original page.
Via Tim Blair, who stresses that one “can’t be too careful”.

Rick Fuschi;

Those who caught Robert Rabinovitch proposing a CBC Contract with Canadians, saw a defining moment in diplomacy. That is, the art of saying “nice doggie…nice doggie” until you can get your hands on a rock.

Canadians respond – “Orwellian roach motel”. Heh.

Michael Fulmento recently returned from his third tour as an Iraq embed. In this interview with John Hawkins. the first question concerns how few reporters are doing the same;

Yes, it’s preposterous to think that you can cover a country with 26 million people, the size of California, from a hotel room or from the international zone in a single city. Nobody would try to be a Hollywood reporter from Des Moines, Iowa. What if you turned on the news about some catastrophe, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans that has been going on a day or so, but the reporter was talking to you from Nome, Alaska? You wouldn’t give it much credence and you shouldn’t give it much credence. The Baghdad Brigade, as I call it, operating out of these hotels — not only would you think that they don’t deserve credence, but time and time again when you look at the stories they write about non-Baghdad areas, you find that they’re wrong.
Hawkins – You don’t have to pull a name out of the hat, but give me an example of that.
This is actually quite important. The Los Angeles Times, right after my next to last embed in April, reported that apparently there was another Fallujah style, Operation Phantom Fury (type attack) about to be carried out any day against Ramadi — and it talked about huge numbers of forces being brought up and this and that — and, of course, we now know it never took place. But, the fact is at the time, there were five reporters listed as chief, secondary, and then contributors. Four were Baghdad-based and one was based in Washington, D.C. So, is it a coincidence that they were completely wrong about this? No, not really. If they had someone in Ramadi, they wouldn’t have written the story. You can’t do these things out of Baghdad and you sure as heck can’t do them out of the District of Columbia (laughs).

Contradicting the prevailing theme, he describes the security situation in Ramadi as greatly improved since he was there six months ago, and is cautiously optimistic about prospects in Iraq.
His comments about the “Baghdad Brigade” are echoed at The Torch, where one of the priorities is auditing the military reporting coming out of Afghanistan;

The real question this focus raises, though, is this: is the attention we’re devoting to Canadian reporting unjustified? Well, not according to at least one member of the press, who expressed the following sentiments to us in private correspondence:

The problem IMHO is that the decisions about such coverage are increasingly being made by editors in Toronto or Ottawa, for reasons wildly unconnected to what’s been going on on the ground there for some time. [Media organization X], for example, insists on using Kandahar as a door prize assignment to hand out to…reporters regardless of their relevant experience (this in one of the most dangerous parts of the world). Many of them have never covered the military, let alone a complex counter-insurgency environment like that of southern Afghanistan, and as a result they mostly stay behind the wire doing “death watch.”
Many of the experienced reporters…who might’ve had the perspective to do stories along the lines that [The Torch] so eloquently outlines, have been sidelined in favour of editors playing [organizational] politics. Personally, I’m so disgusted by the handling of the whole thing I’m not going back to KAF and I’m not the only one who feels this way. The CF’s media strategy and the way they’ve handled the embedding process was and is far from perfect. But the lion’s share of the blame for this distortion of the mission in Afghanistan can’t be laid at their door.

That brings me to something I’ve been noticing lately. The more generalized media auditing that is a primary focus of SDA has prompted a phenomenon of anonymous and defensive comments appearing here from members of the media who attribute misquotes and misrepresentation to their editors, headline writers, even to translaters.
That may all be true. But what is also true is that it doesn’t matter who is responsible. Ignorance, bias, sloppiness, a reluctance to correct false reporting in as aggressive a fashion as it’s first reported – is media malpractice.
Every person who knowingly participates in the release of a flawed product, whether they be the reporter who allows their information to be added to or altered, the editor who ignores a misleading headline, drive-by sneer or burying of the lede – down to the proofreader who realizes that context has being twisted or omitted – all are equally responsible.
Because I make part of my living as an automotive airbrush artist, I spend a good deal of time in automotive body repair shops. It takes a team to restore a damaged vehicle to its original soundness and safety. From the frame straightener to the windshield installer to the paint prep and application, modern automotive body repair is a concert of exacting trades.
Much of it is performed, day in and day out, by people who hold no university degrees. Some aren’t even high school graduates. But, they know their jobs. As craftsmen, they know they will be held responsible for screwing up – but most of all, they understand that everyone who worked on that car shares the consequences when a vehicle is released that fails to meet safety or refinishing standards. Work must be redone. A pattern of faulty workmanship can result in a loss of insurance accreditation.
So, why is it that an industry that produces mere words and facts, that is stacked with university graduates, political celebrities and academics, which serves as a fundamental underpinning of our western democracy, does not hold their members to the standard of performance expected of a nameless welder in an auto repair shop?
How is it that reporters and editors can fail so profoundly, so routinely, with such utter internal unaccountability – and not lose their accreditation to issue a newspaper or news broadcast?
This brings me to the third item in this post, and back to Iraq reporting. The questioning of the source for the Associated Press “six Sunni worshippers burned alive” story (mentioned in previous posts here and here) is now the subject of a column by Boston Herald city editor Jules Crittenden. And he cuts right to the chase;

