At the Toronto Star, Rosie Dimanno reveals something we already know.

The latitude routinely extended to columnists – who, let’s face it, deal largely in the realm of opinion – shrinks when the subject is Islam or Palestine. Editors huddle and debate the potential repercussions from all possible angles.
I can think of no other constituency that is more respectfully – or hyper-obsequiously – treated. And it doesn’t matter how carefully I qualify anything I say, or recount the kindnesses extended to me in Muslim countries (especially Afghanistan, my favourite place on earth) or how often I include all the deferential acknowledgments about Islam – a great religion of peace, its tenets hijacked in recent years by some extremists that commit barbarous acts in its name – it’s never enough to satisfy those who accuse others of promoting hatred while never examining the hostile bitterness in their own hearts. In this paper, commentators can bluntly equate President George W. Bush to Osama bin Laden, Israel be endlessly vilified as a terrorist state, the United States broadly demonized and caricaturized as a superpower gone nuts – and nobody bats an eye. That’s all free speech, which I defend without reservation. But the goalposts shift when the subject is Islamist terrorism or the conflict in the Middle East.

hat tip, Kevin Libin

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal.

Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party’s candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer.
The prominent case studies here are Dan Rather’s failed National Guard story on CBS and the front page the past year of the New York Times (a proxy for many large dailies). Add in as well Big Media’s handling of Abu Ghraib, a real story that got blown into a monthlong bonfire that obviously was intended to burn down the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. I think many people thought the over-the-top Abu Ghraib coverage, amid a war, was the media shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Heavily consolidated Canadian media outlets are just as professionally corrupt. With no Wall Street Journal or Foxnews to provide an balancing establishment lens against which to compare and critique, the left-liberal spin is not only rampant, it’s unbelievably clumsy. Case in point, last evening’s CTV National News included a segment by Kathy Tomlinson who seems to spend much of her time in Washington covering the Democratic Underground.
Heavily paraphrased, her report evolved in the following manner;

“Voters in the US recently indicated “moral values” were behind the re-election of President Bush, and now there is a climate of fear that airing the Spielberg movie Saving Private Ryan (which has bad words and violence that Spielberg won’t allow cut) could result in FCC fines (like they did for Janet Jackson’s tit) because Bush is sending soldiers to Iraq where there is real fighting and killing and he doesn’t want Americans to see what that looks like”

I kid you not.
Henninger has cautionary words for the likes of Ms. Tomlinson.

Authority can be a function of raw power, but among free people it is sustained by esteem and trust. Should esteem and trust falter, the public will start to contest an institution’s authority. It happens all the time to political figures. It happened here to the American Catholic Church and to the legal profession, thanks to plaintiff-bar abuse. And now the public is beginning to contest the decades-old authority of the mainstream media.
Two months ago, Gallup reported that public belief in the media’s ability to report news accurately and fairly had fallen to 44%–what Gallup called a significant drop from 54% just a year ago. The larger media outlets have been pushing the edge of the partisanship envelope for a long time. People have kvetched about “spin” for years but then largely internalized it. Not in 2004. Big Media chose precisely the wrong moment to give itself over to an apparent compulsion to overthrow the Bush presidency.

Left wing CBC TV has long suffered for their sins. Were it not for a billion dollars in federal funding, a 6% audience share would have closed the doors years ago. The scandal damaged BBC has announced dramatic staff cuts. Circulation figures for many major newspapers are falling. In contrast, more and more consumers state they are obtaining their news and opinion from internet sources.
Liberal friendly Candian media has had the luxury of a huge ideological cushion provided by the Liberal appointed CRTC – but as the influence of online news and opinion sources continues to grow, the blocking of sources like Foxnews will no longer protect them.
I sent an email last night to complain about the segment, something I rarely do anymore. For 20 years I was a nightly viewer of CTV National News. Today, I’d estimate I catch the broadcast only once every week or two. They’ve become “CBC light”, and with so many other games in town, I can’t be bothered.

