I am a firm believer that "whole" pictures never lie.

Check out for yourself.

http://www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_september_24_2005/anatomy_of_a_photograph/

While introducing an interview with former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean on his Countdown show Friday night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann implied that Plamegate is worse than past White House scandals because, in contrast to scandals from the Nixon, Reagan, and Harding administrations, a sitting White House staff member has been indicted. Referring to Bush supporters who were offended by the title of Dean's book, Worse than Watergate, Olbermann quipped that because of Libby's indictment, "the protests about John Dean's title might instead be coming from the fans of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Harding."

Also, referring to the possibility that the indictment could bolster the belief by some that the White House lied about the rationale for the Iraq invasion, Olbermann wondered: "Is the damage here, perhaps, that as the nation has solely gotten around to questioning the justification for the war in Iraq, what we've all been asking has been: Did the government and people in it make false statements? Are they liars? And now there is a charge of false statements and basically lying against a man who was prominent in that government?" A complete transcript of Olbermann's interview with Dean from the Friday October 28 Countdown show follows:

In a ten-second promo at the end of Friday's NBC Nightly News, an announcer excitedly promised, “Sunday: Joe Wilson, the man at the center of the CIA leak scandal and NBC's got him!” Viewers then saw a short clip of Wilson as he sat across from Campbell Brown: “The White House trained their guns on me.” Back to the announcer with matching text on screen: “The Dateline interview: Sunday 7, 6 Central.” CBS ran its plug for 60 Minutes inside a CBS Evening News story in which John Roberts asserted: "The case started with the outing of a CIA operative, but [prosecutor Peter] Fitzgerald found no crime in that. It didn't sit well with Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson. In an exclusive interview for Sunday's 60 Minutes, he told Ed Bradley:" CBS played a soundbite of Wilson accusing Karl Rove despite Rove's vindication so far: "After Mr. Rove said about my wife, 'She's fair game,' I would like to see him frog-marched out of the White House. Whether it's in handcuffs or not is immaterial. If it was not illegal, it was certainly, it seems to me, a dubious ethical comportment. And I think we deserve better from our senior public servants."

Video of NBC's promo in Real or Windows Media

In a recent posting by Tim Graham, MoveOn.Org vs. Liberal Media Reality On 2,000 "Milestone" Coverage of Iraq, MoveOn.Org, is seen to be misrepresenting the facts concerning the extent of media coverage of the US military deaths reaching the 2000 mark in Iraq, claiming that “the national media are ignoring this tragic milestone." In reality, the national media gave not only exceptionally broad and prominent coverage to the event, they flooded the air and print medium with extended coverage over many days. In the process, many other newsworthy items, such as the historic vote on the constitutional referendum in Iraq, and the after effects of Hurricane Wilma in Florida were left in the dust.

After weeks of joyous anticipation by many in the media, a Bush Administration official, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was today indicted by a federal grand jury. NBC's Washington bureau chief Tim Russert wanted to emphasize the event's importance, telling his MSNBC audience: "This is significant, it's the first time in 130 years a White House official has been indicted."

Not according to MSNBC's own Web site. It's "Fact File: White House Staff Indictments" provides a "brief
history of indictments in recent administrations." Going back only into the mid-1970s, it identifies eight people, including a Reagan Cabinet member and two Clinton Cabinet members, who were indicted on various charges. These included conspiracy, obstruction, embezzlement, illegal stock trading, lying to the FBI and grand larceny. One Clinton official was indicted on 39 corruption counts related to acceptance of gifts from a company he was responsible for regulating.

“The real lingering question for me is,” former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw asserted on the 5pm EDT Friday edition of MSNBC's Hardball, “was this a one-man band, or were there others in the administration who were linked to his efforts?” Brokaw added, as if it were the natural thing to wonder about: “And, of course, the question that will be raised by a lot of people not in any way fans of this administration, 'what did Dick Cheney know and when did he know it?'”

Brokaw, however, also criticized the news media for “all the speculation leading up to this” when “we ended up with one indictment today.” Looking forward, Brokaw predicted that “I don't think that he [Fitzgerald] has an indictment in mind for Karl Rove,” which, Brokaw noted, “is going to be an acute disappointment to a lot of people who are not fans of this administration.” (Brief transcripts of these comments follow.)

