Wednesday, August 30, 2006

The Ravenous BEAST of the Media WHORES: FEASTING yet again on JonBenet's corpse, to the EXCLUSION of important news.

Yet another excellent indictment of the GHOULISH dereliction-of-duty "Mainstream Media" and TV news.....

The fact that the Mainstream Media - the corporate media that dominates the large newspapers and cable- and network news - is ENTIREL UNAPOLOGETIC about their "JohBenet-Karr" feeding frenzy feasting-on-corpse story, is indicative of two things: #1. how completely DIVORCED the media whores are from any concept of duty or responsibility or the need to keep American citizens INFORMED about more important issues;

and,

#2.) how MAKING MONEY and surrounding oneself with the trappings of success - deferential staff, helpers, production managers and assistants - becomes the reward in and of itself. How WORSHIPPING THE GOLDEN CALF of MAMON *is* the new American religion.

That is, America's major media anchors are interested ONLY in viewers and profits - the content of their newscasts is important only in its ability to glue viewers to their TV screens. Even when they are shown to have spent hours and DAYS covering a bogus story, as long as they have sold commercials and air-time, they are smug and self-satisfied.

----------------------

And we here at MediaWhoresUSA.blogspot.com APOLOGIZE to the "working ladies of the evening" (as, for example, Jamie Lee Curtis portraying 'the working gal' who saves Dan Akroyd's character on a bet in the Dan Akroyd - Eddie Murphy movie "Trading Places"). For these women perform a valuable service to society (just imagine a military base, ANYWHERE in the world, that didn't have 'working ladies' in close proximity), and many, as the character portrayed by Jamie Lee, work long and hard to pay their bills, save a little money, or even raise their children.

Unlike our paid professional Media Whore liars, who get paid huge salaries to pimp, primp, and blather on the little screen or (like Judy Miller of the nyt) in the pages of the nation's 'news' papers.


Jeff Cohen: Sick Puppy Meets Media Beast
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 08/29/2006 - 9:49am. Guest Contribution
by Jeff Cohen
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/383


John Mark Karr is one sick puppy –- a school teacher who fantasized that he’d engaged in consensual sex so passionately with six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey that he accidentally killed her.

And television news in our country is one ravenous beast -– abandoning any notion of journalism, proportion or decency to again prey upon JonBenet’s corpse for ratings and profit.

God only knows what combination of hurt and mental illness went into producing the sick puppy. On the other hand, there’s no mystery about what created the media beast: corrupt government policies combined with corporate greed.

Make no mistake: The media beast is every bit as compulsive and out of control as Karr, who may yet end up behind bars for child pornography. But the beast is free to maul again and again.

For 10 days, TV news has fixated on this imposter-culprit as if he were a world-historical figure –- like Nelson Mandela emerging from prison, only bigger. TV tracked Karr’s travels across the globe, telling us what he ate for dinner, analyzing his attire.

To extend Karr’s allotted 15-minutes of fame into a 10-day ordeal, TV news ignored important stories of war, environmental degradation, corruption, citizen activism. Instead, TV viewers were offered hundreds of hours of single-minded examination and debate on one burning question: did Karr do it? The inquiry was relentless and aired all sides.

If only we’d had such in-depth, full-spectrum debate when the Bush team was dragging our country into war based on pretense.

I worked in cable news just prior to the Iraq war. As I describe in my book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, journalists at MSNBC got into trouble with management for questioning Team Bush too strongly, for insisting on genuine debate.

By contrast, no one will get into trouble for this embarrassing 10-day spasm of overwrought Karr coverage. . .as long as ratings were good and coverage was cheap. If so, news producers can expect congratulations for a job well done.

Tabloid stories involving sex, crime or celebrity are preferred by TV news management today. These stories are inexpensive to cover, since speculation by alleged experts can fill fill up hours of airtime. And tabloid stories typically don’t offend anyone in political or economic power, including corporate sponsors and media owners.

But aggressively covering an administration bent on war can cause all sorts of problems. Especially for a media conglomerate that has business pending before the Federal Communications Commission. Especially when that media titan is lobbying the FCC to allow it to grow even more titanic –- as was happening in 2003 exactly at the time the Bush White House was launching its invasion of Iraq.

During the run-up to war, I was a senior producer on Phil Donahue’s primetime MSNBC show, the most watched program on the channel, until it was terminated three weeks before the war began. An internal NBC memo soon leaked out, complaining that Donahue was "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . .He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives."

Stick to tabloid stories and your TV career will flourish. Be skeptical about officialdom’s war motives and they’ll show you the door.

I’ll never forget my first day of work at MSNBC headquarters in the spring of 2002. As I entered the building's central corridor, I saw a number of framed posters celebrating highpoints of the channel's early history. The first one: "The Funeral of Princess Diana." Then: "Death of JFK, Jr." On the opposite wall, I saw "Columbine Shootings, Live Coverage" and "The Concorde Crash."

I remember thinking: If these are what MSNBC considers its highlights, what were its lowlights?

TV news owners and management love stories that keep viewers passive, on the sidelines -- as spectators. They fear the ones that might motivate us to take action, on the field -- as citizens.

Active, informed citizens seek out (and build) independent media. They’re the kind of pesky activists who intervene in FCC decisions and fight to diversify a mainstream media system that's been surrendered corruptly to a half-dozen conglomerates.

TV news is trying desperately to hold onto its audience of passive consumers: those who know everything about John Mark Karr's dinner of pate and chardonnay, and next to nothing about the court ruling that Bush's warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional.

Last night, with cable news anchors looking ridiculous over their 10-day JonBenet binge, one MSNBC host seemed to need a scapegoat. If not murder, she asked a legal expert, couldn’t Karr at least be charged with "conspiracy to set off a media frenzy"?

You see, the 10-day hijacking of the airwaves was not her fault, or her bosses' fault. It was Karr's fault. . .TV's version of "the sick puppy ate my homework" excuse.

Buzzflash Guest Contributor

Jeff Cohen is the founder of the media watch group FAIR, and author of the new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Media whores CENSOR the story, former FEMA Director Mike "Heckuva Job Brownie" Brown claims Bush ASKED HIM TO LIE about Katrina response....!

In yet another indication of how COWARDLY, CRAVEN, CORRUPT, and COMPLICIT the 'major media' whores are, an American reader must go to.. THE INDIA TIMES - !! to learn that fomer FEMA Director Mike Brown is now claiming that President Bush ASKED HIM TO LIE to cover the awful failures of FEMA in preventing the unecessary deaths of almost 2,000 New Orleans drowning victims, days after Hurricane Katrina had left the area under blue skies.

The Cowardly Washington Post and the Lying New York Times will tell American readers ALL ABOUT the Clinton's OVERNIGHT GUEST 'SCANDAL!" (aka "the Lincoln Bedroom scandal!"), but these corrupt whores don't give two hoots about American citizens dying of neglect as President Bush, #1. strummed guitar, and #2. ate a slice of John McCain's birthday cake as those Americans died of thirst, rising flood waters, and in conditions of squalor and neglect in the national landmark New Orleans Superdome, which (more courageous) media reporters had NO TROUBLE driving their media trucks right up to.




Brown says White House wanted him to lie
DailyIndia.com
Aug. 28, 2006
http://www.dailyindia.com/show/55052.php/Brown-says-White-House-wanted-him-to-lie


WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- The ousted head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency says the White House wanted him to lie about the response to Hurricane Katrina.


Former Director Michael Brown told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" Sunday he stood by comments in a Playboy interview, and President Bush wanted him to take the heat for the bungling.

"The lie was that we were ready and that everything was working as a team. Behind the scenes, it wasn't working at all," Brown said. "There were political considerations going into all the discussions. There was the fact that New Orleans did not evacuate and the mayor (Ray Nagin) had no plan."

Brown said it was natural to "want to put the spin on that things are working the way they're supposed to do. And behind the scenes, they're not. Again, my biggest mistake was just not leveling with the American public and saying, 'Folks, this isn't working.'"

The former FEMA chief cited what he called an e-mail "from a very high source in the White House that says the president at a Cabinet meeting said, 'Thank goodness Brown's taking all the heat because it's better that he takes the heat than I do.'"

Also on "This Week," U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the administration still doesn't understand the magnitude of the reconstruction problem; but the president's Gulf Coast coordinator, Don Powell, said the federal government's No. 1 priority is to rebuild the area in a businesslike way.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

Media whores should be flogged for their Jon Benet ghoulishness....

Bob Geiger at HuffingtonPost.com details just how awful, atrocious, inane, ghoulish, and unforgivably crass our "mainstream media" aka "corporate media" truly are.

WHY is the JONBENET RAMSEY story - a 12 years past unsolved murder case - more important than the DOZENS of Iraqi children who die every week as a result of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld's war of "flowers and cheers" in Iraq?

Oops! Discussing Iraqi children killed as a result of the American occupation/invasion of Iraq is a forbidden subject, so, let's try again:

"Why is the 12 years gone JonBenet Ramsey story MORE IMPORTANT than the corruption and fraud inherent in the 'PRIVATIZATION' of America's voting process, a process that is the very heart and soul of American democracy?" (We ARE 'fighting to spread democracy' aren't we?)

WHY is the Jon Benet Ramsey case MORE IMPORTANT than the ENRON extortion of California rate-payers, or the NO BID, NO OVERSIGHT, MASSIVE OVERBILLING contracts of HALLIBURTON corporation... a company that IS STILL PAYING DICK CHENEY compensation for past and future performance, compensation that GOES UP as Mr. Cheney directs BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars towards his former company??

WHY is the Jon Benet Ramsey case MORE IMPORTANT than how Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld PROMOTE THE TORTURE GENERALS, after those two authority figures of the US government had the United States military run KANGAROO COURTS to try, convict, and imprison FEMALE VOLUNTEER PRIVATES, accused of "abuse" for FOLLOWING ORDERS?

The answer to all the above and much more is that America's corporate media are now craven, paid professional liars. EVERY STATE that permits slot machines demands RIGOROUS INSPECTIONS of the computer-code that runs those machines, because the potential to insert a line or two of code which diverts even a small fraction of the waged money put through the machine ('skimming') is just so great.

YET, ON THE VOTING MACHINES that ultimately determine WHO CONTROLS THE MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR tax-and-spend power of the entire United States federal government, the media whores are AWOL, COMPLICIT, CRAVENLY DISINTERESTED in whether or not votes are being "skimmed," "flipped," diverted, or plain old obstructed.

What they, the corporate media news whores, ARE interested in selling America is SEX, CELEBRITY, VIOLENCE, and DEATH.

And that includes the dean of America's media yakkers, Larry King, who spent at least one entire show, and possibly more, discussing NOTHING BUT the Jon Benet case.

Sort of like the Roman gladiator games spectators cheering as lions devoured hapless, bound and tied Christian martyrs.

By talking about JonBenet's celebrity death, Larry King and the other media ho's DO NOT have to talk about the tens of millions of American children DEPRIVED of funding for pre-school, after-school, HEALTH CARE, and higher education by Republican budget slashings.

Well, DON HENLEY's landmark song (written when the media pursued stories that he was having an affair with an under-age-of-consent fan) is still the operative description of America's ghoulish media, enclosed one stanza (the rest at the cited site).

<< We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
Comes on at five
She can tell you bout the plane crash with a gleam
In her eye
Its interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry >>
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/don+henley/dirty+laundry_20042033.html



Media's Embarrassing Treatment of Ramsey Case Reaches Its Apex
Bob Geiger
08.28.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-geiger/medias-embarrassing-trea_b_28204.html


There should be a lot of very red faces in newsrooms all over the United States right about now -- there should be, but I doubt there will be.

As many legal experts had theorized might happen, Boulder, Colorado prosecutors today dropped their case against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey. It appears that a DNA sample taken from Karr simply does not match DNA from JonBenet Ramsey's body, making it likely that Karr was just an attention-seeker trying to get a quick 15 minutes of fame and dupe a scandal-hungry media into playing along.

Mission accomplished.

It remains unclear whether Karr will be released or extradited to California to face child pornography charges there.

Samples of Karr's DNA had been taken upon his arrival in Boulder on Thursday and they were tested at the Denver Police Department's crime lab over the weekend. Despite his insistence that he killed Ramsey -- and the 10-day media frenzy that has followed -- the tests have failed to put him at the scene of the crime and he may be released entirely by the end of the week.

What is amazing to me is the media circus that has followed this "case" for almost two weeks now without really a shred of proof that anything had truly developed in the 10-year-old mystery. And we're not just talking about an informational mention on page six or seven of the local newspaper, or a 90-second story buried in the second half of a one-hour newscast.

We're talking about hour upon hour of coverage, with some cable news networks devoting the entire hour of a 60-minute newscast to a developing story that could very well have turned out to be a lot of noise about nothing. We're talking about alleged journalists and editors whose judgment made them decide that John Mark Karr's plane ride from Thailand to the United States, where he sat, who he talked to, what he ate and even what procedure was used to allow him to use the bathroom was their very top story.

All of this without the most basic elements of proof that freshman journalism students taking Reporting 100 are taught to look for.

Unbelievable.

And this giant waste of time and resources, occurred at the expense of real news affecting real lives: A major crisis in the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq that's killing an average of 100 Iraqis a day and with our troops stuck smack-dab in the middle of it. We have a major portion of our population without the means to get a simple medical check-up because they have no health insurance, more Americans in poverty, a devastating budget deficit and hurricane season upon us with FEMA in no better shape than it was a year ago when it bungled Hurricane Katrina.

Oh, and those people whose lives were sidelined by Katrina a year ago, tomorrow? Most of them still haven't received any help.

But none of that -- not one bit of it -- was more important to the corporate media over the last 10 days than a specious confession, to a murder long ago and with very little in the way of proof to go along with it.

We should read, see and hear some major mea culpas across every spectrum of the American media for wasting everyone's time over the last two weeks and, if there's a price to pay for total journalistic incompetence, more than a few editors should be fired. That should happen -- but it won't.

The best we can hope for is that the media will take a good, long, collective look in the mirror and hopefully feel some shame over what buffoons they have been over this non-story and how much they have let the American people down.

I'm sure a few will feel that guilt -- at least until the next blonde chick goes missing in the Caribbean.

You can read more from Bob at BobGeiger.com.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Cowardly Washington Post PAID PROFESSIONAL LIARS, shine Bush's boots re Katrina.

If anyone is looking for a TEXT BOOK example of the Washington Post whoring for BushCo... the Washington Post doing a STALINESQUE propaganda-lie job aimed at polishing the boots of George W. "It would be a hell of a lot easier if this was a dictatorship, so long as I was the dictator" Bush, one need look no further than this aricle by Jonathan Weisman and Michael Abramowitz, two Whore Post staff writers.

A "kudos" to AmericaBlog for catching this text-book Post whoring article.

Pointing out that Weisman and Abramof are probably charter members of the AIPAC - Israel first, last and forever - lobby, is probably overkill, even if true - yet another example of American democracy being destroyed by the cancer of big biz Rethuglicans, corporate media propaganda, and an AWOL (which is to say, bought out, corrupted, complicit, and owned-by-AIPAC) Democrat Party.




Wash. Post examines Bush and Katrina -- only through eyes of the GOP
by Joe in DC - 8/26/2006 08:48:00 PM
Saturday, August 26, 2006
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/08/wash-post-examines-bush-and-katrina.html

Today the Washington Post took a look at the political damage Bush suffered because of Katrina. Funny thing, most of the people they talked to thought Bush has recovered quite well and that a lot of the criticism was unfair. Well, it's not that funny. They ONLY talked to Republicans -- not one Democrat. The reporters did talk to two pollsters, one historian -- but the rest of their interviews were with a who's who of GOPers including:
White House Aide Dan Bartlett

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino

Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry from North Carolina

Republican Congressman Jim McCrery from Louisiana

Republican Congressman Jack Kingston from Georgia, and

Republican Congressman Tom Feeney from Florida.
We expect the White House and the GOP to spin Katrina....do Washington Post reporters have to do all their work?

======================================

Katrina's Damage Lingers For Bush
Many See Storm as President's Undoing
By Jonathan Weisman and Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 26, 2006; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082501481.html


For Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), three images define George W. Bush's presidency: Bush throwing out the first pitch of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium, Bush with a megaphone atop the rubble of the World Trade Center -- and Bush staring out the window as Air Force One traversed the Gulf Coast thousands of feet above the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

The first two images epitomize strength and resolution, the image the Bush White House likes to cultivate. But in one year's time, the last one -- of the president as aloof, out of touch, even befuddled -- all but erased the memory of the others, according to pollsters, pundits and Republican politicians who say they have suffered in the wake of the president's decline.

From the demise of his Social Security overhaul to the war in Iraq, many factors have contributed to Bush's slide in popularity in the past year. But the winds of Katrina may have been the force that finally wrenched the Bush presidency off its moorings, these observers said.

"That has always been the driving [attribute] of Bush -- his ability to lead -- and Katrina undermined it badly," McHenry said. "He has rebounded in one year's time from what he lost in one week's time." But, he added, "it was a long and arduous climb" -- and it is not complete.

The president will appear Monday and Tuesday on the Gulf Coast to mark the first anniversary of the hurricane. To the White House, the president has a strong story to tell: approval of more than $110 billion in resources for the Gulf region, 12 previous visits to the region by Bush and 82 by members of his Cabinet, the restoration of more than 220 miles of New Orleans's flood walls and levees, the floodproofing of pumping stations, and the addition of floodgates to protect against storm surges.

Bush aides said the president will accept responsibility for the botched federal response while stressing that the government has learned from the Katrina mistakes and promising to see through the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast.

White House counselor Dan Bartlett said it is difficult to separate the impact of Katrina from the Iraq war and the other problems that have pulled down Bush's approval rating. "It was a setback at the time, but it was recoverable and has been," Bartlett said.

In Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states, Bush's efforts have made a difference, both in rebuilding the region and in restoring his credibility, said Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.).

But McCrery and several other Republicans said the year-old images of Bush's overflight aboard Air Force One, his good-natured joshing amid the devastation about college party days on Bourbon Street, and his "heck of a job" commendation of Michael D. Brown, then the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, still linger.

"Outside the real storm, it was a political storm that we all suffered a little damage from," said Rep. Jack Kingston (Ga.), a member of the House Republican leadership. "Katrina was not just a break in the levee of the great Crescent City, but it was a break in the levee of political goodwill and the Teflon coating that the administration had been enjoying up to then."

In the weeks after Katrina, Bush's disapproval rating rose from 48 percent to 52 percent, while the proportion of those who approved of the job he was doing as president fell from 44 percent to 40 percent, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

The proportion of people who saw Bush as a strong and decisive leader stood at 60 percent in late August 2005, according to a Gallup poll. One week and a hurricane later, it was down to 52 percent. By mid-September, it had fallen to 49 percent.

About 63 percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling of Katrina, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted this March.

"This is an event that calcified the criticisms people were having about Bush, made it more personal and had a big impact on how people look at him," said Andrew Kohut, the Pew Center's director.

Frank Newport, the editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, is more skeptical that there was much of an enduring "Katrina effect" on the president, saying Bush's ratings recovered by the end of 2005 before sliding again in 2006.

