Unbelievable that for over 220 years our former Presidents have had the class, professionalism, and strength to honor this: Keep your mouth shut about a sitting President.

Clinton has jumped on the band wagon and joined the ranks of Carter. Its not too hard to believe the media and academia has said nothing of this second disgusting precedent. (no pun intended)

In a Wednesday CBS Evening News story on shortcomings in FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina, reporter Randall Pinkston cited “frustrations that reached as far away as the state of Maine, where officials received ice that was supposed to go to the Gulf Coast." Pinkston touted how “former President Jimmy Carter, who created FEMA, criticized the Bush administration's decision to strip the agency's independence." Viewers then saw a clip of Jimmy Carter from a Tuesday night forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta: "This obviously lowered FEMA's status so that they would have to go through four or five levels of bureaucracy even to reach the President, whereas FEMA used to deal directly with the President." Of course, that decision -- good or bad -- had bi-partisan support in Congress. (Neither ABC or NBC found Carter's remarks newsworthy.)

Full transcript of the story follows.

When asked about Tom DeLay's position on government pork, Jack "Ching Chong" Cafferty responded with "Has he been indicted yet?". Perhaps Jack should ask "Is my embarrassing career over yet?".

BLITZER: All right. Tom DeLay says there's no pork, everything is essential. I don't know if you heard him say that.

CAFFERTY: Has he been indicted yet?

BLITZER: We'll leave that alone. Jack Cafferty, thank you very much. Coming up, very serious story we're following. We'll tell you how some bloggers are suggesting that they -- suggesting ways they want to fund Katrina relief.

Video available in WMV or Real formats.

NASA reports that it has noticed changes to the Martian surface since it began monitoring in the 1970s.

"New gullies that did not exist in mid-2002 have appeared on a Martian sand dune.

"That's just one of the surprising discoveries that have resulted from the extended life of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which this month began its ninth year in orbit around Mars. Boulders tumbling down a Martian slope left tracks that weren't there two years ago. New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models."

There was another, much more disturbing discovery, surely the product of Martian greed and industrialization.

"And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress."

Inflation is a dirty word in business reporting – except when it’s the journalists themselves doing the inflating.

In the recent Katrina-driven gas scare, network news shows pumped up actual gas prices an average of 75 cents — higher than any state’s gas taxes. Prices shown on the screen were up to $3.25 higher than the national average for the day’s gas. On the other hand, when prices started dropping after Labor Day, the networks’ daily price patrols were scarce.

NBC was the worst offender, with prices shown averaging $1.01 higher than the national price. The network’s Anne Thompson said on the August 31 “Nightly News” that “no matter what kind of gas is sold, today it’s now unbelievably expensive.” Though the national average that day was $2.62, Thompson showed the “unbelievably expensive” backdrop of $3.49 for regular.

In reporting her death, ABC News highlighted
former National Organization for Women president Molly Yard's opposition to Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. What went unmentioned is that Ms Yard also vehemently opposed Justice David Souter's nomination. She ended her written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"Are you prepared to deny freedom to women? Are you prepared to deny reproductive health to women? Are you prepared for lawlessness, and for the death of your daughters and your granddaughters? I tremble for this country if you confirm David Souter. But most of all I tremble for the women of America and their families."

Was Bette Midler serious or joking, when she said at a Tuesday night “From the Big Apple to the Big Easy” fundraising concert in New York City, as recounted in a Rolling Stone posting: "I got a letter from the Republican Party the other day. I wrote back, 'Go fuck yourself.' She then added, 'George Bush is a fan of mine -- he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.'" Rolling Stone characterized that as an example of how some celebrities “angrily denounced government officials” and how Midler employed “even stronger words” than used by another singer. In contrast, however, the AP's Nekesa Mumbi Moody treated Midler's comments as comedy: “Except for a joke about President Bush by Bette Midler -- which promptly got her booed -- the evening's focus was not on the divisive politics of the tragedy, but on the music that has brought communities together in its wake.”

On CNN’s “American Morning” today, Soledad O’Brien spent much of her interview with Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff focusing on what happened in New Orleans three weeks ago when Katrina hit rather than questioning the secretary about how prepared the Gulf coast is for the looming Hurricane Rita (video link and full transcript to follow):

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Lots of officials have told us that they're looking forward in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And I understand that. But I'm curious to know what you see as your responsibility in the big problems in responding to that storm. We heard from the mayor who said he'll take his fair share of the blame. The governor who said the state response buck stops with her. The president said the federal response issues are his fault. Do you take blame for some of the problems?

No doubt in the coming weeks you will hear Big Media accounts of race, poverty and economic imbalance in the United States. As you read these stories, keep in mind the hypocrisy.

While the Publisher and Editor of The New York Times earn $2 million and $650,000 respectively, for entry level journalists they pay below the poverty level (should the worker have a family of five.) Often they will pay employees nothing at all, just the pleasure of working for the Times should be payment enough.

While they try to tell us that unions are great for the country and great for workers, they shudder at the idea of unions infiltrating their own companies. While they bemoan that US corporations don't give minorities a chance, they will probably neglect to mention that the average US corporation has much more opportunity for minorities than the average newsroom.

So take it for what it is worth; a guilty hollow atonement for sins that they continue to perpetrate.

The NY Times is thrilled with the idea of reporters being red carpet walking stars.