Broadcasting & Cable

Players involved in the notorious 60 Minutes II story, reported by Dan Rather,�which employed dubious documents regarding President Bush�s National Guard service, may have been rooting for a John Kerry victory.
No, it wasn’t that old bugaboo liberal media bias as much as it was a bias toward saving their own skins. The report from an internal investigation into the documents mess was purposely being held until after the election.
Pre-election, the feeling in some quarters at CBS was that if Kerry triumphed, fallout from the investigation would be relatively minimal. The controversial piece�s producer, Mary Mapes, would likely be suspended or fired, but a long list of others up the chain of command – from 60 Minutes II executive producer Josh Howard, to Rather and all the way up to news division President Andrew Heyward – would escape more or less unscathed.
But now, faced with four more years of President Bush, executives at CBS parent Viacom could take a harder line on the executives involved.

(Via Drudge)
On a related topic, Eric Engbert a retired correspondant for CBS criticizes the “blogosphere” for publishing leaked exit polls.

“The public is now assaulted by news and pretend-news from many directions, thanks to the now infamous “information superhighway.” But the ability to transmit words, we learned during the Citizens Band radio fad of the 70’s, does not mean that any knowledge is being passed along. One of the verdicts rendered by election night 2004 is that, given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility, the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on.”

Oh, enough already. CBS had their asses handed to them by the blogosphere (in other words- the audience) because certain “professional journalists” perpetrated an intentional, albeit pathetically clumsy, attempt to influence the election. Period.
Only the most obtuse observers of human nature would believe that “Rathergate” was an isolated incident. It is only after long history of success in not getting caught that professional liars become so sloppy. Add another period.
Bitching about the leaking of exit polls is so much irrelevant smoke by Mr Engbert, though it does make one wonder how he can argue that the MSM knows better than to release exit polls because they are known to be unreliable, and “responsible” journalists know better. If this is indeed the case, one should ask him to explain why they commission the polls in the first place. If exit polls require a full day of sampling to provide meaningful results, then why not just wait for the ballot counting to start?
Of course, we should give Mr. Engbert the benefit of the doubt. It could well be that he is basing his opinion on information recieved anonymously from a Kinkos in Texas that has been authenticated by experts contacted by CBS.
With several pithy observations about the fact-checking failures by Eric Engberg, James Joyner weighs in.
Paul, at Wizbang reviews events and calls ’em as he sees ’em. “The whole right side of the blogosphere knew the numbers were bogus long before CBS and the MSM knew”

CBC’s Ira Basen has an excellent summary on the role of blogging in correcting the crumbling standards of “old media”.

[…] this time, the agents of change are not high-priced media experts or expensive new technologies. No, this time the revolution is being brought to us by a large and mostly disorganized group of men and women who spend much of their days and nights pounding away at their keyboards. They are the people who produce political web logs. Some are read only by friends and relatives, others have numbers and influence that rival those of older, more established magazines. And in this campaign, the “bloggers,” as they call themselves, have been all the rage. And their presence really does seem destined to change the course of campaign reporting, just as much as the introduction of radio, TV and spin doctors did in the last century.
[…]
There is a greater need than ever before for Big Media outlets to be at the top of their game when it comes to breaking important stories, dissecting spin, and highlighting the issues that matter to voters. But it has been a long time since Big Media has been at the top of its game. It has been riding on its reputation for too long.
The most important development to come out of the coverage of this campaign is that bloggers, and others such as the intrepid “reporters” at The Daily Show, have pulled back the curtain and revealed Big Media to be a shrunken skeleton of its former self.
Now is the time to begin rebuilding. And the mainstream would be wise to see the blogosphere not as an enemy, but as an ally in the process.

Via Heart of Canada.
Well, this doesn’t happen often – The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan in agreement with the CBC….

Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief–CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS’s “60 Minutes” the election–the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt. It was the yeomen of King Harry taking down the French aristocracy with new technology and rough guts. God bless the pajama-clad yeomen of America. Some day, when America is hit again, and lines go down, and media are hard to get, these bloggers and site runners and independent Internetters of all sorts will find a way to file, and get their word out, and it will be part of the saving of our country.

Both are good reads.
Jeff Jarvis has a useful observation.

Last night, blogs (other than this one) got bombarded with traffic (shutting down this host) for a simple reason: Bloggers were telling the public what they knew. Big media was not.
How absurd is that? When did journalists get into the business of not telling their public what they know?

Bingo.
Then, of course, there remain a few slow learners.

Media Research Center has The Ten Worst Media Distortions of Campaign 2004
Via Let It Bleed this is a must read roundup of the attempts made in the US major media to spin election coverage and commentary in Kerry’s favour. Relevant to a post from a couple of days ago, scroll down to check out the chart showing the ration of bad to good stories during the Clinton administration and coverage of the US economy today.
(Now – in the interest of balance – I’m sure there is a Top Ten of Kerry distortions somewhere out there, but something tells me that in 9 of them, a football will be involved.)

Thomas Friedman in the New York Times….

“When the world liked Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, America had more power in the world“

James Joyner is perplexed.

When exactly was it that the world liked Ronald Reagan? Certainly, not while he was in office. Remember all the protests about his plan to put Pershing II’s into Europe? The controversy over Star Wars? The business about him being a stupid cowboy?
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was wildly popular in Europe. But how exactly did that translate into U.S. power? He was unable to secure UN backing for Kosovo and a myriad of other military operations, having instead to go it alone or with coalitions of the willing. The good will toward Clinton didn’t exactly translate into freedom from terrorism, either, as al Qaeda formed and perpetrated numerous attacks on American targets under his watch.

Ahistoricism isn’t just a symptom of Bush derangement syndrome – it’s a prerequisite. Much of the core criticism of Bush’s foreign policy absolutely hinges upon ignorance – or intentional misrepresentation – of past events. Indeed, it isn’t even that uncommon for critics to move events that occured in the Clinton administration through time to attribute them to Bush, if they think it will help their case.
Case in point: the current meme that unemployment rates under Bush are “high”, placed against a backdrop of Clinton prosperity and full employment. In fact, the unemployment rates in the US today are nearly identical to those under Clinton.
The same phenomenon occured under the dearly departed – and only recently beloved – Ronald Reagan. Under the heavily scorned “Reaganomics” plan, average income for the lowest one-fifth of Americans rose from $7,008 to $9431, inflation fell 48%, unemployment fell 45%, interest rates declined from 21% to under 6% . 21 million new jobs were created.
The only economic indicators that weren’t affected was press coverage. Negative stories on the economic performance of the Reagan adminstration outnumbered the postive by a ration of seven to one.*
[*source- L. Brent Bozell III, Media Research Center, in Imprimis Nov. 1994]

It turns out that the New York Times was let off easy on the Al Qaaqaa fiasco. CBS was trying to hold the Bush-damaging story in order to run it in the final hours of the campaign – when there would be insufficient time to present the facts – but the Times broke it. The initial explanation was journalistic “competitiveness”.
Except they weren’t competing with CBS. They too, had planned to hold it for Monday publication – until it began to leak into the blogosphere. According to the Washington Post, their hand was forced.

On Sunday night, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told Jeff Fager, executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” that the story they had been jointly pursuing on missing Iraqi ammunition was starting to leak on the Internet.
“You know what? We’re going to have to run it Monday,” Keller said.

Bill at INDC has the Russian angle covered (including possible connections to the “caught in the crossfire” incident involving Russian “diplomats), while Wizbang is providing updates and asking for assistance in exploring the discrepencies between the original IAEA inspections and their subsequent reports.

The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing – presumably stolen due to a lack of security – was based on “declaration” from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.
But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency’s inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility – a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.