Katrina was clearly not the only problem facing Bush in 2005. Bush's full-throated push to add private investment accounts to a slimmed-down Social Security system had been rebuffed by his own party. That August, as Bush vacationed in Texas, the administration appeared to cede the debate on Iraq to antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan as she camped outside the president's ranch.

But those events only made Katrina's impact that much more powerful, historians and Republican lawmakers say. "The sort of limited commitment that this president has to using federal power to ameliorate domestic problems registered powerfully in this Katrina episode," said presidential historian Robert Dallek. "It triggered Bush's downturn."

It was not only the slow, ineffectual response to the initial devastation that was responsible for the decline, critics and supporters say, but also the policy initiatives that came later. Urban Democrats and minorities, already prone to dislike Bush, focused on FEMA's botched relief efforts in the early days. But as the White House moved to placate those critics with a shower of financial support, the administration began alienating many Republicans, who wanted to use the disaster to turn the Gulf Coast into a showcase for conservative ideas.

Bush did push through legislation creating tax-favored Gulf Opportunity Zones that offered lucrative tax incentives for businesses to invest and rebuild. But more ambitious tax plans never got off the ground. The most far-reaching school-choice plans were scaled back. The most visible housing program came in the form of hundreds of thousands of government-bought trailers and mobile homes, which former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) predicted would create "ghettos of despair."

And the highest-profile attack on a government regulation -- Bush's suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act's rules on wage rates for federal contractors -- was quickly scrapped in the face of union and Democratic protests.

"Crises create opportunities," said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). "This could have been an opportunity to redo the school systems with free-market principles. It was an opportunity to not just hand over contracts to unions at whatever cost. Now, that's spilt water over the levees."

White House aides suggest that this criticism is unfair, noting that millions of dollars have been spent on school vouchers and on helping homeowners rebuild their property. "The city of New Orleans will see their schools come back stronger, and in fact there will be an explosion of charter schools that can help the region come back quickly," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "Of course we would have liked to do more in many areas, but the president believes the American taxpayer has been generous."

In the political realm, the White House showed an uncharacteristic reluctance to strike back at Democrats and liberal groups that were attacking the administration for its handling of Katrina. Kingston said many conservatives were ready to attack New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, both Democrats, whom they saw as the embodiment of years of incompetence, corruption and cronyism. But the signal from the White House was to hold their fire.

Kingston said all Republicans continue to pay the price for the approach Bush took in the weeks after the hurricane.

"What you ended up with was a lot of people who did not like the administration from the beginning now with the tangible reason they had been looking for for five years," Kingston said. "And on the other side you had his friends, who wanted to circle the wagon, defend the president and take a stand, and instead they were asked just to keep passing the bills."

The Washington cowardly, lying, whore Post Company

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

NY Times quashed, CENSORED, stories in order to boost Bush election 2004 prospects

CENSORED: Eric Boehlert compiles a LIST of stories... STORIES, plural... that the New York Times SAT ON, QUASHED, withheld, denied publication, CENSORED, in order to boost the 2004 re-election prospects of President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

This at a time when, amazingly ALMOST HALF of the editors and papers that had endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2000, REVERSED themselves, and either endorsed the opposing candidate (clueless John Kerry), or withheld endorsement of either candidate. (The latter precisely because Kerry's pathetic, wishy-washy, clueless, and indecisive campaign made him clearly unequal to the task of being president in such hazardous times.)
(The Economist captures this dilemma with their headline: "America's next president: the incompetent or incoherent."
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3329802&subject=LA

Here's the IndependentsForKerry.org compilation of newpaper endorsements for Kerry, which actually includes the New York Times.
http://www.independentsforkerry.org/info/index.php?category_id=791&subcategory_id=1565

But in a text-book example of "ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS," the NY Times WITHOLDING PUBLICATION of stories DAMAGING TO the Bush campaign, was FAR MORE VALUABLE to Bush's reelection prospects, than the few paragraphs buried deep in the editorial pages' official presidential candidate endorsement.

Here is an excellent compilation by Brendan Nyhan of Mr. Bush's in-your-face lies, "Wiretaps require a court order," at a time that Mr. Bush's administration was aggressively pursing the Holy Grail of wiretapping, a complete data-mine crawl of ALL phone conversations and business transactions recorded electronically in America.
http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/12/bush_on_wiretap.html

Certainly the Kerry campaign, AND THE NEW YORK TIMES, could have made hay and some election-season HEADLINES by posting these comment

<< You see, what that meant is if you got a wire tap by court order -- and, by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example.>> (Bush, April 19, 2004)

or << Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. >> (from the next day, both highlighted at Nyhan's site).

Instead, what we have is a SEGREGATED SOCIETY, thanks to the New York Times: The Times put any and all scandal ACCUSATIONS, no matter how trivial, non-criminal, or unfounded, againt the Bill Clinton White House in blaring headlines on the front page ("President invited friends and supporters to sleepover at the White House! Lincoln Bedroom 'SCANDAL' infuriates god-fearing Republicans!") while issues, policies, inconsistencies, and the possibility of OUTRIGHT CRIMES from the Bush White House are CENSORED, quashed, buried, suppressed, and short-sheeted at the Times.

The explanation for this bizarre behavoir is simplicity itself: Like Joe Lieberman, the Times has signed on to the PNAC/AIPAC/neo-con agenda, "War is Good," and the Times would rather hang the Clinton White House for having guests spend the night, than give the American public an honest and forceful investigation of massive government spying on American citizens as ordered by the Bush White House - in an election year where such a story would almost certainly have depressed Bush's national voter turnout by 1%, 2%, 3% or more.

This story - of the NY Times SITTING ON a critical story all through election 2004 - demonstrates how poweful a media presence the New York Times is in American politics, and indeed in American life. (What with goverment programs for middle-class, working-class and poor Americans being slashed everywhere as the Republicans reward America's hyper-wealthy with huge tax cuts.)

Unfortunately, the Times wields this influence in an appalling manner, COVERING UP stories voters and citizens have EVERY RIGHT TO hear about, stories COVERED UP by that old grey bucket of muck that once billed itself as the nation's paper of record.

---------------------------------------------------------

New York Times' Eavesdropping Story Wasn't The Only One Squashed For Bush During 2004 Campaign
by Eric Boehlert
8-22-2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/new-york-times-_b_27741.html


This Sunday the New York Times' Bill Keller got dressed down on the paper's letters page, with scores of readers taking the executive editor to task for being evasive in his previous explanation regarding why--and for how long--the Times held back publishing its December 2005, Pulitzer Prize-winning scoop about the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program under president Bush. A program recently deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge. At the time of publication in 2005 readers were told the story, which the White House pleaded the Times not to publish, had been delayed for "a year." But last week Times public editor, Byron Calame, confirmed the story had been held for 14 months, which, as many had suspected, meant the Times could have published the scoop during the height of the 2004 presidential campaign.

When Calame asked Keller why the paper had reported (vaguely and inaccurately) that the story had been held "a year", Keller conceded, "It was probably inelegant wording." Adding, "I don't know what was in my head at the time." When Calame pressed Keller whether the inelegant wording ("a year") and the sensitivity of the election-day timing issue had been discussed internally, Keller responded improbably, "I don't remember."

That was too much for some Times readers.

"It is depressing to think that the executive editor of The Times would even be able to speak this way," wrote Holly Ketron from Princeton, N.J., just one of many who lectured Keller in print about the proper role of journalists in a democracy.

Depressing, indeed. But even more depressing is the fact the eavesdropping story was just one of several legitimate news stories during the closing weeks of the 2004 campaign that were ignored by mainstream press outlets; stories that would have clearly hurt the Bush campaign. Stories such as the on-going Valerie Plame leak investigation, the tale of Saddam Hussein's hunt for yellowcake uranium, the looming military battle for Fallujah inside Iraq, and Bush's mysterious bulge spotted during the televised debates. I detail the media's disturbing, look-the-other-way approach from 2004 in Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.

• Time and Valeria Plame

In 2004 Time magazine's Matthew Cooper got caught up in the special prosecutor's CIA leak investigation. Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury subpoenaed Cooper to find out who leaked the Plame identity to him. He and Time initially refused to cooperate. Eventually Cooper agreed to testify during the summer of 2005 after receiving a waiver from his source Karl Rove assuring him it was okay to disclose their confidential conversation. Of course, Cooper could have asked for that same waiver in 2004 which would have quickened the pace of the investigation significantly. But Cooper did not, according to a Los Angeles Times report, because "Time editors were concerned about becoming part of such an explosive story in an election year."

• NBC and Fallujah

On Nov. 4, two days after the nationwide presidential vote, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw reported, "In Iraq, the American forces have been poised to make a major assault on Fallujah. We all anticipate that could happen at any moment." He asked Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, "What about other strategic and tactical changes in Iraq now that the election is over?" (Emphasis added.) Said Miklaszewski, "U.S. military officials have said for some time that they were putting off any kind of major offensive operation in [Fallujah] until after the U.S. elections, for obvious political reasons."

So according to NBC, military planners had been telling reporters "for some time" that, in what appeared to be a blatant attempt to boost Bush's domestic fortunes, the bloody offensive to try to retake Fallujah was going to be postponed "for obvious political reason" until after the U.S. Election Day. The problem was that prior to Nov. 2, nobody at NBC--not Brokaw, not Miklaszewski--actually reported that fact to viewers as they pondered their presidential pick. (The go-slow approach to Fallujah proved to be a wise public relations move for Republicans since November 2004 became the single deadliest month for U.S. servicemen and women serving in Iraq; 137 died.)