Much has been written in the news media as of late about the news media and how all of a sudden they've been acting like the news media. Well, color us nostalgic, but it was with great delight that we went to the 26th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards ceremony at the Marriott Marquis on Monday night and witnessed this inspiring sight: reporters walking the red carpet. We saw CNN, for example, interviewing CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR about reporting. This is what journalism is about, ladies and gentlemen. Should be about.

Yes, indeed. That's what journalism should be about; a liberal hack network talking to a liberal politically motivated hack reporter who is married to a liberal hack politician.

As Brent Bozell's latest column mentions, George Stephanopoulos wasn't quite accurate when he claimed "full disclosure" before his Sunday interview with the boss (the one that used to scream at him in "purple rages") that he worked with him in the 1990s. In fact, the day before the interview, he moderated (for cash? or just a personal favor?) a panel at the Clinton Global Initiative on "Religion, Politics, and Social Progress." The web page on the panel explained the religious right would come up: "They will look into the question of whether religious communities and organizations have taken some of the more sensitive issues (such as AIDS and women’s rights) seriously enough, and if not, why not." The panel did include one religious-righty -- Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention -- but there's no transcript posted, and no news accounts of the panel. Let's hope Mr. Land elaborates. But he wasn't the only ABC face to work for Clinton over the weekend.

It has always been that if you put on a mask and spoke Arabic to a camcorder, you could make it big in the media. Now some in Europe want to put an end to it.

According to the British Guardian, the European commisssion declares the "media should draw up a code of conduct to ensure that newspapers, television stations and the internet do not act as propagandists for terrorists."

"The media are the main vehicle through which [terrorism] attempts to affect citizens and leaders alike," reports the commission. "Journalists face the difficult responsibility of reconciling their duty to inform the public with the need not to facilitate the aims of terrorists."

Reports the Guardian:

You knew it was coming. The Hurricane Katrina inspired global warming stories. Well at the top of this morning's Today show Matt Lauer invoked one of the media's favorite boogeymen:

Matt Lauer: "Then why are there so many hurricanes this year and is global warming to blame? We'll take a closer look at that."

At 7:18am Katie Couric, with a graphic next to her running down the names of all the hurricanes this season, conjectured that global warming was causing so many hurricanes this year the government was running out of names for them.

Katie Couric: "Hurricane season ends November 1st but already people are asking why have there been so many? It has been a brutal year. 17 named storms in the Atlantic, nine of them hurricanes. Among them Arlene, Dennis, the deadly Katrina and now Rita. So many in fact that only four names are left. Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma. After that the National Hurricane Center would have to use the Greek alphabet. Are humans partially to blame for all these natural disasters? Here's NBC's Tom Costello."

At yesterday's funeral for former ABC anchor Peter Jennings, the network apparently placed some rather stringent restrictions on the press who covered it.

According to The Media Drop, ABC News spokeswoman Cathie Levine sent out an email to TV and radio assignment desks which banned all TV and radio crews from the service and prohibited both media from using ABC News-provided audio and video in promos or teasers. The network also forbade TV outlets from putting their logos on any of the official video.

The full posting is available here. It includes the text of the email.

Some fabulous news was released yesterday concerning all those missing children from the states recently ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.  Mysteriously, the Washington Post buried the story on page A10:

“Authorities trying to track down more than 2,600 children in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama still missing three weeks after Hurricane Katrina believe that most of them are not really ‘missing.’

“Rather, authorities said, the vast majority of these children are ‘lost’ -- separated from a parent or guardian during the rush to rescue hurricane victims from rooftops and shelters, when families were divided because of lack of space on a bus or helicopter.”

As the story continues, we find out that about 35 percent of the cases of missing children in the area have already been resolved:

“As of yesterday, the center had resolved 966 out of 3,600 Hurricane Katrina cases, Allen said.”

The AP is constructing bad news for the President (Katrina Adds to Public Doubts About Bush). Again. And to do it, they're using a skewed sample poll, and then misrepresenting what it says. The latest AP-Ipsos poll is what they're reporting on. Once again, they've got a sample of adults, and it is signficantly skewed, with 49 percent Democrats and 41 percent Republicans. And they use that skewed sample as a hammer to hit the President, even if it isn't justified by the actual results.

• An AP-Ipsos poll shows a sharp increase since the storm in the percentage of people who are most worried about the economy.

  Of course it does. Let's stop, for just a moment, and consider what was happening in the media in this country before Katrina hit. Every day, in every outlet, it was all Iraq, all the time. As soon as the storm went through, and the refineries and supply lines went down, the story changed to Katrina and the rising gas prices, and the devastating economic impact. The fact that there's been a sharp increase in people being most concerned about the economy says nothing about George W. Bush.


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In USA Today, reporter Jill Lawrence tackles the subject of the atheist left, and their new organization the Secular Coalition of America, but wait -- she never quite places them on the left. She reports they plan to be "part of broad coalitions fighting policies rooted in religious beliefs, such as limits on stem cell research and access to emergency contraception." (Notice Lawrence uses the liberal "EC" argot and doesn't note the embryo destruction in either goal.) Lawrence wrote their new leader, Laura Lipman Brown, was an advocate: "As a Nevada state senator from 1992 to 1994, she fought for gun control, gay rights and abortion rights." That would seem to earn the L word, but Lawrence doesn't use it.

Gaggle is a daily comic strip about the Washington press corps and Larry the press secretary. Larry deals with the shenanigans of reporters who couldn't imagine anyone voting for a Republican.

There will be a new Gaggle strip, fully colored, every weekday.

Click here for previous strips.