Blogs

In an April 30 "Public Eye" entry, CBS ombudsblogger Brian Montopoli wrote about CBS's quandary over CIA director George Tenet has a faulty memory regarding an exchange with Richard Perle that supposedly happened the day after 9/11 at the White House. The problem, Perle was stuck in France. He returned to the country on Sept. 15, 2001. So what to do with Web site transcripts of the April 29 "60 Minutes" segment?

Well, it turns out CBS executives added an editor's note to online versions of the "60 Minutes" interview.

Montopoli wrote about the inclusion of the editor's note here, but it appears he failed to press the suits at CBS over why the supposed September 12, 2001, meeting was not verified before broadcast:

On the heels of his award-winning destruction of Congressman Mark Foley over inappropriate instant messages to teenaged House pages, ABC investigative reporter Brian Ross is on the sex beat again. On Monday's Good Morning America, Ross highlighted ABC’s plans to rummage through a D.C. madam’s list of prostitution clients for "people in the Bush administration." But in 1996, when the tabloid newspaper The Star found Bill Clinton’s chief political guru Dick Morris had a relationship with a prostitute, ABC News (and especially anchor Peter Jennings) found it ugly, distasteful business. On the August 26, 1996 World News Tonight, as President Clinton prepared for his convention’s acceptance speech, Jennings began with a complaining tone:

Good evening, we begin tonight with the sweet and the sour of the Presidential campaign. Here in Chicago today the President has been fine tuning as they say, the speech he will be giving to this convention and to the country tonight. And he has a lot to be pleased about. A very upbeat convention. A very successful train trip here with rising poll numbers to accompany it. And very important set of statistics about the economy today, which he will certainly point to as evidence that the country should re-elect him. And then along comes a nasty little scandal to take the edge off the good news at least for the day. The President’s chief political strategist, a man named Dick Morris, resigned from the campaign today, after a story in a supermarket tabloid that he has been having, he’s a married man, a lengthy relationship with a prostitute and talking about his job.

Over the weekend, blogger Jim Hanson (aka "Uncle Jimbo" at Blackfive) appeared on CNN's "This Week at War" where he asked about how the U.S. military was going to improve its response to the pretty sophisticated usage of the media that Islamic terrorists have begun to develop.

Of course, the fact that the terrorists have gotten good at using the media isn't simply a deficiency of the Pentagon. It's also one of the western media. Hanson pointed this out and mentioned CNN's airing of a tape of an al Quaeda sniper killing an American soldier as being part of the problem.

"You force me to point out you guys did put out a pretty heinous video of snipers, of the insurgents killing U.S. troops on CNN, so you guys to some extent helped them with their own propaganda."

Full transcript of the segment available at Blackfive. Click below the fold to watch the video.

"Put in a tax to make it $4 a gallon right now," urged CNN contributor Allen Wastler on the April 28 "In the Money."

Wastler's motivation for higher taxes was to encourage alternatives to gasoline.

"Because when you saw us flirting with $3, all the sudden we got a burst in hybrid production, we got a burst in ethanol production," Wastler explained to the "In the Money" crowd.

But the CNNMoney managing editor did not explain the burst in government mandates and regulations that helped fuel those alternatives.

The "In the Money" team including Ali Velshi and Christine Romans not only urged higher gas prices (with taxation), but hyped the threat of $4-a-gallon gasoline, though the national average is still below $3-a-gallon.

"Man Who Claims to Be Prophet Muhammad Alive and Well in Hoboken, Says It's Cool to Eat Pork"

Imagine that headline on ABCNews.com. And imagine the story included no Muslim imams or scholars to denounce the charlatan. Well, that's pretty much what ABC did today on an old story front-paged on its Web site today (see screencap on the right), only the religion in question was Christianity (and the fake Jesus in the story lives in Houston).