•CBS and Saddam's hunt for yellowcake uranium

Inn the wake of the embarrassing 2004 Memogate scandal, the network announced a 30-minute report by veteran correspondent Ed Bradley examining the administration's faulty claims about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons capabilities was being pushed back until after the election. CBS News president Andrew Hayward, under fire from conservative critics for the network's allegedly liberal ways, announced it would have been "inappropriate to broadcast the WMD report so close to the presidential election." [Emphasis added.] The election was six weeks away at the time of the unusual announcement.

•The New York Times and the Bush Bulge

The story was hatched when some careful viewers went back and watched the first presidential debate again and noticed, with the aid of a video freeze frame, the outlines of a bulge protruding out of the back of Bush's suit jacket, between his shoulder blades. Suspicious observers noted Bush's debate advance team had insisted that no cameras be positioned behind Bush or Kerry during the debate. But Fox News ignored the request and one of its cameras caught an image of Bush as he stood at the debate lectern, capturing the clear bulge under his jacket.

When Bush aides were pressed for a serious response to the bulge question (the TV image did not lie, a shadowy bulge was obvious), aides alternatively insisted the controversial image had been "doctored," then that it was merely a "badly tailored suit," a "poorly tailored shirt", and the presidential tailor responsible had been fired. Asked specifically by the New York Times whether the bulge was a bullet proof vest, a Bush aide insisted it was not; the president was not wearing one the night of the debate. It turned out none of those public pronouncements were true. (The bulge was later confirmed to be a bullet proof vest.)

Intrigued by the unfolding unfolding, Robert Nelson, a 30-year Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist who works on photo imaging for NASA's various space probes and is an international authority on image analysis, began to do some at-home research on the bulge image. Nelson, with no partisan ax to grind, took a video image of Bush's back captured from the first debate and, using the same methods used to analyze images taken from spacecrafts, greatly sharpened the details, and specifically the shadows.

Nelson quickly concluded the bulge was real. And the enhanced image of Bush from the debate Nelson created ended any speculation. It was irrefutable that Bush was wearing some sort of device across his back, complete with that liked like a wire snaking down Bush's back. Disturbed by the misleading explanations he had read from Bush aides in the press, Nelson forwarded his information to a New York Times science reporter, who was interested. Eventually, three reporters were assigned to the story.

According to the reporting of David Lindorff, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Report's Extra!, Nelson was told by a Times reporters that the bulge article, complete with his compelling imagery, would run Oct. 28, five days before the election. Instead, on the night of Oct. 27 the story was killed. In an email the next day, one of the Times reporters apologized to Nelson: "Sorry to have been a source of disappointment and frustration to you." Two months later, executive editor Keller explained, "In the end, nobody, including the scientist who brought it up, could take the story beyond speculation. In the crush of election-finale stories, it died a quiet, unlamented death." In other words, the Times article would have easily proven there was a bulge underneath Bush's jacket during the debates, which would have undercut all his campaign's public denials and thereby raised questions about Bush's credibility. But because the story could not authoritatively say what the bulge was (and because Bush aides still refused to acknowledge its existence), the article was not worth printing.

As for Keller's insistence the story died a "quiet, unlamented death," that was not true. At least one of the reporters assigned to the article, Andrew Revkin, publicly expressed his frustration with the decision to kill the story, noting the oddity of accepting the Bush campaign's flimsy explanation about a tailor's mistake over the word of an esteemed scientist who produced images that were impossible to ignore. The Times' public editor later said he also thought the paper should have run the bulge story.

Meanwhile, can anyone think of a single bad-news-for-Kerry story that news outlets politely sat on during the 2004 campaign

Monday, August 21, 2006

Robert Parry catches NY Time's Thomas Friedman being a hypocritical shill who scorns American voters...

The Great Robert Parry was one of the handful of American journalists who investigated and unraveled the Iran-Contra story. He details (in his book "Secrecy and Privilege" at his great website ConsortiumNews.com) how, while working for Newsweek as an investigative reporter, he doggedly and steadfastly pursued leads and sources that revealed an amazing story: that the US government was secretly funding an army, and running a secret war, in Central America, without the knowledge or oversight of Congress. At every turn the Republican White House (Reagan and Bush Sr.) denied the story, and even the Washington media derided the story as fanciful. Until the Nicaraguan forces shot down a US "secret" supply flight aircraft, and brought the sole survivor in front of TV cameras where he told the full story of an entire secret air force supplying the Contra rebel US-backed army in Nicaragua.

Even when this story was vindicated, Newsweek continued to downgrade Parry's reporting and downplay the Republican administration's above-the-law tactics, and Parry was eventually forced to resign. He has not been offered a prominent job as an investigative reporter in the US corporate "major media" since, which serves as yet another example of how "liberals," or more specifically Repuglican exposing journalists, are EXILED or PURGED from the American media.

The New York Times, on the other hand, exhibits the complete OPPOSITE behavior of the courageous Mr. Parry: The Times has, over the past decade or two, become an institution of PAID PROFESSIONAL LIARS, as this post will try to illustrate, often PATHOGICALLY so. The Times is so bad that, even as their own home city reeled from the coordinated attack of 9-11 suicide bombing hijackers, as the smoke and ashes of burned bodies of their fellow New Yorkers floated in the air around the NY Times building, the Times STILL adhered to the Bush admin.'s insane defense of their 9-11 incompetence, as for example then Nat. Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice saying "NO ONE COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED the use of airliners as flying bombs." Not only was Ms. Rice lying, but she was transparently, flagrantly doing so. After all, the ITALIAN POLICE stationed surface-to-air missiles around the city of Genoa, Italy, during the G8 summit there, specifically to ward off the prospect of Al Qaida hijacking an airliner and using it as a flying bomb to attack the assembled G8 presidents.

---------------------------------------------------
CNN mentions anti-aircraft missiles as security precautions at Genoa G8 summit:
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/20/genoa.protests/index.html
and
Missiles to protect summit leaders
Rory Carroll in Rome, The Guardian
Wednesday July 11, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,519925,00.html

Italy has installed a missile defence system at Genoa's airport to deter airborne attacks during next week's G8 summit, fuelling hysteria about looming violence.
A land-based battery of rockets with a range of nine miles and an altitude of 5,000 feet has been positioned in the latest security measure against perceived threats from terrorists and protesters.
--------------------------------------------------------

You would THINK that it would be the NEW YORK TIMES' job, and duty, to highlight such a clear and appalling lie on the part of such an important official of the US government.

Yet there was the Times, not only giving the nation's NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR a "free pass" whitewash for gross incompetence before 9-11, but hell, the Times

#1. joined the Bush admin. in STONEWALLING a 9-11 commission until the 9-11 widows demanded it,
#2. didn't express any vocal or thorough opposition to PROMOTING Condoleeza Rice to Secretary of State despite her gross incompetence as National Security Advisor; and
#3. the NY Times JOINED the administration in successfully turning the 9-11 commission into a whitewash, with Bush and Cheney farcically testifying TOGETHER, neither of them under oath!

So much for the ashes of 9-11 victims, still floating in the air. (And today, the NY Times JOINS the Administration's PROPAGANDA EFFORTS to portray the admin. as "LEADING the war on Terror, even though the 9-11 Commission Final Report gave the Bush White House "D" and "F" - FAILING! - grades for post 9-11 security and counter-terror preparations to America's STILL vulnerable infrastructure.
http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-12-05_summary.pdf

Clearly, the NEW YORK TIMES is JOINED AT THE HIP with the Bush administration - daily BETRAYING AMERICA'S SECURITY in pursuit of a "WAR UBER ALLES" agenda, the "war on terror" as license to drop bombs anywhere in the Muslim world as the first resort for America's beserk Jewish neo-cons and Southern Neo-confederates.

Mr. Parry's call on THOMAS FRIEDMAN to RESIGN may not range as far and wide as our indictment of the New York Times (above), nor does Mr. Parry try to list all of the lies, distortions, omissions, and disinformation that the Times has produced (spewed) over the past decade.

But Mr. Parry certainly does captures the ARROGANCE and HYPOCRISY of Mr. Friedman's scorn and derision for those MILLIONS of American citizens and voters - a MAJORITY OF US - who oppose Mr. Bush's negligent, incompetent, and fraud-centered occupation of Iraq, a war based on abject lies and raw demogogue media manipulation.

Also, don't miss our previous post, David Sirota catching the NY Times' David Brooks contempt for American voters and democracy.
http://mediawhoresusa.blogspot.com/2006/08/media-whores-despise-democracy-david.html


<< In other words, according to Friedman, Americans who were right about the ill-fated invasion of Iraq are still airheads when it comes to the bigger picture, while the pundits and politicians who were dead wrong on Iraq deserve pats on the back for their wise analyses of the larger problem. >>

<< As for Friedman, despite botching the biggest foreign-policy story in the post-Cold War era, he retains his prized space on the New York Times Op-Ed page, which, in turn, guarantees that his books, even ones with obvious and pedantic themes such as The World Is Flat, jump to the top of the bestseller lists.

Friedman, who once liked to call himself a “Tony Blair Democrat” (before the British prime minister was unmasked as one of Bush’s chief enablers), now positions himself closer to formerly pro-war Democrats who have triangulated their way to positions critical of Bush’s execution of the Iraq War but not the invasion itself.

In other words, Friedman has re-branded himself what might be called a “Hillary Clinton Democrat.” He also has begun promoting as a favorite new theme something that was obvious to many Bush critics years ago: that one pillar of a sane Middle East policy would be to aggressively confront America’s addiction to oil. >>


***************************************************************

NYT's Friedman Should Resign

By Robert Parry
August 21, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/082106.html

New York Times foreign policy analyst Thomas L. Friedman finally has come to the conclusion that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq – which Friedman enthusiastically supported with the clever slogan “give war a chance” – wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Noting that “it is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are babysitting a civil war,” Friedman wrote, “that means ‘staying the course’ is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B – how we might disengage with the least damage possible.” [NYT, Aug. 4, 2006]

Yet, despite this implicit admission that the war has unnecessarily killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 2,600 U.S. soldiers, Friedman continues to slight Americans who resisted the rush to war in the first place.

