Inspired by Reasons Chris Bray, Joe Katzman at Winds of Change discusses the ineptness of the media when reporting on matters military. Great round up of links to illustrate how bad it can get.

It seems like a simple problem that could be cured by some basic diligence, research; and professional standards that demand real subject expertise to the same level as, say, sports journalism. But that doesn’t seem to be happening, which leads one to wonder why not.

With examples like this it’s hard to argue.

“One of the things you learn quickly in the military is to never, ever rile an Army Ranger, as foes have learned the hard way from Normandy to the Middle East,” wrote Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Kilian, with near-audible grunts and chest blows. How tough are the Army’s elite infantrymen? So tough, Kilian explained, that Rangers brag about parachuting into Alabama — and walking all the way back to Fort Benning, Georgia.
It’s worth pointing out that Fort Benning, Georgia, sits on the Alabama border. In fact, part of Fort Benning sits inside Alabama, including the part with the parachute drop.

Actually, anyone who has ever been interviewed about a specialty field can probably relate similar stories. Even in my own little niche sport, they very nearly always get something completely wrong.
Even worse, they often get confused about what constitutes an expert source – such as when they consult a humane society spokesperson to flesh out a piece on purebred dogs. Rather like asking the concession guy at a Nascar race about engine specifications.

Canadians moving inland, says first news dispatch from beach head
By Ross Munro

WITH CANADIAN FORCES LANDING IN FRANCE, June 6, 1944 (CP Cable) – In two hours and 45 minutes of fighting on the beaches here, the Canadian invasion force won its beach-head and shoved on inland.
At 10:45 this morning the Canadian commander (Gen. Keller) sent this message to Gen. Crerar, G.O.C. 1st Canadian Army: “Beach head taken. Well on way to intermediate objective.”
The strip of coast won by the Canadians in this initial assault was quite narrow, but it gave them the beaches and provided a base for further penetration.
There was some stiff street fighting in the little coast towns and the Canadians also met considerable enemy fire on the beaches and as they worked their way into the defences. They had to overcome numerous steel and wooden obstacles which were placed out on the tidal part of the beach and which were covered at high tide to trap landing craft. However, the assault went in at 7:15 a.m. just as the tide began to rise and many of these obstacles were cleared away by engineers before the water covered them, thus enabling followup craft to beach and unload.
Some casualties were suffered in the assault by the Canadians from enemy machine-guns, mortars and artillery fire.
By 10:00 a.m. the Canadians were about 1,000 yards inland and going strong, meeting only small pockets of Germans. The first prisoners were taken and identified as belonging to a coastal unit.
On other parts of the front near us the operation is moving along. Canadian and British airborne troops did a good job when they dropped and came in by gliders at 3:30 this morning. They captured several bridges and held them.
Cruisers provided very effective support to the Canadians and one cruiser knocked out a troublesome battery about a mile and a half from the coast with six direct hits.
Enemy tanks are reported about 10 to 15 miles south of the beach-head and some enemy transport is also moving.
Up to noon the German air force has not shown up. It is estimated to have 2,350 aircraft in western Europe but it looks as if the air attack will come tonight.
The French coast is still wreathed in smoke driving far down the Channel. In some of the bombarded towns, fires are burning ….

So far the operation seems to have gone as well as could be expected. Destroyers and gunboats are cruising up and down the coastline banging away at last coastal points of resistance on our beach. Now the rest of the assault troops are going in. I am going ashore with them.

The rest is here.
(Ross Munro, war correspondent for The Canadian Press, died in Toronto in 1990 at the age of 76. Why can’t our war reporting of today be as clear and unobstructed by bias as this?)
Hat tip – Rick Hiebert

The media and pundits are leaning hot and hard on Harper in the past 24 hours, now that there seems to be more than a “good scare” looming for the preferred Liberals. The word “extremist” is getting thrown around, and breathless discussion of abortion law is swirling.
We should be working hard to point out what is happening. Fiamma Nirenstein, former Communist, human rights activist and Italian journalist;

“when you call a person a right-winger, this is the first step toward his or her delegitimization.”