The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP.
Curt at Floppingaces, www.floppingaces2.blogspot.com, led the charge. He thought there was something strange about an AP report, and took a second look at it, then a third look. He and others blew the lid off it. The AP is making up war crimes. But the resulting stink in the blogosphere has barely wrinkled a nose in the mainstream press. The ethics-obsessed Poynter Institute seems to be oblivious to it.
It has to do with the AP’s Iraqi stringers and an oft-quoted Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein. Problem is, the Iraqi police say Capt. Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi police and U.S. military say an incident described in an AP report – Iraqi soldiers standing by as people were burned alive in a mosque – didn’t happen. Another AP-reported incident, U.S. soldiers shooting 11 civilians, also never happened, the military says.
When the AP was forced to acknowledge this situation, it did so in a story about a new Interior Ministry policy regarding false reports. The AP buried the fact that its own false report prompted this new policy.
The AP stands by its reporting.. The AP has cast “Capt. Jamil Hussein” simply as someone not authorized to speak, and AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has sniffed morally: “Good reporting relies on more than government-approved sources.”
The AP has another Iraqi stringer problem. Photographer Bilal Hussein is in U.S. custody, and the AP has been clamoring indignantly for his release. AP reports have buried the U.S. explanation that Hussein is being held without charge because – quite aside from producing photos that showed him to be overly intimate with terrorists in Fallujah – he was in an al-Qaeda bomb factory, with an al-Qaeda bombmaker, with traces of explosives on his person when he was arrested.
The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem.

And apparently, neither do the media sources that you and I rely on for our news. From the CBC National to the news-talk radio stations – much of their information on foreign current events originates with the Associated Press. They simply cannot have missed this story – I see their ip addresses in my logfiles.
The original story was widely reported in Canada – why have we not heard that a controversy exists?
The Iraqi stringer issue is just the latest in a serious of questioned reports. Others are currently questioning whether the AP may be working with Al Jazeera.
That elements of the US media are slowly beginning to acknowledge the problem openly is a beginning. The question is – with a Canadian media so invested in anti-Americanism as both an ideology and marketing device, how long will we wait before the minority who are diligent, who do their research properly, who recognize the bias, the misreporting, the under-reporting, are willing to move the extra step and take their complaints beyond anonymous comments and private emails to bloggers?
(Related – The future of journalism doesn’t look any brighter.)
By request – Democracy Project has a listing of the AP Board of Directors.
UPDATE – Bill Roggio is back embedded in Iraq. (The same Bill Roggio who reported on the Canadian media “death watch” while embedded with our Canadian Forces a few months ago) His post covers the soldiers’ take on “balcony reporting”. They feel the press has “abandoned them” and small wonder, when the only good soldier these days is a flag draped “victim”;

What a terrible situation to be in, having to defend yourself because of your profession. I’ve always said that the hardest thing about embedding (besides leaving my family) is wearing the badge that says ‘PRESS.’ That hasn’t changed. I hide the badge whenever I can get away with it.
This isn’t the first time I encountered this sentiment from the troops. I experienced this attitude from the Marines while I was in western Iraq last year, and the soldiers in the Canadian Army in Afghanistan also expressed frustration with the media’s presentation of the war.

Another independent, so hit his paypal button if you can.
Dec.4 Update – New York Times Baghdad correspondent Ed Wong questioned the legitimacy of the AP report when it originally broke;

Hi Tom,
You ask me about what our own reporting shows about this incident. When we first heard of the event on Nov. 24, through the A.P. story and a man named Imad al-Hashemi talking about it on television, we had our Iraqi reporters make calls to people in the Hurriya neighborhood. Because of the curfew that day, everything had to be done by phone. We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here. Such an incident would have been so abominable that a great many of the residents in Hurriya, as well as in other Sunni Arab districts, would have been in an uproar over it. Hard-line Sunni Arab organizations such as the Muslim Scholars Association or the Iraqi Islamic Party would almost certainly have appeared on television that day or the next to denounce this specific incident. Iraqi clerics and politicians are not shy about doing this. Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident. So I mentioned it only in passing in my report.
Best,
Ed Wong

Dec. 20 Updates: Michelle Malkin is still digging.

Those “in the know” are stressing the importance of an item buried in the second portion of a news conference from the Iraq Interior ;
Rusty Shackleford;

This is the sniper known as Juba, who is a real hero to the jihadis around the world. He has real superhero status and there are plenty of popular myths surrounding him. He’s not what you’d call a ‘Big Fish’ in the organizational sense, but as a moral victory his capture is ENORMOUS.