Twelve days after his shift in position, Friedman demeaned Americans who opposed the Iraq War as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in,” presumably a reference to the threat from Islamic extremism. [NYT, Aug. 16, 2006]

In other words, according to Friedman, Americans who were right about the ill-fated invasion of Iraq are still airheads when it comes to the bigger picture, while the pundits and politicians who were dead wrong on Iraq deserve pats on the back for their wise analyses of the larger problem.

The Rabbit Hole

At times, it’s as if Official Washington has become a sinister version of Alice in Wonderland. Under the bizarre rules of Washington’s pundit society, the foreign policy “experts,” who acted like Cheshire Cats pointing the United States in wrong directions, get rewarded for their judgment and Americans who opposed going down the rabbit hole in the first place earn only derision.

As for Friedman, despite botching the biggest foreign-policy story in the post-Cold War era, he retains his prized space on the New York Times Op-Ed page, which, in turn, guarantees that his books, even ones with obvious and pedantic themes such as The World Is Flat, jump to the top of the bestseller lists.

Friedman, who once liked to call himself a “Tony Blair Democrat” (before the British prime minister was unmasked as one of Bush’s chief enablers), now positions himself closer to formerly pro-war Democrats who have triangulated their way to positions critical of Bush’s execution of the Iraq War but not the invasion itself.

In other words, Friedman has re-branded himself what might be called a “Hillary Clinton Democrat.” He also has begun promoting as a favorite new theme something that was obvious to many Bush critics years ago: that one pillar of a sane Middle East policy would be to aggressively confront America’s addiction to oil.

Some readers might praise Friedman for his belated second thoughts on Iraq and for his new enthusiasm for energy independence. But is it fair for Friedman to keep disparaging Americans who were prescient about the Iraq fiasco – and who have urged a less violent approach to the Islamic world?

Many Iraq War critics, from former Vice President Al Gore to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who took to the streets in early 2003, proved they had a more reasonable strategy on Iraq – letting United Nations inspectors finish their search for Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction – than did Bush’s war council and his cheerleaders in the U.S. news media. [For an early warning of the Iraq disaster, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down.”]

As for the larger concern about reducing Islamic extremism, many Bush critics point to the traditional advice of counterinsurgency experts who warn against an over-reliance on force to quell unrest because excessive violence tends to alienate a country’s population and drives them toward rebellion, rather than toward peace.

To win hearts and minds, more subtle strategies are required, targeting the root causes of popular resentments, offering realistic options for a better life, and then systematically isolating die-hard extremist elements.

In the Middle East, such a strategy would demand an equitable settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, steady support for political reform, and expanded economic opportunities for the region’s common people, not just the wealthy elites. A sensible U.S. energy policy – less desperate for oil – would help, too.

Violent Outbursts

Given the bitterness felt by many Arabs over what they see as their decades of humiliation by the West and for the corruption of U.S.-backed Arab leaders, there also must be some forbearance for outbursts of violence.

Overreaction to provocations by small bands of Islamic extremists may be understandable from an emotional viewpoint, but tit-for-tat violence can be counterproductive in stopping the region’s cycles of violence. Indiscriminate counterterrorism plays into the hands of the terrorists.

Many Americans understood this reality in 2001-2002 supporting targeted attacks against al-Qaeda in retaliation for 9/11 while opposing Bush’s strategy of using military force to remake the Middle East.

These Americans recognized that Bush’s vision of a countries either “with us or with the terrorists” was simplistic and dangerous; his one-sided approach to backing all Israeli policies was harmful both to Arabs and Israelis by eliminating the key U.S. role as “honest broker”; and his crypto-racist rounding up and imprisoning of Muslims on the flimsiest of evidence was destructive to America’s reputation for justice and equality.

In this view, Bush’s black-and-white reaction to a world of grays was a recipe for disaster. But this reasonable opinion was largely excluded from the national debate.

Yet, while major news outlets turned mostly a deaf ear to these voices, influential pundits like Friedman preached the glorious benefits of war, from the Op-Ed pages to the TV studios. Indeed, Friedman has been among the highest-profile foreign-policy analysts who have advocated the use of U.S. air power, especially against Iraq.

'Give War a Chance'

As media critic Norman Solomon wrote in March 2002, Friedman’s pro-bombing influence stretched from his Times Op-Ed column to regular segments on PBS news programs, not to mention appearances on “Meet the Press,” “Face the Nation” and even the David Letterman show.

Solomon wrote: “Friedman has been a zealous advocate of ‘bombing Iraq, over and over and over again’ (in the words of a January 1998 column). Three years ago, when he offered a pithy list of prescriptions for Washington’s policymakers, it included: ‘Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge.’”

Solomon continued: “In an introduction to the book Iraq Under Siege, editor Anthony Arnove points out: ‘Every power station that is targeted means more food and medicine that will not be refrigerated, hospitals that will lack electricity, water that will be contaminated, and people who will die.’

“But Friedman-style bravado goes over big with editors and network producers who share his disinterest in counting the human costs. Many journalists seem eager to fawn over their stratospheric colleague. ‘Nobody understands the world the way he [Friedman] does,’ NBC’s Tim Russert claims.

“Sometimes, Friedman fixates on four words in particular. ‘My motto is very simple: Give war a chance,’ he told Diane Sawyer” on “Good Morning America.” [For the full Solomon column, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Giving War a Chance.”]

Seeking Vindication

Though the disastrous consequences of these cavalier recommendations became apparent fairly soon after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Friedman instead searched for slivers of vindication amid the carnage.

Finally, in early 2005, he penned a column entitled “A Day to Remember,” calling himself “unreservedly happy” about the Iraqi national election and declared “you should be, too.” [NYT, Feb. 3, 2005]

A few weeks later, Friedman was adding tentative progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and Lebanese demands for a full Syrian withdrawal as further evidence of the wisdom of invading Iraq. Friedman hailed the three developments as historical “tipping points” possibly foreshadowing “incredible” changes in the Middle East. [NYT, Feb. 27, 2005]

Four days later, Friedman added a touch of self-pity to his sense of vindication. “The last couple of years have not been easy for anyone, myself included, who hoped that the Iraq war would produce a decent, democratizing outcome,” he wrote. [NYT, March 3, 2005]

But the reality was never as Friedman presented it. The Iraqi election was a means for pro-Iranian Shiite parties to consolidate their dominance over the previously powerful Sunni minority, setting the stage for more sectarian violence, not some democratic national reconciliation.

The tentative progress in the Israeli-Palestinian talks resulted from the death of long-time Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, not as a consequence of the Iraq War. Indeed, a post-Arafat election in the Palestinian territories led to a Hamas victory and to the latest round of Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza, now including Israel’s arrest of deputy prime minister Nasser al-Shaer and more than two dozen Hamas cabinet members and legislators. [NYT, Aug. 20, 2006]

As for Lebanon, Bush’s encouragement of Israel to launch a heavy assault against Hezbollah strongholds in south Lebanon – echoing his “shock and awe” strategy in Iraq – has left much of Lebanon’s economic infrastructure in ruins and has elevated the status of Hezbollah guerrillas in the eyes of many Lebanese and across the Middle East.

Catching the Wave

In other words, few of Friedman’s assessments have turned out to be either thoughtful or accurate. Rather than anchoring his work in objective fact and unbiased analysis, he seems instead to have mastered the skill of catching the wave of Washington’s latest “conventional wisdom.”

While that ability has proven very profitable for Friedman, it has hurt U.S. foreign policy and contributed to the deaths of 2,600 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians in the Middle East.

But Friedman is not alone. Many major news organizations fill their opinion columns and their on-air commentary with well-paid pundits who also cheered on the Iraq War.

The Washington Post’s editorial section offers up nearly the same line-up of columnists who ran with the pro-war herd from 2002 through 2005. Some, like David Ignatius, have slowly begun to retreat from their enthusiasm for invading Iraq; others, like Charles Krauthammer, remain true believers in the neoconservative cause.

Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt stays ensconced, too, despite admitting that his pre-war editorials shouldn’t have treated the alleged threat from Iraq’s WMD as a “flat fact” instead of an allegation.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen – who like Friedman presents himself as a slightly left-of-center thinker – is another pundit who admitted misjudgments on Iraq without really accepting blame or showing remorse.

“Those of us who once advocated this war [in Iraq] are humbled,” Cohen wrote in a column on April 4, 2006. “It’s not just that we grossly underestimated the enemy. We vastly overestimated the Bush administration. …

“Victory in Iraq is now three years or so overdue and a bit over budget,” Cohen wrote. “Lives have been lost for no good reason – never mind the money – and now Bush suggests that his successor may still have to keep troops in Iraq.”

It may be positive news that the likes of Friedman and Cohen have finally acknowledged realities long apparent to many other Americans. Still, the halfhearted mea culpas – often combined with continued slights against those who were right – fall far short of the accountability that the deaths and maiming of so many people would seem to justify.

Under principles of international law applied from Nuremberg to Rwanda, propagandists who contribute to war crimes or encourage crimes against humanity can be put in the dock alongside the actual killers.

Though such a fate may not await America’s pro-war pundits, Friedman and other commentators who helped ease the way to Bush’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq and thus contributed to the ongoing slaughters in the Middle East might at least have the decency to admit their incompetence and resign.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.