The abortion debate is a classic example of the unresistable force of one person’s right to choose coming against the immovable object of the other person’s right to exist. There will never be an acceptable common ground for those on either side of the debate, so compromise is not possible.
Law has to choose one side or the other. In Canada, abortion is legal. But legality does not render a position “moderate”. There is no halfway position between life and death. Those who oppose abortion, and want to change abortion law through democratic channels are no less moderate or legitimate than those who want to retain the status quo. Yet, this is how they are characterized in the press and by the pro-choice advocates.
So, while I’m personally pro-choice, I cringe when I hear the pro-life position being described as “right wing” or “extremist”.
Jailing or stoning homosexuals is extremist. Executing people for having extra marital affairs is extremist. Flogging women because they do not cover their hair is extremist.
Being opposed to the taking of life for reasons of convenience is not extremist, nor is it right-wing. It is simply an opposing view, on an issue that has no middle ground.
When we hear the “extremist” meme in our media and from our politicians, we should be aware of what they are doing – it is an attempt to delegitimize that opposing view, so that they do not have to address the issue on its merits, or face the possibility that it is a majority viewpoint that may just prevail if subjected to the democratic process.

Via Instapundit this article in the Statesman about the suppression of stories by the BBC;

Just before the war against Iraq I began to receive strange calls from BBC journalists. Would I like information on how the leadership of the anti-war movement had been taken over by the Socialist Workers Party? Maybe, I replied. It was depressing that a totalitarian party was in the saddle, but that’s where the SWP always tries to get. Why get excited?
Oh there are lots of reasons, said the BBC hacks. The anti-war movement wasn’t a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba’athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn’t this a story?
It’s a great story, I cried. But why don’t you broadcast it?
We can’t, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won’t let us.

The rest is here.

Hundreds of women are murdered every year in the USA by their spouses. A significant percentage of those will be pregnant.
So, please, someone explain to me – why does the Scott Peterson trial merit any attention whatsoever outside of the Modesto, CA area? What can possibly be in the minds of the editors and news directors who choose this schlock to feed us day in and day out, at the expense of real news items?
You’ll notice, I have provided no link to any of the reports on the trial. It does not deserve one.

I listened to Rush Limbaugh on the drive home Monday, and he received an lengthy call from a US soldier back in the states after nearly a year in Iraq. He had put about 200 prisoners in Abu Graihb, and recounted some of the crimes that they had committed. He confirmed that the vast majority of Iraq is at peace and reconstruction efforts are going well.
There’s a brief transcript of part of the call up on his site. I don’t have audio capabilities, but I suspect at least part of the call is available for download there.

“You could sit here and you say you support the soldiers, but if you’re sitting here and saying you don’t support the president, you don’t support the administration, then I got news for you: you’re not supporting us.”

The caller echoed concerns about the media both in Iraq and at home – there are reporters on “every corner”, which interferes with the ability of the military to conduct operations without interference or second guessing. And despite surviving two roadside bombs, scores of missions and firefights in Baghdad, the first time he was truly “scared” was upon returning home to discover that the Iraq being reported was totally unlike the one he served in – and was afraid that the mission there would be lost in the media.

Martin A. Grove at the Hollywood Reporter chronicles the manipulation of events that led to Michael Moore’s film making it onto the pages of the New York Times, and from there through the world press, and to Cannes.

The “Fahrenheit” fracas first broke on the front page of The New York Times in a story with a Washington, D.C. dateline. Typically, stories about movies are covered from Los Angeles or New York, so the fact that this one was being reported on from Washington immediately suggested its origin was atypical. Its headline packed a powerful take-no-prisoners punch: “Disney Is Blocking Distribution of Film That Criticizes Bush.” Whoever planted the story with the Times’ Washington bureau had a political agenda in mind beyond wanting to secure a movie distribution deal.

You think they might have checked their facts before running with a story supplied by the agent of a well known political flacktivist. But some stories are too juicy to pass up, and fact checking might deflate the balloon of enthusiasm. Instead, the Times followed this up with an editorial titled Disney’s Craven Behavior”.

