John Stephenson's blog

I think I’ve heard it all now…a NY Times Op-Ed writer plagarizing himself, and now a Reuters reporter who is his own source. The MSM sure knows how to find quality talent. Hat tip to Jammie Wearing Fool who says:

I think I’ve seen it all now. An story from Reuters reporter Noor Mohammad Sherzai quotes extensively from … Noor Mohammad Sherzai.

And Sherzai claims U.S. troops opened fire on civilians in Afghanistan.

If this story is proven to be bogus, will he claim he misquoted himself?

The Reuters article, titled U.S. fire scatters crowd after Afghan bomb, starts out with “By Noor Mohammad Sherzai”. Later in the article it goes on to say:

In September 2005, a half dozen different bloggers verified that a person facing into what was originally called the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 would be facing almost exactly at Mecca. Some surrounding trees have been added to the design, but the giant central crescent remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign.

If you are a Clinton and a magazine has a negative story on you…then just bribe or threaten them.

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.
So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said. Source

Ed Morrisey has the ultimate question:

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski said MSNBC would show the full comments in context of Rep. King, a top advisor of Rudy Giulliani. Instead they begin the video segment directly with the mosque statement. After showing a few seconds of his comment and a statement from Giulliani, the rest of the segment was spent with CAIR representative, Ibrahim Hooper, without anyone offering an opposing challenge or viewpoint.

Watch Video Here

 

After hearing the apologists defend the paper in countless ways, the New York Times puts them all in an awkward position and admits to giving a huge discount for Moveon.org.

The old gray lady has some explaining to do.
Officials at the New York Times have admitted a liberal activist group was permitted to pay half the rate it should have for a provocative ad condemning U.S. Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus.

The MoveOn ad, which cast Petraeus as “General Betray Us” and attacked his truthfulness, ran on the same day the commander made a highly anticipated appearance before Congress.

But since the liberal group paid the standby rate of $64,575 for the full-page ad, it should not have been guaranteed to run on Sept. 10, the day Petraeus warned Congress against a rapid withdrawal of troops from Iraq, Times personnel said.

Why does the media ignore this? Why is a case of such an important, and active group like CAIR having ties with terrorists being ignored by the mainstream media?  This needs to be exposed to America!

The Holy Land Foundation trial wrapped up months ahead of schedule but a federal judge has yet to rule on whether the Council on American-Islamic Relations will remain an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorist-funding case.

The group known as CAIR asked U.S. District Court Chief Judge A. Joe Fish in a “friend of the court” brief last month to remove it from the listing, saying it caused a decline in membership and fundraising.

Wow! This story is wearing me out! The editor of NewsRound, Sinead Rocks, speaks out about the outrage from Americans to her biased 911 guide for children in her Editor Section. You can read the whole non apology there, but I'll summarize for you here. In short she said that the majority of people clicked through Drudge to an older version and provides a Drudge Archive. As reported earlier, she said she took that page down (we will come back to this). Down a few paragraphs in her piece she says that she later realized that many blogs were actually complaining about the newer version...which you can find here. She wants it to be known that her apology did not apply to the newer version and that BBC stands by it. Problem #1: The Drudge Archive she links to links to the exact same web address as what she claims is the newer version. A Blog called Biased BBC has the entire transformation history captured from google caches.

Even more curiously, having retrieved the original guide on 11SEP2007, watched it disappear on 12SEP2007 (page not found) to reappear as a sanitised single page version, it now seems today that the 11SEP2007 guide version is back online (compare with versions retrieved from Google's cache at Biased BBC) - or is it still not fully purged from your systems (even though the timestamps have been updated to say 12SEP2007)? What gives?

I think you will remember NewsBusters being one of the first to question the authenticity of the latest Osama tapes. Well now a digital forensics expert validates our skeptism. It was a Big Fake!

In analyzing the video, Neal Krawetz of Hactor Factor, an expert on digital image forensics, said in his latest blogs that the video contained many visual and audio splices, and that all of the modifications were of very low quality.

Most striking is bin Laden’s beard, which has been gray in recent images. For this video it is black. “As far as my tools can detect, there has been no image manipulation of the bin Laden portion of the image beyond contrast adjustment. His beard really does appear to be that color.”

….

I need to update everyone on the power of blogs. If it were not for blogs like NewsBusters, that reported this earlier, and our readers exposing media bias, British children would still be learning a rewritten version of history. The BBC has taken down the original quoted page that implied 911 was America’s fault. It is rare that media outlets are so prompt in their self corrections. I am sure that blogs and blog readers were a huge part of making that happen. After all, the earlier reported quote had been there since 2001. Nothing mentioning the correction was posted, but a much more acceptable narrative of facts has replaced it.

The BBC decided to set up a website explaining 911 to kids. They have several sections set up to help the kids out on understanding the war on terror the BBC way. In one section they ask, Why Did They Do It? Guess who gets the blame?

The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks.

In the past, al-Qaeda leaders have declared a holy war - called a jihad - against the US. As part of this jihad, al-Qaeda members believe attacking US targets is something they should do.

When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.

The “La Raza” organization of Hispanics could hardly be more racist. “La Raza” means “The Race” — the Mexican race. But are they ever criticized for that? Not that I have heard. In fact, we read below in the left-leaning Associated Press that “La Raza” is “a mainstream advocacy group”.

“Charlie Norwood, a congressman from Georgia who died earlier this year, appeared to accept the conspiracy at face value, accusing the National Council of La Raza, a mainstream Washington advocacy group, of acting as a front organization for the “radical racist group” MEChA, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan.

The bold type emphasis was mine. My good friend, Jon Jay Ray, that pointed the story out to me says:

I wonder what the various white-racist groups around would have to do to become “mainstream” — cease to be white, I guess.

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about Osama’s beard.Was it fake? Was it dyed?

There has also been a lot of discussion about the politics in the video. Some suggesting they sound a lot like the American left.

There are a lot of oddities that open up questions on the authenticity of the latest Al Qaeda propaganda. Michael Leeden, at the Corner, ponders whether this was really Osama with many good points. Another significant find was pointed out by the leftist site, Booman Tribune.

"Osama Bin Laden’s widely publicized video address to the American people has a peculiarity that casts serious doubt on its authenticity: the video freezes at about 1 minute and 36 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30. The video then freezes again at 14:02 remains frozen until the end. All references to current events, such as the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, and Sarkozy and Brown being the leaders of France and the UK, respectively, occur when the video is frozen! The words spoken when the video is in motion contain no references to contemporary events and could have been (and likely were) made before the U.S. invasion of Iraq."

The blogs and MSM sure paid a lot of attention to Senator Craig, his wide stance, and restroom etiquette.  I wonder why they are not paying as much attention to the ACLU chief getting seven years for child porn?

I wonder, especially, when it involves sexual torture of infants and toddlers....why isn't this getting any coverage?

Take a look here for another example of the media's Fred Thompson-is-lazy meme. Without much else to criticize about him, many are taking his slow approach to announce and anything else they can to label him as lazy, such as using a golf cart instead of walking at the fair. Notice how it is pointed out that he is the "only presidential candidate" to do this. Do these petty things really matter?

I think going after the designer shoes was a definite cheap shot. You tell me, do the shoes make the man? Is this Fox News Channel's idea of "fair and balanced?"