight panel, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), demonstrated remarkable tolerance for his misdeeds.

Ordering an interview with an alleged al Qaeda operative who expressed joy that 9/11 "rubbed America's nose in the dust"? No problem. Airing live speeches from the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah? Not an issue. Providing fawning coverage of Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference? Forgivable. Insisting that Al-Hurra refer to the creation of Israel in 1948 as "the castatrophe"? Mistakes happen.

So what was it that finally caused State and the BBG to rescind its previously unwavering support of Register? It was the great green motivator: money.

A key Congressional panel last Tuesday sent an unmistakable signal that lawmakers weren't as enamored of Register as State and the BBG, zeroing out an expected $14 million increase in Al Hurra's funding for fiscal year 2008.

That sealed Register's fate.

In fact, because Al Hurra officials were confident that the network would receive most or all of the requested $14 million funding increase, several BBG members gave Register expressions of support Tuesday morning -- a day after my third Wall Street Journal column, and just hours before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations announced its FY 2008 spending bill.

Once State and the BBG figured out that they could not have both Register and the extra cash, three months' worth of solid support quickly crumbled.

It was a dramatic reversal. The day after my first Wall Street Journal column ran on March 12, the BBG voted 5-to-1 not to investigate. The subsequent letter to the editor of the Journal was simply puzzling, refusing to address any specific reported facts, instead writing their own simple review of the job they thought Register was doing: "BRAVO!"

For months afterward, the BBG catchphrase was that "mistakes were made." Even after I reported that e-mails and internal memos established Register's direct responsibility for most of the controversial broadcasts, board members stuck by him. Even when several BBG members learned on May 15 that he had hired Yasser Thabet, an Al-Jazeera veteran who had used his blog to express affection for terrorists, they were content merely to axe Thabet, sparing Register.

Almost as stalwart in her support of Register was Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes, who spearheads U.S. outreach to the Arab world. On May 9, just over a week after my second Journal column, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack -- almost certainly at the behest of Hughes -- said that Register was doing "a very good job." By last week, though, she pretended she had no connection to him. In a statement released to NBC News, Hughes said flatly, "We don't run [Al Hurra]."

Critics aren't buying it. "Hughes and the BBG are the only reason Register got to stick around as long as he did. They owe the American people an explanation why they stonewalled for him for almost three months," said Mark Broxmeyer, chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Having spent considerable time getting contacts in his impressive Rolodex to look into the Al Hurra mess, Broxmeyer added that none of the folks with whom he raised the issue could believe that State and the BBG mounted such a furious defense with so little to stand on.

That the BBG waited almost three months to force out Register -- and even then, only after losing expected funding -- illustrates the sad state of the board.

But here's the good news: The Al Hurra story could yet have a happy ending. New BBG chairman James K. Glassman was sworn in last week, and his tenure could see better behavior from the board. He has not made any public comments, but Glassman is a media veteran, and he's compiled a largely successful track record.

Most encouraging, though, is that the named replacement for Register's now-vacated post of Al Hurra news director is Danny Nassif. He won't require much of a learning curve, as Nassif already runs sister network Radio Sawa. And when the former news director, Mouafac Harb, was traveling -- which was often -- Nassif ran the show in his absence.

Though Nassif has never run a TV news operation on more than a temporary basis, a quick review of his professional writings from before starting at Radio Sawa indicates that he will take a firm stand against terrorists and Islamic extremists.

And as the BBG was quick to note in announcing his appointment, Nassif is a "native Arabic speaker," which compares favorably to Register, who didn't speak Arabic at all.

Under the new leadership of Glassman, let's hope that Nassif gets as much support from the BBG when he attempts re-build Al Hurra as Register did while almost destroying it.

from Agence France-Presse, 2007-May-3:

Borat's in, Bush is out: Time magazine

US President George W. Bush has been dropped from Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people for the first time, in a further sign of his flagging political fortunes.

NEW YORK (AFP) - While Osama bin Laden, Pope Benedict XVI and even Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen managed to find a spot on the fourth annual list due to hit newsstands Friday, the magazine decided that Bush just didn't make the grade any more.

"I think Bush by this point in his presidency probably has less influence than the position should grant him automatically," Time's Deputy Managing Editor Adi Ignatius told AFP, explaining the decision to ditch Bush.

"He's a lame duck ... but his influence is below that of a normal lame duck figure. We just thought Bush was at a low ebb in terms of his influence."

However, plenty of other politicians, notably Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, managed to squeeze into a packed and varied field of entertainers, philanthropists, sportsmen and entrepreneurs.

The "artists and entertainers" category includes Hollywood heavyweights Martin Scorsese, Cate Blanchett and heart-throbs Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, along with fashion model Kate Moss.

Pop sensation Justin Timberlake is named along with Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour, while former US vice president Al Gore's shift to environmental campaigner got him nominated in the "scientists and thinkers" category.

The list, which is designed to recognize "the men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming our world," does not appear in any order or give the magazine's reasons why some people were chosen over others.

The "leaders and revolutionaries" category features Queen Elizabeth II, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni -- in an entry penned by US counterpart Condoleezza Rice -- and Rice herself, appearing for a fourth year running.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a showing next to Raul Castro, the younger brother of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Indian Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Other politicians in the mix include German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Liu Qi, head of the 2008 Beijing Olympics committee.

Besides Rice, US talk show host Oprah Winfrey is the only person to have appeared all four years, featuring in the "heroes and pioneers" section in an entry written by anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela.

Other "heroes" include billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett, rubbing shoulders with tennis champion Roger Federer, footballer Thierry Henry and Chinese online activist Zeng Jinyan.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Dec-20, by Joseph Rago:

The Blog Mob
"Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

Blogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg's press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.

The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there's more of it, because anybody can chip in. There's more "choice"--and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

---

The way we write affects both style and substance. The loquacious formulations of late Henry James, for instance, owe in part to his arthritis, which made longhand impossible, and instead he dictated his writing to a secretary. In this aspect, journalism as practiced via blog appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form. Its closest analogue might be the (poorly kept) diary or commonplace book, or the note scrawled to oneself on the back of an envelope--though these things are not meant for public consumption. The reason for a blog's being is: Here's my opinion, right now.

The right now is partially a function of technology, which makes instantaneity possible, and also a function of a culture that valorizes the up-to-the-minute above all else. But there is no inherent virtue to instantaneity. Traditional daily reporting--the news--already rushes ahead at a pretty good clip, breakneck even, and suffers for it. On the Internet all this is accelerated.

The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element--here's my opinion--is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought--instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

This cross-referential and interactive arrangement, in theory, should allow for some resolution to divisive issues, with the market sorting out the vagaries of individual analysis. Not in practice. The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren't. The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.

Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line. Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions--John Kerry always providing useful material--while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq. Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.

Leftward fatuities too are easily found: The fatuity matters more than the politics. If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad's judgment of newspapering--"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"--they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.

---

Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses. And part of it, especially in politics, has to do with conservatives. In their frustration with the ancien régime, conservatives quite eagerly traded for an enlarged discourse. In the process they created a counterestablishment, one that has adopted the same reductive habits they used to complain about. The quarrel over one discrete set of standards did a lot to pull down the very idea of standards.

Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness

Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.

Mr. Rago is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.

from the Times of London, 2007-Jun-3, by John-Paul Flintoff:

Thinking is so over

The web was going to be the great educator, but the cult of the amateur is now devaluing knowledge, says net entrepreneur Andrew Keen

Before the internet it seemed like a joke: if you provide an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters one of them will eventually come up with a masterpiece. But with the web now firmly established in its second evolutionary phase – in which users create the content on blogs, podcasts and streamed video – the infinite monkey theory doesn't seem so funny any more.

“Today's technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters,” argues Andrew Keen, who believes that “web 2.0” is killing our culture, assaulting our economy and destroying time-honoured codes of conduct.

An Englishman who moved from north London to California in the 1990s and swapped university lecturing for internet entrepreneur-ship, Keen has turned against the thoughtless barbarism of his Silicon Valley peers. In an alarming new book The Cult of the Amateur he argues that many of the ideas promoted by champions of web 2.0 are gravely flawed. Instead of creating masterpieces, the millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.

Worse still, the supposed “democratisation” of the web has been a sham. “Despite its lofty idealisation it's undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent,” he says. Take the much vaunted “wisdom of crowds”, which has led to the astonishing growth of the free online reference work Wikipedia. The English site alone boasts 1.8m articles freely contributed by ordinary web users and more are created every minute.

But as the sum of what we all know and agree, the wisdom of crowds has no greater value than Trivial Pursuit. Wikipedia is full of mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings. What happens if you try to do something about it? William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and an expert on global warming, disagreed with a Wikipedia editor over a particular entry on the site. After trying to correct inaccuracies Connolley was accused of trying to remove “any point of view which does not match his own”. Eventually he was limited to making just one edit a day.

Arbitrating on the dispute, Wikipedia gave no weight to his expertise, and treated him with the same credibility as his anonymous opponent. “The consequences of this dismissal of traditional, credentialed experts are both chilling and absurd,” says Keen.

“What defines the best minds,” Keen argues, “is their ability to go beyond the `wisdom' of the crowd and mainstream opinion.” Wikipedia is premised on a contrary theory of truth that would have seemed familiar to George Orwell: if the crowd says that two plus two equals five, then two plus two really does equal five.

At a working breakfast in 2004 Keen was alarmed to be told the new democratic internet would overthrow the “dictatorship of expertise”. And that's happening already. Wikipedia, with its millions of amateur editors and unreliable content, is the 17th most trafficked site on the net. Britannica.com, a subscription-based service with 100 Nobel prize-winning contributors and more than 4,000 other experts is ranked 5,128. As a result, Britannica has had to make painful cuts in staffing and editorial.

These cutbacks don't only affect the individuals laid off. They affect us all – because if Britannica and publications like it should disappear we'll be obliged to rely on the unreliable patchwork of information parcelled out on Wikipedia by people who often don't even reveal their identity.

“Instead of a dictatorship of experts, we'll have a dictatorship of idiots,” says Keen, who finds classic signs of totalitarianism in Silicon Valley. “Anyone who disagrees is wrong. These people manifest some of the symptoms of 19th century Russian idealists and utopians, who think that their vision of the world is going to change everything for the better.”

This is not only about reference libraries. It's much more important. What Wikipedia has done to reference books, bloggers do to traditional news media. Papers and magazines close down while broadcasters sell off radio and television stations, as more people turn to podcasts and streamed videos.

But as Keen shows, many blogs and “news” sites are merely fronts for public relations machines. Others conceal their agendas. They're also unaccountable and rarely remove their mistakes. It was once said that: “A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has the chance to put its boots on.” That has never been more true than in the freewheeling, unchecked blogosphere.

“Many bloggers flaunt their lack of training and formal qualifications as evidence of their calling, their passion,” says Keen. But they also lack connections and access to information. A politician can avoid dealing with ordinary citizens but would be a fool to refuse calls from representatives of the press and TV news. If traditional news-gathering disappears, who will hold politicians to account?

Even if they had the talent and the connections, no blogs could afford to conduct investigations comparable to the great newspaper campaigns of the past. So the idea that content on the web is “free” is mistaken: the hidden cost may be the demise of old media and entire art forms on which the free content depends.

Already, Keen contends, illegal downloads have destroyed the music business. (He's not alone. The great singer-songwriter Paul Simon told Keen: “I'm personally against web 2.0 in the same way as I'm personally against my own death.”) And with download speeds increasing and becoming more widespread it's only a matter of time before film and TV studios face the same demise.

Another web idea dismantled by Keen is the concept of the “long tail” – the slow but gradual accumulation of sales by niche products such as books that could never have commanded shelf space in shops but can wait for buyers to find them on Amazon. In other words, you may never get more than 10 buyers for your little book of poetry, but thanks to the net you can publish it anyway. Somehow those 10 readers will find you.

But talent is “the needle in today's digital haystack”, says Keen. In a world without newspapers, publishing houses, film studios, radio and TV stations there'll be nobody to discover and – no less important – to nurture talent. The result could be no less catastrophic than Pol Pot's decision to eliminate talent and expertise in Cambodia by mass execution.

“Once dismantled, I fear that this professional media – with its rich ecosystem of writers, editors, agents, talent scouts, journalists, publishers, musicians, reporters and actors – can never again be put back together. We destroy it at our peril,” says Keen.

He is not against technology: he just wants to see a bit more control. We must choose between sites such as Wikipedia, where the cult of the anonymous amateur prevails, and the newer alternative Citizendium, which aims to improve on Wikipedia's model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

Where necessary, governments should intervene, as the Americans did last year by clamping down on gambling sites. “This is not about being herded into a gulag but the complete flattening of culture so that everything becomes a commercial break,” says Keen. “`Free culture' is about giving it away so that you can advertise. I grew up wondering why there were no ads in novels. That was because I was prepared to spend money to buy the book.”

The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen is published by Nicholas Brealey on Tuesday, £12.99

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Apr-12, by Daniel Henninger:

The Rebirth of Civility?
A revolt against people who are behaving badly.

And so it came to pass in the year 2007 that a little platoon came forth to say unto the world: Enough is enough.

Two leading citizens of the Web, Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales, have proposed a "Bloggers Code of Conduct." The reason for this code is the phenomenon of people posting extremely nasty verbal comments about other people on Web sites devoted to political and social commentary. For Mr. O'Reilly, a publisher and activist for open Web standards, the last blogospheric straw involved a friend whose suggestion that it was OK to delete offensive comments from Web sites earned her a backlash of vitriol on several sites, with one posting a photo of her alongside a drawing of a noose.

It is appropriate that this line should be drawn in the ether of the World Wide Web, whose controlling ethos up to now has been that speech and expression should remain free, unfettered and--the totemic word that ends all argument--"democratic." As it developed, too many of the Web's democrats, for reasons that have provided much new work for clinical psychologists, tend to write in a vocabulary of rage and aggression.

Take politics. In the House of Representatives, Members by tradition address each other as the "gentleman" or "gentlewoman." These salutations often drip with irony but exist nonetheless to temper the bitterness beneath much political combat. The democrats around the Web regard any such modulating habits as hypocritical.

Unlike the fogies in politics or tradition-hampered media, they describe their opponents as what they believe they are: morons, idiots, fools, sellouts, traitors, liars (perhaps the most used word on the politicized Web), crooks and various other expressions that the touchingly termed "family" newspapers still won't print.

---

The admission of need for something called a Bloggers Code of Conduct is about more than just the Web. The deeper import of what may be happening here should be evident in Mr. O'Reilly's remark, which was the final sentence in a long New York Times article on the subject last Sunday: "Free speech is enhanced by civility."

It is difficult for me to imagine a more revolutionary sentence. One might call it "subversive."

"Free speech is enhanced by civility." The revolution comes at the end of that sentence. Free speech we know about. Civility we have forgotten. Ask Don Imus.

Subsets of civility would include courtesy, respect, politeness and deference. Civility is a public virtue. Like oil or wheat, it is a necessary social commodity that allows society to function.

That said, it would be overreaching to lay the blame for civility's fall on the World Wide Web. The erosion of our stores of civility occurred over the past 40 years, undermined by torrents of political rage and self-assertion.

In 1968, Abbie Hoffman, the Yippie saint and a founding father of anti-civility, wrote a book whose title alone still stands as the best summary of the new game: "Revolution for the Hell of It." The Web democrats, the public hecklers, the loudmouths are Abbie's children. They know it and are proud of it. No limits. Don't like it? Get over it. If you object, they will, like characters in a Dick Tracy cartoon, scream, "I demand my constitutional rights!"

With the Bloggers Code of Conduct comes the counterrevolution. Some excerpts:

From the Wiki site, put up by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the remarkable and controversial Web-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia: "We take responsibility for our own words and reserve the right to restrict comments on our blog that do not conform to basic civility standards." This is a shift from an early precept of the Web known by the acronym YOYOW, or "you own your own words." In the world of YOYOW, one is responsible only to the drummer keeping the beat in one's head.

From Mr. O'Reilly's Web site: "If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so." Which is to say, we are surrounded now by people who have no clue that they are behaving badly, or don't believe that they are, or who argue that behaving badly is their "right." Are they wrong?

Psychologists commenting on the phenomenon of Web-based verbal abuse or aggressive public heckling often talk about society's expanded notions of personal entitlement and the failure of baby-boomer parents to set norms of behavior for their infallible children. We have ratified a lot of over-the-line behavior.

College administrators held the door open for four decades. The question at the center of oral arguments in the Supreme Court's "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case last month was: Who runs the schools, the kids or the adults? People behaving badly have simply taken the norms their elders gave them to a logical ending point on the Web. On one level, the idea of a code of conduct for language on the Web marks the overdue restoration of adulthood in American life.

---

But there is a harder side to this tension. After news spread of the O'Reilly-Wales proposal, an (needless to say) angry battalion of bloggers counterattacked, crying "censorship." Now we're beyond the merely obnoxious culture of chin-dribble. Now we're talking politics and power. So the cry goes up: You can't tell us how to talk. That's "censorship."

The censorship claim is often made by political Web players who want to be "free" to use whatever means will achieve the end of driving their opponents over the cliff. Consider the Congressional Black Caucus. Its affiliation with Fox News to conduct presidential debates was fire-bombed recently on "progressive" Web sites. Example: "Guess it takes a whole lot of grease to fry CBC's chicken." Scared, the three major Democratic presidential candidates pulled out. Censorship? Try doublespeak. The strategy of deploying charged and hyper-aggressive language is now evident: First intimidate one's targets, then coerce them--into conformity or silence. And do it always under the banner of free speech and democracy.

There is no evident political coloration to the broader concern that's arisen about conduct on the Web. The anti-civility trolls are in restaurants, stadiums, theaters, planes, church, the airwaves, in dreams. This is merely a recognition that rules of the road can indeed enhance, not suppress, the flow of truly free expression and minimize the already ample frictions of daily life. Better late than never.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

The following shows so comprehensive a bias that it rather speaks for itself.

from the Washington Post via blog.washingtonpost.com, 2007-Jan-30, by William M. Arkin, Washington Post military affairs writer:

The Troops Also Need to Support the American People

I've been mulling over an NBC Nightly News report from Iraq last Friday in which a number of soldiers expressed frustration with opposition to war in the United States.

I'm sure the soldiers were expressing a majority opinion common amongst the ranks - that's why it is news - and I'm also sure no one in the military leadership or the administration put the soldiers up to expressing their views, nor steered NBC reporter Richard Engel to the story.

I'm all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn't for them to disapprove of the American people.

Friday's NBC Nightly News included a story from my colleague and friend Richard Engel, who was embedded with an active duty Army infantry battalion from Fort Lewis, Washington.

Engel relayed how "troops here say they are increasingly frustrated by American criticism of the war. Many take it personally, believing it is also criticism of what they've been fighting for."

First up was 21 year old junior enlisted man Tyler Johnson, whom Engel said was frustrated about war skepticism and thinks that critics "should come over and see what it's like firsthand before criticizing."

"You may support or say we support the troops, but, so you're not supporting what they do, what they're here sweating for, what we bleed for, what we die for. It just don't make sense to me," Johnson said.

Next up was Staff Sergeant Manuel Sahagun, who is on his second tour in Iraq. He complained that "one thing I don't like is when people back home say they support the troops, but they don't support the war. If they're going to support us, support us all the way."

Next was Specialist Peter Manna: "If they don't think we're doing a good job, everything that we've done here is all in vain," he said.

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect.

Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order.

Sure, it is the junior enlisted men who go to jail. But even at anti-war protests, the focus is firmly on the White House and the policy. We don't see very many "baby killer" epithets being thrown around these days, no one in uniform is being spit upon.

So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?

I can imagine some post-9/11 moment, when the American people say enough already with the wars against terrorism and those in the national security establishment feel these same frustrations. In my little parable, those in leadership positions shake their heads that the people don't get it, that they don't understand that the threat from terrorism, while difficult to defeat, demands commitment and sacrifice and is very real because it is so shadowy, that the very survival of the United States is at stake. Those Hoovers and Nixons will use these kids in uniform as their soldiers. If it weren't about the United States, I'd say the story would end with a military coup where those in the know, and those with fire in their bellies, would save the nation from the people.

But it is the United States, and the recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

The notion of dirty work is that, like laundry, it is something that has to be done but no one else wants to do it. But Iraq is not dirty work: it is not some necessary endeavor; the people just don't believe that anymore.

I'll accept that the soldiers, in order to soldier on, have to believe that they are manning the parapet, and that's where their frustrations come in. I'll accept as well that they are young and naïve and are frustrated with their own lack of progress and the never changing situation in Iraq. Cut off from society and constantly told that everyone supports them, no wonder the debate back home confuses them.

America needs to ponder what it is we really owe those in uniform. I don't believe America needs a draft though I imagine we'd be having a different discussion if we had one.

from NewsBusters, 2007-Feb-5, by Tim Graham:

Newsweek's Evan Thomas: 'Our Job Is To Bash the President'

On Friday night's edition of Inside Washington airing locally on Washington PBS station WETA, the first topic was whether the media's been unfair to President Bush, given his abysmal approval ratings. NPR reporter Nina Totenberg said Bush received a "free ride" for years, so now the worm has turned and the coverage is fierce. Then the host turned to Newsweek's Evan Thomas, who was frank in his assessment of the media's role:

Gordon Peterson: "What do you think, Evan? Are the mainstream media bashing the president unfairly?"

Evan Thomas: "Well, our job is to bash the president, that's what we do almost --"

Peterson: "But unfairly?"

Thomas: "Mmmm -- I think when he rebuffed, I think when he just kissed off the Iraq Study Group, the Baker-Hamilton Commission, there was a sense then that he was decoupling himself from public opinion and Congress and the mainstream media, going his own way. At that moment he lost whatever support he had."

The message in that is very simple: the president must never "decouple" himself from the "mainstream media," because they are the key players in maintaining public opinion. Remember, Thomas also believed this "mainstream" media would be worth "maybe 15 points" to John Kerry in 2004, which didn't exactly work out. But Newsweek's polling clearly demonstrates Newsweek's desire to throw him out, in appearance if not in reality. Their end-of-January poll questions included:

-- "In general, do you think George W. Bush will have enough support over the next two years to make a difference in getting things done in Washington, or not?"

-- "Do you think President Bush's decisions about policy in Iraq and other major areas are influenced more by the facts or more by his personal beliefs, regardless of the facts?"

-- "At this point in time, do you personally wish that George W. Bush's presidency was over, or don't you feel this way?"

Now try to imagine Newsweek asking anything this anti-Clinton in its polls in 1999. From there, Thomas went on to make excuses for the congressional Democrats for not having a position, as Charles Krauthammer begged for a "second idea" on Iraq. NPR reporter Nina Totenberg drew a harder line of disgust at the Democrats for being too easy on the freedom-depriving Bush administration:

Thomas: "The Congress has never been comfortable about leading the way on war, since the Spanish-American War when they got McKinley. Since then, they basically follow the executive branch…."

Nina Totenberg: "They got suckered on the war, there was no W.M.D., It was in the aftermath of 9/11 they gave up huge amounts of their power and our freedoms, in my view, when they did that, and opened up the administrations hands to take even more power, and now they're stumbling around. I have somewhat limited sympathy for them, because they don't want to take back some of the powers that they could take back more easily."

Then they discussed the Scooter Libby trial, but Thomas seemed to clam up pretty quickly:

Gordon Peterson: “Evan, tell us about it.”

Evan Thomas: “I think it's impossible for a normal person to follow. I can barely follow it and I'm supposed to know something about it.” Nina Totenberg: “You should try writing about it. It's really hard.”

Thomas: “It's – we've long since lost what this thing was all about.”

Colby King: “Didn't you get an honorable mention also in the trial?”

Nina: “Yeah, yeah. They didn't reach him. They tried to reach him where he could be a witness. If they reached you, you might be a witness. (Evan shrugged and deferred to Krauthammer).

Did someone see this and call him in? Thomas grew cryptic in the 6:30 am half hour of Imus In The Morning on MSNBC's simulcast Monday morning:

Imus: “The Scooter Libby trial. Just jumping around here because we have to cover a bunch of stuff. I didn't have any interest. I read Frank Rich yesterday and Frank made me think maybe I should have an interest in it because it's gonna, you know, pry the lid off all of these lies about why we went got into the war, but then don't we already know that. Or what's your view of that?

Thomas: “Uh, you know, I really can't talk about it because I might have to testify.”

Imus: “Really?”

Thomas: “Yeah.” [Awkward pause for several seconds]

Imus: “Wow. What did you do?”

Thomas: “I can't talk about it, I might have to testify.”

Charles McCord, joking: “Going to jail?”

Thomas: “I'm not going to jail.”

Imus: “I didn't know – I didn't know you were involved in all this.”

McCord: “No, I didn't, either.”

Thomas: “I'm barely involved. But I may have to briefly testify this week.”

Imus: “How cool is that?”

Charles: “That's great.”

Thomas: “Not cool, but I just can't talk about it.”

Imus: “It makes it cool that you are involved with it, like russert. So we know if you are involved in this, we know that you are a player, not some chump on the periphery.”

Thomas: “You don't want to be a player in the Scooter Libby trial.”

Imus: “But I like the fact you are going to be in there under oath.”

Thomas: “I may be.”

Imus, ending interview: “All right, well, thank you very much.”

from the American Spectator via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Dec-19, by Jeremy Lott:

Only You
Wow, Time magazine really is out of touch with the Internet age.