Here's the headline for the March 6, 2007, story by Jim Avila (yes, the dateline is correct, this story is over a month old):

Jesus Might Be Alive and Well in Houston
Jose de Jesus Drinks, Smokes and Claims to He's [sic] the Second Coming

On Monday’s "Good Morning America," anchor Chris Cuomo grilled returning White House Press Secretary Tony Snow over the new book by  George Tenet, the former director of the CIA. Citing Tenet’s criticisms of the White House’s pre-war activity, Cuomo asked this loaded question: "Is it time for the administration to come clean?"

The ABC anchor wondered if Bush was "out of touch" and asserted Tenet’s claims means "the administration was not straight with Americans, not about weapons of mass destruction, not about 9/11."

Additionally, Mr. Cuomo, who is both the son of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo (D) and the brother of that state’s current Democratic Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, also failed to ask Snow about Tenet’s claim that aggressive interrogation has been very important to fighting the war on terror.

Harry Smith, who has a habit of double standards when conducting interviews, hammered returning White House press secretary Tony Snow on April 30's edition of The Early Show. After discussing Snow’s cancer treatment, Smith said "let’s go to work." Snow stated what many believe, that incorporated timetables are a stunt. An astonished Harry Smith interrupted and harshly inquired: "So the White House regards this, their, their insistence on troop withdrawals as a stunt?"

Snow, who previously accused Harry Smith of sounding like a partisan, immediately backpedaled, but pointed out that the current bill is "something [the Democrats] knew was never going to get passed." After Snow mentioned that Democrats "exhausted nearly three months doing this," Smith retorted "with the support of the American people by the way." Although it is true that, according to CBS’s own poll, 64 percent of Americans do support a timetable for withdrawal, they also found when they asked if Congress should allow continued troop funding without a timetable if it comes to that, 56 percent said yes. Harry never mentioned that polling result.

According to the New York Post's Don Kaplan, Roseanne Barr is the early favorite to replace the deposed Rosie O'Donnell.

Barr is no less of a liberal and almost as controversial as O'Donnell. If she were to replace O'Donnell, Barr would continue to tilt the show to the extreme left and fail to bring back the many viewers of "The View" who were offended at the numerous outrageous statements made by O'Donnell.

In a March appearance on HBO's "Real Time," Barr alleged that conservatives "liked Reagan because he's a confederate. [...] They worship him because he dismantled working rights for people."

Barr will bring a left-wing agenda to "The View." She admitted that she had one earlier this year:

For the fifth straight year, America's biggest newspapers (especially the left-leaning ones) have experienced big drops in circulation.

The Audit Bureau of Circulation released its annual numbers today. Among the findings: Two of the three national newspapers (USA Today and the Wall Street Journal) gained circ while the New York Times fell 2 percent on weekdays and nearly three-and-a-half percent on Sundays.

The biggest loser was the Dallas Morning News which was off 14 percent on weekdays and 13 percent on Sundays. The Miami Herald lost 10 percent on Sundays and 5.5 percent on weekdays.

Let's imagine for a moment now what types of stories we'd be hearing about these bad numbers if liberal journalists applied the same standards to themselves as they do to Republican presidents.

Now that you're done laughing, let me say that I don't think that liberal bias is the sole reason for these drops. It's also old thinking. The proof is that some papers like the New York Post and the Indianapolis Star have gained circulation. It can be done in an age of mass alienation from mass media. (h/t Stephen Spruiell)

For general discussion and comment...

The Bush administration: a bigger threat to national security than a foreign spy. That was Tom Brokaw's implicit assumption in his interview with former CIA Director George Tenet on this morning's "Today." Along the way, Brokaw accused former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of running a "rogue" intelligence operation.

BROKAW: In the opening passage you describe conversations in the Clinton administration between the Palestinians and the Israelis attempting to get some sort of a new peace arrangement. But the Israelis were demanding the release of Jonathan Pollard, a United States military intelligence analyst who had been selling them secrets, who's in jail for life. You said if you release Jonathan Pollard, I'll resign from the CIA. And yet when you were the head of the CIA, you had Condi Rice ignoring your warnings, Vice-President Cheney exaggerating the threats repeatedly, Don Rumsfeld in the Pentagon running what effectively was a rogue CIA, his own intelligence operation, and you didn't threaten to resign then.

