In a web-exclusive story on the web site of U.S. News & World Report, Senior Writer Jay Tolson's article on Muhammad cartoons is headlined "Matters of Faith: Satanic Cartoonery." Satanic? And no quotes? Since when do they use "Satanic" without quotes and mockery?  Tolson comes flat-down in the middle of this controversy, believing that free speech needs some respect, but that freedom has been "abused," as Bill Clinton argued. Hmm...Tolson ends by touting the "high-minded sentiments" of one Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim activist the U.S. State Department banned from teaching at Notre Dame. Tolson's theme is the lines are blurred (and guess who's doing the blurring):

Reactions to the cartoon scandal do not simply fall on two sides of an increasingly blurred line between the Islamic and western worlds.

Over at www.mrc.org, we’ve just posted a new study of how ABC, CBS and NBC have covered the NSA surveillance story. It's just as awful as you expected — most network stories were framed around the idea that the program is probably illegal and a shocking violation of Americans’ civil liberties.

Maybe the most interesting statistic is how reporters themselves refer to the targets of NSA’s surveillance. Most of the time, it’s either “domestic spying” or “spying on U.S. citizens,” categories that account for 84% of journalists’ descriptions. Only about one-sixth of the reporters descriptions point out that the targets are either “U.S. citizens suspected of ties to al-Qaeda” or “suspected al-Qaeda operatives inside the U.S.”

James Taranto at Opinion Journal reports today that Fayetteville (N.C.) State University officials have reviewed a tape of Julian Bond's wild remarks there last week, as reported by World Net Daily, and determined it was not completely accurate: "Based on the review, it was determined that nowhere during Bond's speech was reference made to the Nazi Party, nor was the word 'token' used." Taranto elaborates on a conversation with FSU public relations director Jeffery Womble:

We phoned Mr. Womble this morning, and he told us that FSU disputes the WND account only on these two points. That means the following elements are undisputed:

-- "Calling President Bush a liar, Bond told the audience at the historically black institution that this White House's lies are more serious than the lies of his predecessor's because Clinton's lies didn't kill people." 

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a protest in front of its offices:

More than two dozen people, including children, assembled in front of the Inquirer building this morning to protest the reprinting of a Danish cartoon that has sparked angry denunciations and demonstrations across the Muslim world."

The group carried signs with such messages as "No to Hate," "Peaceful Protest for Religious Tolerance," and "Distasteful Journalism."

Amanda Bennett, editor of The Inquirer, spoke to the group.

"I went out to talk to them, and told them that neither I nor the newspaper meant any disrespect to their religion or their prophet. I invited them to write their views for publication in our newspaper. Several people, both women and men, suggested that this might be the occasion to start a better dialogue between the paper and the Muslim community in the greater Philadelphia area. I agreed, and asked the leaders to contact me so that we could get a meeting together between members of their community and the newspaper."

In the original article accompanying the cartoon, the Inquirer said:

Here CBS goes again. Today, with the aid of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on President Bush’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, CBS’s The Early Show was able to once again focus on "domestic spying." Three times in the first 9 minutes of the 7:00 half hour, there was a mention of "domestic spying."

Harry Smith led off the broadcast at 7:00 with the following tease:

Harry Smith: "Good morning, I'm Harry Smith, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will be on the hot seat today defending President Bush's highly controversial domestic spying program at a Senate hearing, we'll have details."

On the heels of CNN pledging $100,000 to the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association, CNN has now pledged $50,000 to the Native American Journalists Association. Are they liberal "diversity" czars? Yep. Redskins fans in particular can read their "Reading Red Report 2003: A Call for the News Media to Recognize Racism in Sports Team Nicknames and Mascots." (Enjoy the comparison of using the Redskins name to the description of grotesque fatal "splattering" head injuries.)

The CNN news from the NAJA press release:

This is good news," NAJA President Mike Kellogg (Navajo) said. "NAJA awarded more than $25,000 in scholarships last year and each year we see more requests from students. We're delighted that in the coming years we'll be able to help more of our future broadcasters."

In her obituary following the death of Betty Friedan this past Saturday, AP National Writer Hillel Italie summarized Friedan's first and most influential book, "The Feminine Mystique," in these terms:

Few books have so profoundly changed so many lives as did Friedan's 1963 best seller. Her assertion that a woman needed more than a husband and children was a radical break from the Eisenhower era, when the very idea of a wife doing any work outside of house work was fodder for gag writers, like an episode out of "I Love Lucy."

Independence for women was no joke, Friedan wrote. The feminine mystique was a phony deal sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.

After her slap at the Republican Eisenhower era (it's not as if the Democratic Truman era that preceded it was any different for women after the soldiers returned from World War II), Italie's obituary carries expected praise from liberal icons Hillary Clinton, National Organization of Women President Kim Gandy and Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal.

The obituary's account of Friedan's early years and the time leading up to the publication of "The Feminine Mystique" reads like the "bright girl held back by societal norms becomes disillusioned" story one might expect based on her book.

The trouble is, the still widely-accepted accounts of Betty Friedan's early years have been shown to be totally, if you excuse the term, divorced from reality. The only hint that Italie gives of Friedan's true past is the description of her as a "labor reporter" during roughly the mid-1940s.

There's much more to Betty Friedan's early years than Ms. Italie lets on.

One would hope and expect a liberal newspaper like the New York Times to have the meager virtue of consistency on matters of freedom of expression, particularly in defense of another newspaper. As the world now knows, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad last September, considered taboo (though not always recognized as such) by Muslims.

But Times reporter Craig Smith apparently found the cartoons themselves far more inflammatory than he did the actual rioting of Muslims burning embassies in Syria and Lebanon. Even the headline to his Sunday Week in Review story suggests the Danish newspaper's exercise of free speech was somehow irresponsible, likening it to pouring fuel on a flame: “Adding Newsprint to the Fire.”

Michael Hayden, Deputy Director of National Intelligence, appeared on both Fox News Sunday and This Week with George Stephanopoulos, but though at a Senate hearing just three days earlier Hayden and other intelligence officials had cited the potential damage caused by the New York Times story disclosing the program to eavesdrop on al-Qaeda communication inside the U.S., only Fox's Chris Wallace raised the subject. Stephanopoulos was more interested in himself as a potential victim of big brother: “Let me try to give you a hypothetical, see if you can answer it. I went to Pakistan after 9/11. I interviewed a Taliban representative. If after that interview, that person calls me, am I captured?” Wallace asked: "You and other top officials say that disclosure of this program has harmed national security. Do you mean that just in theory, or in fact? Has publication of the New York Times story, to the best of your reckoning, actually changed the way terrorists do business? Do you feel that they're acting differently since this story broke out?" Hayden would only say that the success of American intelligence “is not immune from the disclosure of its techniques and procedures to our enemy." (Brief transcripts follow.)

Today's Matt Lauer scored a Jerome Bettis-sized TD this morning by asking a question regarding the current Muslim rioting that was as unexpected as it was perspicacious. Meanwhile, former Clinton diplomat Bill Richardson offered the instinctive Democratic response to a threat to our security: bring on the UN!

Richardson, currently the New Mexico governor, described the grim state of the Muslim world: "I've never seen the situation so dire with with the threats from Iran, the victory of Hamas, the escape of Badawi in Yemen. This is a very dangerous situation. It seems that the Muslim world is exploding."

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The Tom Toles quadruple-amputee cartoon for the Washington Post hasn't been a major story, but it did inspire a story from ABC's Jake Tapper, and Toles was interviewed on CNN. (NRO Media Blog has video here.) In a brief interview, Paula Zahn's questions were fairly adversarial, and Toles was unapologetically liberal in reply:

ZAHN: So, you have heard what the Joint Chiefs of Staff said about your cartoon, that it was a callous depiction of soldiers who have suffered life-altering wounds. How do you justify using war casualties to make a political point?