Earlier today, NewsBuster Noel Sheppard posted an item wondering how the media would cover the dismissal of Valerie Plame's civil lawsuit against V.P. Cheney and Scooter Libby.

We now have the answer from the New York Times: an article that miraculously manages to omit Plame's name from the headline!

That's right. The Times article is cryptically entitled: "Judge Dismisses Suit by Former C.I.A. Operative". For the casual reader, it could have been any old ex-spook. Move along; nuthin to see here.

Repeating the downbeat spin employed when the Dow Jones Industrials passed 13,000 in late April and ABC's reporter warned “we're actually overdue for a correction,” less than three months later when the Dow closed over 14,000, ABC's World News put the news into a “yes, but” framework. Fill-anchor Elizabeth Vargas on Thursday night led with the record high close, but fretted that “there's a good deal of worrisome economic news these days -- from sky-high gas prices to America's gaping trade deficit” and “yet,” she marveled, “the market keeps marching on.” Reporter John Berman began by emphasizing that though “the Dow went from 13 to 14,000 in just 3 months,” this occurred “despite those serious jitters about the U.S. economy: $3 gas, a major housing slump -- a drag on the U.S. economy.” Crediting the rise to overseas earnings, Berman pointed out that “while the economy in the U.S. is struggling along in a growth rate of less than one percent, it's racing ahead at nearly 11 percent in China with strong numbers in India, Russia and Brazil as well.” Vargas followed up on a gloomy note, raising “disappointing earnings reports from Google,” prompting Berman to predict: “It may mean that the mood tomorrow won't be quite so rosy.”

Thursday's CBS Evening News wasn't as negative as it was back in April, but in his generally upbeat piece Anthony Mason contrasted the American economy with the international scene: “The U.S. economy doesn't look nearly as strong. Retailers just had their worst month in nearly two years. Gas prices are rising. And house prices are falling.”

As journalism giant Rupert Murdoch's bid to buy the Wall Street Journal's parent company gets closer and closer to reality, the number of hit pieces continues to grow. After all, the man behind FOX News, the New York Post, The Times of London and other conservative-leaning news outlets cannot be allowed to conduct business without an effort to bring him to his comeuppance. Finally, however, someone from the liberal-leaning media is sticking up for Murdoch, albeit in a somewhat backhanded way.

In a commentary published on MSNBC's website today, O. Casey Corr goes to bat for Murdoch by saying despite the fact that many of the media concerns he owns tend to favor conservative views, he's not to blame for the current news media atmosphere.

As part of their week-long series of specials previewing their upcoming presidential debates with YouTube, CNN interviewed Dr. Mehmet Oz on Wednesday evening. Oz and host Paula Zahn discussed the media-driven "crisis" in health care. Zahn asked Oz, "what is the answer to piercing the bureaucracy. That is certainly something you can't fix overnight." Oz's answer: "Well, one of our biggest challenges is nihilism. People don't think they can fix the problem. But we can, Paula."

Dr. Oz is a cardiologist, an author, and is a regular contributor to Oprah Winfrey's radio show "Oprah & Friends" on XM satellite radio. In her first question to Oz, Zahn asked, "how much of a crisis are we in, when it comes to health care." Besides listing the "deep-seated lack of confidence" among health care workers, and the technological backwardness in tracking patients and their records in the industry, Oz used the oft-repeated line that "to boot, 50 million people roughly don't have any insurance at all." Of course, this is just a sound byte that is used to support the sense that there is a "crisis," and doesn't tell the whole picture, as a recent BMI report demonstrated.

Patrick Ishmael of "NewsBuckit" has an answer for Noel's question about how the media will cover the Plame case dismissal.

Ishmael found an initial reports first left out any mention of Plame name leaker Richard Armitage.*:

Eleven companies announced on July 18 to self-regulate and stop advertising to children under 12 in order to "help curb the child obesity problem."

But that wasn't enough for ABC "World News with Charles Gibson" or CBS "Evening News." Both shows supplied food fascists to complain that even this change isn't going to be enough.

"Today’s changes are getting a lot of attention, but as American children face an epidemic of obesity, will these changes really make a difference?” wondered “World News with Charles Gibson” anchor Elizabeth Vargas on July 18.

A federal judge has just dismissed Valerie Plame Wilson's lawsuit against members of the Bush administration.

Will this be the lead story of this evening's newscasts? Regardless of the answer, the Washington Post reported moments ago (emphasis added throughout):

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates said that Cheney and White House aides cannot be held liable for the disclosure of information about Plame in the summer of 2003 while they were trying to rebut criticism of the administration's war efforts levied by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Please hold your applause, as the following will likely be greeted by the press with similar disdain as an unwelcome guest on Christmas Eve:

This story seems nothing more that another person's exercising his right to defend life and property, something that most people in Texas heartily support. But the lead paragraph from a Houston Chronicle article raises a warning flag:State Rep. Borris Miles, who voted earlier this year against a bill broadening Texans’ rights to defend themselves with deadly force, shot and wounded a man he said was trying to steal copper from a palatial house he is building in the Third Ward.1 

The article notes that this is a success story for concealed carry, but also emits more warning signals about proper self-defense protocols:

The dems are pushing a government run health care system.

SCHIP, State Children's Health Insurance Program, was an initiative of the Clinton administration. It’s purpose was to extend coverage to those who made too much money to be eligible for government plans. Today the idea is further expansion of eligibility of the poverty level as well as age levels.

The program will alienate current insureds from private programs ultimately eliminating competition, increasing prices, and lowering quality of care.

Author pictures, as you can obviously see, are back again. I had to rewrite the code from scratch and am testing them in the blog posts only.

If I feel confident in the code, user avatars will come back in the comments but a two restrictions: 1) pics can be no bigger than 3kb in size, 2) they must be exactly 85 pixels high if you don't want them to appear stretched out.

Private messaging is working again also.

Forget about carbon credits. SUV owners should just stop buying meat, and all their enviro-guilt will disappear faster than a Big Mac placed in front of former President Bill Clinton.

Such was the finding of a Japanese study published by Blackwell Synergy's Animal Science Journal, and reported at New Scientist Wednesday (emphasis added throughout):

A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.

For those reaching for their metric calculators, a kilogram is about 2.2 pounds, the amount of steak a relatively health conscious family of four might consume at dinner with a variety of yummy side dishes:

A Democratic presidential contender has hinted that he thinks some form of sex ed is appropriate for the nation's five-year olds.

I'm not exactly holding my breath for media outrage or at least interest in the topic, but I though Good Lt. at the "Jawa Report" has some good observations about how yet again, life seems to be imitating South Park:

Amazing. Simply amazing.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Planned Parenthood Tuesday that sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is "age-appropriate," is "the right thing to do."

The left, at the rate of almost several times per month now, is intent on mimicking South Park's proverbial "theater of the absurd" in real life and real time. The episode? Season 5's "Proper Condom Use," in which the school board decides that condom use has to be taught to progressively younger grades to the point that the kindergarteners are learning about it.

The New York Times has been taking a lot of well deserved guff over the last couple of years for obtaining and publishing classified national security secrets but it had not been prepared for the latest row over its pre-publication book review of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".

The review, that gives away a few spoilers, has been met with anger by both the book's author JK Rowling and her publishers. Rowling came out swinging after learning that both the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun had obtained pre-publication copies of the book despite a costly embargo.

"I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children," she said.

Say you write for or edit the metro section of a major metropolitan newspaper and you have a juicy story of a local ex-mayor who was arrested for running a brothel. It's right on the heels of the Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) prostitution scandal and the politician in the local story in question was once a sheriff's deputy, clearly no stranger to anti-prostitution laws.

Party affiliation is just one more tidbit of information that couldn't hurt your readers, right?

Not for the Washington Post.

How many heard anything about yesterday being the 38th anniversary of Chappaqudic? It was mentioned on one of Fox's News Programs. I don't watch the alphabet networks so I don't if it was mentionsed on them.  In July of 1969 I was going through basic trainging at Fort Jackson. The joke then was that the Republicans (Nixon) put a man on the moon but the Democrats (Kennedy) couldn't get a whore across the river.

It seems you can't swing a dead cat these days without whacking a Rupert Murdoch hit piece.

It must have been the New York Times' turn at the plate so to speak Thursday, and writer Richard Perez-Pena was more than up to the challenge.

After an introduction of Peter R. Kann, the Chairman and CEO of Dow Jones, the company Murdoch is trying to buy, Perez-Pena appeared loaded for bear (emphasis added throughout):

Mr. Kann, who had been advising the family against selling, expressed hope that Mr. Murdoch would not prevail, using an image of The Journal as a citadel trying to repel an invasion by tabloid barbarians.

"The drawbridge is up," Mr. Kann told the group. "So far, so good."

News Corp is a tabloid barbarian? Wow. Nice reference, wouldn't you agree? Yet, Perez-Pena was just getting warmed up:

The Business & Media Institute study "Fire & Ice," which examined media hysteria over global warming and global cooling in the past 100 years was cited by "The Rush Limbaugh Show" on July 18.

"But this puts the blame for all of this hysteria on global warming exactly where it belongs, and that is the media!  Now, for a hundred years we've had wacko scientists trying to advance agendas, and if the agenda happens to fit the media -- and the agenda here, by the way, is chaos.  The agenda is crisis," Limbaugh said about the study.

You can read the entire transcript here or listen to audio on the BMI Web site.

The blogoshpere is full of opinions, but this one you're paying for. Your tax dollars are going to National Public Radio Blogger and Morning Edition commentator John Ridley to editorialize "I'm sorry, but chick fights are sexy" in his new blog on the NPR website called “Visible Man”, which will appear twice a week. Ridley chimes in on why he likes Elizabeth Edwards for his first post:

Ladies throwing down is just plain hot, and that's true whether they're drunk and tussling on the Vegas Strip or if they're doing some verbal mud wrestling in the media. And the woman least afraid to get her li'l dukes up, and therefore currently the sexiest in politics, is Elizabeth Edwards.

The day after Independence Day, ABC reporter Terry Moran jotted down his thoughts on what makes some people become terrorists. His answer: freedom.

Rather than explore religious fanaticism or just plain depraved human wickedness, Moran insisted in a July 5 blog posting that modernity and the freedom of association it fosters is causing many a young Muslim male to descend into the hellish depths of terrorism.:

Without much fanfare, NBC made an interesting announcement Tuesday: if Fred Thompson becomes a presidential candidate, his episodes of "Law and Order" will no longer be rerun.

As reported by the New York Daily News Wednesday (emphasis added throughout):

"If Fred Thompson formally declares his intention to run for President, NBC will not schedule any further repeats of 'Law & Order' featuring Mr. Thompson beyond those already scheduled, which conclude on Saturday, Sept. 1," [executive producer Dick] Wolf said.

Wolf assured that NBC would take all "appropriate steps consistent with FCC regulations."

"Consistent with FCC regulations" appears to relate to the Equal Time rule: