Another installment (#19) of Arthur Chrenkoff’s roundup of good news from Iraq. Give it a read – if only as a reality check as to the woefully inadequate and one sided coverage we recieve from our mainstream broadcasters. An example – remember the seige of Sadr City?

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond of the 1st Cavalry Division, says Sadr City is the safest place in or around Baghdad. About 18,000 people have reconstruction jobs, he says, earning about $6 a day. “Sadr City is what the future of Iraq can look like,” he says. Those who were once taking up arms are now talking democracy. ‘Before, the men were buying black cloth for their (martyrs’) banners. Now for the election, we are buying white cloths’ for posters, says candidate Fatah al-Sheikh.

The Dinocrat reports that CEO Summer Redstone sold $12 million in CBS stock in the midst of the Rathergate cover-up, and asks;

Where are the lawyers? For that matter, where are the journalists?
Viacom’s and CBS’s lawyers should have been involved in vetting the stock sale taking place almost a week into the Rathergate scandal, and following the elite media’s extensive discussion of the document fraud, not to mention the non-public CBS News ratings issues, and the big problems with the network’s affiliates. Yet none of this apparently happened, at least that we know about.
Curiously, or perhaps we should say incuriously, the TIME Magazine report by Neil Gough did not mention the stock sale at all. Can you imagine an interview of Ken Lay or Martha Stewart or virtually any CEO who sold some stock at a questionable moment, wherein the reporter does not even bother to ask about it? Suppose it had been Rupert Murdoch.

Good question.
(hat tip – Powerline)

Peggy Noonan ;

The Rathergate Report is a watershed event in American journalism not because it changes things on its own but because it makes unavoidably clear a change that has already occurred. And that is that the mainstream media’s monopoly on information is over. That is, the monopoly enjoyed by three big networks, a half dozen big newspapers and a handful of weekly magazines from roughly 1950 to 2000 is done and gone, and something else is taking its place. That would be a media cacophony. But a cacophony in which the truth has a greater chance of making itself clearly heard.
[…]
In one of his “Making of the President” books the liberal but ingenuous Teddy White famously said of 57th Street in Manhattan that when he stood there he was within a stone’s throw of all the offices in which all of American media was busily churning out its vision of The News. Churning it out were a relatively small group of a few hundred liberals who worked and mostly lived on an island off the continent; they told that continent not only what it should be thinking about but how it should be thinking of it. (I think the New York Times unconsciously echoes this old assumption in their television commercials in which an earnest, graying, upscale dunderhead says the New York Times surrounds a story and gives him new ways to think about it. Doesn’t it just?)
But in the past decade the liberals lost their monopoly. What broke it? We all know. Rush Limbaugh did, cable news did, the antimonolith journalists who rose with Reagan did, the internet did, technology did, talk radio did, Fox News did, the Washington Times did. When the people of America got options, they took them. Conservative arguments rose, and liberal hegemony fell.
All this has been said before but this can’t be said enough: The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.
[…]
Now anyone can take to the parapet and announce the news. This will make for a certain amount of confusion. But better that than one-party rule and one-party thought. Only 20 years ago, when you were enraged at what you felt was the unfairness of a story, or a bias on the part of the storyteller, you could do this about it: nothing. You could write a letter.
When I worked at CBS a generation ago I used to receive those letters. Sometimes we read them, and sometimes we answered them, but not always. Now if you see such a report and are enraged you can do something about it: You can argue in public on a blog or on TV, you can put forth information that counters the information in the report. You can have a voice. You can change the story. You can bring down a news division. Is this improvement? Oh yes it is.

Read the whole thing.

via Powerline, who have much more.
update – CBS seems to have altered the PDF’s of the report to resist cutting and pasting (and thus hinder bloggers). As usual, Kevin is one step ahead. For you newer bloggers, it’s a good policy to follow – when you find something, download or screenshot it and save it – as a hedge against airbrushing or outright disappearance. The original, unlocked CBS Rathergate reports can be accessed here.
update – Charles Krauthammer – The investigation was “clueless, uncomprehending and in its own innocent way disgraceful .”

