CNN’s “Youtube” Republican debate may have set some sort of record…

… for its number of Democratic plants;

Abortion questioner is declared Edwards supporter (and a slobbering Anderson Cooper fan); Log Cabin Republican questioner is declared Obama supporter; lead toy questioner is a prominent union activist for the Edwards-endorsing United Steelworkers

Sell.

Who needs the Supreme Court of Canada, when we have the Canadian Press?

What has the Supreme Court of Canada had to say about the death penalty in the Charter era? Helpfully, in the Kindler case, they decided to tell us. Here’s the answer: extraditing a convicted multiple murderer to face the death penalty in the United States does not violate the Charter. The only pronouncement that “the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment” under Canadian law came from the dissent in that case – in other words, the written decision which a majority of the court disagreed with and which does not represent the law in Canada. Not that the Canadian Press will let that stand in their way…

Who needs elections, when we have the Canadian Press?

Opposition parties are slamming Prime Minister Stephen Harper …. Elizabeth May of the Green Party says Canada has become an environmental saboteur,

I remember the good old days when you had to win a seat to be considered an Opposition party. Canadian democracy is so much more progressive when the media provides equal opportunity for the unelectable in the public policy debate, don’t you think?
h/t Maz2

Chris Taylor’s problem isn’t that he still reads the newspaper. It’s that he reads two.;

The Globe says a relative saw explicit conversation. The Star says they don’t know who filed the complaint.
The Globe says the lad told police she touched him in the genital area. The Star quotes the boy himself saying that’s not true.
The Globe quotes the police saying the teen is “confused”. If we’re to believe the Star, he’s actually fuming mad.

He had been sitting in Abu Ghraib for a month, and nobody realized that he was the AP photog who had snapped dozens of staged photos with al Qaeda fighters.

Until he was noticed by an investigator who reads the Jawa Report.

Joseph Brean (in the National Post);

Pierre Trudeau, of course, inspires deep emotions, both positive and negative, and usually simplistically extreme. The haters tend to be rural Western right-wing ideologues who see in him everything they dislike about urban Eastern left-wingery. And so Trudeau-hatred is rarely more than a niche emotion, a mass-produced populist scorn that looks ever more unsophisticated the more unyielding it gets, like hating olives.

If hairy-fingered readers who can still recall the glory years of the NEP know someone in the city who can assist you with the necessary typing, the Post provides an email address – jbrean@nationalpost.com.
Keep your sentences short.
From the comments – “My opinion of Trudeau was formed at a very young age. I met Trudeau back around 1970 at Exibition Stadium in Toronto. I was a cub scout attending a jamboree and PET was the guest speaker. Afterwards a group of us were chosen to go backstage and meet the PM. We where waiting behind a curtain. He didnt know we where there. He call the crowd of cubs and scouts “the Hitler youth of tomorrow” and spit on the ground.”
Ouch.

The Anchoress;

If you ask them to look around and wonder how people are buying tiny houses in Queens for a million dollars – while everyone is working, their neighbors are expanding their homes, new businesses are being constructed – if you point out that the the stores and restaurants are crowded – if you ask them how it is that France and Germany have elected America-friendly leaders who are making it a point to work with the unanimously hated President Bush…it does not compute; everything is bad. “All I know,” they say, “is what I hear, and it sounds like the world is going to come to an end soon, because how can it keep going? There is going to be a depression and nuclear war! The oceans are going to cover the whole coast! Everything is going to be lost! Little children are being allowed to get sick and die! Here! In America!” And of course, “everything about Iraq is bad. There is nothing good.”
All they know, you see, is what they hear.

RTWT.

But the facts were wrong. Premature headline syndrome at the Canadian Press?

Another great AP headline debate:

“Georgia Turns to Prayer to Ease Drought”
“Georgia gets rain, but it may not help”

For one who swills at the taxpayer trough…

*

“$4 billion in real shareholder value has gone up in smoke.”

Update – From a reader and teacher who was assigned this essay question for her class; “Is the poem “In Flanders’ Fields” by John McCrae, propaganda? “

“They’re making it sound like a sin if you don’t go fight and avenge them. It sounds to me like John McCrae is trying to guilt us into going to war.”*

“‘The torch’ seems to represent nationalism. [. . .] The poem is no different from most pieces of propaganda at the time.”

“The poem is propaganda because he said he lied — ‘and now we lie’. If he didn’t want this to be propaganda then he should have said ‘and now we lye’ as in lye down not I’m going to lie.”

“No, this poem is not propaganda. It is not putting a positive spin on the war to try and get people to join. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote the poem in honour of the fallen soldiers.”

Evidence presented at the Al Dura trial in France indicates that Western journalists are passing along footage produced in the Mideast conflict they are well aware is staged;

So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded:

“These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.”

(That was weird. The name “Christina Lawand” just popped into my head….)

We may have stumbled here onto the very nature of public secrets and the value of a good reputation: everyone can cheat so long as no one is caught. It’s okay for the insiders to know, but the effectiveness of the (mis)information depends on the public not knowing. As Daniel Leconte reproached Eppelbaum: “the media may know [about this staging], but the public doesn’t.” Indeed, the public must not know. CNN advertises itself as “The Most Trusted Name in News,” not because it struggles against the influences, like access journalism, that destroy trustworthiness, but because it knows how important trust is to their audience public consumers of news. Thus, even if Western journalists use staged footage regularly, they cannot admit it. And, if denial doesn’t work, then, apparently, the next move is to say, “it’s nothing; everyone does it.”

SDA regulars won’t find anything new in this, but it’s still worth reading the whole thing.
h/t

Now you don’t. News aggregator National Newswatch is caught in the middle of Toronto Star headline games.

On October 16, former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow received the Media Institute Freedom of Speech Award.
He had a few things to say.

We also hear that the First Amendment is under siege. I think that´s true. I don´t believe anyone here would disagree with the proposition that the quality of public discourse isn´t what it once was or that it presently achieves levels of excellence and depth that it desperately needs to reach.
Yet, while it may be tempting to blame the usual suspects — the government, interest groups, angry factionalists — those forces frequently have always tried to restrict the free flow of ideas, and they always have failed.
They´re not the culprits here. Instead, there´s a new and unexpected menace on the block:
The media.
Let me explain. American journalism finds itself in a highly unusual predicament. In the early days of this nation, the press was wild, untamed, and omnipresent. Papers sprouted everywhere, and not even Ben Franklin could resist the temptation to turn his printing presses into devices for spreading gossip, maligning political enemies, and entertaining readers with items ranging from the important to the grandly weird.
Then came a period of consolidation and gentrification. Moguls controlled major media outlets and a handful of elite institutions — the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the three television networks — shaped and defined not merely what counted as news, but what counted as acceptable opinion. The press lost its Wild West flavor and became what Tom Wolfe described as “a Victorian gent.”
[…]
Political rhetoric has turned nasty, childish, and very personal, especially on Capitol Hill, and Americans are sick of it. Hotheads seem to be enjoying a false spring of fame. And members of the mainstream press are scratching their heads and asking, “What´s going on here?” Why are the nation´s newspapers hemorrhaging readers? Why are the television networks losing viewers? Why has cable news suddenly hit still water? What is going on? Don´t Americans care about the news?
Well, of course they do: The problem is, they don´t think they´re getting news — and they´re right.

You can read the whole thing here(PDF) or here (html).

*
Related – though they’ll never admit it.

We’ll soon have to look for it in the Sunday Entertainment Section. Which makes sense in a perverse sort of way – Britney and Heather Mills owning the front page as they do.