Anyone who wonders why US newspaper sales are heading south should ponder the behavior of the geniuses at The Tennessean. They had the Al Gore electric-bill story a month before the Oscars but somehow never got around to writing anything up.

At the AFP.

Did AFP crib from the Iranian-government controlled news agency, or was the AFP caption biased enough that it fit perfectly into the headline of the press agency of a repressive government?

Dr. Tom Flanagan;

This afternoon (March 6, 2007) I got a call from CBC TV news reporter Krista Erickson. She said she was desperately seeking someone to provide balance for a story she was doing on Christine Tell and the Saskatchewan Judicial Appointments Committee. Ms. Tell is the law enforcement representative on the JAC. The Liberals are calling for her to resign because she has also decided to run for the Saskatchewan Party in the next provincial election. […] Ms. Erickson said a crew would be there in 20 minutes to interview me. Then she called back and said that the story had been scrubbed, so they wouldn’t need an interview after all.
When I watched the National at 10 PM, I saw that they ran the story after all, and without balance. They had law professor Lorraine Weinrib to call for Ms. Tell’s resignation, but no one to give a view from the other side. I’ve watched the CBC for too many years to be surprised at the lack of balance, but I am genuinely surprised at the lack of professionalism. I’ve been cut out of stories before, and I can’t complain about it; no one has a right to appear on the CBC. But why didn’t Ms. Erickson just tell me, we don’t want your interview after all because it doesn’t fit into the one-sided story line we are planning to construct? Or, we can’t interview you because you don’t have the right expertise? Why did she have to make up a story abut canceling the story?

Indeed.

William Shawcross was one of the first journalists to report on the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He issues a reminder to those hoping for a quick US exit from Iraq to be careful what they wish for:

But horror had engulfed all of Indo-China as a result of the US defeat in 1975. In Vietnam and Laos there was no vast mass murder but the communists created cruel gulags and, from Vietnam in particular, millions of people fled, mostly by boat and mostly to the US. Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble.

Read the whole thing.

John Robson today:

In a way it’s a backhanded tribute that, to the modern mind, Christianity is like a train wreck: gruesome, but they can’t look away. Newspapers don’t greet major Buddhist festivals with claims that Siddhartha Gautama was a cokehead, or open Ramadan by saying Mohammed was — (do NOT fill in this blank). As we said while not reprinting the infamous Danish cartoons, never would we insult someone’s beliefs or faith tradition — and by the way did you know that Jesus wasn’t resurrected, plus he had sex with Magdalene.

What can one conclude…

from 110 years of conflicting climate coverage except that the weather changes and the media are just as capricious?
Certainly, their record speaks for itself. Four separate and distinct climate theories targeted at a public taught to believe the news. Only all four versions of the truth can’t possibly be accurate.
For ordinary Americans to judge the media’s version of current events about global warming, it is necessary to admit that journalists have misrepresented the story three other times.
Yet no one in the media is owning up to that fact. Newspapers that pride themselves on correction policies for the smallest errors now find themselves facing a historical record that is enormous and unforgiving.

“Silly me. I thought that journalists were supposed to report the news, not bash the President. Shows you what I know. I can’t help but wonder, though, if Evan Thomas and his fellow ink-stained wretches were laboring under the “Awwww..he’s such a scamp” exception from 1992 to 2000.”

Great news;

“We are back. Everybody is safe and healthy,” Jim Engdahl said in an interview from his Saskatoon home. “We are never going back there.”
Melissa Hawach, 32, and her father went to Lebanon just before Christmas to retrieve Hawach’s daughters, Hannah, 6, and Cedar, 3. Hawach’s ex-husband had defied a Canadian custody order and spirited them to Lebanon during an approved trip with the girls to Australia several months earlier.
Hawach had tried to get her daughters back through various legal channels in Canada, Australia and Lebanon, but nothing had worked. She and Engdahl went to Lebanon and, with the alleged help of former soldiers from Australia and New Zealand, retrieved the girls from a compound in a resort near the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
It was soon revealed that Hawach, Engdahl and the girls were stuck in Lebanon in an undisclosed location. The matter went to court in the absence of both Melissa Hawach and her former husband, Joe Hawach.
A Lebanese court ruled last week that Melissa Hawach was the girls’ legal guardian, but another legal venue decided she might still be charged with kidnapping, according to reports.
[…]
However, in the Sunday Telegraph interview, Hawach describes in detail how she hired a private investigator to track her husband down in Lebanon, and then recruited four former military men from Australia and New Zealand to help her snatch her daughter away from their father.
[…]
Two of the four men were arrested by Lebanese authorities and remain in jail there. They were originally charged with child abduction, but the Sunday Telegraph reports that their charges have been reduced to misdemeanours by Lebanese courts.
Hawach told the Sunday Telegraph that she and her daughters hid for seven weeks in the homes of “complete strangers” in Lebanon who were sympathetic to her cause.
Back in Canada, Engdahl said he and Hawach are worried about the men who helped them win back Cedar and Hannah.
“We’ve still got two guys we need to get out of there,” Engdahl said.