The main thrust of the news conference centered on the continuing pattern of MSM reporting of unsubstantiated rumour as fact. Michelle Malkin has a lengthy, link rich post, from which I’m sharing a few exerpts.
The first involves the Associated Press named source for the of “6 Sunnis burned alive” story that swept the international news cycle last week;

BG Abdul-Kareem, the Ministry of Interior Spokesman, went on the record today stating that Capt. Jamil Hussein is not a police officer. He explained the coordinations among MOI, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Defense in attempting to track down these bodies and their joint conclusion was that this was unsubstantiated rumor.
He went on to name several other false sources that have been used recently and appealed to the media to document their news before reporting. He went into some detail about the impact of the press carrying propaganda for the enemies of Iraq and thanked “the friends” who have brought this to their attention.

A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes on this story among bloggers, despite the protests of Associated Press. But it’s not the only instance causing concern for the Iraqi government.

The ministry received in a week more than 12 cases of claims, one stating 50 killed were there, 200 kidnapped here, 30 corpses found there etc. And when we dispatched our forces and investigators to the locations, we found nothing.

Finally, an officer in the US Army Reserves currently serving in Iraq writes in The American Thinker;

Sunni “eyewitnesses” confidently denounced the Shiite-dominated government for their inaction. There were bold claims that the Iraqi Army stood by and did nothing as this horrifying crime happened. People around the world braced themselves for the spectacular reprisals that would surely come from the Sunni. The press practically salivated at the bloodshed (and glorious headlines) that would be forthcoming.
A winning situation all around.
Except, well, except for the tiny little detail that the incident most likely never happened. A week has gone by and no charred bodies were produced. No dramatic funeral parades, with all the attendant wailing and gnashing of teeth, occurred. Not one photo. No grand reprisals. Not even any speeches (and it is hard to imagine Iraqi religious leaders miss an opportunity to make speeches). Just a few remarks from the Iraqi government, largely ignored by the U.S. press, that all reports showed that that particular district had been quiet, and pleading the Iraqi people for calm.
No one thought to question this unusual divergence from normal protocol.

And don’t forget the blogger who started it all – a sure bet for the latest developments – Flopping Aces.
The excuses given – that it’s hard for reporters to move freely in Iraq, that the circumstances demand they rely on Iraqi stringers just doesn’t cut it. If they can’t confirm, then they shouldn’t report. If the account is disputed by official sources, they need to place that disclaimer front and center.
Perhaps Capt Hussein exists. Perhaps his employment records are stuck in a drawer or spelled incorrectly in the database. But at this point, the only people who are steadfastly defending his credentials are those with most to lose – Associated Press. Whatever the facts turn out to be in this case, there is no doubt that the media we rely on has allowed themselves to become deeply compromised. Until they’ve addressed the issue of relying on stringers and rumour reportage, it is probably wisest to approach any and all reporting coming out of Iraq with the “suspension of belief”.
Update: This story has gone mainstream, prompted by the almost palpable anger generated in the media by an announcement that the Iraqis are setting up a media monitoring unit that will demand accuracy in reporting.
For an example of “gratuitous slam reporting” – in the last paragraph of this response from the Associated Press we are reminded of media oppression under Saddam Hussein.
It’s why they’ve been leading the charge to have him return, I guess.
The idea of a media monitoring unit is not an ideal solution by any stretch of the imagination – but hey – from the Jenin massacre to green helmet man to the unluckiest homeowner in Lebanon to the unburned mosques and mysterious Capt Hussein – they’ve made their bed.
Dec. 4 updates – it’s revealed that NYT Baghdad correspondent Ed Wong questioned the legitimacy of the AP report when it originally broke.

What you haven’t heard, and he won’t tell you!;

Quickly now – no Googling: can you name three projects Canada’s Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (KPRT) has undertaken in the past year? The first wiseguy to spout off that “they dug a well” gets a slap in the head for his trouble.
If you couldn’t think of one specific thing, you’re not alone – I couldn’t either, until I did a bit of digging. The truth is that the KPRT has almost a hundred projects either on the go or completed right now, put together by CF, Civilian Police (CivPol), DFAIT, or CIDA personnel with the team.
[…]
Here’s a stat that might surprise you as well: since January 16th of this year, 175 journalists from 37 different media outlets have embedded with the CF in Afghanistan. How many stories have you seen about the KPRT – other than from the BBC? Now, how many ramp ceremonies have you seen?

A true “good news from Afghanistan” roundup in the Arthur Chrenkoff tradition. Check it out.

John Gormley was asking this question as I pulled up to the shop this morning, so I didn’t hear the answer.
Will rabbit ears work on a plasma flat screen TV?

An Iraq news roundup at Winds of Change. (Including info on how you can help with private charity projects.) And unlike the mainstream media – this one isn’t brought to you by Al Qaeda stringers!
Prompted by the strong suspicion that the “6 Sunnis burned alive” story is fraudulent, Michelle Malkin is compiling the growing list of questionable media sources in Iraq as others begin to dig into this story more deeply;

***4:30pm Eastern update: when it rains, it pours…here’s a third must-read from milblogger John Noonan raising questions about AP stringer Bassem Mroue…more from Lorie Byrd on media malpractice…***
***8:58pm Eastern update: more questions for the AP…see Allah and See-Dubya: “Who is Qais al-Bashir?”…more here…still no word from AP in response to my query this morning…***
***All of Curt’s latest updates here at the Flopping Aces back-up site…Gateway Pundit has a round-up and chronology busting the Associated (w/t) Press for using bogus source Capt. Jamil Hussein…***
***11pm Eastern…yet another story challenged at Flopping Aces, with e-mail confirmation from CENTCOM…see Dan Riehl…Bruce Kesler, who has long diagnosed MSM stringeritis, weighs in…

Lots and lots of links provided there.

I’m beginning to have some doubts about the reader/listenership claimed by mainstream media outlets. For the past few days, the story of the successful court battle waged by New Brunswick blogger, Charles Leblanc, has been spreading through the mainstream media, from the New York Times, to CBC.
I just finished listening to an interview on Mike on Crime over Rawlco talk radio, and once again, his blogsite was mentioned, along with clear instructions on how to find it.
So, where is the traffic?

No eastern media bias here;

Take note of the appearance of scare quotes in the headline. I checked this purported news item looking for the third-party source – as it turns out, the only people the headline “quotes” are Globe writers Dawn Walton and Katherine Harding;

Alberta’s role as the bad boy of Confederation will be decided next Saturday [….]

Some of the bigotry in the reader responses is a little more overt.
h/t Cal, in the comments.

Or buy from enemy propogandists. Patterico;

Last Friday, my reader Tom Blumer sent me a link to an interesting blog post, by a blog called “One Oar in the Water,” which attacked the L.A. Times story about the Ramadi airstrike. The post quoted what purported to be an e-mail from a soldier who was involved in the Ramadi incident. The e-mailing soldier claimed that the “Times correspondent in Ramadi” has ties to the insurgency, and is knowingly repeating enemy propaganda:

The [L.A. Times article] is an example of why you simply cannot believe most media reports coming out of Iraq. The LA Time[s] reporter, Solomon Moore, is not in Ramadi. He relies on an Iraqi stringer here who has ties to insurgents. In this article, Moore repeats almost verbatim, insurgent propaganda we have intercepted. The fighting in question occurred in my battle space within Ramadi and I was personally and intimately involved.

The soldier then disputed certain assertions made in the L.A. Times article. The soldier said that there had been no airstrike, and that only a few insurgents had been killed, by small-arms fire and tank fire.

It’s a long post, and carefully researched.
Related – Via Mudville Gazette, “all the news to not bother telling you about”;

Fighting back: the city determined not to become al-Qaeda’s capital.
While the world’s attention has been focused on Baghdad’s slide into sectarian warfare, something remarkable has been happening in Ramadi, a city of 400,000 inhabitants that al-Qaeda and its Iraqi allies have controlled since mid-2004 and would like to make the capital of their cherished Islamic caliphate.
A power struggle has erupted: al-Qaeda’s reign of terror is being challenged. Sheikh Sittar and many of his fellow tribal leaders have cast their lot with the once-reviled US military. They are persuading hundreds of their followers to sign up for the previously defunct Iraqi police. American troops are moving into a city that was, until recently, a virtual no-go area. A battle is raging for the allegiance of Ramadi’s battered and terrified citizens and the outcome could have far-reaching consequences.

Oct 31st– Ottawa Sun columnist Greg Weston, on the “Peter MacKay must apologize for sexist remark” story his industry kept on life-support for 10 days;

A few hours after Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay first landed in the Commons doghouse over his canine reference to Liberal MP and former flame Belinda Stronach, she of eternal good nature was shrugging off the locker-room remark, telling her dinner companions that night: “Let’s let sleeping dogs lie.”

Fast forward three weeks to Nov 21st and pay attention to how our esteemed columnist decorates his own prose;

As Rona Ambrose returns to Canada from last week’s beatings at the UN climate change conference in Nairobi, we are beginning to wonder if the federal environment minister is perhaps missing her briefs.
[…]
Gosh. Caught with her briefs down again.

