The use of child pornography to sell newspapers was defended this week when New York Times Magazine Editor Gerald Marzorati sent an email defending a photo used in the fashion insert "T", which shows a 17 year old model, topless, with her left breast partially showing.

Now in case you're not versed in New York Times values or the proper use of kiddie porn, this is why it's okay; it's kind of blurry, it was shot by a "legendary fashion photographer", she's got a $4000 coat around her waist, and the section makes about $5 million in advertising revenue which was responsible from moving NYT stock rating to a "buy".

I hope this doesn't throw you out of your chair, but the LA Times was wrong in an article. The difference between this day and every other day is that this time they admit it. The story in question was one that ran 18 months ago about baseball players on steroids named in court documents which by now you've probably heard plenty about. The LA Times, using anonymous sources of course, (do you see a pattern here?) named Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Jay Gibbons, and Miguel Tejada as steroid abusers. Fast forward to the actual affidavit being unsealed, and those players are in fact not among those listed.

Times spokesman Stephan Pechdimaldji said "We regret our report was inaccurate and will run a correction." which I'm pretty sure will be also be known as 'exhibit A' in the libel suits to come. U.S. District Court Judge Edward C. Voss referred to the Times this way: "At best, the article is an example of irresponsible reporting. At worst, the 'facts' reported were simply manufactured." Judge, I believe this makes you an honorary Newsbuster.

On this holy Sunday, just before the celebration of the birth of the Christian Savior, The Seattle Times decided it needed something Christmas related for its Entertainment & Arts section. Not just something that reflects the values of 92% of the country, like a church service, a Christmas play, or a church choir. No, this has to be something that represents The Seattle Times values. Seattle Times arts writer Michael Upchurch certainly found it.

The Seattle Times decided the front page should include the "tawdry glamour" and "warped yuletide spirit" of "drag legend Dina Martina - a big boned chanteuse of stage and dive". So bundle up the kids in their Sunday best and brave the cold night so that your family may celebrate the birth of the Lord at "The All-New Dina Martina Christmas Show".

The ultra-liberal Seattle Times Op-Ed's the usual 21st century media line; the world is going to hell, only journalists can save us, and everything would be fine if it weren't for that darn Craigslist.

"Media companies, especially newspapers, are by default nearly the lone agents of the democratic form of government."

That statement is actually true, if your version of the word "democratic" uses a big D as opposed to a small d. The mainstream media companies you see today is what's left of 50 years of unchallenged "Democratic" mindset. The reason these bastions of liberal thought are failing is that the Internet age has made their bias apparent to people who, thanks to the Internet age, now have other places to get the news.:

You may have seen one of the 19,000 mentions of the "Home-made helicopters from Northern Nigeria." Once the AFP article hit Yahoo! News, it crossed the blogosphere like wild fire. I highly doubt it is true, and if journalists knew the first thing about flight, they might not have been so easily duped.

For starters, let's look at the measurements provided by the journalist.

For a four-seater it is a big aircraft, measuring twelve metres (39 feet) long, seven metres high by five wide.

Seven meters high? That's 23 feet tall. Does the photograph look like the helicopter is over two stories tall and 39 feet long? But the real problem with the story is with the tail rotor -- or lack thereof. France 24 has several more of the photos of this "helicopter", and in the one where the "pilot" is opening the cardboard flap that covers the engine, you can see that there is no axle to turn the tail rotor. The tail rotor, which keeps a real helicopter from spinning the same speed as the main rotor, is purely aesthetic.

The reporter claims this helicopter has "flown briefly on six occasions" at an "altitude of seven feet", but the reporter fails to corroborate this with any other witnesses. In true journalism fashion, the reporter takes a shot at a government for allegedly not supporting the wild ideas of this dreamer:

Although some government officials got very excited when they saw him conduct a demonstration flight in neighbouring Katsina state, Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has so far shown no interest in his aircraft. "No one from the NCAA has come to see what I've done. We don't reward talent in this country," he lamented.... In a country with Nigeria's abysmal air safety record officials may be loath to gamble on one student's home-made helicopter.

Who are the "government officials" who "got very excited"? What were they excited about? What exactly did the reporter expect the government to "gamble on"?

You know it's bad when your own ombudsman compares you to Richard Nixon, or suggests that you need an ombudsman devoted only to you. But that's exactly what PBS Ombud Michael Getler has been pushed to with the latest Bill Moyers "editorial", which was covered by our own Noel Sheppard.