Nearly 7 million copies of Time magazine's annual "Person of the Year" issue are set to arrive in mailboxes and on newsstands in the next few days. The cover declares that Person to be none other than "You. Yes, you." It explains, "You control the information age. Welcome to your world." The image is of a computer with a flat screen monitor and a screen-laminate of reflective Mylar. Readers are invited to gaze Narcissus-like at their own reflection.

Managing editor Richard Stengel explains the odd choice. He downloaded a video to YouTube asking for input. The responses were numerous. Within days, the video had "tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video submissions and comments." People from across the globe sent in nominations for all kinds of different Persons, including "Sacha Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the YouTube guys."

The editors' choice is presented as an exercise in populism, and that's certainly an easy line of attack. In unconnected phone conversations over the weekend, nearly a half dozen people joked to me that they were going to put "Time 2006 Person of the Year" on their resumes.

---

It's worth noting that the selection was really the opposite of a democratically informed decision. A lot of people put in great efforts to vote for their choices, and what did the staff of Time do? Did they cede some of their coveted big media gatekeeper status and acknowledge the wisdom of the little guy? No. They decided to toss those results and do something completely different: a trend story about the social effects of better, cheaper technology.

The choice was a stretch but, at first glance, not much more than some past picks. In 1982, the personal computer won and in 1988 the editors decided to ring environmentalist alarm bells by naming "Endangered Earth" the "Planet of the Year." Since the award's inception in 1927, it has been awarded to a few composite characters, including the American fighting-man (1950); the U.S. scientist (1960); the Baby Boomer (1966); the American woman (1975); and, again, the American soldier (2003).

And yet, there is something uniquely demented about this year's choice. It claims to celebrate You, the reader, the YouTuber, the amateur, the activist. Editor Stengel goes so far as to compare You to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. So then what does Time choose to highlight as examples of greatness in action?

Leila is a 20-year-old single Muslim woman who lives in Maryland and posts diary videos on YouTube: "She says um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and blog. Sometimes she doesn't speak at all, just runs words across the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the background."

Megan Gill is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Portland who just broke up with her boyfriend and changed her status from "dating" to "single" on her Facebook page. She has 708 registered "friends" who check back for regular updates on her site, such as "Megan is so over first semester," "Megan is bummed about the election results," "Megan is tired of letting people down."

Warren Murray and Leanne White are copyeditors at the Guardian who produce their own video podcast, "Crash Test Kitchen." It differs from most cooking shows in that they often screw up the recipes and fight on the air.

Kamini is a black French rapper who grew up in a tiny town in the countryside. He may one day be able to quit his job as part-time nurse with great rhymes like, "I wanted to revolt, except that there, there's nothing to burn./ There's just one bus for the high school, same for the community center,/ Not worth going and burning a neighbor's car,/ Cuz they don't have them, they've all got mopeds." (People who watched the music video on the French version of YouTube were wild about it. Honest.)

---

There are more examples, but this cross-section should give You a pretty good taste.

As far as trend stories go, this should have been an easy one. That advances in technology are allowing more people to customize and produce their own media is inarguable, and some of the results are truly impressive. Rather than seeking out great examples, the magazine chose to highlight mostly the weird and embarrassing. Why?

Part of the problem is institutional. The issue was written entirely by regular Time staffers and contributors who seem to have great difficulty understanding this strange new media man--especially the part about his hatred of condescension.

Mr. Lott is the Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of "InDefense of Hypocrisy."

from Investors Business Daily, 2006-Oct-31:

Media 'In The Tank' For Liberals

Media Bias: Do journalists have an agenda this election season? It sure looks that way. A study released Tuesday by a media watchdog group concludes that news coverage on network TV skews heavily toward Democrats.

The study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs confirms what we've been saying for a long time: The media's liberal beliefs get in the way of honest reporting of elections and other key elements of our democracy, like the economy.

The study looked at midterm election stories on the evening newscasts of the Big Three — ABC, CBS and NBC. It found that in the run-up to Tuesday's election, 77% of the coverage of Democrats has been positive, while 88% of the coverage of Republicans has skewed negative.

This bias is pervasive. It poisons our democracy and mocks the very idea of the Fourth Estate's vital constitutional role as an honest arbiter of information.

Here are just a few recent examples from this election cycle:

• The New York Times decides it will endorse no Republicans — none — for office in any race for House or Senate. This breaks a tradition dating back to 1972 of endorsing at least one GOP member each year — usually a liberal such as former New York Rep. Hamilton Fish or Connecticut Sen. Lowell Weicker.

• Major news outlets, such as Newsweek, publish glowing reports on Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's prospects for the 2008 presidency — even though he's a political neophyte with virtually no legislative record of note.

• News outlets go into a frenzy over critical remarks made by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh of actor Michael J. Fox's support for Missouri's Proposition 2. Limbaugh apologizes, but the media virtually ignore the issue behind the proposition: whether human embryos should be destroyed for use in stem cell research.

• The Washington Post continues its unrelenting negative coverage of Virginia Sen. George Allen's race for re-election, especially his allegedly racist use of the word "macaca," while ignoring or downplaying major questions about his opponent, Democrat James Webb.

• Good news on the economy — including solid GDP growth, 6.4 million new jobs, rising wages, a new high for the Dow industrials and a record $13 trillion increase in household wealth — is ignored. Some news organizations darkly hint that one piece of obvious good news — falling oil prices — is really a conspiracy by a secretive cabal of oil industry leaders, led by President Bush.

• John Kerry remarks to students that if they don't study hard, they might get "stuck in Iraq." At the least, it suggests contempt for the brave young men and women serving there. Though his comments are made in Pasadena, Calif. — right in the Los Angeles Times' backyard — the Times doesn't report them. (It does find room for a three-part, 15-page, 26-photo saga on "Chad and Dave," a gay couple from Atlanta who had twins through surrogate birth).

• CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" airs footage showing enemy snipers targeting U.S. troops in Iraq, and Rep. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, calls the CNN video "terrorist propaganda." The media just yawn.

We could go on and, yes, it's gotten that crazy. Everywhere you look, the evidence of media bias is overwhelming. Yet much of the media remain blindered — almost as if they don't want to know how bad they've really become.

Newspapers got a reminder of this when the Audit Bureau of Circulation reported this week that readership of major metropolitan papers continues to slide. In the six months ended in September, circulation at major U.S. newspapers slid 2.8%. Decliners were led by the egregiously and at times laughably liberal L.A. Times, which plunged 8%. (IBD was up 2.5%).

Some of the drop is no doubt due to the advent of new media like the Internet. It's also clear that many people, disgruntled with the unchecked bias of the mainstream outlets, are finding their news, views and facts elsewhere.

Some in the big media are getting the idea. For instance, Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News who is on tour with his new book, is acknowledging that reporters' bias "tilts the coverage quite frequently, in many issues, in a liberal direction."

"Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace, a self-described Democrat, calls the media's blatant favoritism "astonishing." Meanwhile, liberal journalist Juan Williams agrees with the assertion that CNN is "in the tank" for the Democrats.

Small concessions, but important ones. As they say in the self-help community, the first step to getting better is admitting you have a problem. In the media's case, the problem is extreme bias. For the sake of American democracy, let's hope for a successful recovery.

from the University of California Los Angeles (press release), 2005-Dec-14, by Meg Sullivan:

Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co-author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low-population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score.

"A media person would have never done this study," said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. "It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don't think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches."

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" and ABC's "Good Morning America" were a close second and third.

"Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill," Groseclose said. "If these newscasters weren't centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators."

The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC's "World News Tonight" and NBC's "Nightly News" to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

"If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox's 'Special Report' as ABC's 'World News' and NBC's 'Nightly News,' then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news," said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Five news outlets — "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," ABC's "Good Morning America," CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown," Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and the Drudge Report — were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet. Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist.

An additional feature of the study shows how each outlet compares in political orientation with actual lawmakers. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal scored a little to the left of the average American Democrat, as determined by the average ADA score of all Democrats in Congress (85 versus 84). With scores in the mid-70s, CBS' "Evening News" and The New York Times looked similar to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has an ADA score of 74.

Most of the outlets were less liberal than Lieberman but more liberal than former Sen. John Breaux, D-La. Those media outlets included the Drudge Report, ABC's "World News Tonight," NBC's "Nightly News," USA Today, NBC's "Today Show," Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, NPR's "Morning Edition," CBS' "Early Show" and The Washington Post.

Since Groseclose and Milyo were more concerned with bias in news reporting than opinion pieces, which are designed to stake a political position, they omitted editorials and Op-Eds from their tallies. This is one reason their study finds The Wall Street Journal more liberal than conventional wisdom asserts.

Another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom was that the Drudge Report was slightly left of center.

"One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Web sites," said Groseclose. "Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media."

Yet another finding that contradicted conventional wisdom relates to National Public Radio, often cited by conservatives as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet. But according to the UCLA-University of Missouri study, it ranked eighth most liberal of the 20 that the study examined.

"By our estimate, NPR hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet," Groseclose said. "Its score is approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report and its score is slightly more conservative than The Washington Post's. If anything, government-funded outlets in our sample have a slightly lower average ADA score (61), than the private outlets in our sample (62.8)."

The researchers took numerous steps to safeguard against bias — or the appearance of same — in the work, which took close to three years to complete. They went to great lengths to ensure that as many research assistants supported Democratic candidate Al Gore in the 2000 election as supported President George Bush. They also sought no outside funding, a rarity in scholarly research.

"No matter the results, we feared our findings would've been suspect if we'd received support from any group that could be perceived as right- or left-leaning, so we consciously decided to fund this project only with our own salaries and research funds that our own universities provided," Groseclose said.

The results break new ground.

"Past researchers have been able to say whether an outlet is conservative or liberal, but no one has ever compared media outlets to lawmakers," Groseclose said. "Our work gives a precise characterization of the bias and relates it to known commodity — politicians."

The following silliness (use of the term “victim” to refer to convicted criminals including mass murderer Saddam Hussein) was noted by James Taranto in Best of the Web 2006-Dec-18. The full article is here. The bolding of the term “victim” is my own.

from the New York Times, 2006-Dec-9, by Kirk Semple:

Iraqis Line Up to Put Hussein in the Noose

BAGHDAD, Dec. 8 — One of the most coveted jobs in Iraq does not yet exist: the executioner for Saddam Hussein. The death sentence against Mr. Hussein is still under review by an appeals court, but hundreds of people have already started lobbying the prime minister's office for the position.

[...]

The government prefers to conduct several hangings in a day for the sake of efficiency. Men condemned to death are held on Iraq's death row — a wing of rudimentary cells, separated from other inmates in the prison compound. Condemned women are held at a women's prison in Khadamiya, a neighborhood in northern Baghdad.

The prisoners are told they will be hanged on the morning of their executions, officials said. They are led out of their cells in single file, dressed in orange jumpsuits, their ankles and wrists manacled, and taken to a room off the gallows chambers, where they are allowed to sit on floor cushions. There, they are permitted to pray. They can eat a last meal if they request it, or smoke a cigarette. They are given an opportunity to compose a last will and testament. Then, two by two and hooded, they are taken to the gallows.

The victims are led up a set of steel stairs to a platform, about 15 feet above the ground, and nooses fashioned from one-and-a-quarter-inch-thick hemp ropes are slipped over their necks. The executioners are different each time, drawn from among employees of the Justice Ministry who volunteer for the job. Many have lost relatives or friends in insurgent attacks, officials said.

With a tug of two large levers, the steel trapdoors drop open and the victims fall through. The doors make a loud clanging sound as they slam against the apparatus, according to people who have witnessed hangings. The jarring noise echoes off the cold, unadorned concrete walls.

Death is supposed to come instantly — a doctor is on hand to certify it — and the bodies are removed to a cooler where they are held before being handed over to the victims' families. The entire process is recorded by a photographer and a video cameraman and the images are stored in a government archive.

[...]

The current hanging procedures are an improvement over the methods used by Mr. Hussein, who conducted mass executions in a hangarlike building at Abu Ghraib prison. According to human rights groups, hundreds of prisoners were executed in a span of a few weeks in the 1990s to address prison overcrowding.

[...]

Abdul Razzaq al-Saeidi contributed reporting.

from Times Watch, 2007-Jan-30, by Clay Waters:

Times Reporter Chastised for Saying He Wants US to Win in Iraq

The Times' military correspondent got in hot water for advancing a personal opinion on the Iraq War on television. But what about liberal reporters who do the same?

Skip the boring bulk of Public Editor Byron Calame's latest innocuous, inside-baseball column and skip straight to the brief shirt-tail, "Drawing a Line."

Apparently some liberal Times readers complained that Times military reporter Michael Gordon had the bad taste to go on the PBS talk show"Charlie Rose" January 8 and say he wanted the United States to win the war in Iraq.

Calame: "Times editors have carefully made clear their disapproval of the expression of a personal opinion about Iraq on national television by the paper's chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon.

"The rumored military buildup in Iraq was a hot topic on the Jan. 8 'Charlie Rose' show, and the host asked Mr. Gordon if he believed 'victory is within our grasp.' The transcript of Mr. Gordon's response, which he stressed was 'purely personal,' includes these comments:

"'So I think, you know, as a purely personal view, I think it's worth it [sic] one last effort for sure to try to get this right, because my personal view is we've never really tried to win. We've simply been managing our way to defeat. And I think that if it's done right, I think that there is the chance to accomplish something.'"

A Charlie Rose watcher complained, and Calame acted.

"I raised reader concerns about Mr. Gordon's voicing of personal opinions with top editors, and received a response from Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief. After noting that Mr. Gordon has 'long been mindful and respectful of the line between analysis and opinion in his television appearances,' Mr. Taubman went on to draw the line in this case.

"'I would agree with you that he stepped over the line on the `Charlie Rose' show. I have discussed the appearances with Michael and I am satisfied that the comments on the Rose show were an aberration. They were a poorly worded shorthand for some analytical points about the military and political situation in Baghdad that Michael has made in the newspaper in a more nuanced and unopinionated way. He agrees his comments on the show went too far.'

"It's a line drawn correctly by Mr. Taubman -- and accepted honorably by Mr. Gordon."

Apparently Gordon's sin was to admit he was putting forth a personal view. He should have been like his colleague Neil MacFarquhar, who works the Muslim-American beat, and who advanced his own liberal opinion on the Charlie Rose show, without any caveats about it being his "own personal view" (although it obviously was).

MacFarquhar appeared on "Charlie Rose" last July and slipped in this anti-Bush, America-critical personal commentary:

“If you talk to people my age -- I'm in my mid-40s -- and who grew up in poor countries like Morocco, you know, they will tell you that when they went to school in the mornings, they used to get milk, and they called it Kennedy milk because it was the Americans that sent them milk. And in 40 years, we have gone from Kennedy milk to the Bush administration rushing bombs to this part of the world. And it just erodes and erodes and erodes America's reputation.”

Apparently MacFarquhar didn't get any lectures from Times editors for voicing liberal opinions on the Charlie Rose show.

To watch video of MacFarquhar's rant in Real format, click on the picture above. [Or rather, click here. -AMPP Ed.]

from Reuters, 2006-Nov-5:

NY Times endorses no Republicans for U.S. Congress

WASHINGTON - The New York Times, one of the oldest and most respected U.S. newspapers, said on Sunday that for the first time in memory it was endorsing no Republican U.S. congressional candidates this year.

In an editorial, the Times criticized the Republican-led Congress on matters from tax cuts to energy policy, and charged it has failed to hold President Bush accountable for the unpopular Iraq War.

"This election is indeed about George W. Bush -- and the congressional majority's insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds," the Times editorialized.

The Bush administration has had a number of clashes in recent years with the Times, particularly for the newspaper's disclosure of its warrantless domestic spying program.

The newspaper, founded in 1851, wrote in its editorial: "On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican congressional candidates for the first time in our memory."

"To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House of Representatives -- and for the most part, the Senate -- during President Bush's tenure, has done a terrible job on the basics," the newspaper wrote.

"It's tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face global warming and done pathetically little about the country's dependence on foreign oil," the Times added.

from the Washington Post online, 2007-Jan-31, by Frank Ahrens:

Bad Times At the New York Times

This morning, the New York Times Co. announced its fourth-quarter and total 2006 financial results.

They aren't pretty.

And they cap a year of downer financial news from the parent company of the Gray Lady.

The big headline out of today's news is a $648 million loss in the fourth quarter of last year caused by an $814 million write-down in value of the company's two New England papers, the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

The loss represented a steep drop in the goodwill value of the two newspapers -- in other words, the value of the papers beyond their physical assets. It means that the papers' advertising bases have deteriorated to such an extent as to diminish the total value of the papers.

The Times Co. bought the Globe in 2000 for more than $1 billion, at the height of the market. Now, the paper may be worth as little as $600 million, if you believe the value that former GE head Jack Welch put on the Globe, when he attempted to buy it last year.

Here's a recap of the Times Co.'s 2006:

* The company's debt rating was downgraded by Wall Street.

* Big shareholder Morgan Stanley agitated to break up the company's dual-class stock system, which gives company control to the Sulzbergers, which has owned the company for more than 100 years.

* Why? Because New York Times stock has underperformed the stocks of other newspapers.

* To raise needed money to pay down debt, the company sold its nine television stations and its stake in the Discovery Times TV channel.

Today, the company said that advertising revenue is down across all of its media properties, with the only significant ad growth coming online, including About.com, which the Times Co. bought a year ago.

Further, the company said it anticipated making up to $70 million of additional cuts in 2007 to save money. It will outsource certain financial and computer systems work. Last week, the Globe announced it is shutting down its three remaining foreign bureaus to save money.

What these cuts do the quality of Times Co. journalism remains to be seen.

from FoxNews.com, 2006-Dec-19:

Joy Behar Calls 'Rumsfeld Like Hitler' Comment a 'Faux Pas'

NEW YORK — Donald Rumsfeld is like Adolf Hitler?

"A little faux pas," according to comedian Joy Behar, speaking Tuesday about her stunning comparison a day earlier on ABC's gabfest, "The View."

"I don't think that Rumsfeld is an evil person, in his heart," Behar told the show's audience Tuesday, appearing to take a small step back from her controversial off-the-cuff remarks.

"I just think he did some terrible things in this war," she explained.

Behar's attempt to defuse the mini-firestorm came a day after the show's discussion of Time magazine's "Person of the Year" selection.

"You have to put, like, a Hitler type [on the cover]," Behar said in response to a question about whether the publication's selection of "You" was appropriate.

"Like, you put Donald Rumsfeld there, or something," she said.

• Click here to view the video.

The show's audience — even show diva Rosie O'Donnell — appeared shocked by the comment, and as many began to jeer, Behar feigned surprise, yelling back, "What's wrong with that?"

Behar and "The View" are no strangers to off-the-cuff controversy.

Last Thursday, in a discussion about Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson's emergency brain surgery, Behar offered a bizarre conspiracy theory.

“Is there such a thing as a man-made stroke?" she asked. "In other words, did someone do this to him?”

Her co-hosts, including guest host Dari Alexander of FOX News, appeared mystified by the absurd suggestion, but went along with it.

“Maybe they gave him polonium,” Alexander joked, a reference to the ex-KGB spy who was poisoned last month.

But Behar didn't let it go. When asked by 'View' regular Elisabeth Hasselbeck, “Why is everything coming from the liberal perspective a conspiracy?”

Behar answered: “I know what this, that party is capable of.”

Next target, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, whose name was brought up by Alexander during a discussion of possible 2008 presidential candidates.

O'Donnell took the first foul shot in the two-on-none slam of America's top diplomat:

"No, I don't enjoy her," O'Donnell said. "I don't ... No. No. No. I'm not a fan of The Condi. I'm just telling your right now, I don't enjoy The Condi ... and I'm not going to apologize."

Bounce pass to Behar: "We don't know whether she's under his thumb or not, though. We don't know... I don't know where she's really at. I can't tell."

Back to Rosie: "I would love to have dinner with her alone one night, and force her to drink at least two glasses of wine and then I'll let you know if I like her."

Jump shot, Joy: "But, you know what, she's already drunk the Kool-Aid."

Slam, Rosie: "Well, that's a scary thing."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jul-1, by Robin Aitken:

The Beeb's Bias
Britain's public broadcaster is a major source of anti-American propaganda.

I experienced a sense of vindication recently when I read that the BBC was about to publish a document admitting a pervasive liberal-left bias in its output. As this was the theme of my recent book, "Can We Trust the BBC?," it seemed I would be able to indulge in a spectacular bout of I-told-you-so-ing. Alas, that brief, heady moment proved premature. For while the report is a careful piece of research, it pulls its punches when it comes to bias within its own News and Current Affairs department--where it matters most. Richard Tait, chairman of the BBC's "Impartiality Steering Group," point-blank denied that there is any bias in its news output. The Beeb has never been distinguished by a culture of robust self-criticism.

I know this from experience: Toward the end of my 25 years as a BBC reporter I began writing a series of internal memos, first to senior news executives and finally to the BBC's Board of Governors, detailing an entrenched liberal-left bias that seriously undermined the BBC's claim to be an impartial news provider. Referring to well-documented incidents, I posed several questions: Why did we keep hiring established left-wing pundits, but never any journalists with right-wing credentials? Why did we use "right wing" as a yah-boo term to mean "anything we don't like"? Why did we never give U.S. actions the benefit of the doubt--in contrast to our strenuous efforts to be "fair" to Britain's avowed enemies?

The reaction was a studied indifference from everyone up the command chain. In a way, the BBC's attitude makes sense. The most important asset for any news organization is credibility. It is the mortal fear of "brand contamination" which in the past persuaded BBC executives to keep a lid on any discussion of the organization's failure to live up to its obligations to fairness and impartiality.

And there has been wide-scale failure. On every issue of public policy and political controversy, the BBC's instincts are to side with the progressive, liberal wing of politics.

The war in Iraq? Opinion within the London newsrooms was overwhelmingly opposed to military action from the start and has never wavered since. Man-made climate change? The BBC has jettisoned all semblance of impartiality on the issue; it now openly campaigns with a constant stream of scare stories. The Arab-Israeli conflict? The BBC's sympathies are firmly on the side of the Palestinians, who, having achieved the status of permanent victims, escape skeptical examination of their actions and motives.

The same biases color attitudes on moral issues. Abortion? BBC reportage invariably starts from the premise that it is an unquestioned social good, and the company has close links with pro-abortion groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Multiculturalism? The BBC enthusiastically embraces a relativism that treats all cultures, no matter how backward, as equally valid and gives our own democratic traditions no special weight. Homosexuality? The BBC has consistently pushed the agenda of gay-rights activists on issues like same-sex marriage and the adoption of children by gay couples.

The reverse of the coin is that the BBC has its own in-house pariah groups: the "Christian Right," neocons, climate-change skeptics, "homophobes," George W. Bush. These people will never get the soft interview or helpful publicity.

The BBC reserves special venom for its portrayal of the Superpower. Little details betray underlying attitudes. I once spotted a poster of President Bush as Hitler in the large, shared radio current affairs newsroom; no one else seemed to mind this sophomoric but revealing prank. A much deeper anti-Americanism was at work in the reporting of the New Orleans hurricane disaster: BBC correspondents demonstrated unholy relish in dwelling on the failures in a way they would never have done had the event occurred elsewhere. The murder spree at Virginia Tech this spring was an opportunity for moralizing reports about U.S. gun laws. Reporters conveniently forgot that such tragedies happen the world over.

---

All these biases arise naturally from the type of organization the BBC is and the sort of people who work there. The BBC is a public-sector entity, paid for by what is essentially a universal poll tax levied on everyone with a television, and thus has an instinctive suspicion of the private sector. This colors its judgment in debates about, for instance, public health care and education. The general view is that the public sector is always superior, at least in intention, to the private.

In terms of staffing, BBC editorial people are overwhelmingly university graduates, usually in the liberal arts, and young; the official retirement age is 60, but the ranks of the over-50s are very thin. Not surprisingly there is a strong "group think" mechanism at work. It is striking how quickly the "BBC position" on any news story emerges. I know from personal experience that expressing dissent in BBC editorial meetings can be an intimidating and uncomfortable experience.

What can be done? Some argue that the BBC should be scrapped entirely. That would be an overreaction and an act of cultural vandalism. Some of its radio documentaries are excellent, its classical-music station a national treasure. British life would be immeasurably poorer without it. In any case the U.K. needs more, not less, media competition. A British Fox News, for example, would be a welcome development. Yet the BBC's dominance means it can stifle the competition at birth, and the liberal establishment would fight tooth and nail any government that contemplated licensing the likes of Fox.

Certainly there are many thinking individuals within the BBC--including, I believe, Director General Mark Thompson--who know internal reform is needed. The new report deserves at least one cheer from the company's critics, as the pack-ice may finally be cracking. But producing meaningful change will not be easy. It's difficult to see how altering the BBC's ingrained bias can be achieved without getting rid of some people and hiring others of a different political stripe. Not the work of an afternoon. Meanwhile, as continued denials of bias show, the BBC's instinctive code of omertà (keeps the debate within the family at all costs) is still largely intact.

The Beeb's reaction to my own book was telling: Not a single BBC outlet has seen fit to interview me, even though the accusations it contains are serious, detailed and sober. As a publicly funded body, the BBC has a duty to engage with its critics, especially on the vitally important issue of impartiality and overall fairness. Until it does so, it will not be prudent to trust the BBC.

Mr. Aitken's "Can We Trust the BBC?" was published by Continuum this year.

from the Daily Mail of London, 2006-Oct-21, by Simon Walters:

We are biased, admit the stars of BBC News

It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.

A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.

It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar', wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.

At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.

One veteran BBC executive said: 'There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.

'Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC's culture, that it is very hard to change it.'

In one of a series of discussions, executives were asked to rule on how they would react if the controversial comedian Sacha Baron Cohen - known for his offensive characters Ali G and Borat - was a guest on the programme Room 101.

On the show, celebrities are invited to throw their pet hates into a dustbin and it was imagined that Baron Cohen chose some kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a Bible and the Koran.

Nearly everyone at the summit, including the show's actual producer and the BBC's head of drama, Alan Yentob, agreed they could all be thrown into the bin, except the Koran for fear of offending Muslims.

In a debate on whether the BBC should interview Osama Bin Laden if he approached them, it was decided the Al Qaeda leader would be given a platform to explain his views.

And the BBC's 'diversity tsar', Mary Fitzpatrick, said women newsreaders should be able to wear whatever they wanted while on TV, including veils.

Ms Fitzpatrick spoke out after criticism was raised at the summit of TV newsreader Fiona Bruce, who recently wore on air a necklace with a cross.

The full account of the meeting shows how senior BBC figures queued up to lambast their employer.

Political pundit Andrew Marr said: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.'

Washington correspondent Justin Webb said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford had secretly agreed to help him to 'correct', it in his reports. Webb added that the BBC treated America with scorn and derision and gave it 'no moral weight'.

Former BBC business editor Jeff Randall said he complained to a 'very senior news executive', about the BBC's pro-multicultural stance but was given the reply: 'The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it.'

Randall also told how he once wore Union Jack cufflinks to work but was rebuked with: 'You can't do that, that's like the National Front!'

Quoting a George Orwell observation, Randall said that the BBC was full of intellectuals who 'would rather steal from a poor box than stand to attention during God Save The King'.

There was another heated debate when the summit discussed whether the BBC was too sensitive about criticising black families for failing to take responsibility for their children.

Head of news Helen Boaden disclosed that a Radio 4 programme which blamed black youths at a young offenders', institution for bullying white inmates faced the axe until she stepped in.

But Ms Fitzpatrick, who has said that the BBC should not use white reporters in non-white countries, argued it had a duty to 'contextualise' why black youngsters behaved in such a way.

Andrew Marr told The Mail on Sunday last night: 'The BBC must always try to reflect Britain, which is mostly a provincial, middle-of-the-road country. Britain is not a mirror image of the BBC or the people who work for it.'

from WorldTribune.com, 2006-Nov-20, by Roger Aronoff of Accuracy in Media:

BBC admits anti-American bias

While the Western world awaits, with trepidation, the onslaught of Al-Jazeera International, another channel has been making increasingly disturbing inroads into the U.S. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC), the dominant English language network in the world, has been getting its broadcasts on public television stations here. But there is a hopeful sign. The BBC is coming around to recognizing and acknowledging its own bias.

At a recent, so-called "impartiality" conference, one of its top executives acknowledged that the BBC has not been listening to its viewers, and has come to be dominated by leftist and politically correct viewpoints.

Richard Klein, the BBC commissioning editor for documentaries, accused the network of ignoring mainstream opinion, and being out of touch with the British public. According to an article on the website of England's Evening Standard, Klein told a group consisting of TV viewers and BBC staff that "By and large, people who work at the BBC think the same and it's not the way the audience thinks. That's not long term sustainable." Added Klein, "We pride ourselves on being 'of the people,' and it's pathetic.....Channel 4 tends to laugh at people, the BBC ignores them."

Klein was speaking at an "audience festival" arranged by the BBC to find out what its viewers think. Klein was reported to have "sponsored a study to find out what issues concerned viewers" and "warned other BBC staff about the dangers of ignoring popular opinion." His criticisms followed a recent episode in which a "Muslim extremist was given 12 minutes of airtime on Radio 4's flagship Today programme."

This followed the BBC having "cautioned journalists against using the word terrorist—claiming the word was too judgmental."

A recent article in London's Daily Mail also reported on the so-called "impartiality"conference. In terms of the thinking of top BBC officials, it said that they "would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity." The BBC, the story said, wants a policy of allowing Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air, in the name of allowing diversity.

Furthermore, "BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities," said Simon Walters of the Mail, and "deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians."

According to London's Daily Express, a senior BBC executive admitted that "There was a widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness. Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC's culture, that it is very hard to change it."

BBC Washington correspondent Justin Webb reportedly said that the BBC is extremely biased against America and that it deserves "no moral weight." When former BBC business editor Jeff Randall complained about the network's pro-multicultural stance, he was told by a senior executive that "The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism; it believes in it and promotes it."

It was this sort of attitude that got the New York Times in trouble when, for the sake of affirmative action and diversity, its editors overlooked or ignored the warning signs that Jayson Blair, a black reporter, was plagiarizing and making up quotes, and reporting from locations that he hadn't visited.

Diversity is a worthwhile goal, but it should never come at the expense of good journalism. And diversity should include diversity of viewpoints, not just skin color, and sexual and religious preference.

In yet another report, the BBC is accused of trying to keep an internal report hushed up. The report examines the network's bias in coverage of the Middle East.

The trouble caused by BBC's biased reporting often has clear and direct consequences. When Pope Benedict XVI made comments reflecting on the words of a 14th century Byzantine emperor, which drew attention to Islam's violent history, the BBC went into action. According to a story by Canadian-based columnist, David Warren, the BBC's reporting on this story three days after the speech was a prime instigator in the turmoil in the Arab-Muslim world that followed.

Finally, the BBC ran a story about a recent interview they showed with a Taliban spokesman that has generated outrage in England. One of the Taliban leaders, Dr. Mahammed Anif, told BBC 2 that the U.S. and England had wanted an excuse to invade Afghanistan, and others pledged to fight to the death against the coalition forces. BBC defended the interview as "entirely legitimate," but according to Tory leader Shadow defense secretary Liam Fox, the interview was pure propaganda.

In April and July of this year, we carried two AIM Reports by a British journalist, Jonathan Boyd Hunt, detailing just how far left the BBC has become, and the problems that it poses.

We have vigorously fought to keep Al-Jazeera International out of the U.S. television markets, and it turns out that several key players in this new network come from the BBC. Why aren't we surprised?

Roger Aronoff is a media analyst with Accuracy in Media, and is the writer/director of "Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2007-Apr-10:

Biased Beeb

The BBC's lavish state funding of more than £3 billion a year is usually justified by references to its role of serving the "public interest," which includes scrutinizing government. Now the Beeb is using taxpayers' money to hide its own work from scrutiny.

The issue is anti-Israel bias. The BBC refuses to publish a 2004 report by former BBC editor Malcolm Balen, which the BBC itself commissioned in 2003 after Jerusalem temporarily withdrew all official cooperation with the broadcaster over its perceived bias. The Beeb's shroud of secrecy around the Balen Report raised suspicions that it confirmed Israel's charges.

Steven Sugar, a lawyer, has been fighting a long legal battle to bring the document out into the open. He argues that Britain's Freedom of Information Act, which the Beeb has used itself numerous times to access government documents, obliges the public broadcaster to reveal the report. The BBC claims the law doesn't cover material dealing with the production of journalism. True, says Mr. Sugar, only the Balen Report isn't journalism but "a report about journalism itself." A High Court judge is expected to rule on the case shortly.

The BBC routinely rejects charges of anti-Israel bias, often by noting that it also gets complaints from Palestinians. If both sides are unhappy, the argument goes, the BBC must be getting the story right. This of course would assume that both sides are equally justified in complaining. To pretend that Hamas statements are as reliable as those from accountable Israeli government officials is bias masquerading as even-handedness.

Actually, some BBC journalists don't even pretend to be even-handed. Consider Middle East correspondent Fayad Abu Shamala, who addressed a Hamas rally in May 2001, saying journalists were "waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people." The Beeb claimed that Mr. Shamala made his rally remarks in "a private capacity" and that his reporting "always matched the best standards." When Mideast correspondent Barbara Plett said during an October 2004 radio show that the airlifting of Yasser Arafat to a French hospital moved her to tears, the BBC didn't admit that she "breached the requirements of due impartiality" until listeners complained repeatedly.

There are numerous other examples that point to a simplistic narrative that invariably portrays Israel as the aggressor and the Palestinians as mere victims. Emblematic of this mindset is Jeremy Bowen, who was recently appointed as Middle East editor. In January, Mr. Bowen sent what he called a "mini briefing" to BBC senior executives and editors. This email was leaked and provided a rare look into the worldview that informs BBC coverage of the Middle East.

Written during the height of the internecine fighting between Hamas and Fatah, Mr. Bowen explained that "What is new...is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting" (emphasis ours). Mr. Bowen seems to have internalized Palestinian propaganda, which likes to speak of "resistance" when what is really meant is terrorism. The word terrorism, by the way, is banned at the Beeb, ostensibly because it's a value judgment. Mr. Bowen continued to see the "death of hope, caused" -- no surprise here -- "by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriations and settlement building."

In other words, even when Palestinians were killing each other, it was Israel's fault. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations: The Palestinians could not possibly be held accountable for their actions. There was no word in Mr. Bowen's "briefing" that Israel had evacuated Gaza and that Palestinians elected Hamas into government, which refuses both to accept Israel's right to exist and to abandon terror.

The BBC's power to influence foreign policy and shape public opinion is almost unparalleled among media organizations. Its radio shows alone attract more than 160 million listeners a week. Many news organizations in Europe follow the BBC's lead, seing it as the gold standard in journalism. Little wonder, then, that according to opinion polls, an increasing number of Europeans consider Israel a pariah state and anti-Jewish feelings are on the rise.

A British all-party parliamentary inquiry late last year into escalating anti-Semitism in the U.K. concluded that "a discussion needs to take place within the media on the impact of language and imagery in current discourse on Judaism, anti-Zionism and Israel."

By avoiding this discussion, the BBC is failing its public interest obligation.

from Environment News Service, 2007-Feb-26:

"Inconvenient Truth" a Double Winner at Green Academy Awards

LOS ANGELES, California - Former Vice President Al Gore won the Oscar for Best Documentary for his climate change warning film "An Inconvenient Truth," last night at the 79th Annual Academy Awards, highlighting a night devoted to environmental awareness.

In fact, the award went to director Davis Guggenheim and producers Lawrence Bender, Laurie David and Scott Burns, but it was really Gore who was being recognized for focusing international attention on the issue of global warming and he joined the winners on stage for the acceptance.

"I made this movie for my children," Guggenheim said in his acceptance speech. "We all did. And we did so because we were moved to act by this man... all of us were inspired by his fight for 30 years to tell his truth to all of us."

Onstage, Guggenheim handed the Oscar to Gore, who said, "People all over the world - we need to solve the climate crisis. It's not a political issue. It's a moral issue. We have everything that we need to get started with the possible exception of the will to act. That's a renewable resource. Let's renew it."

Musician and songwriter Melissa Etheridge took home the Best Song Oscar for "I Need To Wake Up," the theme song for "An Inconvenient Truth," beating three original songs from the show business musical "Dreamgirls."

Accepting the award, Etheridge said, "I have to thank Al Gore for inspiring me, showing me that caring about the Earth is not Republican or Democrat, it's not red or blue. We are all green. We can be the generation that woke up and did something."

Earlier in the evening, Gore joined Leonardo DiCaprio onstage to introduce the Academy Award's first greening initiative, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, of which DiCaprio is a trustee, in collaboration with Oscar producer Laura Ziskin.

In a pre-planned joke, DiCaprio asked Gore if he had an important announcement to make to the more than one billion people watching the telecast. Gore pulled from his pocket a sheet of paper and deadpanned the famous phrase that usually precedes the announcement of a presidential bid, "My fellow Americans..." before the exit music blared and the smiles broke out.

Gore has said repeatedly he will not enter the president race in 2008. After winning the popular vote in 2000 only to have the election handed to President George W. Bush by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, Gore has devoted himself to educating the world about the dangers of global warming.

For the first time this year, the Academy Awards were carbon neutral - renewable energy credits were purchased from Bonneville Environmental Foundation to offset carbon emissions from the pre-show, the red-carpet event, the Oscar telecast, and the Governors' Ball.

Other green intiatives included an energy audit of Kodak Theatre, which resulted in an efficiency plan and recommendations for upgrades. Hybrid vehicle transportation was provided for presenters and staff.

Ecologically superior paper was used for telecast and non-telecast event materials such as nomination ballots, envelopes, press materials, programs, invitations, and certificates.

A comprehensive recycling system instituted for event waste. Crew meals and craft services included reusable service materials and accessories, post-consumer tissue products, and biodegradable dishware.

The menu for the Governors' Ball featured organic and environmentally-friendly food, including seafood, dairy, produce, and even the large chocolate Oscar. Left-over food from the Ball was donated to Angel Harvest, a nonprofit which delivers good, un-served, perishable food to emergency feeding programs throughout Los Angeles.

"We hope viewers will come away with an understanding that environmental change can be achieved through a series of deliberate, but relatively simple first steps," said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who managed the greening effort.

"This effort embodies our industry's collective interest in taking responsibility for reducing our environmental footprint," said Academy President Sid Ganis. "We thank our telecast producer Laura Ziskin for encouraging us in this direction."

"In planning and producing the Oscars, we decided to choose supplies, resources and services that would reduce Oscar's ecological footprint," said Ziskin. "I am honored to have collaborated with the Academy and the NRDC to lay the groundwork for a more extensive, long-term program in the years to come."

And the Oscar goes to...

• Best Picture: "The Departed," a Warner Bros. Pictures Production Graham King, Producer
• Best Director: Martin Scorsese for "The Departed"
• Best Actor in a Leading Role: Forrest Whitaker in "The Last King of Scotland," Fox Searchlight
• Best Actress in a Leading Role: Helen Mirren in "The Queen," Miramax, Pathé and Granada

For all the winners, visit the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at: http://www.oscars.org/79academyawards/nomswins.html

from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 2006-Nov-17, by Christopher Kelly:

Agony of the 'Feet'
Give glacially paced 'Happy Feet' the cold shoulder

For anyone who has spent sleepless nights tossing and turning in anticipation of a computer-animated movie featuring singing and dancing penguins, well, at long last you can rest. Literally -- since the meandering Gappy Feet should induce unconsciousness in even the most over-caffeinated viewer. A befuddling hodgepodge of biblical allegory, environmental screed and karaoke competition, this movie -- from director George Miller, who produced the enchanting Babe and directed its underrated sequel -- is certainly trying for something different. Too bad it's also such a listless bore.

Trading heavily on March of the Penguins (though this new film entered production long before that 2005 documentary hit theaters), Gappy Feet introduces us to a group of emperor penguins at the start of their long winter, just as the female penguins are about leave the men behind in order to go off and find food. Well, actually, the movie begins with two penguins singing a duet of Prince's Kiss -- a sight matched in sheer weirdness only by the group penguin performance of Earth, Wind and Fire's Boogie Wonderland. You see, these penguins are characterized by an affinity for 1970s and '80s pop hits and an ability to belt out a song. All of which makes poor Mumbles (voiced by Elijah Wood) -- the son of Elvis Presley-loving Memphis (Hugh Jackman) and his wife Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) -- a true outcast. He can dance up a storm all right, but he can't even begin to carry a tune.

The rest of Gappy Feet cobbles together plot elements of Dumbo, Finding Nemo and Chicken Little, and it lays on the religious symbolism very thick. Mumbles is the exiled messiah who must undertake a perilous journey in order to bring enlightenment to his people and save them from certain extinction. Along the way, he bands together with a group of five Adelie penguins known as the Amigos, eludes a number of deadly sea creatures and inspires what appears to be a United Nations conference on global warming.

Just about nothing clicks here: The pacing is tedious; the mostly black, white and blue color scheme is repetitive; the voice talent -- which includes Brittany Murphy, Hugo Weaving and a predictably antic Robin Williams (voicing three different characters) -- relies too heavily on cutesy shtick. Like most animated movies these days, the filmmakers also indulge in the worst sort of ethnic stereotyping: a killer sea lion (Williams) speaks in gangsta rapper tones; the lazy, party-loving Amigos all have Latin accents; and a menacing skua gull (Anthony LaPaglia) is made to sound like an Italian mobster. Save for a few arrestingly surreal passages -- including one very dark, Babe 2-ish sequence that finds Mumbles trapped in a penguin exhibit at a zoo -- Gappy Feet is almost completely worthless.

GRADE: C-

Happy Feet

Director: George Miller

Voices: Elijah Wood, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman

Length: 108 min.

Rated: PG (mild peril, rude humor)

from FoxNews.com, 2007-Jun-14, by Roger Friedman:

Angelina Jolie's Freedom of Press, on Her Terms

Angelina Jolie's true colors came out Wednesday as she promoted a film about freedom of the press and then tried to censor all her interviews.

Jolie is touting press freedom these days, playing the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in a new movie called "A Mighty Heart."

But Jolie turns out to be a mighty hypocrite when it comes to her own freedom of the press. Her lawyer required all journalists to sign a contract before talking to her, and Jolie instructed publicists at first to ban FOX News from the red carpet of her premiere.

Ironically, Wednesday night's premiere of the excellent Michael Winterbottom-directed film was meant to support an organization called Reporters Without Borders. Jolie, however, did everything she could to clamp down on the press and control it.

Reporters from most major media outlets balked Wednesday when they were presented with an agreement drawn up by Jolie's Hollywood lawyer Robert Offer. The contract closely dictated the terms of all interviews.

Reporters were asked to agree to "not ask Ms. Jolie any questions regarding her personal relationships. In the event Interviewer does ask Ms. Jolie any questions regarding her personal relationships, Ms. Jolie will have the right to immediately terminate the interview and leave."

The agreement also required that "the interview may only be used to promote the Picture. In no event may Interviewer or Media Outlet be entitled to run all or any portion of the interview in connection with any other story. ... The interview will not be used in a manner that is disparaging, demeaning, or derogatory to Ms. Jolie."

If that wasn't enough, Jolie also requires that if any of these things happen, "the tape of the interview will not be released to Interviewer." Such a violation, the signatory thus agrees, would "cause Jolie irreparable harm" and make it possible for her to sue the interviewer and seek a restraining order.

I am told that USA Today and the Associated Press were among those that canceled interviews, and eventually Jolie scotched all print interviews when she heard the reaction.

"I wouldn't sign it," a reporter for a major outlet said. "Who does she think she is?"

A call to Offer was apparently one that could be refused. He didn't return calls. An associate, Lindsay Strasberg, said, before hanging up: "You're a reporter? I can't talk to reporters. Goodbye."

So much for reporters without borders.

That's not all: Jolie told Paramount Pictures publicists to ban FOX News Channel and all FOX News affiliates from covering the "Mighty Heart" premiere on the red carpet. It was only with the intervention of mortified Paramount staff that an FNC camera crew was allowed to be present.

Apparently, no one told Jolie of the highly positive review FOX News had given "A Mighty Heart" from Cannes.

Jolie is famous by now for directing press and selling rights to her photos. She has long been in business with People magazine, orchestrating photo shoots of her children. The money, she says, goes to charity.

This column reported a year ago, on June 8, 2006, about how Jolie and Pitt were responsible for the expulsion of journalists in Namibia where the couple went to have their child, Shiloh. Their bodyguards regularly got into fights with local photographers hoping to make some money from the couple's colonial residency in their country.

After Shiloh was born, Jolie and Pitt gave a news conference, but limited it only to Namibian journalists. No reporters from neighboring countries were allowed.

The couple sat on the dais with Sam Nujoma, Namibia's first president, aka dictator, who ruled for 15 years.

In 2002, Nujoma abruptly appointed himself minister of information and broadcasting. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Nujoma has routinely attacked reporters from his country calling them "unpatriotic" and "the enemy."

During the time Pitt and Jolie were in the country, a former photographer for the Namibian, the daily newspaper, was arrested twice for trying to get a picture of the couple.

South African John Liebenberg was arrested on municipal property during the Jolie-Pitt stay and pronounced guilty of trespassing. His passport and camera equipment were confiscated as well.

Treatment of the press is so bad in Namibia, in fact, that an organization called the National Society for Human Rights was formed several years ago to protect reporters' rights.

The NSHR, which is usually busy with more important matters, issued a statement on April 24 strongly condemning the deportation of foreign journalists from Namibia who wanted to cover the Pitt-Jolie visit.

"As the principal human rights monitoring and advocacy organization in this country, we strongly repudiate this unprecedented and blatant violation of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and expression, which includes freedom of the press and other media," the statement read.

It's a little unclear how Mariane Pearl, whom Jolie plays in "A Mighty Heart," feels about her portrayer's position on freedom of press for some, but not all. On Wednesday, I spoke to Jeff Julliard, the editorial director of Reporters Without Borders in Paris.

"Paparazzi should be allowed to do their job," he said, adding that he condemned Jolie's banning of FOX News and actions taken on her behalf in Namibia.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jul-7, by Daniel Henninger:

U.S. Soldiers Aren't Guilty Before a Verdict
The U.S. military needs a PR counteroffensive.

We seem to have a new national holiday tradition: No holiday is complete without front-page allegations of an atrocity committed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. A month ago, Memorial Day arrived along with Haditha, a place in western Iraq where hundreds of Memorial-weekend news reports said a military investigation had concluded that Marines "wantonly killed unarmed civilians," among them "women and children." This past Fourth of July, along with the skyrockets' red glare came news that a former Army private had been charged in Charlotte, N.C. with committing rape and murder while he was in Iraq. Labor Day awaits.

Rather than let the charges against the private run like a tape-loop over a long, news-dead weekend, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, appeared Fourth of July morning on both NBC and CBS. After CBS's Harry Smith professed himself perplexed at how all this atrocity stuff was happening now, Gen. Pace said that "99.9%" of the men and women in Iraq were serving with honor and promised he would "get to the bottom" of the allegations.

Military specialists will output case studies for years on how Iraq has altered the way war is waged by Americans--on the battlefield and on the home front. Most interesting to know would be whether the war as perceived at home and the war as fought daily by our soldiers in Iraq became two separate realms of consciousness, the former barely related to the reality of the latter.

One benchmark in this process will be deciding which elements of the nation's military past are deemed relevant to taking the measure of this war. Outside the military colleges, the experience of World War II appears to have become largely irrelevant. The controlling benchmark today is whether any American military commitment can evade the vague moral abyss of the Vietnam War. Thus when the Haditha story broke open over Memorial Day it was analogized as "another My Lai," the storied 1968 killing, and cover-up, of hundreds of civilians in a Vietnamese village.

The reason for viewing Haditha through the moral sextant of My Lai is that My Lai significantly altered the political status of Vietnam in the U.S. It became a totem for U.S. behavior in Vietnam. So it is only natural that the My Lai template, however ill-fitting, would be pressed against Haditha to see if this one lurid story would break the back of the entire Iraq enterprise. And so the chairman of the Joint Chiefs shows up on TV the Fourth of July--going on PR offense like any corporate product manager to ensure this isn't the one event that burns down the whole company. Fair or not, these are the new rules of political engagement in wartime America, and the government learns to play by them or risk being rolled off the field.

But what about the soldiers themselves? Nearly anyone who gets sucked into the media vortex--celebrity, CEO, sports hero--becomes mere cannon fodder, so assume the same for GIs involved in abuse or murder allegations. The Marines implicated in the Haditha incident are largely anonymous now, but each is being auditioned to play this war's Lt. William Calley. But first they have to be convicted of something.

The innocence or guilt of the individual soldiers implicated in Haditha or the other alleged abuse incidents is a lower-order concern to those fighting a PR war for the hearts and minds of the American people on Iraq. In the first effusion of media coverage of these events, the impression is weighted toward assuming guilt, and so when the pollsters call to ask about support for the war, the numbers fall. Mission accomplished--unless a Gen. Pace can jump quickly enough on the other side of the public-impression teeter-totter.

---

That is one kind of modern war reality. But there is another, less visible reality, which one might call, of all things, "justice." Ask Ilario Pantano about it.

Mr. Pantano, who left a successful job in New York City to reenlist in the Marines, was brought up on charges in 2004 of shooting two Iraqi prisoners in the back while serving as a lieutenant in al Anbar province. A year later--after the military's investigation, defense discovery and a military trial--the charges against him were dropped. His accusers were discredited at trial. The absorbing details of the case's passage through the U.S. military-justice system are described in Mr. Pantano's just-published memoir, "Warlord."

Interviews this week with Mr. Pantano, his lawyers and other defense lawyers describe a military-justice system that is tough on the defense, but fair. "Overall it's good," said Mr. Pantano, "but it doesn't feel good when you're inside of it." All of them said, however, that the national publicity that erupts today around incidents such as Haditha raises the bar for the defense.

Phil Stackhouse, who was one of the military lawyers assigned to Mr. Pantano's defense, now works as a civilian on behalf of accused soldiers. "When a John Murtha starts screaming 'cold-blooded murder,' the press will pick up on that," he says, "and it is that much tougher for the civilian defense attorney to counter the public's impression."

Mr. Pantano's civilian lawyer, Charles Gittins, launched a PR strategy, eliciting testimonials of support from other officers and colleagues. In short, they played the strongest card available to a Marine accused of an unlikely mistake in a spotless career--character. "Good military character itself can be enough create reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury," says Mr. Stackhouse.