An interesting contrast occurred on the morning shows regarding ExxonMobil’s record high quarterly earnings. Over at CNN’s American Morning, Miles O’Brien and Andy Serwer fretted over ExxonMobil’s announcement, with O’Brien declaring it the, “outrage moment of the morning.” Meanwhile, Good Morning America’s financial contributor Mellody Hobson explained how the profits were a result of supply and demand. Hobson explained to ABC’s Charlie Gibson how the “outrage” over these profits are “not warranted” and “the oil companies have nothing to do with how gas prices are set.”

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had a long news conference this afternoon, addressing the end of service of his Grand Jury and the indictments handed down on I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Shortly thereafter, the talk station to which I listened after the PC ran a newsbreak at 3:30 PM EST. During that break, they ran the ABC news, and one of the stories was, of course, the indictments. The story was read by a female reporter, whose name I missed and cannot find, and after talking about the Libby indictments, she said, in a hopeful tone, that Karl Rove was not indicted, but "Fitzgerald says he is still being investigated."

I listened to the entire Fitzgerald press conference, and he said nothing of the sort. He repeatedly refused to say anything of the sort about ANYONE else. He spoke about the Libby indictments. Period. He did say that the investigation was not completed. He refused to say whether or not he would attempt to impanel another Grand Jury, though it sounded, to me, as if he would not.

"Is the investigation finished? It's not over. But … very rarely do you bring a charge in a case that's going to be tried in which you ever end a grand jury investigation. I can tell you that the substantial bulk of the work of this investigation is concluded."

Is Rove "still being investigated?" Possibly. Possibly not. There's nothing in what Fitzgerald said this afternoon that would confirm or eliminate either possibility. As I say, I listened to the entire thing, and my reaction was "if I'm Karl Rove, this is a good thing." (For what it's worth, Kathryn Jean Lopez says that CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin agrees, that he would be "very, very encouraged" if he were Karl Rove.) I could be wrong, but for ABC news to report that "Fitzgerald says he is still being investigated" is for them to report something that's just plain not true. Fitzgerald did not say that. It's as if they're so emotionally invested in Rove being indicted that they have to keep the dream alive...

Lyflines - Lyford's other blog…

This is a very curious press conference just conducted by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. With his machine-gun delivery, he repeatedly flopped back and forth between saying that the “outing” of Valerie Plame, wife of discredited Ambassador Joe Wilson was a “serious matter,” and saying that he “reached no conclusion” whether she had been outed, and if so, when and by whom.

The mood in the room among the reporters changed appreciably as the conference went on. Initially, the press was very interested in the charges made and reasons for them, and in the charges not made against other people, and the reasons why not. But by the end of the conference, the reporters were clearly puzzled by the wandering speech of Fitzgerald and his lame analogies about a baseball pitcher throwing at a batter’s head, and a bank robber with his fingerprint on the holdup note and a signed confession.

Here's how the AP reported today's developments in the Plame case:

"Karl Rove, President Bush's closest adviser, escaped indictment Friday but remained under investigation, his legal status a looming political problem for the White House." [emphasis added]

"Escaped"?  Did he scale the wall at the Big House?  Pull a Shawshank Redemption and slip out through the sewer system?

If during the Clinton administration, a top aide had not been indicted, would the AP have spoken of him having "escaped"?

Is the AP's disappointment showing? 

Here's a link to the AP story:

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/28/D8DH5FOG0.html

The excitement and anticipation radiating from the mainstream media, as American deaths in Iraq inched toward the 2,000 mark, has been more than evident. It has also been a time of struggle for those of us who deeply mourn the loss of these heroic young men and women. Now, in addition to the pain and suffering we truly understand, the American public must also endure the pre-planned platitudes of a press strongly opposed to this combat action.

Headlines and editorials condemning the war or calling for withdrawal of our troops have been everywhere. News and editorial leads have all sounded the theme of Washington’s wrong doing. For example, Bob Herbert’s column in the October 27 New York Times reads, “Thousands upon thousands are suffering and dying in Iraq while, in Washington, incompetence continues its macabre marathon dance with incoherence.”

Yesterday, Harriet Miers withdrew as a Supreme Court nominee. Today, Lewis Libby has been indicted by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. So how do Keith Olbermann and Craig Crawford explain the lack of any terror alerts to distract the public from this bad news?