The Telegraph story has a lot more detail.

WITH the girls safely in her custody, Mrs Hawach cut her blonde hair short and dyed it black to avoid standing out as she moved between four houses that were found by a network of trusted Lebanese friends.
“My children are half-Lebanese, and these people took me into their homes. They treated me like their family,” a grateful Mrs Hawach said.
Her lawyers worked steadily through official and diplomatic channels to secure her children’s safe exit from their father’s ancestral homeland.
On February 17, the exhausted mother and her brave young daughters were returned home under a shroud of secrecy on an epic journey that took them via Syria and Jordan.
“I knew, even when I was as scared as I was, there was no other option for me,” Mrs Hawach said. “There is nowhere to rest your head when your children aren’t in their beds at night.
“You can’t stop, you just can’t. I wouldn’t want them to think that I gave up. Ever.”

Flashback to Aug. 3. 2006.

Until he learns to interpret the word “right” in the appropriate political context, perhaps Seamus O’Regan should stick to cooking segments.

“… what’s with the kid gloves Seamus? If Dion uses language to describe Canadian conservatives that CTV reserves for Holocaust denial, aren’t you supposed to call him on that? The proper response would have been “now wait one second there, Mr. Dion…”

When the day comes that these intellectually vacant talking heads throw around “left wing” as freely as they do “right wing” as a political perjorative, when they begin to properly attribute to the “left wing” the tens of millions of human beings systematically eradicated in the pursuit of socialist utopia – then, perhaps they’ll have earned the privilage to misapply the term “right wing” to deniers of the Holocaust – despite the apparently forgotten fact that the Nazi brand of human eradication scheme was also conducted in the name of socialist eugenics.

Holocaust Denier Trivia Question: Ernst Zundel run for the leadership of which party in 1968?

Noreen Golfman, chairwoman of the Friends’ steering committee, responded in writing last week with the suggestion that Rabinovitch and other administrators can’t seem to take the criticism.
“We ourselves would always prefer open channels of communication and mature, adult and civil discourse,” wrote Ms. Golfman, also associate dean of graduate studies at Memorial University.
“However, from your communication and others from your colleagues in the recent past we have come reluctantly to the conclusion that this may have to await the arrival of a new CBC president.”

And a sharp catch from a reader. Just where have we heard the name Noreen Golfman before?

Ynet;

An Iranian state news agency used the Photoshop program to manipulate photos in order to try and back up claims that the US was behind a spate of bombings in southeast Iran, a popular American blog said.
On Sunday, Fars said in a report that terrorists using “US-gifted arsenals” were behind the bomb blasts which killed 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards last week.
The report claimed terrorist arsenals “have been confiscated” in police raids, and included an image with a red circle drawn around bullets with a USA tag on them. US dollars were also visible in the photograph.
“The weapons that the terrorists have used are US and British made. Moreover, the arrested terrorist agents have confessed that they have been trained by English-speaking people,” a senior Iranian official was quoted as saying.

But not before the LA Times published the Iranian claims, without mentioning the obvious hoax or considering its implications.

An animation showing which elements were altered.
Note: LGF is under heavy traffic demands at the moment and may be slow loading.
Confederate Yankee spots more.

Here’s the thing: The Winchester USA brand ammunition I’m familiar with (I sell it in multiple calibers) doesn’t look anything like the box on the photo. Typically, when ammunition is stacked, the top of the box is obscured, and so most ammunition manufacturers, including Winchester, put the caliber of the bullets on the end of the box, as seen here in a picture of showing the common packaging of a box of Winchester USA brand 7.62x39mm ammunition.

I wrote a note last week to a talk radio host after he finished an interview with the pro-naptime-in-the-workplace activist whose been making the rounds;

I think someone should pull all these studies together that extrapolate “lost productivity” figures and total them up.
I suspect we’ll discover that we no longer have an economy at all.

NYT Public Editor Daniel Orkent;

One of the appealing things about the complaints I receive about innumeracy at The Times is their ecumenical origin; when it comes to how it handles numbers, The Times is an equal opportunity offender. Like a bad cough that spreads its germs indiscriminately, numbers misapplied and ill-explained irritate the sensibilities of the right and the left, the drug company official and the animal rights activist, the art collector and the Jets fan.
Number fumbling arises, I believe, not from mendacity but from laziness, carelessness or lack of comprehension. I’ll put myself in the latter category (as some readers no doubt will as well, after they’ve read through my representation of the numbers that follow). Most of the journalists I know who enter the profession comfortable with numbers write about sports, where debate about the meaning of statistics is a daily competition, or economics, a field in which interpretation of numbers will no more likely produce inarguable results than will finger painting.
[…]
Numbers issued by those measuring criminal enterprise (“In Mexico, drug trafficking is a $250-billion-a-year industry” [story]) or the economic impact of a new stadium (“Bloomberg said that he expected the arena to generate about $400 million a year through various economic activities” [story]) don’t deserve to be published without challenge; it doesn’t serve agencies who want to fight drug trafficking to underestimate the problem, nor can any politician support a development project without hyping its potential benefit.
Still, The Times persists. In November, when New York City Comptroller William Thompson released a study purporting to show that New Yorkers purchase more than $23 billion in counterfeit goods each year, The Times repeated the analysis as if it were credible [story]. Quick arithmetic would have demonstrated that $23 billion would work out to roughly $8,000 per city household, a number ludicrous on its face. (In the Web version of this column, I’ve linked to an excellent dissection of Thompson’s report, by freelance journalist Felix Salmon.)
[…]
… [I]n the movie business, where records are about as meaningful as promises. “Shrek 2” is not, as an article in The Times Magazine had it in November, “the third-highest-grossing movie of all time” [story]; if you consider inflation, it’s not even in the Top 10 (and “Titanic” is far from No. 1). This record-mania has spread everywhere. “Record-high gas prices” summoned up last year weren’t even close; at its summer peak, gas cost 80 cents a gallon less than it did in 1981. Says economics reporter David Leonhardt, “Treating 2004 dollars the same as 1981 dollars isn’t much different from treating dollars the same as rupees. The fact that 10 is a bigger number than 9 doesn’t make 10 rupees worth more than $9; nor does it make $10 from 2004 worth more than $9 from 1981.” Inflation isn’t the only culprit stalking the record books: “Record deficits” may not be records when they’re expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product, a far more reasonable measure than any raw number.

I’m less generous than Orkent. The failure to factor in the most basic mathematical context – like adjusting for inflation – reveals that modern journalism doesn’t make these “oversights” because of laziness, or even innumeracy.
The do it because a headline that reads “Gasoline Prices Still Well Below All Time Highs” just doesn’t have quite the right ring to it.

Black Rod;

Asked directly if a Dion government would nationalize oil companies, Holland said the Liberals would “work with them collaboratively,” but “of course, if they refuse to work with us … there will be consequences.”
But the day after Holland appeared on Adler’s show, no mainstream televison or newspaper carried a story about his comments.
The day after he appeared on Rutherford’s show, and after his comments were raised in the House of Commons, no coverage.
Or the day after that.
Or the day after that. On Monday, there was a brief mention in the National Post’s editorial, but nowhere in its news pages.
Late in the evening, Canadian Press carried a story about Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach responding to Holland’s comments, and saying there would be “dire economic consequences” if oil sands development was slowed to curb CO2 emissions. Holland was quoted saying Stelmach and the Conservatives were fear mongering. A Google News search shows the story was run in, count ’em, one place—CTV’s website.
On Tuesday, the National Post got around to doing a story on Holland’s threat—in its business pages.
On Wednesday, with the blogosphere afire and Adler replaying Holland’s comments for the second day in a row, CTV’s Mike Duffy broke the MSM blackout at last. His guests?

Holland, who attacked the Conservatives for distorting what he said.

Alberta’s provincial Liberal leader who said the environment trumps politics.

And a clip of Dion who was as unintelligible as ever.
No mention of Rutherford or “consequences.”
Now, imagine if Environment Minister John Baird announced that in order to meet Canada’s commitments to the Kyoto accord the Conservatives were going to take control of the auto plants in Ontario and decide how many cars would be built, what models, and in what months…
Would that be front page news?
How long would it take for the Globe and Mail and CBC and even CTV to plaster Baird’s threat across its news pages? A week? Or a minute?
[…]
It’s beyond doubt that the CBC, the Globe and Mail, TVA, CTV and the rest of the mainstream media have a double standard when it comes to what’s news. When the Liberals circulated a two-year old letter by Stephen Harper on Kyoto, the MSM rushed to get the details out.
Who leaked the letter?
Would you believe some Liberal named Mark Holland?

And that’s just the warmup.