Media Whores BETRAY America's security. Textbook example, Pakistan:

American servicemen and women are bleeding and dying in the hell-hole that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have made of Iraq, and STILL our cowardly, lying, corporate media pushes on American viewers and news-consumers a superficial, distorted and disinformative portrayal of America's relations with other countries.



Fun Facts About Afghanistan
Ankush Khardori
20 August 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ankush-khardori/fun-facts-about-pakistan_b_27654.html


It's not often that one's jaw actually drops while reading the newspaper, but I had that experience Sunday afternoon as I read a piece on The New York Times op-ed page by Richard Armitage and Kara Bue about how we must, as the title says, "Keep Pakistan on Our Side." Armitage has the distinction of being one of the few competent officials to have worked on foreign policy for the Bush administration, but he and Bue have turned out one of the most transparent pieces of nonsense I've ever had the displeasure of seeing on the Times' op-ed page -- and this comes from someone who's read most of what Stanley Fish has penned for the paper.

Referring to connections between Pakistan and the alleged participants in the terror plot in London, Armitage and Bue write, "While the arrests may serve as proof to some that the country cannot be relied on as an ally in our fight against Islamic extremism, we would argue that the recent events should harden our resolve to support it." They go on to emphasize some of Pakistan's supposed assistance in the war on terror; to downplay the ways in which Pakistan has acted directly counter to our strategic interests; and to completely ignore or misrepresent a number of facts crucial to understanding and assessing the merits of continuing, in its current form, our relationship with the country.

For starters, nowhere do Armitage and Bue mention that Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, came to power in a military coup in 1999. After trying to hold elections that pretty much everyone acknowledged were rigged, Musharraf finally managed to engineer a constitutional amendment retroactively legalizing his transparently illegal rise to power. The closest Armitage and Bue come to acknowledging these facts is by writing, in one of the grossest understatements I've ever seen in print, that "much remains to be accomplished [in Pakistan], particularly in terms of democratization." That's it.

Meanwhile, President Bush -- who insists that the spread of democracy is at the heart of his foreign policy -- has given Pakistan status as a major non-NATO ally and called it a "key ally in the war on terror," despite the fact that Freedom House, widely considered one of the best sources for data on democracy in the world, gives Pakistan lower scores in political freedom than -- wait for it -- Iran. While it's often said that the democratic cure for the Musharraf regime would be worse than the disease -- that Islamist parties would quickly rise to power -- a number of scholars vigorously dispute that claim. Frederic Grare, writing recently for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, convincingly argues that the Pakistani Army has deliberately exaggerated the threat from Islamist elements -- which, violent and otherwise, it has nurtured and frequently controlled -- in order to maintain political power and support from countries like ... ours. Husain Haqqani, of Boston University, has been saying much the same thing for years.

Armitage and Bue also focus on Pakistan's aid in the war on terror, but they fail to mention -- startlingly -- that Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding out (hanging out, really) in northwest Pakistan, with the aid of extremists who Musharraf allowed to roam freely even years after 9/11. Not to worry, Musharraf has helpfully told us; even if were to capture the men who killed nearly 3,000 American citizens, we "will have achieved nothing." Nor do Armitage and Bue mention that Musharraf was one of the Taliban's key allies, or that he continues to tolerate the presence of remnants of that regime -- which threaten to throw Afghanistan into chaos once again -- on the Afghan-Pakistani border. This is no accident. As Steve Coll, probably the most well-informed American journalist on Pakistan, said recently, "the infrastructure that radical Islamist groups have developed in Pakistan is considerable. It includes political parties, social networks, charities, and even businesses. It's not a matter of just a few terrorists hiding in the hills."

As to the plotters in London, Armitage and Bue write as if Pakistan could have used more help in order to deal with the terrorists tied to the British Muslims. The facts suggest otherwise. As Alyssa Ayres wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the "common thread" between the airline bombers is a group in Pakistan known as Jama'at ud-Dawa, which previously went under the name Lashkar-e-Taiba. As Ayres writes, this group "has battled India since 1997, when it began sending suicide-jihadists into Indian Kashmir to 'free' the population. In effect this has meant butchering those who don't subscribe to their seventh-century worldview -- Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike -- a program to which the group brings flourishes such as slicing off the noses and ears of those deemed insufficiently pious." In 2002, Musharraf banned Lashkar, in addition to a number of other terrorist organizations. So how did the group manage to reincarnate itself and outwit the Pakistani authorities, which were supposedly determined to rid themselves of these violent elements? By changing its name. Jama'at ud-Dawa then "continued to churn out jihad recruitment material, under the same titles, and to convene massive jihad jamborees to call more of the faithful to arms." Had Musharraf truly wanted to put Lashkar's terrorists out of business, one suspects a name change would not have been sufficient for them to elude his grasp.

I'll wrap things up by noting, with equal parts amusement and shock, Armitage and Bue's statement that "given the exposure of the arms bazaar run by [Pakistan's] top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, it must prove itself a reliable partner on technology transfer and nuclear proliferation." Indeed. Not pardoning Khan -- who has done more than anyone else in recent history to spread the threat of nuclear weapons technology to our declared enemies, including Iran and North Korea -- would have been a nice start. (He now resides under house arrest in a palatial home in Islamabad.) Or perhaps Pakistan could have been so kind as to allow international weapons inspectors simply to question Khan in order to obtain information about everything he did and who was involved -- facts about which there remain large, dangerous questions. Alas, Pakistan refused to permit the IAEA to interview him.

Like Armitage and Bue, I'm all for reevaluating America's relationship with Pakistan, though I would generally oppose further cozying up to an authoritarian regime that harbors and supports terrorists, as it has also done with the mastermind of the world's greatest black market in nuclear weapons technology. But one thing's certain: If we are to have the discussion that Armitage and Bue seek to start, we had better get our facts straight first.

Media Whores SHOVE JonBenet story down our throats....

As we all learned in elementary school, there are costs and consequences for our actions. Yet the American corporate mediatocracy only continues to PROFIT from selling us garbage, trash, and misinformation, as they take their cut from the Bush kleptocracy's "loot American taxpayers to enrich our cronies" agenda - billions in tax cuts for major media corporations
that, as our previous post pointed out, prefers to sell us CONSUMERISM, IGNORANCE, and celebrity news, to the EXCLUSION of information that is vital to our existance as a nation.

(For example, 'the media' REFUSES to make a front-page issue of VOTE FRAUD and HACKABLE computerized vote counting equipment... nor do they spend much time on the time-bomb in the making of America's returning PTSD Iraq war veterans - remember, both Timmy McVeigh and the DC sniper were combat traumatized veterans, and their actions would kill dozens of Americans and cost tens of millions of dollars in damages.)




All JonBenet, All The Time
08.20.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-geiger/all-jonbenet-all-the-tim_b_27626.html


In the news this morning we have yet another bloodbath in Iraq, as gunmen shoot up a Shiite religious procession in Baghdad, killing at least 16 people and injuring 230. More American troops have been killed in Afghanistan by Taliban insurgents -- guess we didn't really get rid of the Taliban before George W. Bush's Iraq disaster was started -- and there's renewed trouble in the tenuous Middle East cease-fire.

And what's the top story on all the cable news channels this Sunday morning?

The JonBenet Ramsey case and the gripping fact that newly-discovered suspect John Mark Karr is on a plane and coming back to the United States.

Are you kidding me? Really. Are you freaking kidding me?

Don't get me wrong: I'm the father of a nine-year-old boy and I can appreciate the horror of any child being murdered. But this case is one child, it's over a decade old and, at this point, there are serious questions over whether Karr will even turn out to be a viable suspect in the killings.

This may be an important regional story in Colorado, where the killing occurred and, perhaps, the seventh or eighth story told to a national audience. But considering everything else of real importance, that truly affects the stability of our planet and real peoples' lives, this is nowhere near the top story on our national news.

Adding to what will continue to be an ongoing media obsession with this case -- in which our single-threaded Corporate Media finds this to be the only story they can cover -- is the fact that it's now been revealed that Karr was a patient at a Bangkok clinic that specializes in... sex-change operations! And it looks like Karr went there for treatments.

Oh, boy. The only way this gets knocked out of the news now is if some winsome blonde chick goes missing in the Caribbean.

So here's a chicken-and-egg question: Have the American people become so dumbed-down because this is the kind of non-story that the Corporate Media beats into the ground for hours on end and for days at a time? Or does the media do it because we have become so vacant and disinterested in real news that this kind of stuff is all we really care about?

There's a lot of speculation going on about whether Karr's story even makes sense and a friend of mine who is both a lawyer and a writer said he would not report more than a one-liner about this until DNA evidence or other indisputable proof verifies that Karr caused this little girl's death.

For the sake of our national awareness and intellect, I hope DNA testing is done quickly and whoever should be caring so intensely gets to the bottom of this case. Even if Karr does turn out to be the killer, this is not the top story in the world right now. It's not even close.

And what if it's discovered that he's just an attention-seeking nutcase that had nothing to do with it?

At this point, the media has pushed this as the story we should all care about to the exclusion of all others. They've made the decision that a suspect in a 10-year-old murder case and the fact that he is getting on an airplane is more important than the incendiary situation in the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq that's killing an average of 100 people a day and the way our own involvement in that quagmire drags our country further into the toilet every day. And even if they did focus on those real stories, they should still find time to talk about 46 million Americans with no health insurance and a looming oil crisis that will have a severe impact on people as winter approaches. That's what journalists are supposed to do for a living.

But in defiance of all of that, we are now assaulted with all JonBenet, all the time.