More at Instapundit, while Powerline is covering the follow-up “reporting” by the Times and finds they are still working hard to salvage/spin this story.

Once again, the Times appears to be the only news organization in America that doesn’t know that the 101st Airborne merely passed through Al Qaqaa on the way to Baghdad without searching the site. It was the 3rd ID, which reached Al QaQaa six days earlier, that knew the site needed to be searched, and did, indeed, search it. Can the Times really be this inept? I don’t think so. I think it’s deliberate. No newspaper could be this bad accidentally.

ABC News President David Westin suffered a pang of professionalism in an address at the Harvard University’s Institute of Politics last night.
Harvard Crimson:

“The more time we express our opinions, the less time we have to talk about the facts,” Westin said. “Unfortunately, opinion is driving out facts too often in most of what we see on television today.”
[…]
“It can be very entertaining to have two very spirited people discussing heath care in this country, but I for one would be better benefited by someone coming on and telling me exactly what the state of health care is before we talk about what ought to be done and telling me what my real options are,” Westin said.
In addition to the danger of having too much opinion, news media face the danger of the blurring between fact and opinion, he said.
“If viewers see news people on different channels that look pretty much the same, on sets that look pretty much the same, and graphics that look pretty much the same, with some expressing opinion some of the time and some expressing facts, is it surprising that the audience believe that they’re all expressing facts?” Westin asked.

Via Drudge.

When this Herald-Palladium item by Anna Clark floated up on Drudge a couple of days ago, I wondered why it didn’t create a news frenzy. Perhaps others noticed, as I did, that the word “wrong” in Clark’s report had been wrestled down to a single word quote.
Tenet: CIA made errors

Tenet called the war on Iraq “wrong” in a speech Wednesday night to 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake Michigan College’s Mendel Center. He did not elaborate.

Today, the Herald-Palladium offers this “clarification”;

Former CIA Director George Tenet told the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan on Wednesday that the United States was wrong on its pre-war intelligence in Iraq, but an article in Thursday’s Herald-Palladium may have put the comment in an incorrect context.
The story said Tenet called the war in Iraq “wrong.” However, after reviewing the reporter’s notes (Tenet barred reporters from using tape recorders), the newspaper now believes Tenet used the word “wrong” in the context of U.S. intelligence, not on the direct question of whether the United States should be in Iraq.

To their credit, I don’t think the original story has been airbrushed (yet), but they should really add this disclaimer to the original online item.

Roger Simon reviews Stolen Honor.

The movie consists of interviews with now gray or graying men who were incarcerated and tortured in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. Their stories are juxtaposed with the testimony of John Kerry at the Winter Soldier hearings. Despite the quality of the filmmaking, and my poor viewing conditions, I was deeply disturbed while watching this. It is not a “filmic” experience in the traditional sense. While viewing this movie, I imagine most of my generation find themselves reviewing themselves and their actions at the time rather than the film. I am far from resolving my view of Vietnam, although I still tend to think it was the wrong war. But the behavior of some factions of the antiwar side, factions which I fully supported then, were clearly out of line and as reprehensible as the war they wished to protest and central among those was Winter Soldier.
Some reviewers, like the NYT’s Alessandra Stanley, made light of the testimony of John Kerry before those hearings as something we heave “heard before” and therefore of little importance, preferring to focus on the unresolved pain of the former prisoners. But the fact that we have heard at least some of Kerry’s testimony before is beside the point. The testimony has never been explained. Kerry lied about his fellow soldiers in a serious and, it seems evident, conscious manner, going so far as to say they cut off peoples’ ears, raped and pillaged like Genghis Khan. Even given the passions of the time, this defamation is hard to explain. No wonder the Democratic Party wants us to look away. I wanted to look away. It is hard to conceive someone of so little moral compass is going to lead us in a time of war. Still, I suppose I could forgive Kerry if he had apologized for this in full as the recklessness of youth. But until now he hasn’t. The Democratic Party knows this too. That’s why they also want us to look away. It is over thirty years ago and therefore, they wish us to believe, beyond the statute of electoral limitations. No it’s not.

Wall Street Journal has more on the extraordinary pressure placed on Sinclair to pull this documentary.

Via Protein Wisdom – NRO’s The Corner does a little media comparison shopping…

For anyone who wants to quibble with the notion that the media favor Kerry, consider this: Since January 1, 2004, here are the number of morning and evening news stories and interview segments the networks have devoted to uncovering the growing United Nations Oil for Food program bribery scandal: four. NBC aired three: a January 15 report by Myers, a July 20 report from Andrea Mitchell, and a Myers story on October 6, when the Duelfer report came out detailing the scam. ABC aired only one this year: from investigative reporter Brian Ross on April 21, the day the UN announced its own internal probe into the scandal. But we found CBS has not aired a single story on the scandal, even when using a list of different search terms in the Nexis search engine trying to find one. Maybe they were hip-deep in phony documents.
Why isn’t this a major scandal for the major networks? Despite the nine ongoing probes, the networks would rather chase anti-Bush angles. ABC, CBS, and NBC have combined for more than 75 stories on George W. Bush’s National Guard Service, more than 50 stories on “skyrocketing” gasoline prices, and hundreds on prison abuse at Abu Ghraib. All year, Kerry has touted a greater UN and European role in Iraq. Now, those players look like what liberals called “the coalition of the bribed.” And the anchormen are keeping quiet. More on the media apathy here.

I’ll go out on a limb and state that if you did a search on Canadian media outlets, the ratios would be similar.
But I disagree with Tim Graham on one point – this is not apathy. It’s journalistic malpractice. And for once I’d like to see some of those who lurk in the “mainstream media” through these blog discussions (yes, your ip’s turn up in our logs) screw up the courage to actually respond in the comments, and attempt to justify why you continue to treat us, the consumers, with such utterly transparent professional contempt.
(Crossposted to the Shotgun.)

Via Wizbang – is it the New York Times’ turn to fabricate quotes?

The reporter in question, Ron Suskind, did not attend the event he got the quote from. Further, it was not televised, it was a private event and there were no transcripts available. Yet he reports the quote as fact.
Suskind does not explain how he got the controversial quote so accurate but does say about an earlier quote “According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak…”
So Suskind got “notes provided to him” and that was good enough to run such an important quote. I hope Bill Burkett was not the source. Is this what passes for reporting at the Times today?
The Kerry/Edwards/NYTimes campaign has decided they can’t convince voters with ringing endorsements so they’ll scare old people to death.
For their part, the Bush campaign is denying the quote and some even claimed Suskind made the quote up from whole cloth. In the end, it is of little use, the media is running wild with the story, facts be damned.
–Oh, and who is Ron Suskind that the New York Times is having write a 10 (web) page story on Bush just days before the election? He is the author of “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill.””

Hey, if it’s good enough for the Associated Press…

Thomas Lipscombe, NYSun;

An official Navy document on Senator Kerry’s campaign Web site listed as Mr. Kerry’s “Honorable Discharge from the Reserves” opens a door on a well kept secret about his military service.
The document is a form cover letter in the name of the Carter administration’s secretary of the Navy, W. Graham Claytor. It describes Mr. Kerry’s discharge as being subsequent to the review of “a board of officers.” This in it self is unusual. There is nothing about an ordinary honorable discharge action in the Navy that requires a review by a board of officers.
[…]
The “board of officers” review reported in the Claytor document is even more extraordinary because it came about “by direction of the President.” No normal honorable discharge requires the direction of the president. The president at that time was James Carter. This adds another twist to the story of Mr. Kerry’s hidden military records.
[…]
There are a number of categories of discharges besides honorable. There are general discharges, medical discharges, bad conduct discharges, as well as other than honorable and dishonorable discharges. There is one odd coincidence that gives some weight to the possibility that Mr. Kerry was dishonorably discharged. Mr. Kerry has claimed that he lost his medal certificates and that is why he asked that they be reissued. But when a dishonorable discharge is issued, all pay benefits, and allowances, and all medals and honors are revoked as well. And five months after Mr. Kerry joined the U.S. Senate in 1985, on one single day, June 4, all of Mr. Kerry’s medals were reissued.

Why is this interesting? (Apart from the fact that Kerry has made his Vietnam service a central argument for his fitness as commander in chief). It’s interesting because the questions surrounding Kerry’s military record and the discrepencies in the documents provided, have been out there for some months now, and with the exception of Thomas Lipscomb’s reporting, has remained completely uninvestigated. The same media outlets that have searched under every rock and in every crevice for evidence to support DNC Terry McAuliffe’s accusations that George Bush was “AWOL” from his guard service seem unconcerned that Kerry is refusing to release his military records – an astonishing “oversight”, considering that the Swift Boat Veterans’ book “Unfit For Command” led the best seller lists for weeks.

I just sent the following email to our local news-talk radio station’s “news reader” David Kirton. He’s heard that there’s a report out from the Iraq Survey Group.
Emphasis on “heard about”.
Judging by the hyperbolic “George Bush LIED” he just claimed was contained therein, he’s not actually, eh… read anything about it.

Subject: Where’s The “Rest Of The Story”?
What was I just listening to? A news report or op-ed????
You know, the “no WMD” reporting has rather been done to death over the past 6 months. It makes you wonder why the “France, Germany and Russia were being bribed through OIL-FOR-FOOD and assisting Saddam to get sanctions lifted so his WMD programs could resume” portion of this latest report is being virtually ignored in North America news media coverage, apparently, including yours.
Though, you must take credit for creativity – tacking on the “George Bush lied” line.
******************************************
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1167592004″
“Just as I have had to accept that the evidence now is that there were not stockpiles of actual weapons ready to be deployed, I hope others have the honesty to accept that the report also shows that sanctions weren’t working” – Tony Blair
SADDAM HUSSEIN believed he could avoid the Iraq war with a bribery strategy targeting Jacques Chirac, the President of France, according to devastating documents released last night.
Memos from Iraqi intelligence officials, recovered by American and British inspectors, show the dictator was told as early as May 2002 that France – having been granted oil contracts – would veto any American plans for war.
But the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which returned its full report last night, said Saddam was telling the truth when he denied on the eve of war that he had any weapons of mass destruction (WMD). He had not built any since 1992.
The ISG, who confirmed last autumn that they had found no WMD, last night presented detailed findings from interviews with Iraqi officials and documents laying out his plans to bribe foreign businessmen and politicians.
Although they found no evidence that Saddam had made any WMD since 1992, they found documents which showed the “guiding theme” of his regime was to be able to start making them again with as short a lead time as possible.”
*************************************
Honesty indeed. This is the singular reason that the news networks are bleeding market share to the internet and cable news. News consumers are sick to death of reporting that has begun to resemble an uncompleted Paul Harvey “rest of the story” schtick.
In a world where schoolchildren are considered legitimate targets by a religious death cult that is sworn to attacking Western civilization by any means possible, yet 95% of coverage is devoted to American “failure” and “lies”, one wonders which side some in our media are on.

David Kirton of Rawlco Radio – we deserve better.
update – not surprisingly, Powerline is better and exerpting actual content.

This item is tantalizing: [D]uring the mid-to-late 1990s Saddam issued a presidential decree directing the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] to recruit UNSCOM inspectors, especially American inspectors. To entice their cooperation, the IIS was to offer the inspectors preferential treatment for future business dealings with Iraq, once they completed their duties with the United Nations. Tariq �Aziz and an Iraqi-American were specifically tasked by the IIS to focus on a particular American inspector. I can’t see that the report ever says whether the Iraqis were successful in bribing the American weapons inspector. The obvious candidate, of course, is Scott Ritter. We do know that Saddam succeeded in penetrating the U.N.’s inspection teams, so that he had advance knowledge of the inspectors’ intentions: IIS personnel were directed to contact facilities and personnel in advance of UNMOVIC site inspections, according to foreign government information. Former Regime officials state that the IIS developed penetrations within the UN and basic surveillance in country to learn future inspection plans.