Pham Xuan Am served on the staff of Time magazine during the Vietnam War – and he also served as a communist spy for the Viet Cong. This should have been the cause of great embarrassment for liberal media outlets like Time. Instead, in 1990, former Time reporter H.D.S. Greenway wasn’t irate at his colleague, but expressed his anger in the Washington Post at the "right-wingers [who] seized on the An story to say that the press had fallen victim to a fiendish disinformation plot."

On Saturday’s Weekend Edition, NPR anchor Scott Simon interviewed Larry Berman, author of a new book on Pham Xuan Am called "Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent." Simon might have been trying to help the author out, but the question he asked seemed like a no-brainer: "Did he give information that resulted in the deaths of South Vietnamese or American soldiers?"

Imagine a conservative congressperson doing something this unhinged and not getting raked over the coals in the press (Wall Street Journal link requires subscription):

Tuesday was Africa Malaria Day, and Michigan Representative John Conyers marked the event by inviting something called the Pesticide Action Network to Capitol Hill to denounce DDT as an unsafe malaria intervention. What was he thinking?

Malaria, which is spread through mosquito bites, kills about a million people annually, mostly children and pregnant women in Africa. We're not sure where the House Judiciary Chairman got his medical expertise, but he won't reduce that death toll by promoting disinformation about DDT and malaria prevention. And at taxpayers' expense, no less.

PAN and a shrinking band of other activist know-nothings insist that employing DDT against malaria is "especially dangerous for developing infants and children," but there is no scientific basis to the claim. Zip.

In Sunday’s paper, the L.A.Times has a piece that mourns a downturn of a portion of Mexico’s economy and, naturally, the Times blames the USA for it. How is it that the USA is responsible for this downturn? New home construction is down in California and illegal Mexicans have found themselves out of work because of it. This means that these out of work Mexicans cannot send US dollars to Mexico and, therefore, Mexican families back home are finding less money in their family incomes.

So, according to the L.A.Times, the US is unfairly hurting Mexican families because of a downturn in new home building in the USA. Why are we Americans so darn mean to those innocent illegals, anyway? For shame you selfish Americans!

On Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” ex-CIA Director George Tenet told CBS’ Scott Pelley the Bush administration misrepresented his now famous “slam dunk” reference to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (video available here).

However, one of Tenet’s former employees, Michael Scheuer, published an op-ed (h/t Captain Ed) in the Washington Post Sunday cautioning that “the former director of central intelligence is out to absolve himself of the failings of 9/11 and Iraq.”

As a result, in Scheuer's view, “we shouldn't buy his attempts to let himself off the hook.”

The former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, who I interviewed last September, wasn’t shy with his criticisms of his former boss, who apparently has quite a history of blaming others for his own failures (emphasis added throughout):

The New Yorker is "a magazine that is not seriously edited," writes George Weigel in his latest column ("The New Yorker spins the pope"). Weigel reached his stinging conclusion after examining a recent article ("The Pope and Islam") from Jane Kramer, who pens a "Letter From Europe" feature for the magazine. In addition to citing the piece for falsehoods, mis-readings and errors, Weigel zaps Kramer's article as a "lengthy tantrum" and "a wailing wall for left-leaning Vaticanisti, disgruntled Curial bureaucrats, and Italian Catholic activists unhappy with Benedict XVI's challenge to Islam."

For at least the second time this month, the Washington Post went after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) for meeting with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

For those that have forgotten, the Post was harshly critical of the Speaker’s trip at the time, calling it “foolish” and “ludicrous.”

On Friday, the Post editorial staff, in a piece entitled “No Results in Damascus,” chronicled what’s happened in Syria, and the rest of the region, since Pelosi returned.

As you might imagine, the news wasn’t good (h/t Glenn Reynolds and Gateway Pundit, emphasis added throughout):

Assume for a moment that a prominent Republican’s uncle that happened to be a former state senator was convicted of accepting bribes. Do you think:

• This would have been headline/front-page news
• The family relationship would have been in the lede and/or headline
• His party affiliation would have been in the lede and/or headline?