Gosh.
Well, this makes for an interesting juxtaposition. For all the controversy, the alleged MacKay comments don’t appear in the public record – the Commons Speaker Peter Milliken having ruled as much.
But this is no “he said -she said”. Greg Weston has not only affixed his name to this trashy piece of commentary, his editors at the Sun signed off on it. But set aside the question of the sexism double standard for a moment – it’s not as though we’ve come to expect moral consistancy from our mainstream keyboard jockeys.
What puzzles me is the metaphorical elephant in the room.
Greg Weston is a professional writer. As we of the media-consuming unwashed masses know full well, professional political writing is hard. It’s like, a gift. Lots of people can think up funny, biting commentary – but it takes a real pro to know which rhetorical ammunition to load when sizing up one’s target. It’s like comedic timing – they’re just born with it.
So, that’s why I’m scratching my head. If “briefs down” imagery is deemed suitable for describing the behavior of female Members of Parliament in the Canadian mainstream press, why waste such a disconnected metaphor on Environment Minister Rona Ambrose?
Just think of the milage (not to mention, peer approval!) Weston might have wrung out of this bit of linguistic cunning if only he’d had the presence of mind to turn his “briefs down” brilliance towards the MP of “eternal good nature”, that former Minister of Complex Files?
Opportunity, lost.
(Though admittedly, on a technical level, it probably fails the strict definition of metaphor.)
h/t Mark Collins, at Daimnation.

Pieter Dorsman learns the truth of an old Chinese proverb – “the man who believes what he reads in the newspaper Is the man who has never been interviewed“.

The power outage is continuing over here, in fact it got worse this morning when another storm knocked out numerous trees and power lines. Of course, this has attracted media attention and on Friday night we got a visit from a local TV-crew interested in how we were making out.
They came the right time, we had just grilled some great chicken on the BBQ, opened up an Australian Shiraz and getting ready to enjoy our dinner in front of the fireplace. The interviewer was trying hard to find bad news or some discord over our predicament, but even our children confirmed that we were doing fine when the camera lights were directed on them. I’ve not been interviewed on TV much, but it occurred to both me and Irene how hard some of these media outfits thrive on the negative rather than the positive. Only this afternoon some other journalists were in town soliciting quotes about how poorly the local power utility was doing in restoring services, but the contrary is true: they’re working around the clock to make things work again.

(OK, so it’s an old Saskatchewan proverb. Just remember where you heard it.)

A commentor wonders;

Check out the poll at canoe.ca re: the US losing its moral high ground in Iraq. I have revisited to and seen the number of votes increase from around 4000 to 5000 and now over 6000 and the percentages have not changed (24%, 12%, 17%, 47%). The source code appears to me to be fixed, but my html knowledge is lacking for me say for sure.

Here’s the link to the poll. I have no idea whether this is the case or not, but it’s worth a test. For once, I’m going to ask that readers vote “no”, only because the answer represents the lowest percentage and is most likely to be affected by an influx of votes.
(Also, a quick look-see at the page source by someone with better knowledge of coding would be useful.)
UPDATE – test over. It took quite some time, but we’ve managed to move the “no” vote from 12% to 13%, so unless it was manually changed, it looks as though the poll is functioning properly.
It is worth noting , that the poll questions have essentially provided two possible responses for those who would vote “no” to the specifics of the question – “does the guilty plea by a Marine diminish the US moral ‘high ground’ in Iraq’.

Glenn Reynolds;

THE DEMOCRATS WIN, AND THE SUN STARTS TO SHINE! “Poll: Afghans express confidence in country’s direction, security.”
Who knows what else will suddenly get better this week?

Watch for more of this. Lots more.

Hugh Hewitt’s site received 125,000 visits yesterday;

On Wednesday morning –oblivious to the feelings of the troops and their families– the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz intoned that “[t]here isn’t anybody, including in the Bush administration, who believes that Kerry meant to insult the soldiers in Iraq with his clumsy joke.
On Wednesday afternoon –even after Kerry had published a half-apology (and an unsatisfactory one to much of the military if my e-mail is good indication), MSNBC’s Chris Matthew was demanding of former Kerry campaign manager Bob Shrum why Kerry had apologized to people whom he had not insulted.
Within the Manhattan-Beltway media machine there was utter cluelessness as to opinion about Kerry’s statement, Kerry’s refusal to apologize, and then Kerry’s non-apology apology, a cluelessness so profound as to be easily mistaken for contempt.
No other group would be treated with such casual disregard than the American military. They were the target of the barb, but their opinions about it and the man who hurled it were not consulted, and indeed, positively avoided. Much more important in the eyes of the MSM is what elite pundits and prestige reporters thought of what Kerry said and what Kerry did.
Why were so many so eager to defend Kerry instead of the troops?
A handful of Democrats instantly understood that Kerry had crossed an unacceptable line, though many including Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown rushed to defend their patron as opposed to the military they soon hope to represent.
In MSM, there were almost no voices willing to recognize the slander and demand an apology.
New media moved to make sure the military’s view was heard, but it was the military itself that ultimately settled the issue.
One picture —now a famous picture— utterly routed the MSM. It did so because it came from the military that had heard and understood what Kerry had said, and what he had not apologized for. Whether or not the old media carries the picture on front pages today (which would have been an obvious decision in any newsroom not deeply biased against the military and in favor of Democrats) most Americans will have seen it and laughed and laughed at John Kerry. Ridicule is the best revenge, and the troops have it.
But the American electorate also has a very clear example of how the media has been covering the war, the 2006 campaign, and, yes, the military for the past few years. The big MSM names want another Vietnam, and they pursue that storyline with a relentlessness that isn’t deterred even by plummeting circulation and declining viewership.
It is surpassingly strange to watch an industry will its own destruction. But stranger still if the culture within which it lives does not object to the design.