Keep a watch on Powerline, as they are continuing to post updates as they read the report.

Sept. 30: For Immediate Release:

“In an effort to broaden the subscriber base, the National Post has made the difficult decision to downsize the intelligence quotient at the newspaper.
While the addition of content from Sheila Copps was a step in the right direction, the Post has realized that our goals would not be attainable without making painful, but necessary cuts. We regret any disappointment this may cause with our dedicated readership, but we are confident that the changes will produce the shorter words and larger photographs that appeal to today’s modern thinkers.”

Who says that a competitive marketplace encourages the best and brightest to rise to the top? Less than a month after the forged TANG memos blew up in their faces, CBS is defending a story by Richard Schlesinger on “Reviving The Draft”.
Nevermind that Schlesinger overlooked telling his audience that his star “mom on the street”, Beverly Cocco, heads up an advocacy group called People Against the Draft. To advance his piece, Schlesinger used the content of an email hoax.
Bill at INDC Journal tracked down Schlesinger, CBS spokeswoman Sandra Genelius, and producer Linda Karas, for an interview. The responses must be read to be believed.

INDC: “Probably the main concern with the story is that the e-mails that are shown in the piece are false; they’ve been debunked on various internet sites long ago …”
Schlesinger: “The fact is, they were going around. I know several people that got them, and it’s gotten people all riled up. Whether or not there’s any reality to there being a draft, is almost besides the point. Do I think there’s going to be a draft? No. But it’s an issue that people are talking about.”
[…]
Karas: “The truth of the e-mails were absolutely irrelevant to the piece, because all the story said was that people were worried. It’s a story about human beings that are afraid of the draft. We did not say that this (e- mail) was true, it’s just circulating. We are not verifying the e-mail.”

“We are not verifying the e-mail”.
What does that mean? They didn’t bother going to the trouble of fact checking and didn’t know it was a hoax? Or that they knew, and deliberately withheld that information from their audience, even though it was cited as reponsible for the “fear” they are reporting?
Is there a third explanation that I’ve overlooked, that validates this response as evidence of the thinking of intelligent, professional journalists?
There’s a long list of media observers who have accused CBS of pro-Democrat bias. There are websites – rathergate.com and ratherbiased.com – devoted to exposing it. But reading Bill’s interview, I’m no longer sure that bias is really at the root of CBS’s problems. These responses indicate something quite different is going on, for they are devoid of any cleverness or obfuscation. We saw hints of that in the defense by Dan Rather of the forged memos. “False, but true”. They actually believe that a hoax is valid basis for a news story, so long as the response to it is “genuine” or that some people believe it to be true. It’s a wonder we don’t get monthly updates from CBS based on press releases from the Flat Earth Society.
I realized this morning, that I’ve seen this sort of “logic” before – in the dog world. Dog breeders usually enter their field as rank novices, without training, accreditation or passing muster with an employer. They buy a dog (or two or three), go to a few shows, start making puppies and learn as they go. As might be expected, a few of these people have trouble getting velcro to work. They approach dog breeding with the intellectual quality of an excited moth sighting a light bulb.
When the puppies that result reflect the mediocrity any reasonably knowledgable breeder would have predicted, they rejoice in their quality. When others beg to differ, they can’t see the shortcomings, they can’t understand why their results are questioned. With beauty so conveniently located “in the eye of the beholder” they rationalize that it is the beholder who is lacking.
They don’t progress, they repeat past mistakes and if they’re stubborn enough to stick it out a few years, develop a reputation as serial losers.
This type of dog breeder is so well known, that we even have a name for them.
We call them “stupid people”.
The more explanations of this type I read from employees of CBS, the more I realize that they don’t sound like crafty politicians or spin doctors at all. They sound like the clueless twits we read on doggie email lists.
It’s not bias at all. Someone at CBS is going out of their way to hire stupid people.