Well, on Friday, the uncle of former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. (D), former Tennessee State Sen. John Ford (D), was convicted of accepting bribes totaling $55,000. Yet, many media outlets buried the connection to his much more popular nephew, as well as the fact that he was a Democrat.

For instance, this is how the New York Times handled the story Saturday coincidentally on page A14 (h/t NB reader Joe Easley):

In case you hadn’t heard, there was a huge protest in Turkey on Sunday as reported by the Associated Press (h/t NBer Gary Hall and LGF, emphasis added throughout):

At least 300,000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey's leaders threatened to destroy the country's modern foundations.

Given the American media’s predilection towards never wanting to write or say anything that could possibly offend Muslims, an interesting question is raised regarding how they will report this story.

Regardless of the answer, the article continued:

Because of Tuesday’s testimony by former Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch, the media have renewed the stories about the government “lying” about Lynch’s heroism and only correcting it later, but the conservative blog American Thinker dug up that first article which supposedly gave the details of Lynch’s rescue and found the “government warned against this fight-to-the-death story line… at the time of the initial reporting by the media,” not later.

Writing at AmThinker, Ray Robison said that the Washington Post was the first to publish the super-soldier story, and even though they had been cautioned by the government, they ran with it anyway, adding a little paragraph that mentioned the warning but giving more prominence to the unnamed “US official” (emphasis added throughout; in this post, I changed AmThinker's highlighting and pointed out the AT's "emphasis added" text to differentiate from mine. Follow link to see original form):

Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said...

"She was fighting to the death," the official said. "She did not want to be taken alive."

Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed.

The reader is formally cautioned to prepare his or herself for an alternate reality. You have been warned.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked to find the New York Times asking the following question on a Sunday morning:

But is the carbon-neutral movement just a gimmick?

Is this possibly a sea change in media coverage on this issue, or just an olive branch cynically tossed to create the illusion of balance?

Regardless of the answer, although Andrew C. Revkin’s “Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?” fell short of exposing all the hypocrisies concerning this matter, it was nonetheless surprising to see a Times writer offer the following opinions about such a controversial and polarizing subject (emphasis added throughout, h/t Glenn Reynolds):

Earlier this week, an Investors Business Daily editorial noted the weak treatment the Social Security Trustees' Report (summary here) received from the Formerly Mainstream Media:

Journalists in Washington are supposed to be public watchdogs. But when it comes to the crisis facing Social Security, they act more like lapdogs for politicians determined to shirk their responsibility.

The Washington Post, New York Times and Associated Press all led off their stories on the latest Social Security and Medicare trustees' projections by pointing out that Social Security isn't expected to deplete its trust fund reserves until 2041. This supports the contention of Democratic politicians and the AARP that the day of reckoning is more than three decades away, so reform is not an urgent need .....

That is, of course, incorrect, as The Heritage Foundation noted (bolds are mine):

Frank Rich is from Venus; NewsBusters is from Mars.

NewsBusters documents the way that, day-in and day-out, the MSM slants its coverage against conservative principles in general and the Bush administration in particular.  Frank Rich looks at the same coverage and complains that the press is too Bush-friendly.

In his p.p.v. New York Times column of today, All the President’s Press, Rich takes the occasion of the recent White House correspondents dinner to complain "how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media."

Annotated excerpts:

The press has enabled stunts from the manufactured threat of imminent “mushroom clouds” to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished,” whose fourth anniversary arrives on Tuesday.

No one in the Bush administration ever spoke of "imminent mushroom clouds." Rich flatly misstates the truth.  Lynch's criticism of the way the military presented her story was all over the MSM this week.  And how incalculably many times over the last few years has the MSM run mocking coverage of President Bush's "Mission Accomlished" moment?

Do you watch the Sunday talk shows? Planning on watching today? If so, comment on the performance of the guests and the moderators here...

Update at bottom of post.

On Saturday afternoon, CNN Newsroom ran a report by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in which the CNN medical correspondent plugged a proposal for the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program to begin supplying vouchers for fruits and vegetables to its recipients to combat obesity in the poor, and fretted that budget cuts by President Bush could "threaten" a proposed plan to do so. Recounting that the problem for WIC recipients when the program was created 30 ago was "malnutrition, not obesity," Gupta relayed plans by the Agriculture Department to supply vouchers for fruits and vegetables. But Gupta cautioned that because Bush is planning to put WIC on the "chopping block," the plan may be endangered. Gupta: "But some say that might not happen because WIC is on the chopping block, slated for a $145 million cut in President Bush's 2008 budget. ... Nutritionists say that's not good because the WIC produce vouchers could help control obesity." (Transcript follows)

One argument at the beginning of the Bill Moyers PBS special on our alleged Bush-polishing press corps centered around a White House press conference just before the Iraq war began on March 6, 2003. Within hours on that night, leftists were complaining that reporters weren't harsh enough.CBS Radio's White House reporter Mark Knoller made a rare protest against the Moyers charge on their Public Eye site. I'm a little surprised that Knoller is the only White House reporter to challenge Moyers on the idea that they were all Bush patsies, just as I'm surprised that no one in the White House press corps really challenged Helen Thomas when she called them all Bush patsies.

The formulation Moyers used -- that reporters failed to "challenge the president" that he was lying about WMD -- is trumped up, and suggests that reporters should not have merely suggested that war protesters and other countries had doubts. Apparently, Moyers wouldn't have honored a reporter as challenging unless they rhetorically punched the president in the face, suggesting his case for Iraq was crawling with lies. Moyers obviously and sleazily skipped the case of ABC's Terry Moran, who insulted all his colleagues as "zombies" after the press conference. He, by contrast, should have earned an A from Moyers from challenging Bush as leading the world in arrogance:

On Friday's The Situation Room, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer gave former Democratic Senator Max Cleland a forum to rail against the Bush administration's Iraq policy, during which the former Georgia Senator charged that President Bush would be "signing in blood" his expected veto of the Democratic plan to withdraw troops from Iraq. While Blitzer did ask a few mildly challenging questions, the CNN anchor did not question some of Cleland's more dubious assertions, including his claim that half a million Iraqis had been killed, and that Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss had called Cleland "un-American" and "unpatriotic" in the past.

While the interview originally ran live during the 5 p.m. hour of The Situation Room, it was repeated during the 7 p.m. hour, which gave Blitzer the opportunity to plug the interview, quoting the former Democratic Senator's charge that Bush would be signing his veto "in blood." Blitzer: "Tonight, the former U.S. Senator, Max Cleland, charges Mr. Bush will be signing that veto in blood." Blitzer later plugged: "Vietnam War veteran and former Senator Max Cleland says President Bush could wind up with blood on his hands." (Transcript follows)

Days after the liberal blogosphere was enraged by a Washington Post column by David Broder concerning Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), it only seems fitting that an unnamed Democrat strategist would be quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle with negative things to say about the Netroots.

For those that have forgotten, in September, Broder wrote about “vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left.”

Months later, as California Democrats gathered in San Diego at their annual convention – with their presidential candidates present and accounted for – an anonymous strategist had rather unflattering things to say about bloggers on the left side of the political aisle (h/t Hot Air, emphasis added):

During the latter part of the Clinton admin, the left media often tossed around the phrase "scandal fatigue," a term of art to explain that certain portions of the public had become upset at the Republican party for going after then-president Clinton over trivial things.

Politicians and their allies do have this tendency. But it's not just Republicans who have it. Democrats do as well.

Since President Bush came into office, Democrats have continued this tradition, cooking up a host of psuedo-scandals on everything from spying on China to Valerie Plame. None of it's stuck. Yet instead of speaking wishfully about "scandal fatigue," the left media has instead been doing the very opposite as John Hinderaker at Powerline points out: