Hugh Hewitt has his BS meter on high;

[L]et me underline two recent media events which deserve more scrutiny than they have thus far received.
The first is the genuinely scandalous assertion by CNN’s Eason Jordan, made at the World Economic Forum, that the United States military has targeted and killed a dozen journalists. The account of Jordan’s remarks – including his backpedaling and the crowd’s reactions–is available at ForumBlog. Thus far no major media outlet has demanded an accounting of Jordan, but the idea that a major figure from American media traffics
in such outlandish and outrageous slanders on the American military deserves attention and criticism, not indifference. It is no wonder that anti-American propaganda gains traction in the world when American news executives set fantasies such as this one in motion. If Jordan had no grounds for peddling this grassy-knoll garbage, he should be fired. If he did have even the flimsiest of grounds, he ought to share his evidence and let the public decide whether his judgment is as flawed as it was when he covered for Saddam all those years.

Well as Hugh points out – this is the man who confessed that CNN had become the “Voice Of Saddam in America ” during the years leading up to the war to ensure access … and there’s been no news he’s undergone an integrity transpant since then …

THE SECOND SUBJECT for mulling is John Kerry’s extraordinary interview with Tim Russert last Sunday. There’s a lot to absorb here, including Kerry’s assertion that he did indeed run guns and CIA men into Cambodia on secret missions–and to aid the Khmer Rouge no less!
What is really remarkable is not Kerry’s whoppers–he couldn’t have meant the Khmer Rouge, right?–or his almost certain not-to-be-fulfilled pledge to sign the form 180. It is the set of questions Tim Russert posed.
Russert is generally regarded as the toughest interview in television, and he did bleed Kerry a bit during the campaign; afterwards Kerry never again came close to Russert’s set before November 2.
But if the questions posed by Russert on January 30, 2005–on Kerry’s fantasy life in Cambodia, on the sequestered records, etc.–were legitimate and useful inquiries after the votes have been cast, why then did no one pose them to candidate Kerry when they might have made a difference in the election? The blogosphere and the center-right media were full of such demands from August 1 forward, but not a single reporter from mainstream media bothered to pose even one of the Russert questions prior to the vote.

The Russert interview with Kerry is simply jaw dropping. I am beginning to suspect that the reason media power brokers like Russert steered so far clear of the Swift Boat accusations wasn’t so
much a matter of fearing the questions were legitimate, but that Kerry may come unglued if he were pressed to answer them. Catching his exaggeration a military resume is one thing – uncovering his grave incompetence – quite another.

A glimpse into the process by which young reporters are indoctinated from the lowest levels in the food chain to conform to formulaic “if it bleeds, it leads” news coverage. The problem is, when you’re at the bottom of the food chain, you tend get bottom of the food chain assignments. There’s not a lot of blood to be found in dry, boring government press releases. Solution? Reach for the ketchup.
Case in point – this evening on the CTV local news (Saskatoon affiliate), reporter Shannon Spring began her segment by revisiting two particularly tragic multi-fatality crashes that occured in the province in 2004. The first involved a carload of pre-driving age teens, the second a horrific crash in which 6 died, caused by a multiple-offender drunk driver with a revoked license.
What was the story?
Transport Canada had announced a 24% decrease in highway fatalities in Saskatchewan over the past 5 years, attributing the improvement to a road safety program and increased police surveillance of rural highways. We also learned that Britain leads all countries in terms of lowest highway fatalities, while Canada is fifth, and that more emphasis is needed on preventing car-pedestrian fatalities….
Of course, just holding up a pamphlet and talking about that is pretty mundane stuff. What’s a reporter to do?
The story needs a “hook”, something to make it more palatable to an audience …. what better than a little hemoglobin on the plate? So, off to the film archives, dig up some corpses, arrange the wrecks to create a pleasing backdrop and voila! Your Transport Canada release is taking on life!
To hell with agony revisited by friends and family who may be watching, and to hell with the dignity of those who lost their lives – the scenes now reduced to a few images to be employed in lieu of your own creativity. Its all part of the hard “reality” of professional journalism.
Nice work. Shannon Spring. You’ll go far.