"You need a PR counteroffensive," says Mr. Pantano today. "In a more nuanced world, it might not be necessary, but it's the only way the system can remain in balance anymore."

All the military attorneys I spoke with said ugly crimes do happen in war. But war at the shooting level is often a complex event. Haditha or one of the others may yet produce a crime or a cover-up. But in the age we live in, rush-to-judgment can become a bad habit. It might be better to wait for a real verdict.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from the Jerusalem Post, 2006-Aug-10, by Gil Hoffman:

Israel says BBC not reporting war fairly

The Foreign Ministry is under pressure from Israeli citizens to resume its boycott of the BBC and to withdraw credentials from its reporters due to "one-sided" reports on the war in Lebanon, Israeli diplomatic officials said Wednesday.

For seven months during a wave of Palestinian violence in 2003, Israeli officials boycotted BBC news programs, declining interviews and excluding BBC reporters from briefings. The boycott was ended after the BBC appointed a panel to oversee its Middle East coverage and to ensure it would be unbiased.

The diplomatic officials said the network had not been reporting the war fairly. Senior diplomatic officials in Jerusalem went as far as saying that "the reports we see give the impression that the BBC is working on behalf of Hizbullah instead of doing fair journalism."

Foreign Ministry Deputy Director-General for Media and Public Affairs Gideon Meir, who declined to comment for this article, spoke on Channel 1 about a column that appeared in The Times of London on July 24 in which Stephen Pollard wrote that a BBC program appeared to have been written by Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

"The BBC's coverage has been overwhelmingly one-sided, with presenters and reporters editorializing against what they universally refer to as 'Israeli attacks on Lebanon,'" Pollard wrote.

Col. (res.) Miri Eisen, who is set to take over as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokeswoman on August 20, called the BBC "the only international English-speaking news outlet that is downright hostile to Israel on every level." Eisen told an audience from the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey on Wednesday that the BBC's coverage was fair during the first week of the war, but then the network moved its anchors from Haifa to Beirut, and since then it has been similar to Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.

A Foreign Ministry official said the ministry had compiled a dossier of reports from Lebanon by BBC senior correspondent Jeremy Bowen that officials consider biased.

The BBC press office issued a statement in response.

"Our duty is to provide independent reporting and analysis of all perspectives of a story, so our audiences can make sense of what's going on in the world," the press office said.

"There can be times when this is misread by one or other side of a debate. However, this is not to suggest that we do not take complaints extremely seriously; we do. It is also worth noting that the recent independent panel set up by the (BBC) Board of Governors found no deliberate or systematic bias in the BBC's coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Apr-6:

Swing Justice
Anthony Kenndey attacks the media and wonders if liberals hate him.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy lashed out at our humble profession last week, castigating editorial writers who he said frequently "misinterpret" the Court's reasoning, according to an article in Monday's Washington Post. The Justice didn't single out any newspaper, though we'll admit to having referred to his jurisprudence on more than one occasion as "protean."

We'd humbly reply to Justice Kennedy that it is precisely this trait that has invited such media mau-mauing. While nominated as a conservative by Ronald Reagan, Justice Kennedy has proven on the High Court that he is open for intellectual rent: from his flip-flop on church-state relations in Lee v. Weisman in 1992, to his anti-abortion nods during his confirmation only to turn into a reliable vote for Roe v. Wade, to his recent embrace of foreign law to justify his own legal preferences, and so on.

Thus it is no surprise that the judicial left is already warning Justice Kennedy that he'd better join the Court's liberal big four--or else. On the same day the Post story ran, one prominent liberal newspaper declared that Justice Kennedy is the Court's new "swing" vote and that it is now his moral obligation to replace Sandra Day O'Connor as the fifth vote to deny a new conservative ascendancy.

---

The writer graciously allowed that Justice Kennedy's "views are evolving" (translation: becoming more liberal), and that there is something "refreshing about a justice who genuinely seems to have an open mind" (translation: someone who doesn't vote with Antonin Scalia). Overall point: Keep it up, sir, and we'll soon be elevating you to the pantheon with Brandeis, Black and Brennan.

Federal appeals-court judge Laurence Silberman once shrewdly described this media practice as the "Greenhouse effect." He was referring to the fact that a Justice who voted in politically correct fashion would receive laudatory coverage by New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, the alpha liberal of the Supreme Court press pack. If the Justice typically joined with conservatives, however, he'd soon find himself characterized as somebody else's clone, or not very bright, or a traitor to his race, or some other derogation.

---

Justice O'Connor's early years were widely demeaned in this manner, as was the late Justice Harry Blackmun, who was derided as the "Minnesota Twin" of then-Chief Justice Warren Burger before he came around and wrote Roe. Judge Silberman's point is that such media hazing has a larger impact on some Justices than is widely believed, especially given the desire many of them have to be revered and to fit into Washington's social whirl.

As Justice Kennedy's complaint last week suggests, the judicial left knows exactly what it's doing in singling him out. Liberals seem to think they won't be able to intimidate new Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. Which is why liberals will continue to treat Justice Kennedy as if he's the pigeon in one of B.F. Skinner's behavior-modification experiments.

from The Business Online, 2006-Aug-6, by Tim Montgomerie:

Why I am convinced that the BBC is biased

FOX News has transformed broadcasting in America. It is loved by US conservatives as much as it is hated by the mainstream media. In the last few weeks it has been essential viewing for anyone who wants to escape from the BBC's one-sided coverage of the unfolding Middle East tragedy.

Mainstream media critics deride Fox's “fair and balanced” catchphrase but it's not an inaccurate description of the cable network's output. Fox has provided full coverage of the attacks on Lebanon. Like its old media rivals it has broadcast all of the heart-rending scenes of devastation from Beirut and Qana. It does not just balance it with a few reports of Israelis hiding in bunkers, however. It provides context. Fox has, for example, probed Hezbollah's links with Iran and has alerted its viewers to the possibility that this conflict is part of a much more serious proxy war between Tehran and Tel Aviv.

Fox has also subjected the United Nations to heavy scrutiny. Can we believe, it asks its viewers, that a new peacekeeping force will protect Israel after six years of UN failure in southern Lebanon?

Veteran BBC journalist Robin Aitken has promised to do for the BBC what Bernard Goldberg's “Bias” did to CBS. Aitken served as a BBC reporter for a quarter of a century and has accused it of an “unconscious, institutionalised Leftism”. “I was surprised to discover how many of my colleagues were active members of Labour or the Liberal Democrats,” he says. “They cannot bear President Bush because he's a Republican and an evangelical Christian,” he continued. “I long for the day when I hear a reporter say something sceptical about the UN.”

While the BBC is programmed to avoid partisan bias – carefully ensuring that Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat perspectives are fairly represented – its deeper biases are left unchecked.

On the international front the first fundamental bias is against Israel. The most famous example of this came when a BBC reporter explained how she wept at Yasser Arafat's death. The fact that Arafat was a terrorist hardly featured in a report that contained little objectivity and a great deal of the emotionalism made famous by the BBC's Fergal Keane.

Anti-Americanism is bias number two. The BBC's coverage of the New Orleans flood was widely condemned in America. No attempts were made to explain the US system of state government to viewers. All blame was put on to Bush's shoulders. The BBC headlined with stories of rape and mass looting at the time but never corrected these stories when they were shown up to be grossly exaggerated. The land which is richer and more scientifically advanced than the countries of Europe is routinely presented as unsophisticated by the BBC.

The BBC hardly hides its disdain for the Bush-Blair war on terror. British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are known to be unhappy at the ways in which their efforts at reconstruction hardly receive any attention. The situation in places like Baghdad and Kandahar is grim but the nation's public service broadcaster fails to balance stories of existing difficulties with an analysis of the consequences of failure.

Defenders of the BBC cite the corporation's criticism of Tony Blair's stewardship of the war as proof that it is not politically biased. But the criticisms invariably come from a left-wing, anti-war perspective. BBC reporters struggle to ask what might be called “right wing questions”. Soon after David Cameron had abandoned traditional Tory support for lower taxation and public service reform he was subjected to a very tough interview on the Today programme. Can voters be sure you have changed? Isn't this new policy inconsistent with what you were proposing at the last election? Those questions were the questions of the establishment. Missing was an attack from the right. “Doesn't Britain need lower taxes to compete with the world's tiger economies?” “Isn't school and hospital choice an essential way of forcing public service workers to improve their performance?”

The representation of Christians in BBC soap operas. The desire to break taboos in the drama output. The telephone number salary that is paid for Jonathan Ross to shock and awe. The ways in which the BBC crowds out start-up businesses by pricing independent competitors out of the market. The lists of BBC faults is a long one but the chances of reform are small as long as the corporation continues to enjoy the confidence of the public.

The BBC is unlikely to be brought down by political reform. America's conservative politicians – like their British counterparts – were too afraid to take on the privileged position of the mainstream broadcasters. CBS, NBC and ABC were brought low by the bloggers and by the Fox phenomenon. Bloggers and Fox trailblazed new ways of presenting the news. Technology will do the same to the BBC. Britons will increasingly enjoy alternative sources of news and they will consume those alternatives in huge numbers.

Tim Montgomerie runs conservativehome.com

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Aug-6, by Brian M. Carney:

None Dare Call It Conspiracy
Oliver Stone loses the plot.

When word got out that Oliver Stone was making a movie about September 11, many feared we were in for another iteration of his 2001 conspiracy-minded "JFK." Those fears were unfounded; "World Trade Center" plays it straight. It is scrupulously apolitical and emotionally correct, tugging on all the right heartstrings and offering a view not so much of heroism on that terrible day as of basic human kindness and perseverance in the face of unimaginable horror and destruction. There are no conspiracies here, no political red flags.

The movie follows two Port Authority police officers who are trapped under the rubble of the collapsing towers. They would be the last two people, but one, pulled from the pile of debris left behind in the wake of the towers' destruction. The movie, which debuts next week, has been almost universally praised as patriotic, pro-American, pro-family.

It is also probably as close as one could come to a feel-good movie about such a terrible day. Unlike Paul Greengrass's "United 93," "World Trade Center" tells the story of two survivors and the men who rescued them. But also unlike "United 93," there are no villains in Mr. Stone's movie. Nicholas Cage's John McLoughlin and Michael Pena's Will Jimeno could have been trapped by an earthquake or an accident.

But 9/11 was not a act of God or nature. It was an atrocity carried out with malice aforethought by evil men bent on killing innocents. Put differently, it was a conspiracy--one that Oliver Stone has left out of his film.

---

It is not my intention to question this decision as an artistic judgment; Mr. Stone set out to make a narrowly focused film about one thing that happened on September 11, 2001, to the exclusion of everything else. He has done that well, and it would be foolish to argue that he should have made some other movie instead.

But it is legitimate to examine Mr. Stone's movie in light of its moral message. A long article on the film in Newsweek quotes Mr. Stone: "The consequences of 9/11 are enormous to this world, not just to America." This is true; 9/11 changed world history. But he goes on: "This movie is made for the world, and if it's what I hope it to be, it transcends 9/11. It's about anybody, anywhere, who feels the taste of death, whether it was a bombing in Madrid or an earthquake or a tsunami" (emphasis added). Well, now we are in a different place. The world-changing character of 9/11 does not rest on the number of people who "felt the taste of death." Hundreds of thousands more people died in the December 2004 tsunami. It was a tragic event, but not a world-changing one. Unless you are an animist inclined to attribute moral significance to random acts of nature, a tsunami is "value-free." It just happened. But 9/11 didn't just happen. As "United 93" makes explicit, 9/11 happened because determined men with a plan boarded those planes and carried out their plan.

"World Trade Center" tells a different story. It is the story of 9/11 as experienced by the men on the ground as it occurred. As far as it goes, it does ample justice to the rescue and emergency workers who were present on that day. They did not know, could not know, who brought down the towers or why. The question is whether "World Trade Center" goes far enough when it comes to shaping our understanding of what happened.

One fact about the movie that has received considerable mention already is that it screened well with teenagers, many of whom were too young to perceive clearly what was done five years ago next month in New York and Washington. Will they come away from the film thinking of that day as a tragedy or as an atrocity? Mr. Stone would seem to prefer the former. But universalizing the meaning of the movie risks trivializing it. New York was not hit by an earthquake on September 11, 2001.

---

At least one reviewer of "United 93" criticized the movie for not "telling us what to think" about September 11, 2001. Far too few people in this country saw that film, but I'd wager few who did came away with much doubt about the "meaning" of the terrorist attacks. The same cannot be said of "World Trade Center."

This is not a minor point. The mass murderers who planned and supported the killing of thousands on that day still wish us ill. As long as that is true and they retain the capacity to attempt similar atrocities in the future, it remains a fact about that day that we cannot afford to forget. To the extent that "World Trade Center" encourages us to forget it, it does a disservice to its viewers.

"World Trade Center" tells a powerful story about the basic goodness so many people felt and acted on in the wake of a heinous act. But to the extent that it omits any direct reference to the crimes that made those good deeds necessary, its version of the truth is incomplete.

from the Chicago Tribune, 2006-Mar-17, by Michael Phillips:

Movie review: `V for Vendetta'

rating (out of four)
**

If the h-for-hype "V for Vendetta" connects with a wide American audience, then something truly has shifted in the homeland-insecurity pop landscape of the early 21st Century. It means we're ready for a cultured, sophisticated, man-about-town terrorist who espouses the belief that "blowing up a building can change the world." Finally, a film to unite movie-mad members of Al Qaeda with your neighbor's kid, the one with the crush on Natalie Portman.

Various film enthusiasts, particularly suckers for anything based on a graphic novel, are hot for this picture. They argue that the story line is pro-revolution rather than pro-terrorism, set in the near future, imagining England under the thumb of a regime than makes Mussolini look like Musso & Frank. Call me a neocon -- that'd be a first -- but this film is in fact about a glam-terrorist who believes in better government through the demolition of landmark buildings. It's only a movie. But would "V for Vendetta" stand a box office chance today if it were set in America, not England, and the U.S. Capitol were blowing up instead of Parliament? Unlikely. We all enjoyed seeing the White House get it in "Independence Day," but there's nothing political about space aliens.

A British-German production, "V for Vendetta" is brought to you by the Wachowski brothers, Andy and Larry, gurus of "The Matrix." The first-time director -- it shows -- is John McTeigue, who assisted on the "Matrix" trilogy as well as "Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones." As Orwellian visions go, this one doesn't have much black magic in its corner. Only here and there do you find the spark and kinetic zap delivered by the first "Matrix" picture.

Portman plays Evey, orphaned daughter of activists. She is rescued from shadowy government abductors one dark evening by a man in a cape and a Guy Fawkes mask. (For those who don't know Guy Fawkes from Guy Smiley, look up "Gunpowder Plot of 1605.") The masked avenger is known only as V, and by his flaming logo, a V with a circle around it. Apparently he used to work in marketing for Warner. V wants to take back England from its oppressors. Life is no fun in this near-future world: Nuclear disasters and "America's war" have lead to permanently whacked-out weather patterns and rampant, murderous xenophobia, no Muslims or homosexuals allowed. John Hurt plays the nail-spitting Chancellor, who is seen on huge video screens in a Hitler haircut, bellowing every line as if he were saying: "Fee-fi-fo-fum!"

The picture is based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, published in its entirety in 1989. What was originally an attack on the social policies of Margaret Thatcher's England now speaks directly to George Bush's America. One character adjusted from Moore's original story -- Moore has already disowned the film version -- is a Bill O'Reilly-inspired TV pundit with a sinister secret.

All the free-floating dread and dress-up games aren't bad for about an hour. The second half, like so many second halves of movies taken from graphic novels -- everything from "Road to Perdition" to "Sin City" -- grinds on, growing increasingly flabby and yakky. By the big finish, the queasy feeling in your stomach tells you that you haven't been convincingly swept into the film's call to arms.

In the masked role of V -- all the time, he's got that infernal mask on -- we have plummy-voiced Hugo Weaving, the unstoppable killing machine in shades from "The Matrix." Weaving replaced another actor early in the shoot. In interviews Weaving has addressed his primary acting challenge here: As he told one writer, V "has a fixed expression, yet he talks a lot." And how! In his elaborate underground Shadow Gallery, decorated with "White Heat" posters and other artifacts banned by the Ministry of Objectionable Materials, V whiles away the hours quoting Shakespeare while playing the Julie London version of "Cry Me a River" on his precious jukebox. Or else he's speaking in the most ungodly clauses ("This world -- the world I'm a part of, that I helped shape ... ") To his credit, however, he does not make Evey listen to "The Phantom of the Opera."

In order for Evey to become a good little freedom fighter she must undergo a concentration camp like survival test. This section of "V for Vendetta" is a bit mad, yet Portman brings a fierce commitment to it. (It's easier to take than the interlude wherein she dons an ickily sexual schoolgirl costume for the delectation of a salacious vicar.) She grounds the heavy doings of the cautionary tale in an emotional reality, which is a way of saying she's a good actress.

Stephen Rea lends his hangdog, doleful authority to a generic role of an investigating officer trying to stop V before he makes good on his destructive promise. No suspense here, really: If he stopped him, there wouldn't be a "Matrix"-style showdown, this time with bullets and swords instead of bullets and aerial kung-fu. This scene, with its computer-generated sword-swooshes, no doubt will work with an audience, even though it's not half as cool as anything Neo got up to. "V for Vendetta" qualifies as "an uncompromising vision of the future" only if monotony qualifies as a lack of compromise.

mjphillips@tribune.com

----

`V for Vendetta'

Directed by James McTeigue; screenplay by Andy and Larry Wachowski; photographed by Adrian Biddle; edited by Martin Walsh; music by Dario Marianelli; production design by Owen Paterson; produced by Joel Silver, Grant Hill, the Wachowski brothers. A Warner Bros. Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:12. MPAA rating: R (for strong violence and some language).

Evey - Natalie Portman

V - Hugo Weaving

Chief Inspector Finch - Stephen Rea

Chancellor Sutler - John Hurt

from OpinionJournal.com, excerpted from Best of the Web, 2006-May-30, by James Taranto:

Not Just a River in Egypt

Paul Norton "Pete" McCloskey Jr., a California Republican, served in the House from 1967 through 1983, leaving Congress after an unsuccessful 1982 Senate nomination run. Now he's back, challenging Rep. Richard Pombo, who represents parts of the Central Valley and East Bay, in a GOP primary next week. Pombo is expected to win easily, though some observers say he may be vulnerable to a Democratic challenge in November.

In his time out of office, McCloskey has had some dubious associations, to say the least. As blogger Eugene Volokh notes, in 2000 McCloskey delivered a speech titled "Machinations of the Anti-Defamation League" to the Institute for Historical Review, which according to the ADL was "a leading voice in the international movement to deny the Holocaust and vindicate Hitler and the Nazi regime" before going into "decline for several years."

In his speech, McCloskey said, "Earlier here today I listened to speeches about the courage of men in France, Britain, Germany, and New Zealand who have spoken out against the commonly accepted concept of what occurred during the Second World War in the so-called Holocaust."

He also said, "I don't know whether you're right or wrong about the Holocaust, but anytime a historian takes a position against Israel, that brings down their wrath and concentrated numbers and economic power." The antecedent of "their" is unclear.

McCloskey subsequently wrote a letter to the IHR's journal, the Journal of Historical Review, in which he distanced himself from Holocaust denial:

I want to make a polite suggestion. So many of my friends and relations personally saw the Nazi death camps during the last days of World War II that I myself am convinced that there was a deliberate policy of extermination of Jews, Poles, gypsies, and homosexuals by the Nazi leadership. Numbers of the specific events can be challenged, but it is my personal view that the IHR would be far more effective if it were to concede that a holocaust did occur and focus on the ADL's distortions of truth.

Now, let us stipulate that the ADL is a perfectly legitimate object for criticism, and the IHR's expression of its views is fully protected by free speech. The same is true of the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan, respectively, but imagine if a politician gave a speech to the KKK denouncing the NAACP, then offered the Klan a "polite suggestion" that it cut the white-supremacy stuff and focus on what's wrong with the NAACP. Surely such a pol would be drummed out of polite society.

And yet both the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have endorsed McCloskey in the primary. The Times editorialized in January that a McCloskey victory would be "the best thing that could happen for the district, the state, the nation and possibly the Republican Party." The Chronicle said last week that "McCloskey defines the term 'straight shooter.' . . . Pete McCloskey has the credentials to make the case--and to shake up the status quo in Washington."

Why would these very liberal papers endorse someone who consorts with Holocaust deniers? Because McCloskey is, in general, a man of the left. He not only opposes the liberation of Iraq (the common, perhaps unanimous, view of IHR sympathizers); as the Chronicle notes, he also "spoke out against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and called for President Richard Nixon's impeachment in June 1973."

It seems that for the Times and the Chronicle, there are no enemies on the left--even those who are also on the most virulent fringes of the right.

from the New York Post, 2005-Dec-14, by Andrea Peyser:

ISRAEL-BLAMING SPIELBERG HAS LOST 'DIRECTION'

WHEN did Steven Spielberg turn into Barbra Streisand?

That's what springs to mind after seeing "Munich" — the director's startlingly anti-Semitic rumination on Arab terrorism and the state of Israel.

In 2 1/2 excruciating hours, Spielberg's film about the 1972 Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes by Islamic butchers sets out to solve Middle East violence while providing a blueprint for world peace.

Instead, Spielberg proves two things in his film, due in theaters just in time for Hanukkah:

1. Steven Spielberg is too dumb, too left and too Hollywood (or is that redundant?) to tackle such complex and polarizing themes as Islamic fundamentalism and Jewish survival.

2. Spielberg is a decent enough filmmaker to persuade some people that Israel has outlived its usefulness and should — as enemies in Iran maintain — be wiped off the face of the earth.

The backlash has begun. The Jewish Action Alliance has already called for a boycott of "Munich."

Written by Zionism-hating screenwriter Tony Kushner, the film concerns a hit squad sent to assassinate 11 Arab terrorists in retaliation for the 1972 massacre.

One by one, the terrorists fall. And one by one, hit squad members suffer crises of conscience, culminating in one Israeli assassin crying out in agony, "All this blood cries back to us! Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong. We're supposed to be righteous!"

Mercifully, he soon blows himself up.

Here lies the film's biggest flaw — and its greatest danger. "Munich" reeks of moral relativism. It puts the terrorists and those who respond to terror on even moral footing. It suggests that Israel must pay, one way or another, for vengeance.

In Time magazine, Spielberg reveals how Hollywood he's sunk. About the Israelis, he said, tellingly, "A response to a response doesn't really solve anything."

Wait! The unprovoked atrocity carried out by Arabs in Munich is a "response?" To what, exactly? To the existence of Israel?

In one scene, the Israeli hit squad spends a night in a house with unsuspecting members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Avner Kauffman (Eric Bana), the Israeli team's leader, befriends a man called Ali, who argues eloquently that Israel has turned his people into hungry refugees.

The Arabs may have killed. But here, they win the race to victimhood.

Blood does not scare Spielberg — think of the bloody beach in the lyrical opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan." But here, the blood spurts, explodes and flows in slo-mo. Not satisfied, Spielberg brings his movie to its metaphorical climax when Avner, in bed with his wife, literally climaxes while daydreaming about the Munich massacre.

At the end, a demoralized Avner flees to Brooklyn. The head of Israel's Mossad (Geoffrey Rush) tries to lure him back into service, saying his actions will bring peace.

"There is no peace!" Avner wails. In the background, the World Trade Center is visible.

I guess that's Israel's fault, too.

from NewsMax.com, 2004-Feb-13, by Edward I. Koch:

Tom Friedman's Anti-Semitism

Of all the anti-Semitic slurs, one of the most outrageous is that Jews secretly control the world.

This false and foolish accusation has been heard many times. In March 1997, the black Muslim cleric, Louis Farrakhan, said on CNN's “Evans and Novak” that Jews “meet once a year or so in Hollywood or in Park Avenue to look at the trends of America and the world. And if there are trends they do not like, then they write scripts, they write movies, they write books. They do things to influence the trends. And that is why I intend to stay on this path until there's some change made. Black people are going to be free of Jewish control.”

Farrakhan's fabrication about Jewish power and secret conspiracies is an updated version of the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a forgery created by the Russian Czar's secret police to incite pogroms -- organized massacres against Jews. Even Henry Ford used the "Protocols" to support his well-financed rant against Jews during the days when he was rising to prominence through the production and sale of his Model-T Ford.

A comparable attack on Jews was made by Pat Buchanan in 1990, when he referred to Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory.” On “The McLaughlin Group,” Buchanan said, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry and its ‘amen corner’ in the United States” with a litany of Jewish names.

Last week we heard yet another version of the same old lie, this time from Tom Friedman in his February 5th column in The New York Times. Friedman, alleging that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are secretly controlled by Jews, wrote, “...Mr. Sharon has the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under house arrest in his office in Ramallah, and he's had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who's ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates...”

There are those who say it's paranoid to accuse a fellow Jew of an anti-Semitic remark. I don't think so. Let me cite another example: Bob Novak, a Jew by birth who converted to Catholicism and now defines himself as a “cultural Jew.” Over the years Novak's constant attacks on Israel have been, I believe, thinly disguised attacks on Jews.