Someone in the comments asked a very good related question, and it’s one I’ve wondered about myself – “Why does the leader of the fourth party in Parliament receive such a disproportionate amount of media coverage?”.
The answer of course, is that while Jack Layton’s leftist ideology consigns his party to the basement of the Canadian mainstream, it nonetheless represents that of the first party in Canadian media.
Thus, it’s no accident that the majority of coverage Canadians receive about Iraq and Afghanistan tends to be filtered through that pink-toned lens, as though the battles waged there exist in isolation. It helps to explain why the activities of Islamists in Pakistan, India, Somalia, Nigeria, Chechnya, Indonesia, Thailand, France, Holland, (and until very recently, Darfur), receive next to no attention at all.
Their leftist world view is solidly rooted in the politics of envy, the tap root – anti-Americanism. Deprived of the ability to tie the atrocities commited by Islamic terrorists (excuse me, “insurgents”) to decisions made by a Republican administration, they simply cease to exist as atrociites at all.

*********
Addendum to “Much more important in the eyes of the MSM is what elite pundits and prestige reporters thought” – As I was posting this, I was listening to a lengthy rant by Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferer and ratings basement dweller, Keith Olbermann (MSNBC), playing over the Canadian radio airwaves.
Charles Adler – radio dedicated to the relentless pursuit of the opinions of other pundits.
More – Greg Staples had the same reaction.

Mario Loyola notices something;

I would just like to point out that the New York Times appears to have doctored the slide referred to in this brilliantly well-timed bit of election propaganda by removing the classification markings which are invariably found at the top and bottom of these slide (even when they are unclassified — and this one was classified, as Central Command has already confirmed). I want to know whether there is any level of national secret the Times is not willing to betray for the political advantage of its pet causes. And I would like to know what else they may have doctored on the slide.

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News. As lengthy as they are, I’ve exerpted only small portions – the exchange lasted 3 hours. It’s a must read for those of you still clinging to the notion that there isn’t an overwhelming left-leaning bias in the news industry – the “default setting”, as some of us call it. This is from one of their own.
Halperin was on the show to discuss his new book on US political strategists, The Way To Win, and throughout the interview, holds fast to the assertion that revealing his own political viewpoint to the audience is inappropriate for someone in his profession. (He also believes that journalists should refrain from voting). Hewitt disagrees;