In their warped news judgment, the media is deciding for all of us that we should be more concerned about the minute-by-minute developments with John Mark Karr than the fact that our brave men and women continue to be lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are making a decision every hour that a story of such incredibly specious importance, is more relevant than the deaths of our men and women serving in uniform overseas.

And, for that alone, they should be profoundly ashamed.

You can reach Bob at geiger.bob@gmail.com and read more from him at BobGeiger.com.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

News vultures feasting on JonBenet's tragic death... again.

What a terrific op-ed contribution by Jeff Cohen at Buzzflash.com... the MEDIA VULTURES are once again circling JonBenet Ramsey's corpse, feasting on the tragedy as an opportunity to sell the American public ghoulish, diversionary **** as 'news.'

<< In a media system dominated by entertainment conglomerates, it's no accident that we're served up a steady stream of "top" stories saturated by sex, violence and celebrity: OJ, Princess Di, JonBenet, JFK Jr., Condit/Levy, child abductions (especially upper-middle class blonde girls), Laci Peterson, the runaway bride, the missing teen in Aruba, etc.

Let's face it: The Murdochs and Disneys and Time Warners and GEs that own our media system much prefer a nation of mindless consumers and spectators over a nation of informed, active citizens. They like the fact that avid TV viewers know all the intimate details about the JonBenet or OJ murder cases -- and almost nothing about how big corporations lobby against middle-class interests in Washington. >>



Jeff Cohen: TV News Vultures Circling JonBenet’s Corpse -- Again

Buzzflash guest Contribution
Fri, 08/18/2006
by Jeff Cohen
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/365


The top story on TV news lately has not been the Iraq war or tentative Lebanon peace, or major court rulings on tobacco and warrantless wiretapping, or oil prices or pension "reform" or any of a dozen stories that affect millions of citizens.

TV's top story -- a new suspect in the decade-old murder of 6-year-old beauty princess JonBenet Ramsey -- affects very few people.

But it has the potential of grabbing millions of us, as spectators. That's the beauty of the story to the owners and managers of TV news - my former bosses. They couldn't be more thrilled to see new life in the tabloid story of the death of Little Miss Colorado, a story they'd grudgingly given up on years ago.

In a media system dominated by entertainment conglomerates, it's no accident that we're served up a steady stream of "top" stories saturated by sex, violence and celebrity: OJ, Princess Di, JonBenet, JFK Jr., Condit/Levy, child abductions (especially upper-middle class blonde girls), Laci Peterson, the runaway bride, the missing teen in Aruba, etc.

Let's face it: The Murdochs and Disneys and Time Warners and GEs that own our media system much prefer a nation of mindless consumers and spectators over a nation of informed, active citizens. They like the fact that avid TV viewers know all the intimate details about the JonBenet or OJ murder cases -- and almost nothing about how big corporations lobby against middle-class interests in Washington.

Best of all to TV news managers, tabloid stories are cheap to cover, especially when pundits or legal experts can fill up hours of time with their (often ridiculously wrong) speculation. And these are stories that can't possibly offend powerful forces in Washington, or advertisers.

In my new book Cable News Confidential, I describe my years as a pundit at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. Their instinct toward tabloidism is like a junkie's impulse toward crack. I know what it's like to have to fill up airtime with speculation on a tabloid story when there's no news to report. And I've seen my share of innocent people accused of murder by on-air analysts who suffered no repercussions for the evidence-free accusations. (In the JonBenet case, her parents were repeatedly found guilty of murder on TV.)

In the summer of 2001, as terrorists went about plotting the 9/11 attacks, cable news was obsessed with one and only one huge story: the disappearance of D.C. intern Chandra Levy. She'd had an affair with Congressman Gary Condit, who was wrongly accused over and over on cable news of involvement in the murder. Levy was the apparent victim of random street crime.

In 2002, I spent hours on-air at MSNBC as the "Beltway sniper" terrorized the D.C. area with long-range rifle attacks. The one thing most experts were sure about in the weeks of speculation is that the culprit was white, and he was a loner. Wrong and wrong. There were two culprits, both black.

It was the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995 that had changed TV news forever. That's when management saw that "news," turned into soap opera, could actually compete with entertainment programming for ratings . . . and was much cheaper to produce.

The next year, after MSNBC and Fox News had launched to compete with CNN, JonBenet was murdered. TV news thought it had its next O.J.-type story, and the kiddie beauty pageant footage -- looking creepily like kiddie-porn -- began to run in an endless, exploitative loop. But the JonBenet case lost steam when no one was charged. The circus-trial never materialized. Thankfully, Monica Lewinsky burst on the scene and cable news went virtually all-Monica-all-the-time until Clinton's impeachment acquittal in 1999.

The Clinton acquittal left cable news in the doldrums again. But wait, a JonBenet grand jury was now stirring in Boulder. By October 1999, indictments were expected. For cable news, the long-coveted trial and ratings bonanza were finally at hand. All eyes were on Boulder. The prosecutor stepped to the mike and announced the grand jury's conclusion: There was insufficient evidence to charge anyone.

It was a crushing setback for TV news. I went on the air on Fox News and joked that we could expect "mass suicides" among cable news executives. My prediction was unfortunately wrong.

With the new arrest of a murder suspect in Thailand, the tortured soul of JonBenet Ramsey is once again prey for TV news. She lived six sparkling years. And corporatized media have been able to feast on her death for many years since.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Media Whores DESPISE democracy. David Sirota's editorial masterpiece catches NYT's David Brooks SCORN for voters....

<< Take, for instance, New York Times columnist David Brooks’s piece yesterday - it is arguably the most brazen admission of elite disdain for democracy that has ever been printed in a major American newspaper. Before you dismiss that as hyperbole, read the third line of Brooks’ piece:

“Polarized primary voters SHOULD NOT be allowed to define the choices in American politics.”

Yes, you read that correctly: According to one of the most prominent columnists in America, “voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.” >>


<< But [Brook's] underlying message is, again, right there in black and white: “Voters SHOULD NOT be allowed to define the choices in American politics.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the first major American newspaper columnist to officially go on record publicly demanding that American democracy be substitued with dictatorship - and one undoubtedly run by a small, bodyguarded council, cloistered in a luxury Manhattan high-rise, made up of David Brooks, a few of his country-club golfing buddies and maybe - if Davey decides billionaire Tom Friedman is deserving enough - a few other select New York Times columnists. >>



Finally, The Media Elite Admit the Truth About Themselves
http://davidsirota.com/index.php/2006/08/11/finally-the-dc-media-admits-the-truth-about-itself/

Finally, oh thank God finally, the Washington media elite is making it easy. Usually, D.C.’s professional pundits, pontificators and partisan puppets very carefully package their language to hide their real motives and their real beliefs. But this week following the primary defeat of Sen. Joe Lieberman by first-time candidate Ned Lamont, America is witnessing a good-old-fashioned watershed moment: the perfume is off, the restraint is removed, and the ugly, rancid, sweaty-lockerroom stench of truth is there for all of us commoners to waft. Sniff up, contain your dry heaving, and you will finally understand that all the talk of the Establishment’s disdain for ordinary citizens is not just talk or conspiracy theory - it’s very real, and very powerful.

Take, for instance, New York Times columnist David Brooks’s piece yesterday - it is arguably the most brazen admission of elite disdain for democracy that has ever been printed in a major American newspaper. Before you dismiss that as hyperbole, read the third line of Brooks’ piece:

“Polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.”

Yes, you read that correctly: According to one of the most prominent columnists in America, “voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.” Sure, he tries to couch his statement by targeting “polarized primary voters” (because, of course, in the world of David Brooks - a chickenhawk who avoided military service himself but aggressively pushed the Iraq War - the 60 percent of Americans who are now “polarized” in opposition to the war should have their voting rights immediately revoked). But his underlying message is, again, right there in black and white: “Voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.” Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the first major American newspaper columnist to officially go on record publicly demanding that American democracy be substitued with dictatorship - and one undoubtedly run by a small, bodyguarded council, cloistered in a luxury Manhattan high-rise, made up of David Brooks, a few of his country-club golfing buddies and maybe - if Davey decides billionaire Tom Friedman is deserving enough - a few other select New York Times columnists.

But no, folks, it gets better. Brooks goes on to offer up the transparently dishonest claim that “Lamont’s voters are rich.” As evidenced by its repitition, this lie is clearly a talking point crafted right in the Republican National Committee headquarters, Joe Lieberman’s campaign offices - or most likely, both. For instance, right-wing pundit Michael Barone wrote in the Wall Street Journal today that Lamont did not win “the lunch-bucket working class” in Connecticut, but instead was propelled to victory by “the secular transnational professional class” - an attempt, like Brooks, to portray Lamont’s victory as just a product of a few wealthy limousine liberal voters. Barone then tops off his tirade with an attack on Lamont, for being “one of several members of a Democratic caucus who have made, inherited or married big money.” Barone anger at Lamont for this doesn’t seem to be tempered by the fact that Barone himself became famous for marrying into the billionaire Shorenstein family.

How do we know this is a lie? Just take a look at the results. Lamont not only won 7 out of 8 of Connecticut’s counties, but he specifically won the poorest, most working-class areas of the state. For instance, Lamont won New Haven. That’s not only Lieberman’s hometown, but also “the seventh poorest community in the United States,” according to the Department of Education, where “one out of every four citizens lives in poverty,” according to the Yale Daily News. Lamont also won Hartford, the second-poorest city in America - one the American City Business Journals recently noted “is burdened with more socioeconomic stress than any other major city in the United States.” It’s possible that Brooks and Barone’s only firsthand knowledge of Connecticut is their treks circumventing these working-class bastions and heading to the state’s lavish vacation spots - but more likely, they knew what the results meant, but deliberately decided to ignore the facts.