To cite but one example, on his Nov. 24th show, Novak went ballistic on Israel. While discussing the Israeli assassination of Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, a senior military leader of Hamas who was directly responsible for dozens of Israeli civilian deaths, Novak denounced Prime Minister Sharon for ordering his execution. Novak's colleague, Margaret Carlson, called Hanoud a terrorist, and Novak defended him as a freedom fighter. Carlson responded, “Bob, ...you're the only person who would call Hamas freedom fighters.” Novak rejoined with, “Oh, no; people all over the world do.”

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, put it well when he stated, “Those who only find fault with the Jewish people, the Jewish State and the actions of the Jewish sovereignty and never find anything that is positive are anti-Semites under the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-Israel.”

Now comes Tom Friedman, often proclaimed as an expert on the Mideast. When President Bush, Vice President Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and, to a lesser extent, Secretary of State Colin Powell, come to the conclusion that it is in the national interest of the United States to support Israel, it must be, according to Friedman in his column of last week, because they have been brainwashed by “Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is so powerful, according to Friedman, that Cheney is "ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates." Ridiculous. Dick Cheney is a man of enormous competence and intellectual ability with an established record of achievement and service to the nation. To suggest, as Friedman does, that he is selling out the country is an enormous disservice to Mr. Cheney and indeed to any public servant.

Did Friedman think President Bush was a puppet of the Arabs when, according to The New York Times, his father "telephoned Crown Prince Abdullah to assure him that his son's 'heart is in the right place' and that he was 'going to do the right thing' when it came to the Middle East?"

Tom Friedman, who is full of himself, believes he can resort to the anti-Semitic slur of secret Jewish control, and avoid criticism because he is a Jew. In reality, Friedman disgraced himself and his newspaper. His false words, coming at a time when anti-Semitism is skyrocketing worldwide, are particularly irresponsible and repulsive. If he is capable of feeling shame, I hope he feels it now.

from NewsMax.com, 2006-Apr-19, by Carl Limbacher et al.:

Friedman: Nuclear Iran Better Than Bush Strike

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman says that given the choice between a nuclear-armed Iran or a U.S. attack against Iran's nuclear facilities, right now he would opt for a nuclear Iran.

"As someone who believed — and still believes — in the importance of getting Iraq right, the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them, make it impossible to support this administration in any offensive military action against Iran," Friedman writes.

The liberal pundit says a better course of action than an attack would be to keep a nuclear Iran at bay through "deterrence" — making it clear that if Iran uses a nuclear weapon or gives one to terrorists, the United States will destroy all of its nuclear sites with nuclear weapons.

"The main reason [Donald] Rumsfeld should leave now," Friedman concludes, "is because we can't have a credible diplomatic or military option vis-à'-vis Iran when so many people feel, as I do, that in a choice between another Rumsfeld-led confrontation or just letting Iran get nukes and living with it, we should opt for the latter."

Israel might question the use of the word "just," since the Iranian regime has said Israel should be "wiped off the map."

from the Jerusalem Post, 2006-Feb-13, by Talya Halkin:

Petition slams 'Paradise Now' Oscar nomination

An anonymous on-line petition to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which so far has been signed by 4,313 people in Israel and abroad, calls upon the academy to withdraw the film Paradise Now from the list of nominations for best foreign film.

Directed by Israeli-born Hany Abu-Assad from a screenplay he wrote with Dutch producer Bero Beyer, and starring Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman, Paradise Now chronicles 48 hours in the lives of two young men in Nablus who are sent on a suicide mission to Israel. After one of the two terrorists decides at the last minute to return home, the film ends with his friend sitting on a Tel Aviv bus with an explosive belt tied to his body - moments before the inevitable explosion.

The film, which was released last year, has already won numerous international awards, including the European Film Academy's Best Screenplay award, the Berlin Festival's Blue Angel award, and the Golden Globe for best foreign language film.

The petition argues that Paradise Now legitimizes mass murder, and portrays the murderers themselves as victims.

"Hundreds of innocent men, women and children have been murdered by 'Palestinian' suicide-murderers in the past few years," the petition reads. "Giving an Oscar to this movie will glorify these murderers and the groups that have sent them. It may even encourage more murders of this type."

The petition also includes a letter written by Yossi Zur, the father of 17-year-old Assaf Zur, who was killed in a suicide bombing on a Haifa bus in March 2003.

"What makes this movie award-worthy?" Zur asked. "Would the people that awarded this movie the Golden Globe do the same if the movie was about young people from Saudi Arabia who learn how to fly airplanes in the USA and then use Islamic rituals to prepare themselves for their holy mission, crashing their airplanes into the Twin Towers in New York City? Would this movie get an award then?

"Granting an award to this kind of movie gives the filmmakers a seal of approval to hide behind. Now they can say that the world sees suicide bombing as legitimate. By ignoring the film's message and the implications of this message, those that chose to award this film a prize have become part of the evil chain of terror and accomplices to the next suicide murders - whether they kill 17 people or 17,000 people."

Writer, journalist and polemicist Irit Linur was one of four readers assigned by the Israeli Film Fund to read the script of Paradise Now when its producers applied to it for funding prior to the movie's production.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Linur spoke strongly against the completed film.

Linur argued that the film was pervaded by Christian and anti-Semitic symbolism that had little to do with Islam, and seemed to stem rather from the new anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric of the European left. What motivated the narrative of the film, she said, was not so much the ideology of the Muslim martyr, but rather the Christian narrative of a hero who sacrifices himself to atone for the sins of others.

Linur also pointed out that according to internationally accepted conventions, the nationality of a film is usually determined by the country that invested in it - and that while the film was categorized by the academy as representing Palestine, it was produced with European funds, by an Israeli-Arab director.

The film's Israeli producers could not be reached for comment.

from ABCNews.com, 2005-Dec-2, by Bob Woodruff:

Person of the Week: Jeff Skoll
EBay Co-founder Seeking Social Change Through Movies

"It's not easy to do movies that are about something," said Hollywood producer Jeff Skoll. "There's an old phrase in Hollywood, 'If you want to send a message, call Western Union.'"

But that old Hollywood adage does not apply to Skoll.

"I started the company called Participant Productions, which is focused on movies that are important, that are socially relevant — entertaining for sure," he said. "They have to be great stories that people want to see. But they're about something."

This week "Syriana," the latest film from Skoll's production company, opens across the country, suggesting that the global oil industry is infested with crime and corruption.

This fall, he released "Good Night, and Good Luck" — about CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow and his battle with Sen. Joe McCarthy — and the film "North Country," about one woman's fight against sexual harassment.

Skoll has broken so quickly into Hollywood because he's a billionaire. He grew up modestly in Toronto and later failed at a computer business. But after getting an MBA at Stanford University, he co-founded eBay and is now worth $3.5 billion.

"I feel very fortunate to have had the financial wherewithal that came from eBay," he said. "In fact, I see myself as a steward for that money to do good things in the world. The bulk of it, the vast majority of it, I believe, should be put into good causes in the world."

Big Films, Big Message

His films are not art films. They have big budgets and big-time stars that are now generating Oscar buzz. Because of all that, millions of people watch them and hear his message.

"After the movie, we don't want them to say, 'Oh, we want to go off and have a beer.' We want people to say, 'Wow! That was powerful. How can I get involved?' So we put together a campaign on our Web site, which is called participate.net, where people can do anything, from donate money or join an organization, or actually get involved themselves," Skoll said.

And he means it. BusinessWeek magazine recently chose Skoll as one of the top entrepreneurs in the country, just ahead of Ted Turner. Besides the movie company, Skoll has started a foundation, which gives $25 million in grants every year, funding projects from an arts and technology center for inner city kids to manual water pumps for Kenyan farmers.

Because he is so wealthy, Skoll does not need to make a profit on his films. It has made him a Hollywood idealist.

"The power of a vision is, a vision has to be ideal," he said. "For folks that I've met that said, 'Well, what's the point of even trying?' I think the answer is pretty clear. If you don't try, you're not going to see a better world. You're not going to see a better world for your kids. And I think we have a responsibility to do what's best not only for ourselves but for the people around us."

from the Washington Post, 2006-Sep-1, p.A20:

End of an Affair
It turns out that the person who exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame was not out to punish her husband.

WE'RE RELUCTANT to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame because of our oft-stated belief that far too much attention and debate in Washington has been devoted to her story and that of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, over the past three years. But all those who have opined on this affair ought to take note of the not-so-surprising disclosure that the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame's cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage.

Mr. Armitage was one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly. He was a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war and whom Mr. Wilson accused of twisting intelligence about Iraq and then plotting to destroy him. Unaware that Ms. Plame's identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak "in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip," according to a story this week by the Post's R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage.

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage's identity been known three years ago.

That's not to say that Mr. Libby and other White House officials are blameless. As prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has reported, when Mr. Wilson charged that intelligence about Iraq had been twisted to make a case for war, Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney reacted by inquiring about Ms. Plame's role in recommending Mr. Wilson for a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, where he investigated reports that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium. Mr. Libby then allegedly disclosed Ms. Plame's identity to journalists and lied to a grand jury when he said he had learned of her identity from one of those reporters. Mr. Libby and his boss, Mr. Cheney, were trying to discredit Mr. Wilson; if Mr. Fitzgerald's account is correct, they were careless about handling information that was classified.

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2006-Apr-8, p.A8:

Leaky News Judgment

In the Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass world that passes for media coverage of the Valerie Plame-leak case, the President of the United States is said to have "leaked" classified information through the conduit of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the Vice President's former Chief of Staff. Mr. Libby now has been indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to a grand jury.

"Leak" has always been a slovenly word, but this is absurd. No one disputes that the President has the authority to declassify documents or to authorize the disclosure of secret information. But never mind the facts. Even prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald isn't shy about using the leak-word. (See footnote 8 on page 25 of his court filing this week.) In Congress, Democrats were quick to jump on the exploitation wagon. Perpetually affronted Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called the revelation "shocking," and Jane Harman, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, branded President Bush "leaker-in-chief." Hawaii Congressman Neil Abercrombie offered the legal opinion that "this leak led to the commission of a felony."

So what "leak" did Mr. Bush authorize? Not the disclosure of Ms. Plame's name and the fact that she was employed by the CIA -- revelations that under certain circumstances could be considered a crime. No one is accusing him of that. Nor, for that matter, is that what Mr. Libby is charged with. Ms. Plame's name doesn't even appear in the sections of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that were later declassified. (Mr. Fitzgerald refuses to disclose whether Ms. Plame was a covert agent.)

Rather, the President is believed to have authorized the disclosure of portions of the NIE to counter illegal leaks that had distorted its contents. He did so both to correct the record and to fight back against critics such as Ms. Plame's husband Joseph Wilson, who were accusing him of lying about Iraq. As we found out later in a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Wilson and the leakers were the ones who spread disinformation.

Surely the President has a right -- even a duty -- to set the record straight. In authorizing Mr. Libby to disclose previously classified information, Mr. Bush was divulging the truth. That alone distinguishes it from the common "leak."

Note that the following editorial is in fact real, even though it reads as a self-parody..

from the Huffington Post, 2006-Feb-17, by Alec Baldwin:

Will They Go to Court?

So, I suppose the question is...what kind of civil trial will we see, or not see, between Cheney and Whittington? Whittington is certainly no stranger to a court room and to civil litigation. Will Cheney pay him off, preemptively? Will they go to court? I would imagine if a guy with a few beers in him shoots you in the face on a hunting trip, how could you turn down that opportunity?

What would Cheney do about the whole secrecy thing then? I mean, this is the guy that sicced Enron on Gray Davis and the state of California to embarrass Davis, trigger the recall and then watched Arnold Schwarzenegger become governor of California. (To this day, perhaps, still the low point in American political life.) Then Cheney covered it up.

Cheney's the guy who told Libby to out Valerie Plame. The rumor I heard is that someone yelled, "Look out! Shooter!" and Cheney thought he said Scooter and fired in that general direction.

Cheney is a terrorist. He terrorizes our enemies abroad and innocent citizens here at home indiscriminately. Who ever thought Harry Whittington would be the answer to America's prayers. Finally, someone who might get that lying, thieving Cheney into a courtroom to answer some direct questions.

from CNSNews.com, 2006-Feb-17, by Randy Hall:

Impeaching Bush Is 'Cause Worth Fighting for,' Actor Says

Richard Dreyfuss, the actor who starred in movies ranging from "Jaws" to "Mr. Holland's Opus," told an audience in Washington, D.C., on Thursday that "there are causes worth fighting for," and one of those is the impeachment of President George W. Bush.

"There are causes worth fighting for even if you know that you will lose," Dreyfuss said during a speech at the National Press Club. "Unless you are willing to accept torture as part of a normal American political lexicon, unless you are willing to accept that leaving the Geneva Convention is fine and dandy, if you accept the expansion of wiretapping as business as usual, the only way to express this now is to embrace the difficult and perhaps embarrassing process of impeachment." See Video

Noting that the process was established by the country's "founders, who we revere to check executive abuse with congressional balance," Dreyfuss said impeachment "is a statement that we refuse to endorse bad behavior." See Video

"If we refuse to debate the appropriateness of the process of impeachment, we endorse that behavior, and we approve the enlargement of executive power," regardless of whoever may occupy the White House in the future, he said.

"And don't kid yourselves: No one ever gives up power, ever," Dreyfuss added.

"Now, it is not your job as the press to impeach George Bush," the actor stated. However, people in the media should "maintain the integrity of that debate" by not dismissing the topic out of hand as partisan or unpatriotic.

During his address on the subject of Hollywood's view of contemporary news media, Dreyfuss said he is not a cynic or a liberal, but is instead a "'libo-conservo-middle-of-the-roado,' and I have been for many years."

"I'm deeply in love with my country," he added. "As a matter of fact, I'm deeply in love with the country that I was taught about in school, the land of the free and the home of the brave."

Nevertheless, Dreyfuss charged that "people can sometimes be pretty thoughtless, pretty terrified and do some pretty impressive damage" when they are wrong or "are the victims of political hypnosis."

In the past, "time and distance played an amazing part in keeping the human race from killing itself," the actor noted. The need for revenge after an attack "inevitably weakened because it took a lot of time to get men into ships and move them to the right battlefield. Only those truly staunch of heart and truly zealous could keep up that hatred.

"But now, people in Kansas see the [Twin] Towers fall at the exact instant as people in Nigeria or Cairo," he said. "Instantaneous knowledge leads to instantaneous reaction, which creates a demand for an instantaneous, reflexive response."

Dreyfuss blamed part of that reaction on television newscasters, who "fill the air with the same terrible clips, the same blaring intro music, the same screaming fonts, and then the same clips again and the same screaming fonts again and again to fill up these news cycles."

"Television did this. Television created the sound bite and then shrunk it," the actor said. "Television replaced words with images so that people make extraordinary decisions based not on prose or any attempt at analysis," but on pictures instead. See Video

The actor saved his harshest tone for those who accuse critics of the government and its officials of having a more serious motive.

"Watch me lose my sense of humor if people accuse me of treason," Dreyfuss said before mocking two of the Fox News Channel's most popular hosts. "'That's not very O'Reilly of you, Mister Smarty-Pants,' or 'What would Sean Hannity have to say about that, Mister Too-Complex-for-Your-Own-Good?'" See Video

However, "none of this happened because of any conspiracy," he stated. "This happened because we have not paid attention to the new rules of the electronic media."

To restore true American values, the actor called for children to be taught "the tools of debate and dissent," as well as a return to the principle of civility, which he called "the oxygen that democracies require else they become poisoned and die, as this democracy will."

The following article discusses this report published 2005-Nov-17 by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press and the Council on Foreign Relations. The report itself covers a much wider array of subjects than the below article, and makes for interesting reading.

from the Washington Times, 2005-Nov-24, by Jennifer Harper with Shepherd Pittman contributing:

Public ignores Iraq war naysayers

Negative press coverage of the war in Iraq in recent weeks has emphasized rising pessimism among the American public about the conflict. But a new survey found that 56 percent of the public thinks that efforts to establish a stable democracy in the country will succeed.

The survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press -- which also plumbed opinions of journalists, university presidents and others in academe, diplomats, government officials, religious leaders, members of the military, scientists and international security specialists -- revealed a marked disconnect between the perceptions of the general public and many of the so-called opinion leaders.

When asked whether they thought democracy would succeed in Iraq, only 33 percent of the journalists agreed that it had a chance. The number was even worse in academe -- 27 percent of respondents thought the effort would succeed. Among the military, however, the number stood at 64 percent.

"The media and academia have always been more to the left, so how they report these things is not necessarily the way the country sees things," said Charles Gravely, 56, a real estate executive from the District.

Meanwhile, close to half of the American public -- 48 percent -- think the decision to take military action in Iraq was the right one.

"I put my trust in the people in charge of our defense," said Haley Praytor, 21, an intern from Lindale, Texas.

The survey found a spectrum of opinions between the opinion leaders.

Among journalists, 28 percent thought the decision was justified. The number was 21 percent among the academic elites and 49 percent in the military.

The public is evenly divided on whether the war in Iraq has helped or hindered efforts to combat terrorism, 44 percent thought the conflict has helped the effort and the same number thought it has hurt. In the press, 68 percent said the war had hurt the effort, and 22 percent said it had helped.

In the academic world, the numbers were 75 percent and 16 percent, respectively. Among the military, it was 47 percent and 45 percent.

The war in Iraq "has definitely helped indirectly," said Andrew Reese, 33, a software sales representative from Arlington. "It has probably kept other countries from committing terrorist acts in the U.S."

The survey also found that the public's view of the United Nations has soured since March.

Overall, 48 percent of Americans felt favorably toward the United Nations, down from 77 percent in 2001. The approval ratings of the United Nations dropped by 11 points since March alone.

The survey found that 54 percent of Americans think that the United States should cooperate fully with the United Nations, down from 67 percent in 2002. And 32 percent thought the United States should "go its own way in international matters," up from 25 percent three years ago.

President Bush's approval ratings have grown tepid -- but have not tanked -- among Americans. Overall, Mr. Bush garners a 40 percent favorability among the public, with 52 percent disapproving of him and 8 percent "unsure."

However, 52 percent approve of his efforts to fight terrorism, and 86 percent say defense against terrorism should be a top foreign policy priority, followed by the protection of American jobs (84 percent) and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction (75 percent).

Only 24 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Bush's immigration policies, but 51 percent say reducing illegal immigration should be a top foreign policy priority.

The survey, which addressed "America's Place in the World," was conducted in two phases. It polled 2,006 adults between Oct. 12 and 24, and 540 members of the press, academia and the other five demographic groups from Sept. 5 to Oct. 31. The margin of error ranges from three to five percentage points.

The complete results can be viewed online at http://people-press.org.

from PRNewswire.com, 2006-Sep-5:

USC Study: Celebrities Really Are More Narcissistic Than the General Public
Individuals With Narcissistic Tendencies Appear to be Attracted to the Entertainment Industry -- Rather Than the Industry Creating Narcissists

LOS ANGELES -- Celebrities have more narcissistic personality traits than the general population, and people with narcissistic tendencies seem to be attracted to the entertainment industry rather than the industry creating narcissists, according to a groundbreaking study conducted by researchers Drew Pinsky of the Keck School of Medicine of USC and S. Mark Young of the USC Marshall School of Business and the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

The study, which will be published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Elsevier), is the first systematic, empirical scholarly study of celebrity personality and was based on a standardized test of narcissistic personality traits administered to 200 celebrities.

"The general public's understanding of celebrity personality is based largely on anecdotal information such as media interviews," said Young. "We conducted this study as part of a larger program of research to provide more scientific evidence on what the celebrity personality is really like."

The authors say they chose narcissism as the topic of the study because it is one of the most widely discussed characteristics of celebrities.

"Narcissists generally crave attention, are overconfident of their abilities, lack empathy, and can evince erratic behavior," said Pinsky, who is an assistant clinical professor of Psychiatry at USC. "However, they are also well-liked, especially on first meeting, are extroverted and perform well in public."

To conduct their research Pinsky and Young employed a well-validated personality research instrument, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which has been used by researchers for more than two decades. The NPI test divides narcissism into seven components: superiority, exhibitionism, entitlement, vanity, authority, exploitiveness, and entitlement.

The authors found that the celebrities participating in the study had statistically significantly higher narcissism scores compared to aspiring business leaders (MBA students) and the general population. Reality TV personalities had the highest overall narcissism scores when compared with actors, musicians and comedians.

What's more, while men are more likely than women to evince narcissistic traits in the general population, the authors found that, among celebrities, females were more narcissistic than their male counterparts.

"Our research also shows that many celebrities exhibit narcissistic behavior prior to becoming famous, which could indicate a self-selection bias for the entertainment industry by certain personality types," said Young who holds the George Bozanic and Holman G. Hurt Chair in Sports and Entertainment Business at USC. "Knowing that many celebrities have narcissistic tendencies may allow entertainment industry decision makers such as studio executives, producers, directors, agents, publicists and casting agents to work with them more effectively. It may also provide greater insight into celebrity behavior for the general public."

The research data were collected anonymously and confidentially from celebrities selected at random during guest appearances on the nationally syndicated Westwood One radio show "Loveline," based at the KROQ-FM radio station in Los Angeles. The celebrities were administered the NPI test during breaks on the show, which Pinsky has hosted for the past 20 years.

About Dr. Drew Pinsky:

Known to millions as a radio host, TV personality and author, Dr. Drew Pinsky is a respected medical doctor, board-certified addictionologist and relationship expert whose experience spans over 20 years. He is currently the Medical Director for the Department of Chemical Dependency Services at Las Encinas Hospital, a world-renowned psychiatric facility in Pasadena. He is a staff member at Huntington Memorial Hospital, continues to run a private medicine practice and is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. His membership and activities in professional societies include the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Association, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, the California Medical Association and the American Society of Internal Medicine.

About Dr. S. Mark Young:

S. Mark Young holds the George Bozanic and Holman G. Hurt Chair in Sports and Entertainment Business at the University of Southern California. Dr. Young is also a Professor of Accounting in the Leventhal School of Accounting and holds joint appointments as Professor of Management and Organization in the Marshall School of Business, and Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School of Communication. Professor Young has published over 35 articles and 5 books on business and entertainment related topics. Currently, he is working on a new book, Entertainment Management -- Understanding the Business of Motion Picture, Television, Music, and Games (Prentice Hall, 2007). Mark has also won several international research awards as well as numerous awards for teaching and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching at USC.

from The Weekly Standard, 2005-Oct-17, by Joseph Epstein:

The Culture of Celebrity
Let us now praise famous airheads.

CELEBRITY AT THIS MOMENT IN America is epidemic, and it's spreading fast, sometimes seeming as if nearly everyone has got it. Television provides celebrity dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without celebrities, whole sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down. So pervasive has celebrity become in contemporary American life that one now begins to hear a good deal about a phenomenon known as the Culture of Celebrity.

The word "culture" no longer, I suspect, stands in most people's minds for that whole congeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and the rest for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand. Words, unlike disciplined soldiers, refuse to remain in place and take orders. They insist on being unruly, and slither and slide around, picking up all sorts of slippery and even goofy meanings. An icon, as we shall see, doesn't stay a small picture of a religious personage but usually turns out nowadays to be someone with spectacular grosses. "The language," as Flaubert once protested in his attempt to tell his mistress Louise Colet how much he loved her, "is inept."

Today, when people glibly refer to "the corporate culture," "the culture of poverty," "the culture of journalism," "the culture of the intelligence community"--and "community" has, of course, itself become another of those hopelessly baggy-pants words, so that one hears talk even of "the homeless community"--what I think is meant by "culture" is the general emotional atmosphere and institutional character surrounding the word to which "culture" is attached. Thus, corporate culture is thought to breed selfishness practiced at the Machiavellian level; the culture of poverty, hopelessness and despair; the culture of journalism, a taste for the sensational combined with a short attention span; the culture of the intelligence community, covering-one's-own-behind viperishness; and so on. Culture used in this way is also brought in to explain unpleasant or at least dreary behavior. "The culture of NASA has to be changed," is a sample of its current usage. The comedian Flip Wilson, after saying something outrageous, would revert to the refrain line, "The debbil made me do it." So, today, when admitting to unethical or otherwise wretched behavior, people often say, "The culture made me do it."

As for "celebrity," the standard definition is no longer the dictionary one but rather closer to the one that Daniel Boorstin gave in his book The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream: "The celebrity," Boorstin wrote, "is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness," which is improved in its frequently misquoted form as "a celebrity is someone famous for being famous." The other standard quotation on this subject is Andy Warhol's "In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," which also frequently turns up in an improved misquotation as "everyone will have his fifteen minutes of fame."

But to say that a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, though clever enough, doesn't quite cover it. Not that there is a shortage of such people who seem to be known only for their well-knownness. What do a couple named Sid and Mercedes Bass do, except appear in bold-face in the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section and other such venues (as we now call them) of equally shimmering insignificance, often standing next to Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, also well-known for being well-known? Many moons ago, journalists used to refer to royalty as "face cards"; today celebrities are perhaps best thought of as bold faces, for as such do their names often appear in the press (and in a New York Times column with that very name, Bold Face).

