Just after the Rice testimony had concluded, the local talk-radio station had their usual hourly news blurb. They’re a CNN affiliate – I will assume this was a CNN feed. update – In an email from the station’s news director, I am told they use both CNN and ABC – so the post has been edited to reflect that.

Another update My complaint to the station yields results – in the lastest broadcast, the local news director Kurt Leavins interrupted the tape in the portion that was edited out, with brief verbal commentary that went something to the effect of “Rice finally gets around to answering the question”. The missing testimony was not reinserted or mentioned, (probably not possible), but the voice interruption is an improvement.
The overall suggestion that Rice was avoiding the question remains intact, though – Leavins being an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, no surprise there. It would have been more reassuring had he chosen to paraphrase the missing segment, instead of editorializing a news item.

The upstart Western Standard has upstarted a blog – “The Shotgun”. update – the url has changed, and I’ve changed the link accordingly. Comments and trackbacks are now active, so it’s becoming a blog in the truer sense. Mark Steyn writes for this new Canadian magazine. It’s gotta be good.

Publisher Ezra Lavant – “Enough about us. The Western Standard is about you – thoughtful readers who want to know the other side of the ‘official’ news and views. If you watch the CBC, we will be your antidote. If you read Maclean’s, we will be your fact checkers.”
Fact checking Macleans? Can you do that in only 72 pages?
Hat tip Jay Currie

Press release

Friday, April 2nd, 2004 – Reporters Without Borders Presents a public conference with Alina Fernandez(Castro), daughter of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
…
A 26-minute documentary “One party, one newspaper : Cuban press from the republique to Castro” on the history of liberty of the press in Cuba from 1952 to the 1990s will be presented before the debate. This event will take place Friday, April 2nd at 6:00 p.m. in the amphitheatre of the Henri-Julien pavillion, located at 4750 Henri-Julien (Mount Royal metro.) [ ed- in Montreal] The event is free and open to the public, but donations would be appreciated.
…
During the March, 2003 crackdown, 27 independent journalists were arrested, adding to the three journalists who were already in prison. The journalists were charged with “acts against the independence and economy of Cuba” (law 88) or with “acts against the independence and territorial integrity of the state” (article 91 of the Cuban penal code) and were condemned to sentences of 14 to 27 years after summary trials that often lasted only half-a-day. In general, these journalists are accused of collaborating with the United States by publishing articles that present a different vision of Cuba than is presented in the official press. Their articles generally discussed opposition within Cuba (which is not recognized by the official press), human rights violations and the daily life of Cubans.
For further information: Emily Jacquard, (514) 521-4111 or email: rsfcanada (at)rsf.org

More here
Sounds like the makings of a movie plot… someone call Spielberg.
Eh.. .come to think of it, someone call the media. They’ve been all over this Cuban jail story.

Jeff Jarvis takes a break from his crusade to save Howard Stern to rip a strip from Oprah.

Hypocrite. Oprah: You can’t act as if you don’t bear considerable responsibility for this. You brought sex to afternoon TV. Now I don’t think you should be fined for that and I don’t think you should be taken off the air for that; I just don’t watch you. But you’re doing nothing different from Howard Stern — except getting away with it. So cut your holier-than-thou disapproval of sex on the rest of TV. You are the Queen of Trash.

Jeff doesn’t mention her greater and more destructive hand in creating the “Culture of Victimhood”.
It began with countless shows about child abuse, especially child sexual abuse. The same juicy and shocking details, cloaked in weepy concern and repackaged as “public service”. The biggest fallacy of the time was cultivated by Oprah – “Children never lie about these things”.
Well, they do, and they did, and largely because of the myths that Oprah and her copycats fostered, innocent people – child care workers, parents, neighbors – were smeared, accused and jailed because it wasn’t appropriate to question the veracity of a child. Then we got countless more Oprah shows educating the mainstream about “repressed memory” – and more broken families and lives ruined, based on false accusations and true-believer therapists.
Victimhood was good for ratings. Child abuse. Spouse abuse. Substance abuse. Date rape. Disease of the Week. Oprah shifted gears effortlessly, from trash talk to trash thought, creating an afternoon sisterhood of victims and transforming unproven and sometimes ludicrous theories into mainstream “fact”. And the over-riding message – no one was ever personally responsible. There was always an underlying excuse. Someone else was always to blame – a monster in the past, an uncaring parent, a teacher who bullied. Society. History. Cultism. Racism. Sexism.
Now, we have an entire generation suffering the effects of “Oprahism”, and wonder why so many “dysfunctional” North Americans blame everyone but themselves.