HH: All right. Now let’s…then let’s put the plumb lines down on issues. Are you pro-choice?
MH: Hugh, it’s the same thing on issues as it is on candidates. I don’t think it’s appropriate, if you’re going to cover these things, to talk about views. I will say this, Hugh. I will say that many people I work with in ABC, and other old media organizations, are liberal on a range of issues. And I think the ability of that, the reality of how that affects media coverage, is outrageous, and that conservatives in this country for forty years have felt that, and that it’s something that must change. But what my views are, are not important, and just like I said on not voting, I think having views and expressing them is a dangerous thing. I have opinions and thoughts, but I think talking about them is only bad for America.
***
HH: Mark, if you’re all left-handed, you’re not going to be able to hit from the right side of the plate, all right? If you’re all left-handed, you’re not going to be able to cover pro-life politics the right way. If you’re all atheists, you’re not going to be able to understand…
MH: That’s why we need to have the newsroom not filled with people who are all atheists, or anti-2nd Amendment.
HH: But if we can’t figure that out, how in the world…
MH: We have to work on it, Hugh. We can’t give up. We have to work on it.
HH: But how do we know you’re working on it when you won’t answer the questions?
MH: Because I’m telling you that my views, to the extent I have them, and I’m very good at pressing them out of my brain, do not impact my attempt to be fair to everyone I cover.
HH: But Mark, was Mary Mapes fair?
MH: No.
HH: Okay. There are more Mary Mapes. Even if we believe for a second…
MH: Hugh, Hugh, Hugh. Stop going back…
HH: …and there’s no reason to believe you…
MH: Stop going back to the stuff we agree on, because we can talk less about the book if you do that. I agree with you that the Mary Mapes’ of the world are ruining it for the rest of us, and they are the dominant majority. We’ve got to fix it.
***
MH: You’re asking me should people be skeptical? I think anyone who’s conservative should be skeptical of anything the old media does. But if they look at what we say in the book about the old media, if they look at the quality of ideas, I think that they’d have no reason to be skeptical, that the book is not a straightforward and honest account of not just the right, but of the left, and of the media.
HH: But the old media is overwhelmingly liberal, correct, Mark Halperin?
MH: Correct, as we say in the book.
HH: And so everyone that you work with, or 95% of people you work with, are old liberals.
MH: I don’t know if it’s 95%, and unfortunately, they’re not all old. There are a lot of young liberals here, too. But it certainly, there are enough in the old media, not just in ABC, but in old media generally, that it tilts the coverage quite frequently, in many issues, in a liberal direction, which is completely improper. And it goes from the big and major like CBS’ outrageous story about President Bush’s draft record right before the 2004 election, to the insidious and small use of language describing Nancy Pelosi’s liberal policies and ideas different than they would Newt Gingrich’s conservative ones.
HH: And that’s what I’m getting at. Inside of ABC News political division, how many people work with you, Mark Halperin, in that division?
MH: You know, it’s hard to quantify it, because you’ve got people involved in a political year like this one, or during a presidential race, you’ve got hundreds of people who are touching our political coverage. There aren’t very many people, just a handful of us, are full-time political reporters.
HH: But with editorial control, a producer, an editor…
MH: It’s literally hundreds…
HH: Okay.
MH: Because again, you’ve got people on Good Morning America, people on World News Tonight, or World News, we call it now. So literally hundreds.
HH: Of those hundreds, what percentage do you think fairly, honestly, are liberal, and would vote Democratic if they voted?
MH: The same as in almost every old media organization I know, which is well over 70%.
HH: Isn’t it…Thomas Edsall, in an interview that I know you read, because you wrote me about it, he said 95…
MH: I think 95’s well overstated…
HH: He said 15-25:1 in the Washington Post, liberal to conservative. Do you think that’s fair?
MH: Absolutely. And again, I mean, look. John and I work for old media organizations. We write things in the book that most people in old media won’t admit. But we’re proud of our organizations, but I don’t want to say it’s singular to ABC. It’s in all these…it’s an endemic problem. And again, it’s the reason why for forty years, conservatives have rightly felt that we did not give them a fair shake.
***
HH: And these liberals…you know, Terry Moran on this program said…Terry Moran on this program from ABC, your colleague…
MH: Right.
HH: …said that the media hates the military, has a deep suspicion of it. Do you agree with that?
MH: I totally agree. It’s one of the huge biases, along with gays, guns, abortion, and many other things.
***
HH: Three books, The Looming Tower, America Alone, and Imperial Grunts by Lawrence Wright, Mark Steyn and Robert Kaplan. Have you read any of them.
MH: Not a one.
HH: Does media read widely?
MH: No. We say in the book that reporters are more likely to write books or steal them from book parties than to read them. And I’m not an exception to that. I’m constantly in the midst of covering a presidential campaign, and for the last year, finishing my book and promoting it. So I tend to not read serious books as much as I should, and that I’m not an exception amongst reporters.
HH: How about…you just answered that. How about in television? Are they even less well read than the print media?
MH: Oh, yeah.
HH: And so…
MH: Though not everybody. Not uniformly. I have plenty of colleagues who read serious books all the time, and sometimes write them. But compared to the responsibility that we have to be informed and help inform, we should read more.
HH: And so, it’s basically a very ill-informed group of very influential people who are driving modern media coverage of politics.
MH: Not to a person, but certainly that’s more true than it should be.
HH: A lot more true than it should be.

Set aside some time to read the whole thing.
It should also be printed out and left on the desk of every editor and reporter in the country, but somehow, I don’t think that’s likely to happen – these aren’t egos naturally suited for speaking truth to self.
Update – a timely item this morning;

An analysis by the Center for Media and Public Affairs of midterm election stories aired on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts Sept. 5-Oct. 22 found that 2006’s coverage has been almost five times as heavy as in the 2002 midterm elections: 167 stories, compared with 35 four years ago.
The study found that three out of four evaluations of Democratic candidates’ chances of winning — such as sound bites — were positive, compared with one out of eight for Republicans. Coverage has been dominated by two major themes: the effects of the Foley scandal, and the impact the Bush presidency is having on the party’s congressional candidates.
The Foley scandal produced 59 stories alone, compared with 33 on Iraq and 31 on terrorism/national security issues. “What’s hurting Republican candidates is the media’s focus on two non-candidates: Mark Foley and George W. Bush,” says center director Robert Lichter.