The best overview yet of the demise of the mainstream media as we know it. By Howard Fineman;

A political party is dying before our eyes – and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the “mainstream media,” which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox’s canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying� journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.

Nicely done.

This lengthy piece by Melanie Phillips has been recieving a lot of buzz;

How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view – hitherto confined to the most extreme left-wing circles — that the President of the United States is more of a danger than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to view a democracy – Israel – that has been under attack since its foundation as the greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?
Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.
This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don�t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them.
Yet that is what is happening. Public debate in Britain is now marked by a collapse of objectivity, truth, fairness and balance. Logic and morality have been stood on their heads. Victims are portrayed as oppressors, while mass murderers have to be understood and sympathised with. The outcome is an ugly and dangerous climate in which prejudice and lies have achieved the status of unchallengeable fact; a climate which is now being eagerly manipulated by terrorists who know that if they ratchet up their barbarism and distribute the video the result will merely be an ever greater public clamour for Tony Blair to split away from President Bush and shatter the coalition in defence of the free world.

Rightfully so.
(Crossposted to the Shotgun)

“Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it’s] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas.” – Jonathon Klein – president, CNN*

Judge upholds CBC firing of reporter who sent candy rubbed in chicken to critic.
Keating broadcast a story in 2000 about a health-care lobby group called Save Our Services abandoning a lawsuit against the provincial government.
Keating told the arbitrator he understood that Earl Hamilton, head of the lobby group, had referred to him as a “toady of the government; he was not to be trusted,” Allan’s ruling stated.
The reporter had spoken to a CBC lawyer about taking defamation action against Hamilton but was talked out of it.
So, on Jan. 29, 2003, Keating “purchased a box of chocolates with a view to spitting on them and sending them anonymously to Mr. Hamilton,” Allan wrote.
Instead, he took two of the chocolates, rubbed them in thawed, raw chicken and sent the box to Hamilton with a note that said “keep up the good work.”

To be fair, Keating did endure a “pang of conscience” and informed the recipient before any harm could be done, and the followup mea culpa cost him his career.

“I did something beyond stupid and it cost me a career. I think the CBC was justified in firing me.”

However, it’s equally fair to ask how tainted the reporting of this “professional journalist” had become before this final excess and resulting epiphany.
via Nealenews There’s no sign at all of the story on CBC.ca.

The countdown to the utter disintegration of the credibility of mainstream journalism approaches zero.
update – the countdown continues…(one…)
Jack Kelly says it’s a free fall

Jack Stokes, director of media relations, Associated Press, responds to contraversy over the presence of a AP photographer on the scene of an ambush and murder of Iraqi election workers;

Several brave Iraqi photographers work for The Associated Press in places that only Iraqis can cover. Many are covering the communities they live in where family and tribal relations give them access that would not be available to Western photographers, or even Iraqi photographers who are not from the area.
Insurgents want their stories told as much as other people and some are willing to let Iraqi photographers take their pictures. It’s important to note, though, that the photographers are not “embedded” with the insurgents. They do not have to swear allegiance or otherwise join up philosophically with them just to take their pictures.

It’s too bad they missed the boat with Robert Picton, during his (alleged) murder spree of Vancouver area prostitutes. Perhaps he would like to have his story told? The Hells Angels must feel shortchanged – they’ve had to resort to buying billboard space to get their message out.
Unsurprisingly, there are a few others who remain unimpressed.
Wretchard: at what point did the “brave Iraqi” photographer become aware that the story of the day was going to be the live execution of two Iraqi election workers?
Just asking.
Roger Simon: It sounds as if the “Insurgents” were calling a press conference to express their campaign positions. But they weren’t. What they were doing was brutally murdering innocent people in the street and they wanted the press there to record the event. The Associated Press, like good poodles of fascism, came along for that most necessary of tasks for terrorists in asymetrical war–publicity.
Powerline: Am I missing something, or has the AP now admitted everything it was charged with by Wretchard?