Via Pol:Spy this – “Columnist criticizes foreign correspondents’ coverage of “boy bomb’ story; they respond

Gentlemen of the press: Peter Dudzik of German television ARD, Dietmar Schuman of German television ZDF, Jorg Bremer of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, Gilles Paris of the French Le Monde, Patrick Saint-Paul of Le Figaro, our dear Charles Enderlin of France 2 television, Ms. Emma Hurd of Sky TV, Steve Farrell of the Times of London:
You are all respectable journalists who represent important news organizations. Colleagues.
Maybe one of you knows why, by Thursday morning, none of you had bothered to report to your millions of viewers or readers the story of the boy Abdullah Koran, 10 or 12, who was sent to carry an explosive charge through an IDF roadblock for five shekels by Palestinian “freedom fighters”? Is there no public interest in that story? Does it not have interesting details?
How is it, Ms. Hurd of Sky TV, that when the first missile fell on Gaza your network went into a ‘live” broadcast in prime time for about seven whole minutes (a television eternity), without having current footage (it showed Palestinian pedestrians), but passed over the story of the Palestinian child bomber? How do you explain the nearly complete disregard of the French media for that story? (I understand the Spaniards, who did report the story briefly; they had 200 terror victims to bury). The French news agency devoted a sentence and a half to it at the margins of something, while stressing it was a story whose credibility was problematic.
Well, gentlemen, it is not the credibility of the story that is problematic. It is your credibility that is problematic. The IDF roadblocks are a serious, distasteful reality. They should be covered and reported and so you do. As do we. Ask Gideon Levy. But the other side doesn’t have B’Tselem and Gideons. It has people who take a 10- year-old boy and send him with five shekels and a backpack full of explosives over to our side. To fully understand the roadblocks, from both sides, you have to report that. If you don’t report it, you are fooling your public and yourselves. If I had the authority here, you would all be on the plane on the way home. That might be the reason I do not have the authority here. Have a nice day.

Read the “responses”.

David Frum reviews the Clarke book causing this week’s furor.

Still, there are things that can be learned from the book. One is that for all the praise that Clarke pours on Bill Clinton personally, he presents an absolutely damning account of the terrorism record of the Clinton administration. Time and time again, he and his team agree that a course of action is vital – up to and including air raids against the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan (air raids not cruise missile raids – cruise missiles are slow and gave the Pakistanis time to tip off al Qaeda that the bombs were coming). And nothing happens. Either the bureaucracy refuses to carry out the order or the military drags its feets or (most typically) President Clinton rules out courses of action that carry any risk at all.

Ramblings Journal

For those of you who have been under a rock, Wachs and Von Haessler planned a segment mocking the so-called “war on decency” by recording porn actress Devinn Lane “talking dirty”, but then running it back in reverse, making the verbage unintelligible.
Someone in their infinite wisdom, however, left a mike on the air while the bit was being recorded, allowing very explicit depictions of sexual encounters to go out on the air. The descriptions could be clearly heard over a Honda Truck ad last Friday morning.

The Atlanta morning show hosts are still in the doghouse.

What did I tell you?
I watched CTV National News last night – Clarke’s testimony was presented in surgical out-takes, as though the commission members had remained silent and awe stricken as he spoke. No coverage of the Lehman challenges, no mention of the contradictions between his book, the testimony and his previous statements.
From their website:

Meanwhile, the White House has been fighting back against Clarke, even saying he was angling for a job should Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry win the Nov. 2 election.
“I will not accept any position in a Kerry administration should there be one. On the record, under oath,” was Clarke’s responses.