Maybe the "coincidence" of a terror alert being issued each time there's a bad news story about the Bush administration isn't as "consistent" as Olbermann declared just a couple of weeks ago when he posited that the liberal Republican mayor of New York was launching a panic over a potential subway attack to distract from the Plame investigation.

Harriet Miers was the victim of conservative "attacks," according to the lead story and its two headlines in Friday's New York Times, and another story advances a theme of vicious and unfair attacks against Miers.

"Bush's Court Choice Ends Bid After Attack By Conservatives -- Too Many Doubts," is from Elisabeth Bumiller and Carl Hulse. The headline on the jump page is similar: "Bush's Nominee for Supreme Court Ends Bid After Persistent Attacks by Conservatives."

Reporters Bumiller and Hulse first go to left-wing Sen. Ted Kennedy for a quote lambasting the "extreme right wing": "'The issue of whether the documents were the make-or-break issue is really a red herring,' said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. 'The extreme right wing of the Republican Party have effectively undermined this nomination. They have a litmus test, and Harriet Miers didn't pass that test.'"

The Times lets the Democratic minority leader join the fun: "Democrats, who had remained largely silent as the conservative opposition to Ms. Miers grew, braced for the prospect of a highly conservative replacement choice as the administration seeks a candidate who can better unify Republicans. They said the failure of the nomination illustrated how captive Mr. Bush was to the right wing of his party. 'The only voices heard in this process were the far right,' said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, who had initially suggested Ms. Miers to Mr. Bush as a potential justice."

As ABC, CBS, and NBC all dived into live coverage today to report the indictment of Vice President Cheney's top aide Scooter Libby, this is not at all the way the networks covered indictments of cabinet officers in the Clinton years.

In September 1997, we reported in Media Watch that when former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was indicted on 39 counts, the networks aired a single evening news story. Three of the four networks -- ABC, CNN, and NBC -- underlined that the Smaltz inquiry had so far cost $9 million. None of them noted civil penalties originating from targets of Smaltz's inquiry amounted to more than $3.5 million. The next morning, CBS's morning show, called CBS This Morning, didn't even mention Espy's indictment. Months later, I noted in a Media Reality Check that on December 11, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros was indicted on 18 counts for misleading the FBI about payoffs to a mistress, Linda Medlar. NBC Nightly News filed one story; ABC's World News Tonight gave it 18 seconds. CBS Evening News didn't arrive on the story until the next night, and gave it nine seconds, a fraction of the two minutes Dan Rather gave the nightly El Nino update, about the weather "giving a gentle lift to the monarch butterfly." The morning shows were worse: NBC's Today passed on two anchor briefs, and ABC's Good Morning America and CBS This Morning ignored it.

Isn't it way overdue to clean up the press corp?  Why do they get to print propaganda as if it were news and go back to work each day?  When do we say enough, and clean them out.

Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post today reports on a racist attack lodged by a liberal blogger on Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele (R), an African-American, who is the front-runner in the Republican primary for US Senate in 2006. Mosk also notes how this controversy has touched a Democrat seeking statewide office in Virginia.

A racially charged image of Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele on the Web site of a liberal blogger brought recriminations from both Democrats and Republicans yesterday.

The doctored photo of Steele (R) as a minstrel, and accompanying slurs, prompted Virginia gubernatorial candidate Timothy M. Kaine (D) to pull an ad from the site, stevegilliard.blogspot.com . Kaine's campaign had purchased the space through a broker that put his advertising on numerous liberal-leaning blogs.

As Brent Baker noted on NewsBusters, last night on Larry King Live Bob Woodward made what amounted to a pro-Bush point regarding an Iraq-Niger uranium deal. In a Thursday piece on the Editor & Publisher web site, however, Woodward's ex-Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, discussing the Iraq war and Plamegate, sounded anything but pro-Bush. (Hat tip: Romenesko.)

Some of Bernstein's comments from the Joe Strupp-written article:

"We are obviously watching and the press is beginning to document the implosion of a presidency...How destructive that implosion is going to be, ultimately, we don't know yet.

http://tinyurl.com/a...

And people wonder why I'm a partisan-Libertarian...It's not like the party's all that great (actually, Libertarians suck at a lot of political stuff, a lot of the time, due to principles!). John Stossel (unlike many partisan journalists) clearly cares about the TRUTH, and holding both "major" parties to (gasp!) the same, single standard of wasteful-voting behavior. A breath of fresh air...
JMR