This must read from Wretchard.

Even with today’s proliferation of compact photographic equipment, a legitimate photojournalist rarely gets the opportunity to capture an execution. Apart from the beheadings which are purposely recorded on video by the jihadis and from gun camera film, most footage of people actually being shot are taken by photographers in company with combatants who are ready to film an ambush. Those individuals are combat cameramen for their armies or embedded reporters. The most famous analogue to the Associated Press sequence of photographs is probably the Eddie Adams photo of the execution of Vietcong Captain Bay Lop by South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Adams owed that opportunity to General Loan himself, who brought Adams along to cover what he believed to be a justifiable summary execution. Adams depressed the shutter at exactly the moment Loan fired and photo analysis actually shows the impact of the bullet on Bay Lop’s skull.
It may have been pure luck, but it was surely the longest of odds that would have brought an Associated Press cameraman to the site of a surprise attack on two Iraqi electoral workers. As it was, the AP photograph was unable to capture the actual execution, only the moments shortly before and after the Iraqis were killed. Although the Eddie Adams photograph was widely used to illustrate the ‘brutality’ of the Saigon government, the photos taken by the Associated Press
are unlikely to reflect badly on the electoral worker’s killers. Press reports highlight the confidence and boldness of the insurgents. “Both of the victims shown in the sequence wore traditional Arab headscarfs. In contrast, the attackers were bareheaded and apparently unafraid to show their faces”, suggesting that ‘collaborators’ must conceal their faces while the Ba’athists stride with impunity through the light of day. It was fortunate for the AP that their photographer was accidentally there.

A similar thing happened during the murder and desecration of the 4 contract workers in Fallujah. Though it was an Arab news outlet, the cameras were there and rolling. The “ambush” was carefully set up for media consumption.
They learned from the best. I don’t know what was more outrageous – the admission by Eason Jordan that CNN had been functioning as the Western propoganda wing of Saddam Hussein’s information ministry – or the mild mumble of disapproval that the rest of the MSM reacted with.
How long are we going to tolerate media outlets who accept invitations from terorist regimes and organizations, in order to capture a few drops of bloody propoganda on film? At what point do their actions cross the line from observer to participant? I can honestly say that I’d sleep better tonight knowing the AP photographer who panted along behind these thugs like an adrenaline-intoxicated puppy was behind bars under terrorist conspiracy or accessory to murder charges.
It’s bad enough that news consumers have to do their own fact checking, and bring in their own document experts to verify the information being presented as “truth”. Now we have to worry that the RPG triggerman who has selected our restaurant, our bus, our airplane for random anhilation has a goddamn AP cameraman in tow.

Honest Reporting hosts their “fourth annual recognition of the most skewed and biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.

Incessant Rant;

This is what happens when you search GOOGLE using the phrase “condition of anonymity” and a desired publication (and a few blogs). What does it mean? Probably nothing. I just found it interesting that the two most left leaning print media publications out pace their nearest competition by an average of about 500%.

Surely a coincidence.

Steve Verdon demonstrates today at Outside The Beltway why googling transcripts is becoming one of the blogosphere’s most productive techniques. A quote from Donald Rumsfeld is presented in falsified context by Spencer Ackerman at the New Republic, whereupon Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly decides it makes a fine springboard for his own purposes.
Drum:

But go read Spencer Ackerman’s summary of Rumsfeld’s performance. Sure, we ought to have more armor for our Humvees by now, but this isn’t really a question of armor, it’s a question of respect:

Today, he came face to face with pissed-off frontline soldiers. And he treated them with the same arrogance and condescension that their superior officers have come to expect. To the question about unequal retirement benefits for equal service, Secretary Marie Antoinette replied, “I can’t imagine anyone your age worrying about retirement. Good grief.”

Indeed. Hard to imagine an average joe worrying about retirement. Who does this grunt think he is?