Problem is, that wasn’t the question to which he responded. And he wasn’t answering to the White House, but to the 911 Commission. The question:

“Until I started reading those press reports, and I said this can’t be the same Dick Clarke that testified before us, because all of the promotional material and all of the spin in the networks was that this is a rounding, devastating attack — this book — on President Bush.
That’s not what I heard in the interviews. And I hope you’re going to tell me, as you apologized to the families for all of us who were involved in national security, that this tremendous difference — and not just in nuance, but in the stories you choose to tell — is really the result of your editors and your promoters, rather than your studied judgment, because it is so different from the whole thrust of your testimony to us.
And similarly, when you add to it the inconsistency between what your promoters are putting out and what you yourself said as late as August ’05, you’ve got a real credibility problem.
And because of my real genuine long-term admiration for you, I hope you’ll resolve that credibility problem, because I’d hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book.”

I guess I’m not surprised – CTV’s war coverage and Alan Fryer’s Washington reporting have been abysmal for the past year – error ridden, one sided and poorly researched.
Early in the invasion of Iraq, there were priceless moments when news anchor Sandy Reynaldo would report with sober face that American forces were “bogged down” and suffering immense difficulties… only to turn the cameras over to Ret.Gen. MacKenzie who, complete with maps and pointers, would cheerfully explain how the US military was making military history with the success and speed of the campaign.
Belgravia Dispatch sees the same spin in the US media.

The end of Scrappleface?

Reuters: Yasser Arafat Says Gibson Film Not Anti-Semitic

I suppose Arafat would be the guy to ask.

On April 12th 2003, after the fall of Baghdad, I wrote a column in The Daily Telegraph discussing the latest predictions of doom and making my own observations on how things would look a year ahead. Well, that time is almost up, so here’s how it stands. I wasn’t 100% right, but the naysayers were close to 100% wrong. The original column and predictions appear in black. The updated assessment of the situation is in red:

Read it here – IRAQ: ONE YEAR ON. None of Steyn’s observations will come as any surprise. But it’s fun watching him rub it in.
What is perplexing is the behavior of those who were wrong a year ago, who continue to predict doomsday and failure, unwilling or unable to learn from experience. It’s almost perverse. If you want a good idea of what is likely to happen in the coming months, listen carefully to these people, and then presume the opposite. Not a bad system, actually.

BBC commissioned poll in Iraq The poll suggests that Iraqis are happier than they were before the invasion, optimistic about the future and opposed to violence. It suggests that the reporting of the daily attacks on the occupying forces in Iraq could be obscuring another picture. Seventy percent said that things were going well or quite well in their lives, while only 29% felt things were bad. And 56% said that things were better now than they were before the war. Almost half (49%) believed the invasion of Iraq by the US-led coalition was right, although 41% felt that the invasion “humiliated Iraq”. More than three quarters (79%) want Iraq to remain united, and only 20% want it to become an Islamic state.

CTV/Globe and Mail/Ipsos Reid poll of Canadians Prime Minster Paul Martin … reiterated his support of Canada’s decision not to send troops to Iraq, a view shared by 74 per cent of Canadians in a new CTV/Globe and Mail/Ipsos Reid poll. 63 per cent of Canadians believe the United States made a mistake in going to war in Iraq.That’s a dramatic jump of 16 points since December. Other findings of the poll: 67 per cent agree that U.S. President George Bush knowingly lied to the world in order to justify his war with Iraq. 61 percent agree “true democracy will never come to the region,” despite all the U.S. efforts. 69 per cent�agree that because of what has happened, the U.S. “will learn a valuable lesson” that it is better for them to work with countries around the world rather than to act on their own in issues of world crisis. 54 per cent disagree that because of what happened on Sept. 11 2001, the U.S. is justified in any action it takes to protect itself from future terrorist attacks.

What do the Iraqis know that Canadians don’t?
The truth?
The Canadian poll was blasting all over the airwaves today. A representative from Ipsos-Reid was interviewed on local talk radio – and it was most enlightening. In discussing the poll results there was no qualification offered for the belief that “Bush lied”, as in pointing out that no one has any evidence that this is true. He offered that the poll results indicated that Chretien had chosen the correct position regarding Iraq – as though popular opinion should guide national security policy.
Very revealing. I wonder how the questions were worded. Check the second last paragraph, for example – the learned a valuable lesson result.

A followup to my comments on the allegedly beleagured shock jock:
Dead Man Talking, And Talking, And Talking – Reid Stot has a lengthy post on the history of Howard Stern, wolf crier…

But if you want the short tame proof this is nothing new, consider this quote: “Howard Stern is Dead Man Talking. Remember where you heard it first.” And where and when did we hear it first? From Michael Harris, in Ottawa, Tuesday, November 18, 1997.

“Live by the tit, die by the tit”.
Wish I’d come up with that.
Via Instapundit:

Is it just me, or is Howard Stern turning into a whiny tit?

Howard came back after the break and said he has some bad news. He said that the future of radio is coming to what he thought it would. He said he’s wanted to be on radio since he was 5 and knew that he would change the way people talk on radio. He said it was his stupid destiny. He said he finally got on the radio and got on in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and he’s even changed the way people talk on TV. He said that his tim has passed though and he’s become too much of a symbol in this country that is out of control to the religious right. He said they’ve been organizing for the past 15 years or so trying to get him off the air. He said that they’ve been targeting his advertisers and trying to censor him. He said he has made the big mistake of getting political.

He’s made a career for himself as a risk taker, and now he wants a risk free environment.
I actually like Stern well enough to listen to him when travelling in the US. But give it a rest, Howard. When you push the envelope, sometimes, the envelope pushes back.
If you were broadcasting in a country in which there were no rules or regulations, in which there were no possibility of enforcing decency norms, you’d be busting your ass in a real job. Without the envelope, there can be no “Howard Stern”.
Stern could always move here to Canada , where both he and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are banned by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council and where watching Fox News is a criminal code offense.
update – Added to the Beltway Traffic Jam.
more – at Instapundit

Jaeger skewers Mary Walsh, and it looks good on her.

Speaking of taxpayer-funded nonsense, what’s one to make of this interview with Mary Walsh? Mary Walsh is the warrior princess of the CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, who regularly subjects conservative politicians to haranguing monologues. Here she is taking a run at Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s health care reforms:

Well, I already talked to Jean Chretien about it, but what is Ralph Klein up to? What does he want? I think he’s just drinking too much. I think he should just get off the liquor. Personally, Ralph Klein, cuz he really has that kind of, now, this is the fourth time he’s trying to drive through this private health care legislation; nobody wants it, not even the people of Alberta and he’s still doing it. He’s just like one of those drunks. He’s got a bad hangover. I don’t even know if he drinks, but just to me, it appears to me that I’m not making any kind of libelous statements about Mr. Klein and his relationship with a scotch bottle.

Now that’s the kind of classy, cerebral policy analysis we fund the CBC to do. Perhaps you’re not aware that Mary Walsh has a personal interest in health care. She is suffering from macular degeneration, which would have left her blind had she gotten the usual Canadian treatment of being stuck on a waiting list for several months. But instead she’s been rushed off for two urgent eye surgeries – in St. Louis.
She continues to read her leftist harangues off of a teleprompter albeit with large type. That she can see at all is thanks to surgery performed in private American clinics, yet she continues to rant against private health care. All the time funded by Canadian taxpayers, of course.

Another good Canadian blogger. Don’t let the “Trudeau” in “Trudeaupia” scare you off.

Tonight’s top stories on CTV National News:
Screenshot

9. Rosie O’Donnell marriage
8. Howard Stern / Clear Channel story
7. Canadian boy scout leader caught with kiddie porn
6. Man arrested for killing air traffic controller in Europe
5. Blair spy story [ed – Claire Short’s allegations reported as fact]
4. Crisis In Haiti
3. �U.S. judge blocks Conrad Black’s newspaper sale
2. Fraud and illegal trading at CIBC, Canada’s second largest bank.
And… Canada’s number one news story for Feb.26, 2004?
A month old misdirected letter.
1. Stephen Harper, a candidate for the the bigotted, stupid, redneck, rightwing Reform Conservative Party leadership, issued an apology for an error in which a letter intended for the Canadian Indian community was sent to an (Aboriginal) Indian Friendship Center.

Read the item. They certainly don’t waste an opportunity to pile on, do they?