Moore’s reference to the Times’ article on his Web site wound up being cited later on by AFP (and, presumably, by other media outlets around the world) without mentioning that Moore’s own agent was the person the Times had quoted about those claimed Florida tax breaks for Disney that would be supposedly be endangered if Disney dared to let Miramax release “Fahrenheit.”
After the Times’ article appeared, Florida officials denied that Disney was receiving any tax breaks from the state. In an Associated Press story May 5 Gov. Bush was quoted as saying, “What tax break? We don’t give tax breaks that I’m aware of to Disney. I appreciate the fact that Disney creates thousands and thousands of jobs in our state.” In another AP story the same day Eisner was quoted as stating, “None of that (Florida tax breaks) was ever discussed. It is totally not true.”
Nonetheless, in stories written over the course of the past few weeks journalists have continued to refer to those so-called Florida tax breaks as if there’s no question at all about them being reality. Indeed, without the tax breaks issue the whole argument falls apart as to why Disney didn’t, in Moore’s view, want to let Miramax release his movie. The importance of this issue was hammered home in a Times’ May 6 editorial attacking Disney. Under the headline “Disney’s Craven Behavior,” the Times said the company deserved “a gold medal for cowardice for blocking” the film’s distribution by Miramax. It then went on to say: “Mr. Moore’s agent said that Michael Eisner, Disney’s chief executive, had expressed concern that the film might jeopardize tax breaks granted to Disney for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Jeb Bush is governor. If that is the reason for Disney’s move, it would underscore the dangers of allowing huge conglomerates to gobble up diverse media companies.”

Perhaps the NYT should just start a “Mea Culpa” page to compliment their corrections column. “Correction” isn’t really the right word for what they’ve been up to lately – the word implies an honest error, and these aren’t honest errors.
“Agenda-mongering” seems more appropriate.

I was planning to write on the recent New York Times faux “correction”, but Paul has done a fine job.

The Times, like many in the media, made numerous mistakes in its coverage of Iraq. Perhaps the most (in)famous of all was the series of “Strategic Pause” stories. The stories, which ran only a few days after the start of the war, claimed that American forces were bogged down in Iraq and were forced to pause for a few weeks to regroup. “The war plan had failed” was a favorite quote of the day. Apparently the Pentagon missed the stories because just 2 weeks later, Iraqis were dancing in the streets and pulling down statues of Saddam as American tanks rolled thru Baghdad. The Times never did explain how it blew that story.
The fall of Baghdad lead to perhaps the second biggest gaff of the Iraq war reporting- that the Baghdad museum had been looted. The Times breathlessly reported that the museum had 170,000 items looted or destroyed. They also reported that the administration failed to put guards at the museum but had placed guards at the Oil Ministry’s office. None of those stories were true.

Nope. What the Times decided to “correct” was its reporting on evidence of weapons of mass destruction – information provided by Iraqi defectors and the Bush Administration. In fact, it’s not a correction at all, but an transparent attempt to focus blame – “They lied to us, and we fell for it. We won’t let that happen again!”
In keeping with the tone and quality of the piece, they can’t even get the facts straight now. Look at this;

The informant also claimed that Iraq had sent unconventional weapons to Syria and had been cooperating with al-Qaida — two claims that were then, and remain, highly controversial. But the tone of the article suggested that this Iraqi “scientist” — who in a later article described himself as an official of military intelligence — had provided the justification the Americans had been seeking for the invasion.

A full year and a half into this exercise, and the editors at the New York Times still haven’t heard of UN Resolution 1441, which mandated Iraq to prove it had destroyed known weapons stocks. No proof that they existed was necessary. Not a single defector, not a single spy plane photograph was required to “justify” anything. The “justification” was contained in the wording of the resolution.
That some member countries of the UN Security Council, now found to have been profiting from illegal kickback schemes in the Oil-For-Food program, refused to participate in military action, and efforts were made to demonstrate that Iraq was not only not complying, but continuing a clandestine operation, was merely tangential to that resolution.
The resolution is here.
But, hey – let’s take the Times at their word. Write the ombudsman, Daniel Orkent – demand they put their money where their correction is, and fire those editors responsible.
update