Well, Kevin – maybe he thinks he’s a grunt in a room with a Secretary of Defense who’s comfortable enough to share a mildly self-effacing joke with his troops? Here is Rumsfeld’s actual answer:

SEC. RUMSFELD: [Laughter] I can’t imagine anyone your age worrying about retirement. [Laughter] Good grief. It’s the last thing I want to do is retire. The pay and benefits for the Guard and the Reserve relative to the active force have been going up unevenly at a rate faster than the active force. If you go back over four years – matter of fact, I just went over this with the senior person in the department who looks at pay and benefits. And apparently, what’s happened is that for a variety of reasons, the incremental changes that are made each year, in terms of pay and benefits and health care and retirement and what have you, have brought the Guard and Reserve up at a faster level than the active force. And what one has to do in managing the total force and the total force is critically important. We need the Guard and Reserve as well as the active force. And we have to see that we have the incentives arranged in a way that we can attract and retain the people that are needed to defend the country. At the moment, we are doing well in terms of attracting and retaining the people we need. And if anything, I think the data suggests that the Guard and Reserve forces had been advantaged relatively compared to the active force over the past four years. Question.

Keep in mind that these aren’t two neophyte amateur bloggers. Drum and Ackerman are paid to write this crap. You’d think fact checking before writing would be part of the job description, unless of course – the job is crafting dishonest, politically-motivated hit pieces.
Oh… wait….

New background on the “shot heard round the world” yesterday – a question to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Kuwait, posed by a soldier in the audience about what is now being termed “hillbilly armor”. Today, Drudge is reporting that the question was planted by an imbedded reporter.

Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts is embedded with the 278th Regimental Combat Team, now in Kuwait preparing to enter Iraq, and is filing articles for his newspaper. Pitts claims in a purported email that he coached soldiers to ask Defense Secretary Rumsfeld questions!
When reached Thursday morning, various Chattanooga Times Free Press staffers offered ‘no comment’ on the development.

I’ve copied the email in the extended entry.
While it appears the soldiers have a legitimate complaint (though, apparently not a new or immediately solvable one), the media reporting on the incident would have us believe that the question was unexpected.
Why is the distinction between a legitimate spontanious question and a legitimate, but media planted question, important?
It’s this type of manipulation that chips away at the legitimacy of the profession of journalism – not because the question is false, but because it makes us pause, and wonder what other “spontanious” questions from “the audience” are planted by reporters looking to manufacture and/or enhance contraversy for the purpose of increasing the “sales” value – both literally and figuratively – of a story.
In the case of reporter Edward Lee Pitts, it was a story he’d already written and submitted.
(update – The media reports assume a premise of “more armour good, less armour bad”. A roundup of opinion and observation about the question is well covered by Instapundit. Go read it, before forming any opinions about the criticism.)

Continue reading →

I don’t know dick all about US Treasury Secretary John Snow.

New York Times, Dec. 6: President Bush has decided to replace John W. Snowas treasury secretary and has been looking closely at a number of possible replacements, including the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., Republicans with ties to the White House say…

But I think I know a rope-a-dope when I see one.

“What are you going to do? Shoot us all?”
“No, Ace – just you.”

(h/t)

Drudge breaking

ADDRESSES CBS NEWSROOM AT APPROXIMATELY 1:39PM EST [Partial transcript]: No matter what you hear elsewhere, this was a mutual decision. The timing has to do with (wanting to separate) this decision to leave the anchor chair… from the (investigation) of the 60 MINUTES report. The decision got made the way I described. There is nothing more important (to me) than how honored I am to work with the greatest news organization in the world. Thank you for coming. We’re not going to spend much time (on questions) because we have news to cover. (Offered to answer questions, but staff simply gave his signature ‘hip hip’ three cheers.) Let’s get back to work. Thanks everyone.

Well, there’s half a shoe dropped, I guess. But why, pray tell, is Rather being allowed to stay on at the scene of the crime?
Maybe there’s a hope at CBS that his “retirement” will diffuse criticism over Rathergate. I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Washington Post is coming to grips with a 10% drop off in circulation over the past 2 years, prompting a “self-examination” meeting on the issue. Apparently, newspaper reporters seem to labour under a misconception that readers can see them.

Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. met with hundreds of newsroom staffers yesterday to outline management’s latest attempts to combat declining circulation. However, the more intense discussion at the meeting involved diversity at the newspaper, as several minority staff members lamented that a white man recently was chosen over a woman and a black man as the paper’s new managing editor.
[…]
“We’re crushed,” said national reporter Darryl Fears at the meeting. Fears, who is black, organized two meetings of African American staffers in recent days in response to Bennett’s promotion. “A lot of our worst suspicions were confirmed about the ability of African Americans and other minorities to rise to the highest level of the best papers in the world,” he said.

(Note to Fears – if you can deal with the recognition that comes with promotion, check with the Bush administration.) *

In an effort to win new readers, Downie said Post reporters will be required to write shorter stories. The paper’s design and copy editors will be given more authority to make room for more photographs and graphics.
The paper will undergo a redesign to make it easier for readers to find stories. It is considering filling the left-hand column of the front page with keys to stories elsewhere in the paper and other information readers say they want from the paper, which they often consider “too often too dull,” Downie said.
“Newspapers should be fun and it should be fun to work at one,” Bennett said.

Ah yes, the intellectual mismatch dilemma. Those WaPo folks are just smarting themselves out of readership.

On Nov. 16th, I dashed off the following email to news@ctv.ca, after the airing of the National at 11 pm.

Subject: Film footage hypocrisy
Time : 11/16/04 11:32 pm
No tape of the aid worker’s execution. Too disturbing to show the audience the face of the enemy? Or too truthful?
Two plays of the Marine shooting of the wounded prisoner. (whose unit had lost a member the day before when a boobytrapped body exploded)
And you wonder what the mainstream media is struggling with credibility issues and falling audience share?
—
Kate
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com

I’ve probably sent about 6 complaint emails to CTV news over the past year – their coverage of the Iraq war and US politics has been abysmal – slanted, inaccurate, selectively incomplete…. in short, pretty typical. But for the first time, I recieved an actual reply from someone who claims to be a “news producer”, and it appears I hit a nerve. From which news producer, I can’t say – the email was unsigned. I reproduce it here, spelling and typos unaltered.

Ask Us askus@ctv.ca Re: film footage hypocricy Your arguement is specious. Video ot the aid worker being shot in the head was not available in North America. However it was reported on extensively. The marine shooting video — which on the surface appears in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention — was frozen before the bullets ripped into the body. I fail to see either a moral equivalency or a moral imbalance. If you think there are credibility issues … by all means … check out other forms of media. How many conspiracy theories can you really take. I find it amazing that you think we news producers disucss issues the way you seem to think we do: that masters attend our meetings telling us what and what not to put on air.j News value. It’s a concept.

Whew! …Looks like I’m in over my head…

James Adams exhibits “fair and balanced” reporting at the Globe and Mail.

Fox News, the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right, will come to Canadian digital television next year, the federal broadcast regulator is expected to rule today.
[…]
News Corp. is controlled by the right-wing Australian media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch.
It claims to have more than 80 million subscribers in the United States alone, subscribers who have made it that country’s top- rated all-news channel and its commentators Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren and Bill O’Reilly full-fledged media personalities.
The abrasive Mr. O’Reilly, in particular, has developed an intense, albeit negative, interest in things Canadian in the past two years.
He used his much-watched The O’Reilly Factor program as a launching pad for feuds with The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle and Heather Mallick, and attacked, variously, Canadian teens (for being “ignorant”), the CRTC (for “banning” Fox), former prime minister Jean Chr�tien (for being “a bum”), The Globe and Mail (“a far-left newspaper”), Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell (for being soft on heroin users) and Canadian health care (“socialist”).

Woohooo! With endorsements like that, I think Fox can look forward to a healthy relationship with the unserved Canadian conservative news audience.