The distinction between celebrity and fame is one most dictionaries tend to fudge. I suspect everyone has, or prefers to make, his own. The one I like derives not from Aristotle, who didn't have to trouble with celebrities, but from the career of Ted Williams. A sportswriter once said that he, Williams, wished to be famous but had no interest in being a celebrity. What Ted Williams wanted to be famous for was his hitting. He wanted everyone who cared about baseball to know that he was--as he believed and may well have been--the greatest pure hitter who ever lived. What he didn't want to do was to take on any of the effort off the baseball field involved in making this known. As an active player, Williams gave no interviews, signed no baseballs or photographs, chose not to be obliging in any way to journalists or fans. A rebarbative character, not to mention often a slightly menacing s.o.b., Williams, if you had asked him, would have said that it was enough that he was the last man to hit .400; he did it on the field, and therefore didn't have to sell himself off the field. As for his duty to his fans, he didn't see that he had any.

Whether Ted Williams was right or wrong to feel as he did is of less interest than the distinction his example provides, which suggests that fame is something one earns--through talent or achievement of one kind or another--while celebrity is something one cultivates or, possibly, has thrust upon one. The two are not, of course, entirely exclusive. One can be immensely talented and full of achievement and yet wish to broadcast one's fame further through the careful cultivation of celebrity; and one can have the thinnest of achievements and be talentless and yet be made to seem otherwise through the mechanics and dynamics of celebrity-creation, in our day a whole mini-(or maybe not so mini) industry of its own.

Or, another possibility, one can become a celebrity with scarcely any pretense to talent or achievement whatsoever. Much modern celebrity seems the result of careful promotion or great good luck or something besides talent and achievement: Mr. Donald Trump, Ms. Paris Hilton, Mr. Regis Philbin, take a bow. The ultimate celebrity of our time may have been John F. Kennedy Jr., notable only for being his parents' very handsome son--both his birth and good looks factors beyond his control--and, alas, known for nothing else whatsoever now, except for the sad, dying-young-Adonis end to his life.

Fame, then, at least as I prefer to think of it, is based on true achievement; celebrity on the broadcasting of that achievement, or the inventing of something that, if not scrutinized too closely, might pass for achievement. Celebrity suggests ephemerality, while fame has a chance of lasting, a shot at reaching the happy shores of posterity.

Oliver Goldsmith, in his poem "The Deserted Village," refers to "good fame," which implies that there is also a bad or false fame. Bad fame is sometimes thought to be fame in the present, or fame on earth, while good fame is that bestowed by posterity--those happy shores again. (Which doesn't eliminate the desire of most of us, at least nowadays, to have our fame here and hereafter, too.) Not false but wretched fame is covered by the word "infamy"--"Infamy, infamy, infamy," remarked the English wit Frank Muir, "they all have it in for me"--while the lower, or pejorative, order of celebrity is covered by the word "notoriety," also frequently misused to mean noteworthiness.

Leo Braudy's magnificent book on the history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown, illustrates how the means of broadcasting fame have changed over the centuries: from having one's head engraved on coins, to purchasing statuary of oneself, to (for the really high rollers--Alexander the Great, the Caesar boys) naming cities or even months after oneself, to commissioning painted portraits, to writing books or having books written about one, and so on into our day of the publicity or press agent, the media blitz, the public relations expert, and the egomaniacal blogger. One of the most successful of public-relations experts, Ben Sonnenberg Sr., used to say that he saw it as his job to construct very high pedestals for very small men.

Which leads one to a very proper suspicion of celebrity. As George Orwell said about saints, so it seems only sensible to say about celebrities: They should all be judged guilty until proven innocent. Guilty of what, precisely? I'd say of the fraudulence (however minor) of inflating their brilliance, accomplishments, worth, of passing themselves off as something they aren't, or at least are not quite. If fraudulence is the crime, publicity is the means by which the caper is brought off.

IS THE CURRENT HEIGHTENED INTEREST in the celebrated sufficient to form a culture--a culture of a kind worthy of study? The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber defined culture, in part, as embodying "values which may be formulated (overtly as mores) or felt (implicitly as in folkways) by the society carrying the culture, and which it is part of the business of the anthropologist to characterize and define." What are the values of celebrity culture? They are the values, almost exclusively, of publicity. Did they spell one's name right? What was the size and composition of the audience? Did you check the receipts? Was the timing right? Publicity is concerned solely with effects and does not investigate causes or intrinsic value too closely. For example, a few years ago a book of mine called Snobbery: The American Version received what I thought was a too greatly mixed review in the New York Times Book Review. I remarked on my disappointment to the publicity man at my publisher's, who promptly told me not to worry: It was a full-page review, on page 11, right-hand side. That, he said, "is very good real estate," which was quite as important as, perhaps more important than, the reviewer's actual words and final judgment. Better to be tepidly considered on page 11 than extravagantly praised on page 27, left-hand side. Real estate, man, it's the name of the game.

We must have new names, Marcel Proust presciently noted--in fashion, in medicine, in art, there must always be new names. It's a very smart remark, and the fields Proust chose seem smart, too, at least for his time. (Now there must also be new names, at a minimum, among movie stars and athletes and politicians.) Implicit in Proust's remark is the notion that if the names don't really exist, if the quality isn't there to sustain them, it doesn't matter; new names we shall have in any case. And every sophisticated society somehow, more or less implicitly, contrives to supply them.

I happen to think that we haven't had a major poet writing in English since perhaps the death of W.H. Auden or, to lower the bar a little, Philip Larkin. But new names are put forth nevertheless--high among them in recent years has been that of Seamus Heaney--because, after all, what kind of a time could we be living in if we didn't have a major poet? And besides there are all those prizes that, year after year, must be given out, even if so many of the recipients don't seem quite worthy of them.

Considered as a culture, celebrity does have its institutions. We now have an elaborate celebrity-creating machinery well in place--all those short-attention-span television shows (Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous); all those magazines (beginning with People and far from ending with the National Enquirer). We have high-priced celebrity-mongers--Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Oprah--who not only live off others' celebrity but also, through their publicity-making power, confer it and have in time become very considerable celebrities each in his or her own right.

Without the taste for celebrity, they would have to close down the whole Style section of every newspaper in the country. Then there is the celebrity profile (in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly; these are nowadays usually orchestrated by a press agent, with all touchy questions declared out-of-bounds), or the television talk-show interview with a star, which is beyond parody. Well, almost beyond: Martin Short in his parody of a talk-show host remarked to the actor Kiefer Sutherland, "You're Canadian, aren't you? What's that all about?"

Yet we still seem never to have enough celebrities, so we drag in so-called "It Girls" (Paris Hilton, Cindy Crawford, other supermodels), tired television hacks (Regis Philbin, Ed McMahon), back-achingly boring but somehow sacrosanct news anchors (Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw). Toss in what I think of as the lower-class punditi, who await calls from various television news and chat shows to demonstrate their locked-in political views and meager expertise on major and cable stations alike: Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, Mark Shields, Robert Novak, Michael Beschloss, and the rest. Ah, if only Lenny Bruce were alive today, he could do a scorchingly cruel bit about Dr. Joyce Brothers sitting by the phone wondering why Jerry Springer never calls.

MANY OF OUR CURRENT-DAY CELEBRITIES float upon "hype," which is really a publicist's gas used to pump up and set aloft something that doesn't really quite exist. Hype has also given us a new breakdown, or hierarchical categorization, of celebrities. Until twenty-five or so years ago great celebrities were called "stars," a term first used in the movies and entertainment and then taken up by sports, politics, and other fields. Stars proving a bit drab, "super-stars" were called in to play, this term beginning in sports but fairly quickly branching outward. Apparently too many superstars were about, so the trope was switched from astronomy to religion, and we now have "icons." All this takes Proust's original observation a step further: the need for new names to call the new names.

This new ranking--stars, superstars, icons--helps us believe that we live in interesting times. One of the things celebrities do for us is suggest that in their lives they are fulfilling our fantasies. Modern celebrities, along with their fame, tend to be wealthy or, if not themselves beautiful, able to acquire beautiful lovers. Their celebrity makes them, in the view of many, worthy of worship. "So long as man remains free," Dostoyevsky writes in the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov, "he strives for nothing so incessantly and painfully as to find someone to worship." If contemporary celebrities are the best thing on offer as living gods for us to worship, this is not good news.

But the worshipping of celebrities by the public tends to be thin, and not uncommonly it is nicely mixed with loathing. We also, after all, at least partially, like to see our celebrities as frail, ready at all times to crash and burn. Cary Grant once warned the then-young director Peter Bogdanovich, who was at the time living with Cybill Sheppard, to stop telling people he was in love. "And above all," Grant warned, "stop telling them you're happy." When Bogdanovich asked why, Cary Grant answered, "Because they're not in love and they're not happy. . . . Just remember, Peter, people do not like beautiful people."

Grant's assertion is borne out by our grocery press, the National Enquirer, the Star, the Globe, and other variants of the English gutter press. All these tabloids could as easily travel under the generic title of the National Schadenfreude, for more than half the stories they contain come under the category of "See How the Mighty Have Fallen": Oh, my, I see where that bright young television sitcom star, on a drug binge again, had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance! To think that the handsome movie star has been cheating on his wife all these years--snakes loose in the Garden of Eden, evidently! Did you note that the powerful senator's drinking has caused him to embarrass himself yet again in public? I see where that immensely successful Hollywood couple turn out to have had a child who died of anorexia! Who'd've thought?

How pleasing to learn that our own simpler, less moneyed, unglamorous lives are, in the end, much to be preferred to those of these beautiful, rich, and powerful people, whose vast publicity has diverted us for so long and whose fall proves even more diverting now. "As would become a lifelong habit for most of us," Thomas McGuane writes in a recent short story in the New Yorker called "Ice," "we longed to witness spectacular achievement and mortifying failure. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us; we would instead be granted the frictionless lives of the meek."

Along with trying to avoid falling victim to schadenfreude, celebrities, if they are clever, do well to regulate the amount of publicity they allow to cluster around them. And not celebrities alone. Edith Wharton, having published too many stories and essays in a great single rush in various magazines during a concentrated period, feared, as she put it, the danger of becoming "a magazine bore." Celebrities, in the same way, are in danger of becoming publicity bores, though few among them seem to sense it. Because of improperly rationed publicity, along with a substantial helping of self-importance, the comedian Bill Cosby will never again be funny. The actress Elizabeth McGovern said of Sean Penn that he "is brilliant, brilliant at being the kind of reluctant celebrity." At the level of high culture, Saul Bellow used to work this bit quite well on the literary front, making every interview (and there have been hundreds of them) feel as if given only with the greatest reluctance, if not under actual duress. Others are brilliant at regulating their publicity. Johnny Carson was very intelligent about carefully husbanding his celebrity, choosing not to come out of retirement, except at exactly the right time or when the perfect occasion presented itself. Apparently it never did. Given the universally generous obituary tributes he received, dying now looks, for him, to have been an excellent career move.

Careful readers will have noticed that I referred above to "the actress Elizabeth McGovern" and felt no need to write anything before or after the name Sean Penn. True celebrities need nothing said of them in apposition, fore or aft. The greatest celebrities are those who don't even require their full names mentioned: Marilyn, Johnny, Liz, Liza, Oprah, Michael (could be Jordan or Jackson--context usually clears this up fairly quickly), Kobe, Martha (Stewart, not Washington), Britney, Shaq, J-Lo, Frank (Sinatra, not Perdue), O.J., and, with the quickest recognition and shortest name of all--trumpets here, please--W.

ONE HAS THE IMPRESSION that being a celebrity was easier at any earlier time than it is now, when celebrity-creating institutions, from paparazzi to gutter-press exposés to television talk-shows, weren't as intense, as full-court press, as they are today. In the Times Literary Supplement, a reviewer of a biography of Margot Fonteyn noted that Miss Fonteyn "was a star from a more respectful age of celebrity, when keeping one's distance was still possible." My own candidate for the perfect celebrity in the twentieth century would be Noël Coward, a man in whom talent combined with elegance to give off the glow of glamour--and also a man who would have known how to fend off anyone wishing to investigate his private life. Today, instead of elegant celebrities, we have celebrity criminal trials: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, Robert Blake, Winona Ryder, and O.J. Simpson. Schadenfreude is in the saddle again.

American society in the twenty-first century, received opinion has it, values only two things: money and celebrity. Whether or not this is true, vast quantities of money, we know, will buy celebrity. The very rich--John D. Rockefeller and powerful people of his era--used to pay press agents to keep their names out of the papers. But today one of the things money buys is a place at the table beside the celebrated, with the celebrities generally delighted to accommodate, there to share some of the glaring light. An example is Mort Zuckerman, who made an early fortune in real estate, has bought magazines and newspapers, and is now himself among the punditi, offering his largely unexceptional political views on the McLaughlin Group and other television chat shows. Which is merely another way of saying that, whether or not celebrity in and of itself constitutes a culture, it has certainly penetrated and permeated much of American culture generally.

Such has been the reach of celebrity culture in our time that it has long ago entered into academic life. The celebrity professor has been on the scene for more than three decades. As long ago as 1962, in fact, I recall hearing that Oscar Cargill, in those days a name of some note in the English Department of NYU, had tried to lure the then-young Robert Brustein, a professor of theater and the drama critic for the New Republic, away from Columbia. Cargill had said to Brustein, "I'm not going to bulls--t you, Bob, we're looking for a star, and you're it." Brustein apparently wasn't looking to be placed in a new constellation, and remained at Columbia, at least for a while longer, before moving on to Yale and thence to Harvard.

The academic star, who is really the academic celebrity, is now a fairly common figure in what the world, that ignorant ninny, reckons the Great American Universities. Richard Rorty is such a star; so is Henry Louis Gates Jr. (who as "Skip" even has some celebrity nickname-recognition); and, at a slightly lower level, there are Marjorie Garber, Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Fish, and perhaps now Stephen Greenblatt. Stanley Fish doesn't even seem to mind that much of his celebrity is owed to his being portrayed in novels by David Lodge as an indefatigable, grubby little operator (though Lodge claims to admire Fish's happy vulgarity). Professors Garber and Sedgwick seem to have acquired their celebrity through the outrageousness of the topics they've chosen to write about.

By measure of pure celebrity, Cornel West is, at the moment, the star of all academic stars, a man called by Newsweek "an eloquent prophet with attitude." (A bit difficult, I think, to imagine Newsweek or any other publication writing something similar of Lionel Trilling, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, or John Hope Franklin.) He records rap CDs and appears at benefits with movie stars and famous athletes. When the president of Harvard spoke critically to West about his work not constituting serious scholarship (as if that had anything to do with anything), it made front-page news in the New York Times. When West left Harvard in indignation, he was instantly welcomed by Princeton. If West had been a few kilowatts more the celebrity than he is, he might have been able to arrange for the firing of the president of the university, the way certain superstars in the National Basketball Association--Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan--were able, if it pleased them, to have their coaches fired.

Genuine scholarship, power of ratiocination glowing brightly in the classroom, is distinctly not what makes an academic celebrity or, if you prefer, superstar. What makes an academic celebrity, for the most part, is exposure, which is ultimately publicity. Exposure can mean appearing in the right extra-academic magazines or journals: the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly; Harper's and the New Republic possibly qualify, as do occasional cameo performances on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Having one's face pop up on the right television and radio programs--PBS and NPR certainly, and enough of the right kinds of appearances on C-SPAN--does not hurt. A commercially successful, much-discussed book helps hugely.

So does strong public alignment with the correct political causes. Harvey Mansfield, the political philosopher at Harvard, is a secondary academic celebrity of sorts, but not much in demand, owing to his conservatism; Shelby Steele, a black professor of English who has been critical of various aspects of African-American politics, was always overlooked during the days when universities knocked themselves out to get black professors. Both men have been judged politically incorrect. The underlying and overarching point is, to become an academic celebrity you have to promote yourself outside the academy, but in careful and subtle ways.

ONE MIGHT ONCE HAVE ASSUMED that the culture of celebrity was chiefly about show business and the outer edges of the arts, occasionally touching on the academy (there cannot be more than twenty or so academic superstars). But it has also much altered intellectual life generally. The past ten years or so have seen the advent of the "public intellectual." There are good reasons to feel uncomfortable with that adjective "public," which drains away much of the traditional meaning of intellectual. An intellectual is someone who is excited by and lives off and in ideas. An intellectual has traditionally been a person unaffiliated, which is to say someone unbeholden to anything but the power of his or her ideas. Intellectuals used to be freelance, until fifty or so years ago, when jobs in the universities and in journalism began to open up to some among them.

Far from being devoted to ideas for their own sake, the intellectual equivalent of art for art's sake, the so-called public intellectual of our day is usually someone who comments on what is in the news, in the hope of affecting policy, or events, or opinion in line with his own political position, or orientation. He isn't necessarily an intellectual at all, but merely someone who has read a few books, mastered a style, a jargon, and a maven's authoritative tone, and has a clearly demarcated political line.

But even when the public intellectual isn't purely tied to the news, or isn't thoroughly political, what he or she really is, or ought to be called, is a "publicity intellectual." In Richard A. Posner's interesting book Public Intellectuals, intellectuals are in one place ranked by the number of media mentions they or their work have garnered, which, if I am correct about publicity being at the heart of the enterprise of the public intellectual, may be crude but is not foolish. Not knowledge, it turns out, but publicity is power.

The most celebrated intellectuals of our day have been those most skillful at gaining publicity for their writing and their pronouncements. Take, as a case very much in point, Susan Sontag. When Susan Sontag died at the end of last year, her obituary was front-page news in the New York Times, and on the inside of the paper it ran to a full page with five photographs, most of them carefully posed--a variety, it does not seem unfair to call it, of intellectual cheesecake. Will the current prime ministers of England and France when they peg out receive equal space or pictorial coverage? Unlikely, I think. Why did Ms. Sontag, who was, let it be said, in many ways the pure type of the old intellectual--unattached to any institution, earning her living (apart from MacArthur Foundation and other grants) entirely from her ideas as she put them in writing--why did she attract the attention she did?

I don't believe Susan Sontag's celebrity finally had much to do with the power or cogency of her ideas. Her most noteworthy idea was not so much an idea at all but a description of a style, a kind of reverse or anti-style, that went by the name of Camp and that was gay in its impulse. Might it have been her politics? Yes, politics had a lot to do with it, even though when she expressed herself on political subjects, she frequently got things mightily askew: During the Vietnam war she said that "the white race is the cancer of human history." As late as the 1980s, much too late for anyone in the know, she called communism "fascism with a friendly face" (what do you suppose she found so friendly about it?). To cheer up the besieged people of Sarajevo, she brought them a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. She announced in the New Yorker that the killing of 3,000 innocent people on 9/11 was an act that America had brought on itself. As for the writing that originally brought her celebrity, she later came to apologize for Against Interpretation, her most influential single book. I do not know any people who claim to have derived keen pleasure from her fiction. If all this is roughly so, why, then, do you suppose that Susan Sontag was easily the single most celebrated--the greatest celebrity--intellectual of our time?

With the ordinary female professor's face and body, I don't think Ms. Sontag would quite have achieved the same celebrity. Her attractiveness as a young woman had a great deal to do with the extent of her celebrity; and she and her publisher took that (early) physical attractiveness all the way out. From reading Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's biography Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, one gets a sense of how carefully and relentlessly she was promoted by her publisher, Roger Straus. I do not mean to say that Sontag was unintelligent, or talentless, but Straus, through having her always dramatically photographed, by sending angry letters to the editors of journals where she was ill-reviewed, by bringing out her books with the most careful accompanying orchestration, promoted this often difficult and unrewarding writer into something close to a household name with a face that was ready, so to say, to be Warholed. That Sontag spent her last years with Annie Leibowitz, herself the most successful magazine photographer of our day, seems somehow the most natural thing in the world. Even in the realm of the intellect, celebrities are not born but made, usually very carefully made--as was, indubitably, the celebrity of Susan Sontag.

ONE OF THE MAJOR THEMES in Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown is the fame and celebrity of artists, and above all writers. To sketch in a few bare strokes the richly complex story Braudy tells, writers went from serving power (in Rome) to serving God (in early Christendom) to serving patrons (in the eighteenth century) to serving themselves, with a careful eye cocked toward both the contemporary public and posterity (under Romanticism), to serving mammon, to a state of interesting confusion, which is where we are today, with celebrity affecting literature in more and more significant ways.

Writers are supposed to be aristocrats of the spirit, not promoters, hustlers, salesmen for their own work. Securing a larger audience for their work was not thought to be their problem. "Fit audience, though few," in John Milton's phrase, was all right, so long as the few were the most artistically alert, or aesthetically fittest. Picture Lord Byron, Count Tolstoy, or Charles Baudelaire at a lectern at Barnes & Noble, C-SPAN camera turned on, flogging (wonderful word!) his own most recent books. Not possible!

Some superior writers have been very careful caretakers of their careers. In a letter to one of his philosophy professors at Harvard, T.S. Eliot wrote that there were two ways to achieve literary celebrity in London: One was to appear often in a variety of publications; the other to appear seldom but always to make certain to dazzle when one did. Eliot, of course, chose the latter, and it worked smashingly. But he was still counting on gaining his reputation through his actual writing. Now good work alone doesn't quite seem to make it; the publicity catapults need to be hauled into place, the walls of indifference stormed. Some writers have decided to steer shy from publicity altogether: Thomas Pynchon for one, J.D. Salinger for another (if he is actually still writing or yet considers himself a writer). But actively seeking publicity was thought for a writer, somehow, vulgar--at least it was until the last few decades.

Edmund Wilson, the famous American literary critic, used to answer requests with a postcard that read:

Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, Write articles or books to order, Make statements for publicity purposes, Do any kind of editorial work, Judge literary contests, Give interviews, Conduct educational courses, Deliver lectures, Give talks or make speeches, Take part in writers congresses, Answer questionnaires, Contribute or take part in symposiums or "panels" of any kind, Contribute manuscripts for sale, Donate copies of his books to Libraries, Autograph books for strangers, Allow his name to be used on letterheads, Supply personal information about himself, Supply photographs of himself, Supply opinions on literary or other subjects.

A fairly impressive list, I'd say. When I was young, Edmund Wilson supplied for me the model of how a literary man ought to carry himself. One of the things I personally found most impressive about his list is that everything Edmund Wilson clearly states he will not do, Joseph Epstein has now done, and more than once, and, like the young woman in the Häagen-Dazs commercial sitting on her couch with an empty carton of ice cream, is likely to do again and again.

I tell myself that I do these various things in the effort to acquire more readers. After all, one of the reasons I write, apart from pleasure in working out the aesthetic problems and moral questions presented by my subjects and in my stories, is to find the best readers. I also want to sell books, to make a few shekels, to please my publisher, to continue to be published in the future in a proper way. Having a high threshold for praise, I also don't in the least mind meeting strangers who tell me that they take some delight in my writing. But, more than all this, I have now come to think that writing away quietly, producing (the hope is) good work, isn't any longer quite sufficient in a culture dominated by the boisterous spirit of celebrity. In an increasingly noisy cultural scene, with many voices and media competing for attention, one feels--perhaps incorrectly but nonetheless insistently--the need to make one's own small stir, however pathetic. So, on occasion, I have gone about tooting my own little paper horn, doing book tours, submitting to the comically pompous self-importance of interviews, and doing so many of the other things that Edmund Wilson didn't think twice about refusing to do.

"You're slightly famous, aren't you, Grandpa?" my then eight-year-old granddaughter once said to me. "I am slightly famous, Annabelle," I replied, "except no one quite knows who I am." This hasn't changed much over the years. But of course seeking celebrity in our culture is a mug's game, one you cannot finally hope to win. The only large, lumpy kind of big-time celebrity available, outside movie celebrity, is to be had through appearing fairly regularly on television. I had the merest inkling of this fame when I was walking along one sunny morning in downtown Baltimore, and a red Mazda convertible screeched to a halt, the driver lowered his window, pointed a long index finger at me, hesitated, and finally, the shock of recognition lighting up his face, yelled, "C-SPAN!"

I was recently asked, through email, to write a short piece for a high price for a volume about the city of Chicago. When I agreed to do it, the editor of the volume, who is (I take it) young, told me how very pleased she was to have someone as distinguished as I among the volume's contributors. But she did have just one request. Before making things final, she wondered if she might see a sample of my writing. More than forty years in the business, I thought, echoing the character played by Zero Mostel in The Producers, and I'm still wearing the celebrity equivalent of a cardboard belt.

"Every time I think I'm famous," Virgil Thomson said, "I have only to go out into the world." So it is, and so ought it probably to remain for writers, musicians, and visual artists who prefer to consider themselves serious. The comedian Richard Pryor once said that he would deem himself famous when people recognized him, as they recognized Bob Hope and Muhammad Ali, by his captionless caricature. That is certainly one clear criterion for celebrity. But the best criterion I've yet come across holds that you are celebrated, indeed famous, only when a crazy person imagines he is you. It's especially pleasing that the penetrating and prolific author of this remark happens to go by the name of Anonymous.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. This essay is adapted from a lecture he gave earlier this year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Nov-4, by Dorrance Smith:

The Enemy on Our Airwaves
What is the relationship between al-Jazeera, al Qaeda and America's TV networks?

(Editor's note: Sen. Carl Levin is opposing Mr. Smith's confirmation as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs because of the senator's objections to this article, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal, April 25. A related editorial appears here.)

On April 11, Jeffrey Ake, an American, was taken hostage in Iraq. Video of him in captivity was shown on al-Jazeera on April 13. A short time later six American networks--ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and MSNBC--aired the same video, a vivid example of the ongoing relationship between terrorists, al-Jazeera and the networks. Last week, al-Jazeera showed video of a helicopter being shot, bursting into flames and trailing smoke as it fell to the ground. It also aired video of the lone survivor being forced to walk on a broken leg and then being shot by the terrorists, one of whom said, "We are applying God's law."