Stephen Den Beste examines some recent examples of biased reporting by the AP. More here on “reconstructed” quotes being used by the Globe and Mail (BellGlobe), NYT, Reuters, The Guardian…
To those, I add this. CTV’s National News trailers of last night mentioned the Bush speech. About halfway down the newscast, they got around to footage of Bush approaching the podium…. a few shots of the crowd.. and then … a clip of a single sentence.
Begin voiceover:
Cut to photos of naked prisoner in Abu Graihb.
Cut to Alan Freyer in Washington and his “analysis”.
Cut to interview with someone from the Brookings Institute
Cut to Janis Mackey Frayer in Baghdad. Is that Baghdad? Same backdrop every day.
Cut to film footage of “wedding party”. No coverage of the contradictory evidence.
Cut to interviews with unnamed Iraqis.
Cut to footage of burning car in Baghdad.

Turns out, the speech “coverage” really wasn’t coverage at all – just another excuse to recycle past negative events and political criticism. We heard reporter analysis of Bush’s poll fortunes, assertions that Iraqis are ovewhelming opposed to “the occupation”, were informed of the unstable security situation. Who knew? The razing of Abu Graihb was mentioned in passing.
It’s like this, night after night, and has been since the first days of the war. – and this is the network we turn to in order to escape CBC bias?
Well, this to Lloyd Robertson, Alan Freyer and Janis Makey Frayer: if this is the best you can do, if this is indicative of the level of respect you hold for the intelligence of your viewers, if you can think of nothing better than to replace the content of a speech made yesterday in Pennsylvania with the opinions of your Washington bureau chief, and 6 month old photos from a prison in Iraq, then thanks – but no thanks. You promised you would cover the speech, and when I gave you the chance to follow through on that, you didn’t. You wasted the opportunity code-talking to Canadians about what you think about Iraq.
So, I shall simply go read it for myself. I do not require your opinions about what it says, or what you think it says. I will form those on my own.
But unlike years past, I do not need you, Lloyd Robertson, Alan Freyer or Bell Globe Media. In fact, following is more information about the speech, and about the future plan for Iraq than you have provided in the past month. And I have provided it to my readers.

There are five steps in our plan to help Iraq achieve democracy and freedom: We will hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government; help establish security; continue rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure; encourage more international support; and move toward a national election that will bring forward new leaders empowered by the Iraqi people.
The first of these steps will occur next month, when our coalition will transfer full sovereignty to a government of Iraqi citizens who will prepare the way for national elections.
On June 30th, the Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist and will not be replaced. The occupation will end and Iraqis will govern their own affairs.
America’s ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, will present his credentials to the new president of Iraq. Our embassy in Baghdad will have the same purpose as any other American embassy: to assure good relations with a sovereign nation.
America and other countries will continue to provide technical experts to help Iraq’s ministries of government, but these ministries will report to Iraq’s new prime minister.
The United Nations special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is now consulting with a broad spectrum of Iraqis to determine the composition of this interim government. The special envoy intends to put forward the names of interim government officials this week.
In addition to a president, two vice presidents and a prime minister, 26 Iraqi ministers will oversee government departments from health to justice to defense. This new government will be advised by a national council which will be chosen in July by Iraqis representing their country’s diversity.
This interim government will exercise full sovereignty until national elections are held.

Now, did you read my opinion? Did I rewrite it for you? See any prison photos or burning cars?
No? Is that so hard?
Outside The Beltway has aroundup of links about the speech and reactions.

Paul at Wizbang offers a solution for the lack of diversity in the media, that should make any liberal feel warm and fuzzy inside.
I wonder what a survey of Canadian news outlets would reveal?

About a week ago, news shot round the world that a spike in asthma rates has been attributed to global warming and rise in CO2 emissions:
New Jersey Star Ledger

The third-grader at the East Orange Charter School was diagnosed with the life-threatening condition when she was just a year old. Predictions of higher pollen counts and rising temperatures exacerbating asthma in America’s cities is a scary prospect for her.
…
A report recently released by researchers at Harvard University predicts that poor and minority children in America’s cities will experience worsening asthmatic conditions due to global warming and air pollution. As the climate warms up, allergens such as pollen and mold will flood the air, interacting with urban pollutants such as ozone and soot to fuel an already growing epidemic of asthma.