And when we learn that the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt has a brother who worked for Liberal leadership candidate Joe Volpe before jumping to B.C. MP Sukh Dhaliwal, we’re supposed to say “At least she doesn’t write stories in her pyjamas.”

“Perhaps the editor of The Independent does not read The New York Times. But their graphic artists sure do.”

Haaretz;

Why would the man behind the New York Times be stressed? Well, profits from the paper have been declining for four years, and the Times company’s market cap has been shrinking, too. Its share lags far behind the benchmark, and just last week, the group Sulzberger leads admitted suffering a $570 million loss because of write offs and losses at the Boston Globe.
As if that weren’t enough, his personal bank, Morgan Stanley, recently set out on a campaign that could cost the man control over the paper.
All this may explain why Sulzberger does not talk with the press.

The article focuses on a probable transition from print to internet publishing at the NYT, as though the meltdown of the newspaper publishing industry (which saw 13.5B in market value evaporate in the last two years) is simply the result of consumer preference for faster information delivery – the problem not the product, but the platform.
What isn’t mentioned is that while the New York Times, and other distinguished organs of the mainstream press have been bleeding circulation, another was inexplicably moving in a different direction;

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.

Sulzberger makes an open admission;

There are millions of bloggers out there, and if the Times forgets who and what they are, it will lose the war, and rightly so, according to Sulzberger. “We are curators, curators of news. People don’t click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust,” he says.
“We aren’t ignoring what’s happening. We understand that the newspaper is not the focal point of city life as it was 10 years ago.
“Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information,” he says. “But the paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world.”

And with that, reveals (like so many who argue the false premise that “blogs will never replace the mainstream media”) that he still doesn’t fully comprehend what is happening to his industry.
Those “bloggers and external writers” aren’t an “online world”. Blogs, forums and other resources of the internet are a platform, a pathway for information transmission – but they are tools of the individual, not the collective.
The “external writers” Sulzberger sees are not competitors. They’re his industry’s former subscribers – media consumers no longer interested in recieving politically-filtered news from the bottom end of a one-way pipe, who no longer tolerate interference by self-appointed gatekeepers who view information as their exlusive property to frame, sanitize, analyze, and interpret as they see fit,
It’s not a war, Mr. Sulzberger. It’s a revolt.

But don’t tell the CBC;

Harald Gremel, who headed the Austrian unit of the investigation, said police recorded more than 8,000 visits or “hits” to the Austrian server from 2,361 computer IP addresses within a single 24-hour period. Visitors from 77 countries, ranging from Iceland to South Africa, each paid $89 US to access the illicit material.

And balanced.

Who knew the Parliamentary Press Gallery has a Christmas Card pecking order?

And following a Radio-Canada story in January, which inaccurately reported on a “secret” Conservative government agreement with the U.S. to rapidly develop the oil sands, the government cancelled 10 interviews that Radio-Canada had planned with Cabinet ministers.

When “inaccurate” is just another way to say “intentionally misrepresented”, “cancelling 10 interviews” is best thought of as a synonym for “consequences”.

Journalism blithely builds bridges for others to use to transport troops into the heartland. It has lost the skill to differentiate behavior that is antithetical to any society. As a surrogate for readers, it chases what it claims to be objectivity so hard it can no longer identify and label misbehavior. It does so because journalism — and the programs that teach journalists — can’t see what they can’t see. When they can’t see what they are missing no traction exists to convince them what must be done to recover their purpose.
[…]
Journalism does not see a society at risk. Thucydides, wrote “The History of the Peloponnesian War” 2,400 years ago about the war between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides warning to readers is that just as Athens’ weaknesses became its strengths and her strengths became her weaknesses, so do those lessons apply for all nations even today. The great strengths of America have been the roots of her foundation, her liberty, her wealth and her isolation, her unfettered press, her education, and her political processes. These strengths are the weapons turned back against us so long as we fail to recognize our strengths can be double-edged.
Two hundred years of stability have left America believing the freedom citizens enjoy is more permanent than it is. Her liberty is presumed to exist by nature rather then the product of constant vigilance. Her wealth and her isolation have let citizens become complacent. Her education has turned into schooling of easily-tested clichés that supplant honing skills to think. Her unfettered press allows propaganda to be injected unchallenged into every corner of the country into minds unprepared to defend themselves against it. Her political processes have become adversarial, tuned more towards winning power than serving principle. She is, as Athens was, at war with herself as much as with any external enemy, yet does not anticipate the consequences.

“When did you become convinced global warming is caused by human activity?”

Who did they get to write this stuff – Decima??
Here’s one at the Star for your Saturday enjoyment. Scroll down, it’s on the left – “Will the latest report on climate change prompt you to make changes in your lifestyle?”