Set aside for the moment that in a tirade Moyers referred to the Commander in Chief as "an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket". That's the PBS equivalent of 'fair and balanced'. At question here is whether or not Karl Rove is a religious man. Moyers postulates that he is not, going off various dubious sources (that Moyers referred to as "circulating reports") such as the outright conjecture of bloggers. Church-attending Karl claims Moyers is wrong. Who are you going to believe?

Getler rightly points out that this type of sourcing "is not up to his [Moyer] standards", which apparently are already far below average journalistic standards. He also points out that, again, Moyers has violated PBS's Editorial Standards and Policies which require that when "a program, segment, or other content is devoted to opinion or commentary, the principle of transparency requires that it be clearly labeled as such" and "should identify who is responsible for the views being presented."

Continue reading the ombud report if you like, but I found it a tiring report of the obvious: Bill Moyers is, as Dan Rather would say - a partisan political operative, cloaked in the auspices of a journalist taking tax money from the public against the will of the majority.

It should come as a surprise to nobody that revenue is down again for the Tribune Company, owner of news properties such as the LA Times and Chicago Tribune. This time the bleeding stopped at 5.9 percent. Circulation was down 5.4 percent. Classifieds are down 18.2 percent. Retail advertising sales are down 6 percent.

But it's not their fault, of course. This time the blame is "due to difficult year-over-year comparisons." Though one must wonder if their circulation would continue to have dropped had they heeded my suggestion that newspapers "get rid of the bias, the America-hating columnists, the socialist editorials, and the reporters pushing a gay/lesbian/transgendered/illegal alien/pro-abortion/anti-God/anti-gun agenda?"

Or they could continue doing what they're doing.

As an example that the media can't learn from the mistakes of others, a BBC IP address has been tracked down to a recent Wikipedia edit that changed the name of George Walker Bush to George Wanker Bush.

While that kind of activity in the States might cause you to get a warning email from the executive editor, at the BBC it might just get you promoted. 

Hot on the heels of Barack Hussein Obama claiming U.S. troops are "killing civilians", Yahoo! News runs a AFP picture (right) taken by Wissam al-Okaili showing a woman with two bullets that purportedly "hit her house" during a coalition forces raid.

I won't even insult you by pointing out what's wrong with this picture. One photographer on a forum asks "How would any photo editor ever allow such a photo to be published?" I offer two answers; 1. Because they want to believe. 2. Because they don't know the first thing about guns or bullets.

In a completely Clintonesque defense (depends what the meaning of 'is' is), some are claiming that the bullets could have "hit her house" -- had they been thrown at it. '

(Ken Shepherd's take on the story.)

In this second installment, we take a break from our usual program of pointing out the absurdity of liberal bias in the press to let you get to know some of the people who provide the news for public consumption.

Meet Mario Anthony Orlikoff, formerly a Daily Press Sports Editor, now an alleged bank robber. After being followed by a drive-through bank customer, Mario was pulled out of a river by police and his toy gun was taken away, which will no doubt lead to calls for a three day waiting period for toy guns. The big tip-off was that the note he handed the bank teller in the robbery was written in perfect AP Style.

In other news, Seattle Times staffers showed their true colors this week. Editor & Publisher reports that when news staffers at the Seattle Times learned of Karl Rove's resignation, they cheered. It led Executive Editor Dave Boardman to send a note to the staffers telling them to keep their politics to themselves, which apparently means keep doing what you're doing but don't cheer out loud about it.

Update: Seattle Times stock "losing value dramatically." Down 12% in six months.

The screaming left is always going on about the lives that will be lost from the global warming boogeyman, yet I can't find a single newspaper willing to confront the seven lives that may be lost on Wednesday because of it. You may recall how Clinton/Gore EPA regulations forced NASA to switch to a freon-free foam, one that doesn't stick to the tanks, one that causes up to 11 times more damage to the life-saving thermal tiles, all in an effort to make the libs feel better about flying their personal jets across the globe. Ever since then we've had scare after tragedy every time a Shuttle launches.

A cursory look at Google News shows that the brave and enterprising journalists from American news organizations are completely unwilling to even mention this important story. It makes me wonder what Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times who created the journalistic oath to cover the news "without fear or favor", would think of the state of journalism today. Show me the journalist with the courage to look the families of these astronauts in the face and tell them the science has already been decided.

Update (April 3, 2008) at bottom of post: Charges dropped against Corral. Statement appended.

I'd like to take a break from our usual program of pointing out the absurdity of liberal bias in the press to let you get to know some of the people who provide the news for public consumption. First up is C.P. Smith (pictured), page-one editor for The Orange County Register and husband of LA Times deputy editor Sherry Stern. When the cameras roll in his newsroom, he likes to do things like walk up and pick his nose and then wipe it on his shirt. It's gotten to the point where the news director doesn't even want to shoot in the newsroom anymore.

Next up is Miami Herald reporter Oscar Corral. Apparently Oscar is so fond of Bill Clinton that he wanted to emulate his most famous act... in his car... with Yamilet Lopez, an 18 year old. Unfortunately for Oscar, the police were listening in while he tried to negotiate the price. The Herald covered the story, of course, with 90 uninteresting words that left out the typical embarrassing mugshot, mention of the prostitute being 18 and the fact that the police overheard the transaction. Not surprisingly, Corral is proclaiming his innocence. Perhaps this was just his attempt at a unsanctioned undocumented migrant social program. After all, they are doing the work that Americans won't do.

Update (Ken Shepherd | April 3, 2008): It has come to our attention that the charges against Corral have since been dropped. In an e-mail statement Corral wrote, "This all stems from a misunderstanding. The charges were dismissed and my name has been cleared. No crime occurred. I should have never been arrested." Yamilet Lopez was also not prosecuted.

Editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal Constitution was asked why letters that are "factually inaccurate" are allowed into the newspaper. I had long assumed it was the same reason stories that are factually inaccurate are used in the newspaper, but not-so says Tucker: "We live in such a politically polarized age that not everybody agrees on the facts. My letters policy tends to be a bit looser than those of some other editorial page editors."

This includes "Readers who still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that they were taking to Syria are allowed to express that view even though it is clearly not true." As you may recall, I addressed this "inaccuracy" once before for ACLU president turned journalist, Robyn Blumner.

George Ou reports that Dateline NBC investigative "journalist" Michelle Madigan was run out on a rail when she tried to infiltrate DEFCON in Las Vegas, the convention for hackers and security specialists, hoping to catch someone admitting to a crime. This is the same group of people who play "spot the spook" at their yearly conventions, so Michelle never had a chance. This all came after DEFCON organizers gave her four chances to register as press. Instead, Madigan made reference to how "people in Kansas" would be interested in what the hackers were up to (Kansas being the reference to the fly-over area between LA and NY) and then made a trip to the restroom to get her pinhole camera running.

Journalists far and wide are still crying about Rupert Murdoch possibly owning the Wall Street Journal. Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff said a Murdoch-owned WSJ would suffer "the loss of a few points of I.Q., a quickened pace, a higher sense of drama, less accurate, perhaps, but less tedious too, and, likely, a keener instinct for following the money." So for all of you psych majors who thought IQ scores were static; you've apparently never met a journalist who was told to be fair. By the way, isn't the most precious tenet of journalism "following the money"?

LA Times' Tim Rutten shocks us with the real reason the NY Times and Baltimore Sun reject forced embargoes and try to wreck your Harry Potter night with pre-dawn spoilers; "...it's about money." Harry Potter spoilers, classified information spoilers, apparently Pinch Sulzberger has a different take on "follow the money."

Let's face the facts; newspapers are in trouble. Every morning, for a dwindling group of Americans, a newspaper blows its dying breath in their face. You and I know what the problem is, but when it comes to listening to the vast majority of traditional Americans, journalists are as deaf as politicians. So rather than following my previous advice, ("Why don't you get rid of the bias, the America-hating columnists, the socialist editorials, and the reporters pushing a gay/lesbian/transgendered/illegal alien/pro-abortion/anti-God/anti-gun agenda?") the newspapers have decided instead to redefine the number of readers they have.

Did you go to the paper's website just to read an asinine editorial that you heard about? You're now a "paying customer". Forget for the moment that you would never patronize the advertisers on that site, in fact you're more likely to boycott them. Leave a newspaper on a park bench? Hey, there were probably two or three more "paying customers" to count.

And these are the same people who are charged with protecting our elections.

The liberal leadership of the leftist media, Columbia Journalism Review, cries because of the column they landed on in some Army person's Powerpoint slide deck. The context, that this is just someone's Powerpoint, is conveniently left out of CJR's complaint.

It looks like it's official: the United States Army thinks that American reporters are a threat to national security... Make no mistake, this is a very big deal, and every American citizen, not just reporters and soldiers, needs to understand the implications of the Army's strict new policy...

Except the strict policy in question says no such thing. The journalists from the esteemed CJR assume as much by interpreting their location on a Powerpoint slide. The bigger question for CJR is why shouldn't the military treat them as the enemy? After all, they work with our enemies to obtain videos of our soldiers being killed, they run terrorist messages without vetting through the military first, and they take every opportunity they can to attack our government officials, they've also proven that they'll run nearly any secret they can obtain.