New Zealand Herald

“The combination of air pollutants, aero-allergens, heat waves and unhealthy air masses increasingly associated with a changing climate causes damage to the respiratory systems, particularly of growing children, and these impacts disproportionately affect poor and minority groups in the inner cities,” the report says.

Globe And Mail

America’s cities, blanketed with smog and climate- altering carbon dioxide, have become cradles of ill health and are fostering an epidemic of asthma, according to a report yesterday from a leading group of Harvard University researchers and the American Public Health Association.

Except that…. it’s not what the report says.
Cantstats surveyed the actual report;

The focus of the Harvard report is not the relationship between asthma rates (in children or adults) and increased levels of CO2 or global warming.
It had a larger purpose. “This report examines the direct impacts of CO2, as well as climate change, focusing on urban centers; examining synergies between air pollution and climate change and connections between climate change and emerging infectious diseases � in particular, West Nile virus, a disease carried by urban-dwelling mosquitoes that presents new problems for public health and mosquito control authorities.” (Epstein, pg. 4)

In fact, they revealed (exerpts):

The Command Post brings this breaking news from CNN;

Dozens of people killed in a U.S. attack in the Iraqi desert Wednesday were attending a high-level meeting of foreign fighters, not a wedding, and photos shown to reporters in Baghdad support that belief, according to the senior coalition military spokesman.
…
Kimmitt said that troops did not find anything – such as a wedding tent, gifts, musical instruments, decorations or leftover food – that would indicate that a wedding had been held.
Most of the men there were of military age, and there were no elders present to indicate a family event, he said.
What was found, he said, indicated the building was used as a way station for foreign fighters crossing into Iraq from Syria to battle the coalition. “The building seemed to be somewhat of a dormitory,” Kimmitt said. “You had over 300 sets of bedding gear in it. You had a tremendous number of pre-packaged clothing — apparently about a hundred sets of pre-packaged clothing.
“[It is] expected that when foreign fighters come in from other countries, they come to this location, they change their clothes into typical Iraqi clothing sets.”
At Saturday’s briefing for reporters in Baghdad, Kimmitt showed photos of what he said were binoculars designed for adjusting artillery fire, battery packs suitable for makeshift bombs, several terrorist training manuals, medical gear, fake ID cards and ID card-making machines, passports and telephone numbers to other countries, including Afghanistan and Sudan.

Watch for no mention of this.
Update – as of this morning, Sunday May 23th, I can find no mention of this development on either the CBC or CTV sites.

Watch now.
The chatter and concern of the past few weeks about Iraq being too insecure for a July transition of power is going to change.
As the countdown to June 30th begins, and there is no sign that the Bush administration is going to move the deadline, the talking points and the media coverage will shift. “Holding to the deadline” is going to be revised to “running away”. Watch for mention of the deadline to be buried deeply, or even dropped from news reports.
Every attack, every setback, every unexpected event that does not result in a postponement of the transition will be shouted forth as evidence that “Bush is rushing to get out”.
Why? Because confidence in Bush on leading the “war on terror” and finishing the job in Iraq is one of the polling points that consistantly puts him ahead of Kerry. That needs to be undermined. He will be accused of looking for an escape hatch before the Presidential elections – and personified as a weak, calculating coward who has betrayed the helpless Iraqi people to save his political skin.
Indeed, it is already beginning.
There will be more of this. Lots more. Mark my words.

“the CBC will not only not commission polls … but it also intends to “place limits on the systematic reporting of polls conducted by other media organizations,” covering primarily poll results that constitute a major campaign story.
Its preferred strategy, he said, will be a weekly wrap-up of poll results to illustrate a trend.”

Occam’s Carbuncle ;

Now this is an interesting little fit of journalistic integrity from the network that brought you “Counterspin”. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what the latest CBC commissioned poll said about the Liberals� election prospects? No, I don’t mean the last one reported.

Theresa at Heart Of Canada;

All those site hits on Heart of Canada coming over from Wizbang. How pleasant. Perhaps people coming here will get some perspective on why they shouldn’t watch, link to, or upload the snuff video of Nick Berg’s murder.
It’s interesting that people think watching the video or enabling others to watch it protects their freedom. You know, just because you’re free to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. You have the freedom to engage in ethical decision making and personal restraint, too, and doing so in no way compromises your freedom. In fact, deciding not to do something can be an act of freedom as much as deciding to do something might be — the freedom is in the capacity to decide. People who post the snuff video argue that everyone should have the freedom to decide on their own. Let’s explore that idea.

I couldn’t agree less.
The hosting of the video has little to do with “freedom”.
We are currently witnessing a breathtaking double standard in the media. It is not about the images. It is about the perpetrators. If it were not, there would 30 headlines about Berg in the NYT and WaPo, as there have been about prison abuse. The prison abuse story was broken in January. They reported it then, deep in their pages. There has been no new information that can be revealed by photographs, but it hasn’t stopped them from exploiting them. They weren’t concerned about the allegations of abuse, or the clamour would have started 4 months ago when the DoD announced the investigation.
It’s all about the “dirty” pictures.
a) The Berg video is not a “snuff” film. Stop minimizing its importance and misrepresenting why it was made. Snuff is created for sexual gratification. This is a taped execution, committed for political purposes, by an established group, who have take responsibility for it. Who we are at war with.
b) The argument being put forward by the media over not airing or publishing stills is shown to be lie through their endless parade of prison “porn” photographs. That the Boston Globe and others have been eager to display genuine porn and misrepresent it as American and British misconduct gives proof to that. Most of what has been released amounts to nothing more than different camera angles. This is a feeding frenzy – not responsible journalism.
c) The argument about viewers seeking the video having “honourable reasons” for seeing it is irrelevant – or equally applicable to the prison photographs. They make “prison porn” for sexual gratification too. You cannot have it both ways.
d) Dignity in death. There was no dignity in Nick Berg’s death. None was intended. He was a political sacrifice. Hiding that truth, attempting to create dignity where there is only barbarism and subhumanity is dangerous and naive.
If this were a single, isolated murder by an outraged lover or sadistic serial killer, the argument not to show the video would be sound.
In this case, it is not. This is the face of our enemy and we need to see it.

Oh, that’s still on?

With just 11 weeks to complete a full account of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the leaders of the 9/11 commission say they have had unprecedented access to classified documents – and are planning to question suspected members of Al Qaeda being held by the US government.
“We have had access to documents that nobody has ever had access to before in the Congress or investigatory committees,” said Thomas Kean, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, at a Monitor breakfast Tuesday. “We have gotten in the end every document we have requested…. We have also been able to interview every single person we requested.”

I wonder where the press is on this. Why, just a few weeks ago we were being blanketed with wall to wall criticism of the Bush administration “stonewalling” over Condi Rice’s testimony. Followed of course, by the endless replays of 7 second sound bites from her appearance.

The commission has won access to several copies of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), the top secret intelligence report that the president and a few top officials receive each weekday morning. One such report to President Bush was declassified and released to the public.
At the breakfast, commissioner Kean said the panel has asked the White House to release a Clinton-era PDB concerning Al Qaeda for its report. The public may be surprised when the document is released, Mr. Hamilton noted. “The product of intelligence, which I think many people expect to be very precise and very accurate and very unambiguous, is anything but,” he said. “The product of intelligence raises as many questions as it answers.”

An ambiguous intelligence report about Al Queda from the Clinton era?
I can see the headline now.
On page 17.
Under the Toyota Sales Event ad.
via Drudge

This didn’t take long. I read the article earlier today about LA Times Editor John Carroll’s comments on journalistic ethics. Paul, at Wizbang;

Oh Goody… Who was he going to rip?
– The New York Times for their Jayson Blair fiasco?
– NYT owner Pinch Sulzberger who blamed the fiasco on his readers?
– Eason Jordan and CNN who admitted to spewing Saddma’s propaganda for dollars?
– The NY Times’s Rick Bragg who never went to the places he claimed to be reporting from?
– The USA Today who let Jack Kelley make stories up for years?
– Steven Glass whose pseudo-journalism was so legendary they made a movie about it?
– Dateline NBC for planting explosives on a GMC truck to make it look like any impact would make it blow up?

Nope. The BBC and Andrew Gilligan’s “sexing up” scandal against the British government didn’t make his list, either. Oddly enough!
Go read the whole jaw-dropping thing. Instead, the LA Times editor’s directed “a scathing critique of Fox News and some talk show hosts, such as Bill O’Reilly…”
Well, there’s one of his problems – he doesn’t know the difference between a journalist and an op-ed guy! Finally, an explanation for the editorial content that masquerades as hard news in his own paper.

There’s a genesis of a discussion beginning at the Shotgun over an article that asks Why Don’t Journalists Get Religion?
I think the premise is wrong. I think that journalists think they have it all nailed. They get religion just fine, thankyouverymuch. Nice religions have shaved heads, smiling non-judgementalism and celebrity endorsements. Or brown skin. You can be as judgemental as you wish if you have brown skin. It’s why Yassin stubbornly held onto his description as “spiritual leader” all through his years inciting terrorism and hatred, and why Al Sharpton is held to a different standard than Pat Robertson. Journalists also like victim religion, which goes a long way to explain why the deferencial, self effacing pedophile Woody Allen is pardoned while a naked Ariel Sharon is featured in political cartoons tearing the heads off of Palestinian babies with his teeth.
You don’t quite agree, do you? Well, let’s take a look at this fawning hero worship article in yesterday’s Toronto Star;

The Dalai Lama wrapped up more than ten days of public appearances in Toronto today by completing the initiation of thousands of devotees into the spiritual teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. About 7,000 people, including dozens of robe-clad monks, attended the ceremony marked by prayers, chants and teachings from the Tibetan spiritual leader.

Complete with quotes from the devoted;

Tina Petrova of Toronto, a practising Tibetan Buddhist, travelled to southern California in 1996 to take teachings from the Dalai Lama. Her reaction to seeing him in Toronto was summed up in one word: “Wow.”
“I mean just to be in his presence, he feels like an ocean of love and peace and grace,” she said. “He just instils in one a sense of deep calmness and serenity, and you can just feel his purity of heart.”
…
In the final rite of the ceremony, the sand was to be poured into Lake Ontario, allowing “the perfect peace” of Buddhist philosophy “to flow with it into the everyday world.”
Today marked the final day of public appearances for the Dalai Lama, who arrived in Vancouver on April 17 for his first visit to Canada since 1993. In the two-and-a-half weeks since, he has become the first Tibetan spiritual leader in history officially welcomed by a Canadian prime minister, been honoured and entertained by several of the country’s luminaries and feted by celebrity devotees from south of the border, including Richard Gere and Goldie Hawn.

Now step back from this scene for a moment, and imagine a different one:

The American evangelist wrapped up more than ten days of public appearances in Toronto today by completing the initiation of thousands of born-again Christians. About 7,000 people attended the ceremony.
Tina Brown of Airdrie, a practising Baptist, travelled to Illinois in 1996 to take teachings from his institute. Her reaction to seeing him in Toronto was summed up in one word: “Wow.”
“I mean just to be in his presence, I feel the power of the Lord working through him.”
In the final half hour of the ceremony, on the shores of Lake Ontario, prayers were held that “the world will learn to live in harmony and peace” and to “preserve the lives of the unborn”.
Today marked the final day of public appearances for Billy Graham, who arrived in Calgary on April 17 for his first visit to Canada since 1993. In the two-and-a-half weeks since, he has welcomed by Leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper, been honoured and entertained by congregations across Canada and feted by celebrity devotees from south of the border, including Mel Gibson.

Tell me, and be honest. Would such an article have been written without alluding to the “Passion violence/anti-semitism contraversy” or “right-wing conservatives” ?
Or would it have been covered from the perspective of the placard carrying pro-choice protestors and gay marriage advocates on the sidelines?
Could Stephen Harper even afford to be photographed with Billy Graham in an election run-up?