Editor and Publisher reports grim news in the mainstream media battle against the growing strength of an internet insurgency ;

The Los Angeles Times reported that daily circulation fell 8% to 775,766. Sunday dropped 6% to 1,172,005
The San Francisco Chronicle was down. Daily dropped 5.3% to 373,805 and Sunday fell 7.3% to 432,957.
The New York Times lost 3.5% daily to 1,086,798 and 3.5% on Sunday to 1,623,697. Its sister publication, The Boston Globe, reported decreases in daily circulation, down 6.7% to 386,415 and Sunday, down 9.9% to 587,292.
The Washington Post lost daily circulation, which was down 3.3% to 656,297 while Sunday declined 2.6% to 930,619.
Circulation losses at The Wall Street Journal were average, with daily down 1.9% to 2,043,235. The paper’s Weekend Edition, however, saw its circulation fall 6.7% to 1,945,830.

It’s a quagmire.
And then, there’s the matter of the walking wounded. With staff cuts taking place across the industry, hard questions are being asked.

Of course that you need journalists, but for what?
To re-package the same news from the same sources?
To attend the same boring press conferences?
To publish today the same news that our readers knew YESTERDAY?
To produce pages and pages of commodity information with no value added?

However, there’s one bright bright spot amidst the carnage;

The New York Post today surpassed the Daily News and The Washington Post to become the 5th largest newspaper in America after bucking the national trend and chalking up a whopping 5.1 percent jump in circulation. The Post’s average paid circulation was 704,011 for Monday to Friday in the six-month period ending Sept. 30, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported.

Maybe it’s not the medium, after all.
Maybe it’s the messengers.

Confesses;

“I’m not sure it’s any good for anyone if we end up commenting on each other without actually understanding each other. In this case, I imagine that it would only have informed my story and gotten your points across to a wider audience if I’d we’d actually spoken before I wrote.”

Who’s this “we’d” Panetta speaks of? (Notice the word “I’d” is left orphan in the middle of that sentence – suggesting there was a bit of rewording before it was sent.)
The use of “we” suggests a shared responsibility – if only Kathy Shaidle had the presence of mind to discuss the “news brief” with the CP before the unresearched speculation appeared in print.
Kathy has the full email exchange. Unbelievable, but a useful insight into what goes on behind the scenes.
Just don’t expect to see any retraction or corrections from CP/CTV.
(My own email response to Panetta follows in the extended entry.)

Continue reading →

If one only read the CBC’s account, you’d be led to believe that the controversial remarks of a senior Muslim cleric in Australia occurred in a vacuum;

A senior Muslim cleric in Australia apologized Thursday after he was widely condemned for recently reported comments he made about women and rape, but said he would not step down from his position.
Sheik Taj Aldin al Hilali denied he was condoning rape in a sermon last month when he compared women who don’t wear a headscarf to “uncovered meat,” suggesting they invite sexual attack.
But Hilali apologized to any women he had offended, saying they were free to dress as they wished.
Hilali was quoted in the Australian newspaper as saying in the sermon: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside … without cover, and the cats come to eat it … whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s?”
“The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred,” he was quoted as saying, referring to the headdress worn by some Muslim women.
Hilali issued a statement Thursday saying The Australian had selectively quoted from the sermon, and that he was shocked at the reaction.
“I would like to unequivocally confirm that the presentation related to religious teachings on modesty and not to go to extremes in enticements,” the statement said.
“This does not condone rape; I condemn rape,” he said. “Women in our Australian society have the freedom and right to dress as they choose; the duty of man is to avert his glance or walk away.”

Read the CBC item carefully.
Now,we go to the Sydney Morning Herald for the part they left out;

As well, by revealing so unequivocally his primitive views of women, Hilaly destroyed the claims by cultural relativists that Sydney’s series of gang rapes by Muslim men had nothing to do with culture or religion.
“If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street … without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat?” he said in the sermon to 500 people last month at Lakemba mosque. “The uncovered meat is the problem. If the meat was covered, the cats wouldn’t roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won’t get it … if the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she’s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen.”
Then in a clear reference to the gang rape trial of Bilal Skaf, he said: “A woman possesses the weapon of seduction. It is she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us … then it’s a look, then a smile, then a conversation … then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years.”
The only incitement committed by 18-year-old Ms C, who was raped 25 times by up to 14 men including Skaf in 2000, was being Australian. Sitting on a train, dressed for a job interview in her best suit, and reading The Great Gatsby, she was a slut, an “Aussie pig” as they called her later, while boasting: “I’m going to f— you Leb style.”
“I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference,” she said.
Hilaly was simply echoing what the father of four Pakistani-born gang-rapists from Ashfield once said of the young victims: “What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don’t go out at night.”
Hilaly’s younger, Australian-born counterparts have been saying the same thing for years.
“A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world,” Sheik Feiz Mohammad told 1000 people at Bankstown Town Hall last year. “Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world … strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses.”

Like the selective reporting on yesterday’s anti-war rallies, the damning stuff is left on the cutting room floor.