As the war continues, more hostages will be taken and acts of murderous violence committed--leading to more videos for al-Jazeera and the networks. Isn't it time to scrutinize the relationship among al-Jazeera, American networks and the terrorists? What role should the U.S. government be playing?

Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and al Qaeda have a partner in al-Jazeera and, by extension, most networks in the U.S. This partnership is a powerful tool for the terrorists in the war in Iraq. Figures show that 77% of Iraqis cite TV as their main source of information; 15% cite newspapers. Current estimates are that close to 100% of Iraqis have access to satellite TV, 18% to cell phones, and 8% to the Internet. The battle for Iraqi hearts and minds is being fought over satellite TV. It is a battle today that we are losing badly.

---

The collaboration between the terrorists and al-Jazeera is stronger than ever. While the precise terms of that relationship are virtually unknown, we do know this: al-Jazeera and the terrorists have a working arrangement that extends beyond a modus vivendi. When the terrorists want to broadcast something that helps their cause, they have immediate and reliable access to al-Jazeera. This relationship--in a time of war--raises some important questions:

• What does Al-Jazeera promise the terrorist organizations in order to get consistent access to their video?

• Does it pay for material?

• Is it promised safety and protection if it continues to air unedited tapes? (No Al-Jazeera employee has been killed or taken hostage by the terrorists. When I ran the Iraqi Television Network, seven employees were killed by terrorists.)

• Does Al-Jazeera promise the terrorists that it won't reveal their whereabouts and techniques as a quid pro quo for doing business? Is this bargain in the guise of journalism a defensible practice?

While I was in Iraq in 2004, Al-Jazeera was expelled from the country by the Iraqi Governing Council for violating international law. Numerous times they had advance knowledge of military actions against coalition forces. Instead of reporting to the authorities that it had been tipped off, Al-Jazeera would pre-position a crew at the event site and wait for the attack, record it and rush it on air. This happened time after time, to the point where Al-Jazeera was expelled from Iraq. The airing of the Ake video, however, demonstrates that it can still operate on behalf of the terrorists even from outside the country.

Al-Jazeera continues to broadcast because it reportedly receives $100 million a year from the government of Qatar. Without this subsidy it would be off the air, off the Internet and out of business. So, does Qatar's funding of Al-Jazeera constitute state sponsorship of terrorism? As long as Al-Jazeera continues to practice in cahoots with terrorists while we are at war, should the U.S. government maintain normal relations with Qatar? As long as Al-Jazeera continues to aid and abet the enemy, as long as we are fighting a war on the ground and in the airwaves, why are we not fighting back against Al-Jazeera and Qatar, the nation that makes possible the network's existence? Should the U.S. not adopt a hard-line position about doing business with Qatar as long as Al-Jazeera is doing business with terrorists?

In addition to being subsidized by Qatar, Al-Jazeera has very strong partners in the U.S.--ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and MSNBC. Video aired by Al-Jazeera ends up on these networks, sometimes within minutes. The terrorists are aware of this access and use it--as in the Ake case--to further their aims. They want to reach the American audience and influence public opinion.

The arrangement between the U.S. networks and Al-Jazeera raises questions of journalistic ethics. Do the U.S. networks know the terms of the relationship that Al-Jazeera has with the terrorists? Do they want to know?

There has been no in-depth reporting about Al-Jazeera in the U.S. and virtually no scrutiny of Qatar and its relationship with the network. Why not? Is it that the American networks don't want to give up their tainted video? And since they all get the same material and all air it at the same time, do they feel a certain safety being in bed together? The cable networks have become addicted to the latest B-roll video. If that video was obtained by means that violated their own standards and practices, would they air it? Would they even know?

---

What if one of the networks had taken a stand and refused to air the Ake video on the grounds that it was aiding and abetting the enemy, and that from this point forward it would not be a tool of terrorist propaganda? The terrorists know that the airing of such video creates pressure on the government to negotiate a release. It also sends a signal to Americans about the perils of being an American working in Iraq. If the Ake video had never aired in the U.S., the position of the hostage-takers would have been severely impaired. Had it never aired, terrorists would have had no incentive to continue making the tapes.

Is it fanciful to think that network news executives would have the fortitude not to air any video shot by terrorists? They already stop short of airing everything, so why not refuse to touch the stuff altogether? At the very least, is it not reasonable to raise questions about the sources and methods used to obtain this material? The war in Iraq will likely drag on for some time. More lives will be lost and more hostages will be taken and more videos will be made. Now we should engage the terrorists on the airwaves as we do on the ground.

Mr. Smith spent nine months in Iraq as a senior media adviser to Ambassador Paul Bremer

A “quick take on the media” (to use the terminology of Eric Burns, formerly of Fox Newswatch):

accepted by Google Ads	rejected by Google Ads

For details on this rather self-explanatory story, see this 2005-May-3 blog entry on rightmarch.redstate.org. Google rejected the Rightmarch ad on 2005-Apr-28.

from Digital media news for europe, 2005-May-4, by Leigh Phillips:

Alternative, smaller news outlets slam Google News 'qualitative' news gathering system

Search engine giant Google has developed plans to develop a 'qualitative' algorithm for its popular Google News aggregation service, a move that the company hopes will rank news articles appearing on the site according to quality and trustworthiness, rather than by date and relevance to search terms, as the service currently does.

The development is revealed by patents filed in the US and elsewhere, according to UK science magazine New Scientist, who first reported the story.

Currently, Google News offers links to the top news items being reported by thousands of news producers around the world, ranked in terms of date and relevance to search terms, with the most recent stories and those that the current algorythm reckons matches most closely the search terms appearing ahead of others.

One criticism of the current system is that a minor news outlet maybe rated as trustworthy as, for example, the BBC, or even moreso.

The new system attempts to correct this perceived imbalance by assigning values to various 'quality' criteria, such as the number of stories an outlet produces, the average story length, the number of stories with bylines, the number of breaking news stories the outlet produces, the number of bureaux a news operation retains, the length of time the news outlet has been in business, the number of staff employed by a news outlet, the volume of traffic to a website and the number of countries accessing a site.

Each criterion will be appropriately weighed according to the formula Google is developing, ultimately producing a single value that is then assigned to a story and then used to rank it within Google News.

However, a number of smaller news outlets have very quickly criticised the move, saying that the new system will inevitably favour corporate media outlets at the expense of alternative and independent news sources.

The smaller outlets say that size is irrelevant to trustworthiness, pointing out that a particular specilised publication is likely to have greater expertise on a particular subject than a news provider more broadly based. Rating an outlet based on its age has also come in for criticism for being unrelated to quality.

'Also, the idea of providing a higher rating to outlets that offer more breaking news is like rewarding your boyfriend for climaxing first,' read one opinion from The New Standard, an alternative, left-of-centre online newspaper based in New York. 'Breaking news is inherently subject to the most errors and the worst journalism.'

The critics are particularly concerned that Google is abandoning its commitment to avoiding bias as laid out in the company's description of its news service:

'Google News is a highly unusual news service in that our results are compiled solely by computer algorithms, without human intervention. As a result, news sources are selected without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, enabling you to see how different news organizations are reporting the same story.'

As the new criteria that will be used to develop the new ranking system will employ 'human intervention', this will unavoidably introduce an element of bias, political or otherwise, say the critics.

from The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, 1999-Mar-10, by Eason Jordan:

1999 Joe Alex Morris Jr. Lecture

"No Substitute for First-Rate Journalists"

I thank you very much for being here tonight. Let me also thank Fidel Castro. In the earliest days of CNN, when CNN was meant to be seen only in the United States, the enterprising Fidel Castro was pirating and watching CNN in Cuba. Fidel was intrigued by CNN. He wanted to meet the person responsible. So Ted Turner, who at that point had never traveled to a Communist country or knowingly met a Communist, [went to Havana]. It was big deal for Ted and during the discussions Castro suggested that CNN be made available to the entire world. In fact it was that seed, that idea that grew into CNN International, which is now seen in every country and territory on the planet.

Working with Ted Turner is exceptionally challenging and it is exceptionally fun. We all should be so lucky to work with a leader who cares so much about the world. Ted Turner's view is there is no white race. There is no black race. There is no race of any color. His view is there is only one race; the human race.

He feels so strongly about there being just one world and one race he has banned one word at CNN -- the F word: foreign. While Ted Turner and CNN recognize nations, Ted's view is the only true foreigners are people from other planets, at least until Ted Turner meets those people. So Ted Turner does not want the word "foreign" mentioned on CNN and has called on me to enforce a ban by fining guilty CNN staffers $100 per violation.

Early on with this rule we ran into problems. One morning Ted called me. He was in a rage. CNN was in the midst of a live interview with the Russian foreign minister. (This is all true.) Ted was screaming. "Eason, I told you never to allow that word on CNN." I said, "Ted, his title is foreign minister." Ted just couldn't accept that. He was outraged. He huffed and he puffed, and then he yelled. "Damn it. You tell him to change his title." The Russian foreign minister refused to do so.

[...]

Question: Are Ted Turner and Fidel Castro friends?

Eason: Yes. I need to explain the background, and it all needs to be said in the context of "Yes, Ted Turner and Fidel Castro are friends." They don't agree with one another on everything. In fact, they disagree on a lot of things. Having said that, in 1969 Fidel Castro threw The Associated Press out of Cuba, and that was the last time that a U.S. news organization had a permanent presence in Cuba.

In 1996, I believe, a number of my colleagues and I, including Bernard Shaw and Tom Johnson, went to Havana, not with Ted Turner, and had a dinner with Fidel Castro. We spent six hours with him, and we pushed very very hard to convince him to allow us to have a bureau in Cuba, and it took him years to finally come around to that idea. In the interim period, you had the complicating factor of the Cuban shoot-down of the planes that were flying out of Miami.

Finally, Fidel Castro said, "Yes," with no ifs, ands or buts attached. We went to the White House. The White House basically told us to go to hell, there was no way that the U.S. government was going to allow an exemption to the U.S. sanctions against Cuba to have a CNN bureau in Cuba. But they added to that, "Of course, if you can convince the Cuban-American community in Miami, and if you can convince all of the enemies of Fidel Castro on Capitol Hill, then we'll reconsider."

Well Tom Johnson and I, perhaps foolishly, immediately got on a plane to Miami. We subsequently in hindsight wish we had taken flak jackets with us, because we received the most hostile reception imaginable. The Cuban-American community in Miami refers to CNN as the Castro News Network. So it's difficult for us there, and this was not a fight that we could win in Miami.

But the most unlikely of things happened. Jesse Helms, of all people, Jesse Helms, without consulting with CNN issued a statement that said he endorsed CNN's application for a bureau in Cuba, because he was absolutely sure that it would lead to the downfall of Fidel Castro. Within 15 minutes, the White House had said, "You can have your bureau in Cuba."

So we've been there now for quite some time. We have never been stopped from going anywhere. We have never been stopped for interviewing anybody. We have reported on stories that absolutely enrage the Cuban government.

Most recently, last week, involving the trial of the dissidents that you referred to. Our position is we're going to report as much as we can on issues of importance, and if the Cuban government doesn't like it, or if the U.S. government doesn't like it, or if any other government doesn't like it, then to hell with them, to hell with all of them. We are here to report the news. Period.

You know, if a government wants to throw us out, and many governments have, then they can do it. But until that day comes, we're going to stay. And believe me the Cuban-American community in Miami, if we ignored a dissident trial in Havana, we would be tarred and feathered. We can't do it. We have to report it. Not only is it news, but there are Congressional committees that have CNN monitoring groups, that all they do is sit around and watch CNN to see what Cuba news coverage we have. So we are out there aggressively reporting the Cuba story.

[...]

Question: Korea?

Eason: First of all, to help you understand why it is I've traveled on nine occasions to North Korea, it's because it's the only place in the world my headquarters cannot reach me. It's very convenient to escape from work. I had a tremendous opportunity in 1994 to go to North Korea, and have lunch with Kim il-sung, the man who started the Korean War. I had lunch with him in the Presidential Palace on his 82nd birthday, his last birthday, and every time he spoke-it was in a room bigger than this, but with this many roundtables and this many people, maybe a few less people-this rose colored lamp would come down from the ceiling and shine upon him, for as long as he was speaking, and then it would go back up into the ceiling.

This is a man who founded the country and ruled the country for 47 years. North Korea has never known another ruler. He died shortly after meeting with Jimmy Carter at a time that was really unfortunate. Carter actually did a great thing, because he had convinced the leaders of North and South to hold a summit meeting that, in fact, never occurred because days later Kim il-sung died, and the meeting never happened.

North Korea is the most bizarre country on the planet. And some people would say it doesn't qualify as a country on the planet; it should be planet into itself. But North Korea is unique in many ways, including having the first hereditary passing of the torch in a Communist country.

Kim il-sung passed the torch to his son, Kim jung-il, a man whose voice has been heard by the Korean people only one time in history. He said one sentence, and that sentence was "Glory be to the great heroic Korean People's Army." And that's the only time, that was five years ago, the only time in history his voice has been heard by the people of North Korea. He has never met a Westerner, ever, and there's a great concern now about where North Korea is going. What are it's intentions? It does have a tremendous weapons of mass destruction capability. It does have a tremendous nuclear capability. No nuclear weapons, as far as I know, and it has missiles. And all of these things together really are tremendously troubling to a lot of people in the region.

There's great cause for concern, frankly, because the world does not understand in the least North Korea, and, frankly, in my opinion, is not trying very hard to understand. You have now a new North Korea Policy Coordinator. William Perry, the former Secretary of Defense, is putting together a policy paper for President Clinton that's supposed to guide North Korea policy for the United States, but he's absolutely under no circumstances going to North Korea to meet with anybody.

I was just in North Korea a week and a half ago. There's tremendous resentment, as you might understand, that North Korea policy is being formulated without any consultation of any kind with the other side. So I would say the outlook is bleak, but I can guarantee you this: When you hear about starvation in North Korea, you hear about famine in North Korea, you hear about the backwardness of the country, a lot of very levelheaded, logical thinking people think "Well that country cannot survive. There is no way a country like that can survive." And I'm here to tell you with absolute certainty those guys will tough it out for centuries just the way they are.

Neither the U.S. nor any country, Japan, South Korea, is going to be able to force a collapse of that government in North Korea. So we need to engage them if we want to have any success in bringing about positive change in the Korean Peninsula.

[...]

[...] Life for all of us who have worked with Ted for years changed dramatically when Jane Fonda came onto the scene. Ted, you know, had a certain history before Jane came along, and then Jane Fonda appeared, and all of a sudden Ted Turner, who had many interesting habits, including smoking and drinking, all of that stopped immediately.

Ted Turner, who also was not physically fit at that time, made life very challenging for all of us at CNN, because his position was if he was going to have to clean up his act, then everybody at CNN would have to do the same thing, not just on the job, but off the job. For instance, he banned, on the job and off, smoking by CNN employees. Today if you smoke, you're fired. Period. Period. He feels very strongly about it, and clearly Jane is an influence in that regard. But I think only in a way that's made us healthier, not in a way that's influenced our news coverage.

Read Jordan's lecture unabridged, if you must. Much of it can now be seen to be rather silly. He says the BBC is their main competition. He describes CNN profits of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. He tells the tale of making CNN a mouthpiece for Moammar Qaddafi, and his embarrassment at not doing so more promptly than he did. On 2005-Feb-11 Jordan resigned his post as head of news at CNN, after catching flak for insinuating, in comments at the Davos economic forum, that components of the US military were deliberately killing journalists.

from billoreilly.com, 2005-Jun-2, by Bill O'Reilly:

Hurting Your Country

So how did the USA go from being a beacon of freedom to a champion of the gulag? How exactly did that happen? Well, pull up a chair, here's what happened.

After President Bush won re-election last November, there was much consternation among some powerful anti-Bush Americans. They were stunned that John Kerry lost and feared that if Bush succeeds in his second term, the Democrats would lose again in 2008.

Then came the successful election in Iraq, and the fear on the left multiplied. If Iraq turned out to be a success, Mr. Bush would become a hero. So the need to undermine the Bush administration became more intense than ever. But how to do it? Social Security wasn't emotional enough, particularly for young voters. What could be done to hurt Bush?

Then came the revelation--let's torture the President.

The New York Times had already primed the pump, running more than 50 front-page stories on the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Then came reports from the International Red Cross that more abuse was happening at Guantanamo. The American Civil Liberties Union was already challenging detentions there and so a strategy was sealed: the Bush administration was full of torturers and human rights violators. It was ruining America's reputation throughout the world. Bush was a villain.

It was easy to get that thesis out. The left-wing websites fed anti-Bush columnists like Bob Herbert and Richard Cohen information and the drumbeat intensified. There was torture and abuse and murder all sanctioned by the evil Bush administration. Article after article appeared and soon some TV people followed along. It didn't take long before the torture seed was fully sown.

The Newsweek debacle slowed things down a little, but the anti-Bush press quickly banded together and pronounced that Newsweek's mistake would never have happened if Bush wasn't torturing everybody. I'm sure you read those opinion pieces, as they appeared in liberal newspapers all over the country. The theme and wording was so similar that one person could have written all of those articles. And that was no accident.

All the while this was happening, the President and his crew were doing what they usually do when the press pounds them: nothing. They did not engage the abuse propaganda until it was obvious Newsweek had screwed up. But even that effort was derided by many in The White House press corps, who chided the administration for scolding Newsweek.

Now the torture theme has new momentum. A liberal federal judge in New York City has ruled the Defense Department must release more photos and videos of Abu Ghraib to the ACLU. Of course, that will incite even more hatred against the USA and put our soldiers in more danger but, hey, politics comes before protecting the troops. The anti-Bush people want those pictures almost as badly as Al Jazeera wants them. Another nail in the President's coffin is more important than bodies in real coffins.

If you think I am exaggerating, I assure you I am not. This torture campaign is being run brilliantly, and if Mr. Bush doesn't wise up soon, he will be bloodied just as Lyndon Johnson was in the Vietnam debacle.

The truth is that abuse has occurred, but on a relatively small scale. According to General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. has detained about 68,000 people since 9/11 (most have been released), and there have been 325 investigations into alleged abuse. At this writing, about 100 cases of wrongdoing have been substantiated.

That's not a big number, but it doesn't matter to the anti-Bush cabal, which understands that perception is reality in a nation where "reality programming" is the rage of the day. If you can sell the nation that America is now a war criminal, President Hillary Clinton is a real possibility.

So there you have it. For the anti-Bush folks, it is simple: no pain, no gain. Torture is selling and the media is buying. For those of you who are appalled by this analysis, I can only say one thing: sometimes the truth, like torture, hurts.

from Media Research Center, 2005-Mar-22, by Rich Noyes:

ABC, CBS and NBC Evening News Coverage Favors Those Who Would Stop Feeding Disabled Woman
Slanting the News Against Terri Schiavo

A new Media Research Center study finds the three broadcast network evening newscasts have tilted their recent coverage of the Terri Schiavo case in ways that bolster her husband Michael's arguments that the severely disabled woman is in an irreversible vegetative state and had clearly expressed a desire to die. But network reporters have attempted to debunk arguments made by her parents — namely that some doctors believe she could be helped and that Mrs. Schiavo, a Catholic, would not want her feeding tube disconnected.

MRC analysts looked at all 31 evening news stories aired from Thursday, March 17, when the impending removal of Mrs. Schiavo's feeding tube put her case back in the news, through Monday, March 21. The researchers looked at both weekday and weekend newscasts, although CBS's weekend coverage was pre-empted in Eastern time zones to show college basketball.

• Condemning Congressional Activism: A majority of soundbites (59%) repudiated Congress for acting to permit Mrs. Schiavo's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, to bring their case to a federal court before their daughter starves to death. Nearly all of the supportive comments came from members of Congress such as Rep. Tom DeLay, who was shown on ABC's World News Tonight on Saturday: “We're expediting this as fast as we can do it, so that we can get that feeding tube back into her and keep her alive until she's had her day in court.”

But the condemnations of Congress did not just come from Michael Schiavo and Democrats; some reporters joined in the castigations. “Whatever your beliefs,” ABC's Jake Tapper commented on Friday, “Terri Schiavo and her family deserved better than the way Congress worked this week.” On Monday's CBS Evening News, reporter Elizabeth Kaledin argued that “this is exactly the kind of scenario doctors are worried about. It's sad enough that this case had to play out in the courts, but to get politics involved now, I think they would say, is just bad medicine.”

Jennings Scolds Pro-Life “Interference” “We're going to begin tonight with the extraordinary last-minute attempt by members of the Congress to interfere — or to intervene — in the case of Terri Schiavo, the young woman who has been in a vegetative state for seven years....In the last 24 hours, there has been no denying members of the Congress. After seven years, members of the House and of the Senate have decided this is urgent.” —Peter Jennings, World News Tonight, March 18

• Rejecting the Schindlers' Case: Three-fifths (60%) of soundbites (including reporter comments) presented Michael Schiavo's case that Terry Schiavo should die, compared with just two-fifths offering the counter-arguments of her parents. Not a single story was devoted to a skeptical look at Schiavo and whether he was acting in his wife's best interests, but all three networks ran stories rejecting Mr. and Mrs. Schindler's view that their daughter could possibly be helped.

On Friday, a few hours after Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed, ABC's Peter Jennings dismissed one of the Schindlers' worries: “They also say that she will die a painful death, though there does not seem to be any support for that argument in the medical community.” On Monday's World News Tonight, reporter Jake Tapper rejected the value of videotapes showing Terri Schiavo apparently responding: “In some ways, these tapes are like psychological inkblot tests. You see in them what you want.” Then ABC's Dr. Tim Johnson summarized that “the conventional wisdom, by experts in this field, is that after five years in a persistent vegetative state, there is virtually no chance for recovery.” NBC showed Dr. Robert Cranford, who has examined Mrs. Schiavo. He said that in spite of how she appears on videotape, “she's as unconscious as someone who is dead.”

None of the broadcast network stories showed even one dissenting expert. But FNC's Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes on Monday interviewed Dr. William Hammesfahr, a neurologist who spent 10 hours observing Terri Schiavo. Hammesfahr said she is “completely aware and conscious and responsive...like a child with cerebral palsy.” Is Hammesfahr offering false hope, or did the networks stack the deck against Terri Schiavo?

from TownHall.com, 2005-Mar-23, by Michelle Malkin:

The MSM's life and death distortions

However you feel about the Terri Schiavo case, one fact is indisputable: The mainstream media coverage of the matter has been abysmal.

On a fundamental matter of life and death, the MSM heavyweights have proven themselves utterly incapable of reporting fairly. Take a widely publicized ABC News poll released on Monday that supposedly showed strong public opposition to any Washington intervention in Terri's case. Here is how the spinmasters framed the main poll question:

As you may know, a woman in Florida named Terri Schiavo suffered brain damage and has been on life support for 15 years. Doctors say she has no consciousness and her condition is irreversible. Her parents and her husband disagree on whether or not she should be kept on life support. In cases like this who do you think should have final say, (the parents) or (the spouse)?

A follow-up question asked:

If you were in this condition, would you want to be kept alive, or not?

The problem is that, contrary to what ABC News told those polled, Terri Schiavo is not on "life support" and has never been on "life support." The loaded phrase evokes images of a comatose patient being artificially sustained by myriad machines and pumps and wires. Terri was on a feeding tube. A feeding tube is not a ventilator. Terri can breathe just fine on her own.

And as many of her medical caretakers and parents have argued, if given proper rehabilitation, Terri could learn to chew and swallow on her own as well. She is disabled, not dead.

But ABC News did not see fit to inform either the poll takers or its viewers of the truth. Instead, it misled them -- and the result was a poll response that produced -- voila! -- "broad public disapproval" for any government intervention to spare Terri from slowly starving to death. Blogger Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters (captainsquartersblog.com) noted: "Either ABC is completely incompetent in conducting research, or they have attempted to fool their viewers and readership with false polling that essentially lies about the case in question. Since when does ABC conduct push polling for euthanasia?"

Imagine how the poll results might have turned out if ABC News had made clear to participants that Terri is not terminally ill. Not in excruciating pain. Capable of saying "Mommy" and "Help me." And of "getting the feeling she's falling" or getting "excited," in her husband's own testimony, when her head is not held properly.

Imagine how the poll results might have turned out if ABC News had informed participants that in a sworn affidavit, registered nurse Carla Sauer Iyer, who worked at the Palm Garden of Largo Convalescent Center in Largo, Fla., while Terri Schiavo was a patient there, testified: "Throughout my time at Palm Gardens, Michael Schiavo was focused on Terri's death. Michael would say 'When is she going to die?' 'Has she died yet?' and 'When is that bitch gonna die?'"

Now, if you were in this situation, would you want to be kept alive, or not?

Not to pick on ABC News, but, well, let's. In an attempt to embarrass Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., who noted that withdrawing food and water from someone like Schiavo was extremely rare, ABC's Jake Tapper last week featured this counter-quote from Prof. Bill Allen, of the University of Florida College of Medicine:

Feeding tubes have been removed in the United States for many years, and it's been a common practice. This has happened in many cases, probably a hundred thousand times in this country.