Drudge mentions that during a live press conference in Baghdad, CNN "reporter" Michael Ware heckled John McCain. Video from the event is sure to follow. What will be interesting to see is who in the mainstream press covers it. Will it be covered on CNN? Will the press gossip blogs mention it? Or will this be swept under the rug as usual?

"Objective reporter" Michael Ware is no stranger to spouting his personal opinions. In an interview with Bill Maher he said "I've been given a front-row ticket to watch this slow-motion train wreck … I try to stay as drunk for as long as possible while I'm here … In fact, I'm drinking now.”

Rosie O'Donnell, one of my favorite method actors of all time, made the claim on her blog (devoid of any puncuation, grammar, or the capitalization that people with intelligence substructures tend to use) that after mentioning Bill O'Reilly's lawsuit from 2004 on The View, she was told that they couldn't bring it up anymore.

She failed to say who told her this. Was it the producer? An ABC executive? The clerk handing her a half-dozen special at Fatburger? She also accused O'Reilly of editing her statements to make them into something they weren't, as if screaming over everyone around you that the British sent their soldiers to Iran to be prisoners on purpose can be taken in some other way. This coming from someone who doesn't know the difference between a judge and an attorney.

Former Newsday Publisher Robert Johnson got his sentence; 15 months in a Federal prison and a $50k fine for his collection of child pornography.

Of course, if you left it to journalists, they would be exempt from child porn laws and have a journalist shield law that protects them if they were to get caught.

Jeff Martin sets up his defense of, again, printing the names of lawful concealed weapons permit holders by revisiting a previous time in which he did the exact same thing. He justifies it by noting that someone who went on to win a Puleftist prize was involved. He claims:

Every day, it seems, Jim or Jayne or I take a call from someone who wants something kept out of the newspaper. It's usually a name... Each time, we listen. Each time, we refuse...

Yet we try to print everything. Here's why: We print the names of people in the news because that's our business... That means we'll tell them not only what's happening at the city council and at Iowa State University, but also who is arrested, who is having babies, who is selling his house (and for how much), who has died (and of what cause). People expect that from us.

If we leave out just one name, just one fact, we have failed in our mission and damaged our credibility. That's why we printed those gun permits in Iowa. It's the kind of journalism that goes to the heart of the First Amendment.

First, let's get the reason behind this "news" out of the way: It's a way for those who are against the Second Amendment to know who to shun, who to refuse to hire, and who to refuse to do business with. It's a list that tells (stupid) burglars exactly which houses to break into if they want to be armed.

Well they don't exactly print "every name". His paper may print the names of breeders, but they don't print the names of people who terminate babies. Isn't that also news? They don't print the names of licensed doctors and nurses who perform abortions. They don't print the names of people who get sex changes or the doctors who perform them, and they don't print the names of people at Iowa State who are performing stem cell research (outside of government funding.)

Why not? Because journalists go after people they are opposed to, not people they agree with.

Howie Kurtz tells us what we already know:

And, in truth, many journalists are probably rooting for a Democratic House. But not for the reason you might think. After six years of almost uninterrupted GOP control of Washington, divided government would produce what reporters like best: conflict. A spate of investigations and subpoenas of the Bush White House, led by such new committee chairmen as John Dingell, Henry Waxman, Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel, would liven things up for the capital's chroniclers.

Of course a divided government and the conflict it would produce will weaken the country and make us more susceptible to terrorist attacks, but who ever accused journalists of trying to make the U.S. stronger or safer? The job of journalists is to sell newspapers, not protect this great nation.

The Seattle Times tries to defend John Kerry's flub (I know, huge surprise):

His prepared text showed he meant to say those who aren't academically well-prepared might end up getting the country stuck in a war, as President Bush has done.

Ok, let's take that at face value and compare it to the facts:

Kerry received five Ds, including four in his freshman year, with a D in political science! Bush, during his time at Yale, got one D, in astronomy. Overall, Kerry finished Yale with a cumulative score of 76. Bush finished with a score of 77.

So if Bush who scored 77 might end up getting us stuck in a war, what would Kerry who scored a 76 end up getting us stuck in?

In the exhaustive search for WMDs in Iraq, CNN has left all stones unturned. These are the words right out of the mouth of CNN reporter Jane Arraf:

And if you had a bureau there, like we did, and it was a known bureau and a known company like CNN was,