Events of this past week remind me of the first time I drove to Los Angeles.
I was 19, just out of college and living in northern Alberta on my own, trying to grab a piece of the first tar sands exploration boom. My younger brothers and sister were still at home, and our parents decided that a last “family vacation” was in order. Disneyland would be the destination. For the sake of comfort, we took two cars – the family Plymouth and my new Ford Pinto, complete with rather gaudy trick paint.
The journey was not undertaken lightly. Saskatchewan drivers are well equipped mentally for long distance driving – crossing the vast open spaces of the Dakotas, Wyoming, Arizona, and Nevada was a breeze. I can still recite verbatim most of the Steve Martin comedy tape Cruel Shoes. �(“Put them on me.”)
However, like everyone else, we knew that the infamous Los Angeles freeways were among the most dangerous places on earth. We knew that merely touching a brake pedal at the wrong time could transform 8 lanes of racing Detroit metal into a screeching, twisted, burning mass of death. The cars travelled “bumper to bumper” at high speed, only inches from one another in a death defying race, only moments from chaos. One blown tire and many dozens could die – and God help you if it rained. Carnage. Pure carnage.
We knew this to be fact, because every week or so we saw news reports and grisly film footage of multi-car pileups on smog obstructed, rain-soaked California freeways on CBC news.
California “hundred car pileups” were a favoured bleed-lead of the 1970’s, like the role played by giant snowstorms, floods and hurricanes on the networks today. Plenty of death, destruction and distraught onlookers. In fact, much like coverage in Iraq over the past two years.
We were determined to make the journey and set our concerns aside until that bridge had to be crossed. The plan didn’t include much LA driving, anyway – Disneyland, Marineland, Capistrano, San Diego, a day trip by bus to Tijuana.
After a couple of days doing the sights as a family from our small motel in Anaheim, my younger sister and I struck out on our own in my Pinto. We bought a simple freeway map, and headed to Long Beach, downtown LA and Hollywood. We went window shopping on Rodeo Drive, discovered (by chance) the mansion where the exterior shots of the “Beverly Hillbillies” were filmed, cruised around in the Hollywood hills, marvelling at the homes.

It was when we decided to return to the motel that we reailzed our timing was not so good. Deep in the evening “rush hour” and to make matters worse, the unthinkable – it started to rain. We were facing the most dangerous stretch of California freeway destruction of all; the Santa Ana.

To our relief and amazement, we discovered that the drivers on LA freeways were actually quite sensible. Contrary to what we had been led to believe, they did not plow into the cars before them at the first touch of a brake – they slowed down in an orderly fashion. The clogged lanes were capable of slowing to a full stop, then accelerating, which we did on multiple instances without so much as a dent to show for it.
It was nothing like we had been led to believe.
We returned to the motel safe and sound, with a newfound confidence in our driving competence – and a newly planted seed of skepticism about the CBC news.
Today, after an election in “war-torn” Iraq that will be forever remembered for confounding the dire predictions, defying the threat of violence, and exceeding popular expectations, as the anti-war left and Bush critics begin to concede (however grudgingly) that liberating the Iraqi people may have been the right thing to do – I’m taken back to that news footage we used to see of freeway pileups in California on the CBC.
The difference today is that some of us – a minority, admittedly – were not relying on the CBC, CNN, or CBS to get our information about the Iraq war and their prospects for democracy. We read Chrenkoff and 2Slick and Healing Iraq and knew that for all the horrific pictures and body counts on the nightly news, that there was a chance – even a good chance – that things were not quite as bad as our televisions would have us believe.
Just as California freeways of the 70’s weren’t one long demolition derby, most cars in Iraq were not full of explosives, most ordinary Iraqis, military and security forces left for work and arrived at their destinations, and returned home for dinner after an uneventful day.
I wonder how many of those who are seeing for the first time a larger picture of Iraq that suggests under-reported success and stablity, are reviewing what they were told in the days leading up to the election and considering the credibility of those who did the telling.
Despite the frustration of watching positive news being supressed by a media that was not so secretly hoping for a “Republican failure”, in the final analysis the mainstream media may have done the Bush administration, the Iraqi people and most importantly – the western world – a huge, unintended favour.
They oversold their case.
In days to come, there will be return to partisan business as usual, to bad news and negative spin. The glow of a successful election will wane and the Media Left will again try to bury progress under failure, to forecast grave outcomes, to second guess, to challenge the motives and intelligence of those leading the war against Islamofascism. They are, after all, slow learners. I suspect it’s just not going to matter as much as it used to. They threw everything they had at Iraq – and failed. Bush did not flinch, the American people held firm, and the Iraqi people threw it all back at them.
Like Dan Rather writ large, the credibility and influence of the mainstream media over public opinion has been dealt a crippling blow in Iraq. That it was self-inflicted just makes it all the more satisfying.