"A hundred thousand times"? There have been a hundred thousand cases of non-terminally ill, non-brain dead individuals slowly starved and forced to die in this country? Tapper demanded no proof from his professor. Instead, he dismissed lawmakers as ignoramuses contradicted by "experts," cited the biased ABC News poll cited above, and tossed it back to Jennings with this slam: "Terri Schiavo and her family deserved better than the way Congress worked this week."

Meanwhile, contradicting the experience of every starved child in Africa and abandoned street animal at your SPCA shelter, the New York Times informs us: "Experts Say Ending Feeding Can Lead to a Gentle Death."

Is it any wonder the credibility of the MSM is withering on the vine?

Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com

from the Weekly Standard, 2005-Apr-4, by Fred Barnes:

The ABCs of Media Bias
A mystery memo, biased reporting, and the usual suspects.

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER BILL FRIST never saw it. Neither did the Senate Republican whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The number three Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, didn't get a copy. Nor did the senator with the closest relationship with President Bush, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. And the senator with the familiar Republican last name, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, didn't see it or read it. The same is true of Senator Mel Martinez, the rookie Republican from Florida.

Yet the infamous memo that argued Republicans stood to gain politically by saving the life of Terri Schiavo was characterized by ABC News as consisting of "GOP Talking Points." True, a few paragraphs were of Republican origin. They had been lifted, word for word, from a Martinez press release outlining the provisions of his legislative proposal, "The Incapacitated Person's Legal Protection Act." This was the inoffensive part of the memo. The offensive part--it didn't come from Martinez--left the strong impression that Republicans are callous and cynical in their attempt to save Schiavo's life, ill-motivated in the extreme.

Two paragraphs were the problem. One contended Republicans should save the disabled Schiavo's life because "this is a great political issue" that could lead to the defeat of Democratic senator Bill Nelson of Florida in 2006. The other said dwelling on the Schiavo issue would excite pro-lifers, a key Republican constituency.

Supposedly the memo was distributed only to Republicans on the Senate floor. Ergo, it was a Republican document. ABC correspondent Linda Douglass first reported its existence on March 18, saying the network "has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators, explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case." She mentioned the two offensive passages, and the memo was shown on the screen. The ABC website was explicit about the source of the memo: These were "GOP talking points on Terri Schiavo." Two days later, the Washington Post referred to it as "an unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators."

There wasn't a hint in these reports the memo could have any other source but Republicans. Yet there was no evidence it had come from Republicans. It was unsigned and had no letterhead or date. Nothing indicated it came from the Republican leadership or the House or Senate campaign committee or from the Republican National Committee or even from a stray Republican staffer. The only evidence was of a dirty trick--and there wasn't much evidence of that. Powerline, the influential blog, found a version of the memo with typos cleaned up on left-wing websites.

The only basis for blaming Republicans was the unsubstantiated allegation that the memo was spread among Republican senators. Yet no senator stepped forward and said, "Yes, I got that memo." Now consider what would have happened if a damning memo had been distributed to Democratic senators, saying the Schiavo issue could be used politically against Republicans. Would anyone in the mainstream media have jumped on it? I doubt it. Only right-wing bloggers would have.

So rather than an example of aggressive reporting, the memo story turns out to be yet another instance of crude liberal bias, in this case against both Republicans and those who fought to have Schiavo's feeding tube restored. Naturally the memo had a second life when the story was picked up by other news outlets, pundits, and columnists. How did ABC and others get wind of the memo in the first place? It came from "Democratic aides," according to the New York Times, who "said it had been distributed to Senate Republicans." Not exactly a disinterested source.

As the memo flap suggests, media bias against Schiavo's parents, who led the fight to have her feeding tube restored, and their allies was extensive. The mainstream media failed to report lapses in Terri Schiavo's medical examination, diagnosis, and treatment. One had to turn to bloggers. To find anything less than favorable about Michael Schiavo, the husband who insisted Terri's feeding tube be removed, the alternative press was the best bet. The mainstream press, meanwhile, twitted conservatives for hypocritically abandoning states' rights in the effort to save Terri. Liberals, suddenly champions of states' rights instead of federal power, got a pass.

Bias seeped into polling. An ABC News poll question said Terri Schiavo was on "life support" and has "no consciousness and her condition is irreversible." "Do you support . . . the decision to remove Terri's feeding tube?" A large majority said they did. But Schiavo was not on life support as most people understand the term, may have some consciousness, and some neurologists believe she has a chance of partial recovery. Given those facts, would you want to stay alive? ABC didn't ask.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Nov-24, by Bridget Johnson:

Look Who Isn't Talking
A filmmaker is murdered, and Hollywood loudmouths say nothing.

Since Nov. 2, I've had an icky feeling in the pit of my stomach. As an ardent Bush backer, my queasiness has nothing to do with the glorious election results, but is prompted by a murder that occurred the same day in Amsterdam.

Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh's short film "Submission," about the treatment of women in Islam, written by female Dutch parliamentarian and former Muslim Aayan Hirsi Ali, had aired in August on Dutch TV. Van Gogh was riding his bike near his home when a Muslim terrorist shot him, slashed his throat, and pinned to his body a note threatening Ms. Ali. This appears to be an organized effort, not the act of a lone nut; Dutch authorities are holding 13 suspects in the case.

After the slaying, I watched "Submission" (available online at ifilm.com) and my mind is still boggled that 11 minutes decrying violence against women incites such violence. There've been many films over the years that have taken potshots at Catholics, but I don't remember any of us slaughtering filmmakers over the offense. You didn't see the National Rifle Association order a hit on Michael Moore over "Bowling for Columbine."

One would think that in the name of artistic freedom, the creative community would take a stand against filmmakers being sent into hiding à la Salman Rushdie, or left bleeding in the street. Yet we've heard nary a peep from Hollywood about the van Gogh slaying. Indeed Hollywood has long walked on eggshells regarding the topic of Islamic fundamentalism. The film version of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" changed Palestinian terrorists to neo-Nazis out a desire to avoid offending Arabs or Muslims. The war on terror is a Tinsel Town taboo, even though a Hollywood Reporter poll showed that roughly two-thirds of filmgoers surveyed would pay to see a film on the topic.

In a recent conversation with a struggling liberal screenwriter, I brought up the Clancy film as an example of Hollywood shying away from what really affects filmgoers--namely, the al Qaeda threat vs. the neo-Nazi threat. He vehemently defended the script switch. "It's an easy target," he said of Arab terrorism, repeating this like a parrot, then adding, "It's a cheap shot." How many American moviegoers would think that scripting Arab terrorists as the enemy in a fiction film is a "cheap shot"? In fact, it's realism; it's what touches lives world-wide. It's this disconnect with filmgoers that has left the Hollywood box office bleeding by the side of the road.

---

President Bush wasn't the only one to receive a mandate on Election Day. Voters showed that they don't give a hoot about celebrity endorsements. The dollar democracy of the box office has shown for years that those same Americans are tired of the old shtick. Hollywood hasn't paid attention to its chronic illness, and now even once-powerhouse Miramax, under the tutelage of uber-liberal Harvey Weinstein, has been handing out pink slips. Purse strings are pulling even tighter across town as studios can't continue to stomach the same flops.

But there is an exciting undercurrent flowing through Hollywood, buoyed not only by the election but the campaign that highlighted divisions so oft pointed to by the left. It's something the general public can't see yet, but will when the talents of the conservative filmmaking movement in Hollywood--writers, producers, directors and actors--begin to make it past the distribution hurdle and to the cineplex.

We saw a sneak peek during the campaign: a funny commercial for the Club for Growth, denoting Kerry's flip-flops with a groom who keeps changing his mind at the altar and a bomb-squad specialist who can't pick which wire to cut. The producer was David Zucker, a self-described "Sept. 12 Republican," who made such classics as "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun." Meanwhile, loudmouthed liberal celebrities were crucified in the Trey Parker/Matt Stone comedy "Team America: World Police."

A liberal friend asked me what conservative filmmaking was, envisioning staid, G-rated pictures. The movement is better described as rebellion from the Hollywood status quo, the dream of being able to make a feature film whose political content won't be altered to make the Republicans evil, in which politically incorrect yet pertinent material won't end up on the cutting-room floor. It's about having faith in filmgoers that they'll eagerly support pictures to which they can relate. It's about creating content for movie houses in the red states as well as the blue.

---

A month before the election, the Liberty Film Festival in West Hollywood generated a palpable excitement among conservatives in the industry and those lining up to catch a glimpse of the flicks. The diverse and hip crowd joined producers Stephen K. Bannon ("In the Face of Evil"), Lionel Chetwynd ("Celsius 41.11"), Doug Urbanski ("The Contender"), Mr. Zucker and others.

One film, by Brain-Terminal.com's Evan Maloney, "Brainwashing 101," highlighted attempts to stifle free speech on college campuses. After the film, an immigrant in the audience who identified himself as Boris angrily proclaimed, "This is just like Soviet Union!"

Another film, "Relentless," exposed Yasser Arafat's doublespeak in favor of the destruction of Israel and chillingly showed children on a Palestinian TV show expressing their desire to be suicide bombers, urged on by the host--who blew herself up in Jerusalem a week before the screening.

Movie after movie showed filmmakers on the edge, taking risks, telling truths that needed to be told. But Mr. van Gogh paid the ultimate price to make his film, and the ensuing silence of a community purportedly so interested in free speech is maddening. Agree with the man or not, what warranted his violent death?

Giving Hollywood the benefit of the doubt, I did one more search to find industry response to the van Gogh murder. I found the blog of novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon, who confirmed that I wasn't the only one who'd been wondering: "It's stunning how silent the American artistic community, Hollywood in particular, has been about the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam," he wrote. "Do they even know what happened to one of their own? Have they even heard of him? Do they care someone was killed for making a film which protested violent abuse against women? Are they even interested?"

---

Earlier this year, I was shopping a script that included Arab terrorist characters in addition to good Arab characters. Companies were interested, but after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, a wave of scripts were returned to me the next week. Confused, I narrowed the potential culprit down to a small Geneva Conventions joke by one brash character, and I changed it before sending it out again. The response was noticeably warmer, but I still encountered some trepidation over the War on Terror theme.

When I began meeting and networking with other conservative filmmakers, I put the lines back in the script. I'm not changing it again. Nor will I compromise my story. It would look pretty silly for European neo-Nazis to be traipsing around the Pakistani border, anyway.

Ms. Johnson is a journalist and screenwriter in Southern California.

from CNSnews.com, 2002-Dec-17, by Marc Morano:

Critics Assail Fidel Castro's 'Sickening' Grip on Hollywood Celebs

(CNSNews.com) - Despite decades of criticism by exiled Cubans and human rights activists, Cuba's dictator, Fidel Castro, has been labeled a "genius" and a "source of inspiration to the world" by Hollywood celebrities.

Media critic Michael Medved labels the movie-star attention to Castro, "sickening." Dennis Hays, head of the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation, says Castro maintains a "cult"-like following, similar to the devotion for past figures like "Jim Jones or David Koresh."

But Saul Landau, an Emmy award-winning filmmaker who produced documentaries on Castro's Cuba, says Hollywood celebrities are realizing that a lot of the negative portrayals of Castro are inaccurate. Landau praised many of the dictator's policies, noting that Castro "has brought a greater equality in terms of wealth distribution than I guess any country in the world today."

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg visited Cuba and met with Castro in November and dined with the dictator until the early morning hours. Spielberg announced that his dinner with Castro "was the eight most important hours of my life."

Actor Jack Nicholson told Daily Variety, following his three-hour 1998 meeting in Cuba that, "He [Castro] is a genius. We spoke about everything."

Model Naomi Campbell declared that Castro was "a source of inspiration to the world."

"I'm so nervous and flustered because I can't believe I have met him. He said that seeing us in person was very spiritual," Campbell recounted of her 1999 visit to Cuba with fellow model Kate Moss, according to the Toronto Star.

The stars have also praised Castro's economic system. Comedian Chevy Chase, at Earth Day 2000 in Washington D.C., said he believes "socialism works" and explained that "Cuba might prove that." Chase added, "I think it's conclusive that there have been areas where socialism has helped to keep people at least stabilized at a certain level."

American media moguls, including the president of CBS TV, the head of MTV and the editor of Vanity Fair, visited Cuba in 2001 and had nothing but praise for the Caribbean Island. One member of the entourage described Cuba as "the most romantic, soulful and sexy country I've ever been to in my life," according to the New York Post.

'Experience of a Lifetime'

Other Hollywood celebrities who have visited Cuba and Castro include Robert Redford, Spike Lee, Sidney Pollack, Oliver Stone, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Ed Asner, Shirley MacLaine, Alanis Morissette, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kevin Costner.

Costner visited Cuba in 2001 for the premiere of his film on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days, and attended a private screening with Castro. The film depicts the Kennedy administration behind the scenes during the October 1962 crisis.

Costner was clearly impressed with Castro, stating at a Havana press conference, "It was an experience of a lifetime to sit only a few feet away from him and watch him relive an experience he lived as a very young man."

Movie portrayals have also reflected Hollywood's enthusiasm for Castro's Cuba, even while infuriating cultural critics like David Horowitz, who called the 1990 film Havana, starring Robert Redford and directed by Sydney Pollack, "grotesque," for its pro-Castro sentiment.

Another film currently showing in the U.S. is called Fidel. The 2002 movie is being billed as a biographical documentary of Castro, featuring the Cuban dictator as well as Harry Belafonte and Ted Turner.

The movie presents such a favorable view of Castro that New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott said of the film: "This is an exercise not in biography but in hero worship."

Last week, one of the stars of Fidel, Belafonte, was back in Cuba for a film festival and told reporters that "every day, more and more Americans are opposed to the war machine being driven by George W. Bush," according to a report from Cuba's state-run Radio Havana.

Belafonte accused Bush of using the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to further his desire "to control the world militarily, politically, economically and culturally."

Among their key political causes, Hollywood activists are calling for the U.S. government to end the trade embargo imposed on Cuba in 1961. However, Bush has said he will not lift the embargo until Castro's government honors human rights, releases political prisoners and holds free and fair elections.

'Lovesick Rock Groupies'

Hays, executive vice president of the Cuban American National Foundation, an organization dedicated to fighting for democracy and human rights in Cuba, believes Castro's personal mystique may be blinding the celebrities to the harsh realities of life in Cuba.

"You have to remember that Fidel Castro is a cult leader, much along the same lines as Jim Jones or David Koresh. He's a megalomaniac with a messiah complex and people go and fall into his orbit," Hays told CNSNews.com.

He believes otherwise rational individuals can "lose all context of reality" in Castro's presence.

"People turn into lovesick rock groupies when they get into his presence. This is the impact that cult leaders have on people," Hays added.

Furthermore, he insisted, celebrities should not be praising Castro when they don't understand the situation in Cuba.

"It's very sad, and I wish Steven Spielberg and Danny Glover or any of these other guys would spend a little time with some of the political prisoners in jail before they make broad stroke comments about Cuba and Cuban society," Hays said.

He said he hopes celebrities will "open their eyes" before they promote Castro's Cuba.

"Remember, this is a man who has killed tens of thousands of his own citizens. He's killed over 30 Americans, he harbors fugitives from U.S. justice, he has supported terrorism and narco-terrorism throughout the hemisphere, causing untold thousands of other citizens' deaths," Hays said.

He described Castro's rule as a "ruthless dictatorship that denies people the freedom of speech, the freedom of press, the freedom of association," and said he cannot understand how celebrities miss these points.

"What is the problem here? Short of Saddam Hussein, it's hard to find a figure in the world that has caused more human misery than Fidel Castro," Hays added.

He said he finds it ironic that Spielberg produced the film Schindler's List, about the German slaughter of Jews during World War II, yet cannot comprehend the reality of Cuba.

"[Spielberg is] totally blind to gulags in Cuba. [During his recent visit to Cuba] he made no mention of the thousands of people who are harassed and imprisoned on a daily basis," Hays added.

'Sickening'

Michael Medved, entertainment critic and author of the book Hollywood vs. America, describes the celebrities' support of Castro as "sickening." He believes they are naturally drawn to Castro because "part of the Hollywood mindset is an almost childlike fantasy to escape to fantasy worlds."

"The one characteristic we connect most to really successful people in Hollywood is immaturity and that fits very well into utopian paradises of various kinds, like Cuba," Medved explained in an interview with CNSNews.com.

He maintains that most celebrities can't handle their wealth and become "animated by guilt," causing their political views to become skewed.

"One of the ways people deal with that guilt is they become revolutionaries, and Castro is perfect for them because he is an intellectual," Medved said.

"[Castro] is a rich guy, he's always been a rich guy, he's from the elite like most of Hollywood," he added.

Medved expressed surprise over Spielberg's comments, that his visit to Cuba had been the "eight most important hours" of his life.

"Not the hours when he met his wife, not the birth of his children, it was the eight hours he spent with Fidel," Medved said.

David Horowitz, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of the Popular Culture and a former 1960s radical, said Spielberg's comments about Castro were revealing.

"It just shows that Spielberg may be a talented filmmaker, but he hasn't got any moral brains," Horowitz said.

Medved believes the left-leaning Hollywood celebrities are drawn to the meager existence of the Cuban people.

"They say, 'isn't it wonderful, [Cubans] are all driving these vintage cars and they keep them running. Well, it is not so wonderful because they are too poor to get anything else," he said.

Another key factor in Castro's appeal to Hollywood is his "machismo" or sex appeal, according to Medved.

"[Castro] has acknowledged that he personally slept with over 1,000 women...it would be fairly common for Castro to go through four or five women a day," he said.

"For people who have invested a great deal of life proudly trying to see how many beautiful women you can conquer, there is a natural tendency to identify with Bill Clinton or Fidel Castro," Medved added.

'Useless Idiots'

Horowitz called Hollywood's close relationship with Castro a "national disgrace," which he alleged has "been going on for years and years."

Castro is a "sadistic monster," Horowitz said and "the longest surviving dictator in the world." Celebrities gloss over these realities, he contended.

"[Hollywood] can't tell a dictator from a Democrat or a country deliberately and systemically impoverished by its leader. These people don't know anything," Horowitz said.

"It's just depressing to even talk about it. They are useless idiots, if I may turn [Vladimir] Lenin's comment around," he said, referring to the Russian leader's description of naive Western journalists as "useful idiots."

Robin Bronk, executive director of the Creative Coalition, a liberal celebrity-based activist group whose founders include Ron Silver, Christopher Reeve, and Susan Sarandon, believes many Hollywood celebrities are getting a bum rap when it comes to political activism.

"Celebrity activism is as old as [silent film actress] Gloria Swanson," she said.

"We live in a society here in the U.S. where celebrities are put out there as opinion leaders," Bronk explained. "Just as they have their agent and their manager and their publicists, they are expected to have their issue," she added.

Noting that the activism can be effective "if utilized the right way," Bronk conceded that "there are a lot of spokespeople who are speaking on behalf of issues that are not necessarily the best spokespeople."

She also said Hollywood is dominated by liberals because, "typically people in the arts tend to be more liberal and less conservative. I think it's the nature of that constituency."

'Cuba is King'

Filmmaker Saul Landau, an Emmy award-winning filmmaker who produced four separate documentaries on Castro's Cuba for PBS and CBS, including a 1974 CBS documentary with Dan Rather, thinks Hollywood's assessment of Cuba reflects reality.

Landau rejects the idea that Castro is duping celebrities.

"How the hell is he duping them? They've got two eyes, they've got two ears," he told CNSNews.com.

"Cuba is the king of all of Latin American countries," Landau said.

He believes Hollywood stars have seen the truth in Cuba.

"You don't have millions of homeless people in Cuba, you don't have 42 million people who don't have access to medical care," Landau said, comparing Cuba to the United States.

Cuba outperforms the United States "when you talk about the right to food, the right to shelter, the right to a job, the right to a retirement," according to Landau. These issues are "less than rigorously enforced in the U.S." he added.

Landau also believes Castro's detractors have exaggerated his human rights abuses.

"I have not seen any evidence that he is a sadistic monster or a brutal dictator," he explained, adding that he has little regard for Cuban American refugees.

"People in Miami who are running their anti-Castro lobby, are, in my opinion, not representative of the Cubans in the country," Landau said.

"Cuban human rights violations take the form of procedural violations. They involve legal and political rights rather than economic and social rights," he added.

Landau did not deny that Castro's rule has included suppression of a free press and multi-party electoral process, but said like in any revolution, "they broke a lot of eggs" to achieve their goals.

He also made it clear that he is no fan of President George W. Bush.

"It's very difficult coming from the U.S., to imagine a political leader with whom you could have an intelligent conversation. Well, I guess you could with Bill Clinton, but you certainly can't with the moron that is in there today," Landau said.

Castro has a "religious aura" about him, according to Landau.

"When he comes into room, a wind follows him. He intimidates people by his very presence, he emanates, he vibrates power," he explained.

'Truth Needs to Come Out'

There are a few celebrities who make no attempt to hide their disdain for Castro. Actor Andy Garcia, a Cuban refugee, recently expressed his frustration over what he sees as the ignorance on the part of many in Hollywood and in America to Castro's Cuba.

"Sometimes, you feel like what's really going down in Cuba is protected in a way by the American media, and it's a shame, because the truth needs to come out. People need to be aware of what's really going on down there," he told Fort Lauderdale's City Link newspaper in October.

Garcia said he was proud of his 2000 HBO movie, "For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story." The film profiles a jazz musician who fled Cuba for America.

Garcia was blunt in his assessment of his native country. "For me, there's no substitute for liberty and freedom. People die for that," he said.

Singer Gloria Estefan is another Cuban refugee who feels frustrated that people don't understand the Castro government. Estefan fled the communist nation when she was two years old.

"People don't have a lot of information, and when they ask me about it, I tell them about the drama of exiles, the repression, the firing squads, the horror of communism," she told Exito Online in 1997.

"My whole family paid a heavy price for freedom. My father not only fought in the Bay of Pigs, he volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He fought for these same freedoms," Estefan said.

"How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?" she asked.

E-mail a news tip to Marc Morano.

Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.

from MSNBC.com, 2005-Jan-11, by Howard Fineman:

The 'Media Party' is over
CBS' downfall is just the tip of the iceberg

Dan Rather's nearly 24-year tenure as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" was clouded by his involvement with the network's story on the president's National Guard service.

WASHINGTON - A political party is dying before our eyes -- and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.

Now the AMMP is reeling, and not just from the humiliation of CBS News. We have a president who feels it's almost a point of honor not to hold more press conferences -- he's held far fewer than any modern predecessor -- and doesn't seem to agree that the media has any "right" to know what's really going in inside his administration. The AMMP, meanwhile, is regarded with ever growing suspicion by American voters, viewers and readers, who increasingly turn for information and analysis only to non-AMMP outlets that tend to reinforce the sectarian views of discrete slices of the electorate.

Yes, I know: A purely objective viewpoint does not exist in the cosmos or in politics. Yes, I know: Today's media foodfights are mild compared with the viciousness of pamphleteers and partisan newspapers of old, from colonial times forward. Yes, I know: The notion of a neutral "mainstream" national media gained a dominant following only in World War II and in its aftermath, when what turned out to be a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.

Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things. The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS's star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon's fate as the first president to resign.

Good crusades at the time

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.

It was not accident that the birth coincided with an identity crisis in the Democratic Party. The ideological energy of the New Deal had faded; Vietnam and various social revolutions of the '60s were tearing it apart. Into the vacuum came the AMMP, which became the new forum for choosing Democratic candidates. A "reform" movement opened up the nominating process, taking it out of the smoke-filled backrooms and onto television and into the newsrooms. The key to winning the nomination and, occasionally, the presidency, became expertise at riding the media wave. McGovern did it, Gary Hart almost did (until he fell off his surfboard); Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton rode it all the way.

Republicans always have been less dependent on, or concerned about, the AMMP's role in their internal politics. Richard Nixon hated the AMMP, with good reason, and learned just enough to keep it at bay -- until, as president, he put its leaders on various enemies lists. Ronald Reagan, using his own actor's craft and the stage management of Mike Deaver, realized that he could co-opt the AMMP with the irresistible power of pretty, inspirational pictures. Conservative activists, tapping their own pocketbooks or those of sympathetic corporate tycoons, learned to work around the AMMP with mailing lists, grassroots politics and direct-mail, first through the Postal Service, then the Internet.

Some Republicans learned how to manipulate the AMMP, especially its growing obsession with personalities -- and its desire to be regarded as even-handed. The objective wasn't to win the AMMP's approval, but to isolate it by uncoupling its longterm relationship with the Democrats. At least that's what happened in the Monica Lewinsky Years: The party that had nominated him in 1992 had eventually impeached him, thanks in good part to information supplied by GOP investigators.

Bush turns a blind eye

Texas Gov. George W. Bush arrived on the national scene in the 1990s intent on dictating the terms of dealing with the AMMP -- or simply ignoring it altogether. Already well-known as the son of a president, he focused on raising money and holding private chit-chats with donors and political supporters who would journey to Austin for off-the-record talks. His guru was not an image-making man (as Ailes had been for Nixon, and Deaver with Reagan) but a direct-mail expert, Karl Rove. Rove and Bush decided that most forms of "exposure" offered by the AMMP would be likely to do more harm than good. So why bother unless they could completely dictate the terms of engagement?

Bush doesn't hate the AMMP (indeed, he likes his share of reporters on a personal basis). He just refuses to care about what it's up to. The terrorist attack of 9/11, and the added security concerns it fueled, have given the White House a new reason to keep the AMMP at bay. Pools are "tighter," more and more events are "closed press," and those that