“If you were a fish, Dan, what would it be?”

Update: Ratherbiased.com is down, so I’ve redirected the link to Jeff Goldstein’s save of the story
Update2: “Sugarcoat it” Memo surfaces via an uninpeachable source.

Editoral director of CBSNews.com, Dick Meyers, was a guest this afternoon on the Murray Wood Show (Rawlco Radio – 650 CKOM), explaining the decision of his network regarding the use (or rather, non-use) of beheading images on television. While explaining his own difficulty struggling with the issue, and propensity to “err in favour” of disclosure, his rationale included the fact that the images were beyond the realm of good taste and they served as propoganda.
?
I called in, and suggested that his explanation would make more sense, had the contraversy over supressing “propoganda” images of Nick Berg’s murder not been played out over the backdrop of Abu Graihb and the weeks of tasteless prison photos that amounted to nothing more but different camera angles.
(Sorry, there are no transcripts, so this is from memory).
In addition to making a weak attempt to justify the use of the prison images as part of a “developing story” , Mr. Meyers actually attempted to claim that CBS had “broken the story” on Abu Graihb.
I corrected him. I reminded Mr. Meyers that the story had been actually “broken” by the Pentagon months before it made national news, had been covered in the back pages of print media, and was pretty much ignored until months later – when the photos became available.
I don’t think he was expecting that.
He seemed a little rattled. Then, the (extended) segment ended and he had to go.
Heh. Thanks, Murray.
Added to the Beltway Traffic Jam

French photographer Gilles Nicolet sells National Geographic staged photos. The magazine doesn’t notice.

The readers do.

On pages 78-9 (photograph above), the picture caption reads that hunters are carrying “tusks taken from an elephant found dead in the bush.” Soon after the article was published, several readers pointed out that there are faint but unmistakable numbers on the tusk on page 78 which we failed to notice before publishing the story. We now know that the tusks belong to the Tanzania Department of Wildlife. When we asked photographer Gilles Nicolet to explain, he admitted that he himself had supplied the tusks to the hunters after borrowing them from local wildlife authorities.
This was in direct contrast to what Nicolet had repeatedly assured us when we were preparing the story. As part of our rigorous internal system of checks and balances, we routinely obtain independent verification of the circumstances in which a photograph is made. In very few instances, we are unable to do so. This story was one of those cases, and we published it knowing that we were relying heavily on Nicolet’s accounts.
In light of his disturbing admission about the tusks, we immediately launched an investigation into the other photographs in the story and determined that the two on page 85 which the caption identifies as showing a successful hunter removing his spear from an elephant and then removing the tusks were actually made several years earlier and are not of the Barabaig. (See photographs below.)

And National Geographic editor-in-chief William L. Allen does the right thing.

By publishing this story, we failed our readers. We are currently reviewing our internal procedures to do our best to ensure that this type of mistake does not happen again. In addition, we are re-examining Nicolet’s only previous story for National Geographic (“Hunting the Mighty Python,” May 1997); to date it appears that all of the pictures and accompanying captions are accurate.
We apologize to our readers.

Of course, here the stakes weren’t as high. The elephant story wasn’t written to help get a donkey elected.

The Sept. 13-15 poll — conducted after the CBS News report was questioned but before the network issued a formal apology — found that just 44% of Americans express confidence in the media’s ability to report news stories accurately and fairly (9% say “a great deal” and 35% “a fair amount”). This is a significant drop from one year ago, when 54% of Americans expressed a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media. The latest result is particularly striking because this figure had previously been very stable — fluctuating only between 51% and 55% from 1997-2003.

Hat Tip – Jeff Jarvis