Finally, there was ABC News political director Mark Halperin appearing on Charlie Rose’s PBS show doing his best, funniest, most slapstick stand-up comic routine - only he was being deadly serious and thinking he was making a very astute point, while everyone was likely laughing. He eagerly declared as fact that “every Democrat who is prominent now…the Republicans have succeeded in defining as weak, Jane Fonda-type Democrats.” Halperin - the guy who brags to Washington insiders about how much of a genius he is for supposedly possessing up-to-the-minute knowledge of all political news, polling and data - made this comment one day after the Washington Post released its major nationwide poll showing voters trust Democrats to do a better job of fighting terrorism. In fact, Halperin’s own employer, ABC News, reported less than a year ago that its polling showed Democrats had pulled even with the GOP on fighting terrorism. But no, that annoying reality didn’t fit nicely into Halperin’s pre-packaged storyline - and so he ignored the facts, grabbed for the most cliched stereotypes he could summon, and created his own hysterically laughable fantasy. It was as breathless, hysterical, crazed, unsupported and insulting as Joe Lieberman today telling a local Connecticut paper that a Lamont win in the general election would be a “tremendous victory” for terrorists like those who “wanted to blow up these planes” in the stymied Al Qaeda plot in England.

You can usually tell when you are becoming frightening to the powers that be when they begin to publicly freak out. The spasms began in the lead up to the Lieberman-Lamont primary, with D.C. cocktail party icons Marty Peretz, Lanny Davis, Cokie Roberts, Marshall Wittman, Robert Kagan and Little Stuey Rothenberg throwing temper tantrums and publicly having nervous breakdowns. And now, as shown, these elites are having a full-on, heart-pounding, Tony Soprano-style panic attack. The result is certainly a pretty entertaining show as elite after elite after elite very publicly embarrasses themselves. But it is also something more: it is the very clear, very well-documented admission of just how much hatred these elites really have both for ordinary people’s intelligence, and ordinary people’s growing political power.

It is no hyperbole to say that these elites hate democracy and democratic movements - they hate them so much they are willing to break the taboo and scream their hatred for democracy in the pages of the largest newspaper in the world. They hate ordinary people so much they are willing to fabricate storylines wholly unsupported by even a shred of fact. But thanks to the fact that democracy still exists in America and elections still happen here, their hatred is no longer the ideology that gets to govern unchallenged. This week in Connecticut we saw the first rumble. And come election day in November, that rumble is going to be an earthquake no matter how much the elites whine, cry and scream.

NY Times DELAYED the "Bush-NSA spying on all Americans" story until AFTER the 2004 election....

Far, far, far from being a "liberal-democrat" newspaper, the New York Times, owned by the Arthur Sulzberger family, is wholly and completely dedicated to the proposition of the Bush-Cheney government being UNACCOUNTABLE to either American (much less international) laws, nor to the American people.


NYT Delayed Publication Of NSA Spying Story Before 2004 Election
Byron Calame
Sunday August 13, 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eat-the-press/2006/08/13/nyt-delayed-publ_e_27151.html


On December 16, 2005, the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been eavesdropping on telephone calls without a warrant in an in-depth investigative report by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen. Controversially, it was also revealed that the NYT had "delayed publication for a year." Questions arose as to whether the NYT had had evidence of the program prior to the 2004 election and had kept mum. Today, NYT Public Editor Barney Calame has the definitive answer:

"I have now learned from Bill Keller, the executive editor, that The Times delayed publication of drafts of the eavesdropping article before the 2004 election."
Calame traces the language of the delay from "a year" to "more than a year" in subsequent references made in print and by executive editor Bill Keller. Calame writes that his attention was caught by Keller's "Talk to the Newsroom" web-only column in April wherein he was challenged for holding the story and thus influencing the outcome of the election — and he did not correct the timing.

Keller told Calame that drafts of the article had been around for "weeks" before the election, and that "the climactic discussion about whether to publish was right on the eve of the election." WOW. Keller dismisses this as "old business" to Calame; I'd say this is a fairly new and significant bombshell. (One which will, at least, momentarily shut up Peter King, Melanie Morgan, and the rest of the conservative Times bashers.)

Keller told Calame that his claim of a year-old story — missing a crucial month — was "inelegant wording" and claimed that "I don't know what was in my head at the time." Again, WOW. In the Calame article Keller cops to deliberating about publication in the weeks leading up to the election, having a "climactic discussion" on the eve of the election, and weighing the "fairness" of publishing the story just before the election without giving the administration a chance to respond. And now he can't remember what he was thinking? Calame agrees that it wouldn't have been "fair" to spring it on the Republicans; well golly gee whiz, I'm sure the millions of voters who might have liked to know this will totally agree.

(One more wow: Keller says that they initially held the story before the election because the administration had assured them that "everyone involved was satisfied with the program's legality." Gee, the administration making the claim that everything's hunky-dory leading up to an election. Why shouldn't the Times have taken that on faith? Oh, and what was that about fairness? Riiiiight. )

This is a big deal. Newspapers, magazines and, yes, blogs make decisions about what to publish and emphasize and draw attention to every day. But there are three big issues here: (1) The fact that the New York Times held back an explosive, important and possibly decisive revelation prior to the 2004 election; (2) The fact that the New York Times claimed that the story did not, in fact, date from prior to the 2004 election; and (3) The fact that executive editor Bill Keller, who ultimately made the call on whether to run or hold the piece, and who greelit the "delayed for a year" wording in the Dec. 16th article and was cagey about the timing thereafter, now claims to be fuzzy on why, exactly, he might have used inaccurate and misleading language.

The blogs are going to be on fire with this one, on both sides. In other news, that sound you hear is John Kerry banging his head against a wall.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Media Whores' BLATANT Hypocrisy: Lieberman primary challenger "a PARTISAN liberal!", Lincoln Chaffee's Right-Wing challenge "NO COMMENT..."

This is a masterpiece editorial by Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and NY Times editorial writer. In one understated editorial, it does at least 3 things:

#1. Documents that the US nightmare quagmire in Iraq is the Frankenstein creation, first and foremost, of Secretary of War (Defense) Donald Rumsfeld. But anyone who heard Rumsfeld declare of Saddam's (nonexistent) WMD's "They are in the region around Tikrit, to the points north, east, south and west" already knew that Rumsfeld is a blithering idiot whose only talent, as with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove, is to get cowering Democrats to scurry for their bunny holes, rather than stand up for America's combat servicemen and women and American citizens (much less, heaven forbid, Iraqi nationals caught up in Rumsfeld's hell-hole).

#2. Krugman effortlessly and understatedly documents what hapless, pathetic cheerleaders Joe Lieberman (and, by extension, the whole crop of pro-war Democrats) have been for Rumsfeld's babbling folly.

#3. And most important for this editorial, Krugman puts the RANK HYPOCRISY of the 'MSM" - the main-stream-media 'news' whores - on stark display, the nation's major networks playing up the theme that Lieberman's Connecticut primary loss to an anti-war opponent was "PARTISAN!" and "DEFEATIST!"

NOW note the sound of the MSM media whores covering the challenge to Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffee by his RIGHT-WING primary challenger...

As Krugman says, "Sounds of crickets."

Yet more proof, as if any were needed, that today's MainStreamMedia mavens are PAID PROFESSIONAL LIARS.. they have a corporate agenda to sell (in this case, boost the Bush administration's incompetent and corrupt use of "war on terror" to bolster they own political power, in return for huge corporate tax cuts for media conglomerates), and NO LIE, NO DISTORTION, NO SMEAR, NO OMISSION is to brazen for our "Karl Rove is our Master!" media whores to get on their knees for.


(For a, perhaps, less over-the-top example of "paid professional media liars," simply recall the "experts" and media blitzes the Tobacco companies put forward in the 1970s and 1980s to tell America that they had "No idea! No, none!" that tobacco smoking caused cancer.)



Nonsense and Sensibility
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Published: August 11, 2006

After Ned Lamont's victory in Connecticut, I saw a number of commentaries describing Joe Lieberman not just as a "centrist" — a word that has come to mean "someone who makes excuses for the Bush administration" — but as "sensible." But on what planet would Mr. Lieberman be considered sensible?

Take a look at Thomas Ricks's "Fiasco," the best account yet of how the U.S. occupation of Iraq was mismanaged. The prime villain in that book is Donald Rumsfeld, whose delusional thinking and penchant for power games undermined whatever chances for success the United States might have had. Then read Mr. Lieberman's May 2004 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, "Let Us Have Faith," in which he urged Mr. Rumsfeld not to resign over the Abu Ghraib scandal, because his removal "would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America's presence in Iraq."

And that's just one example of Mr. Lieberman's bad judgment. He has been wrong at every step of the march into the Iraq quagmire — all the while accusing anyone who disagreed with him of endangering national security. Again, on what planet would Mr. Lieberman be considered "sensible"? But I know the answer: on Planet Beltway.

Many of those lamenting Mr. Lieberman's defeat claim that they fear a takeover of our political parties by extremists. But if political polarization were really their main concern, they'd be as exercised about the primary challenge from the right facing Lincoln Chafee as they are about Mr. Lieberman's woes. In fact, however, the sound of national commentary on the Rhode Island race is that of crickets chirping.

So what's really behind claims that Mr. Lieberman is sensible — and that those who voted against him aren't? It's the fact that many Washington insiders suffer from the same character flaw that caused Mr. Lieberman to lose Tuesday's primary: an inability to admit mistakes.

Imagine yourself as a politician or pundit who was gung-ho about invading Iraq, and who ridiculed those who warned that the case for war was weak and that the invasion's aftermath could easily turn ugly. Worse yet, imagine yourself as someone who remained in denial long after it all went wrong, disparaging critics as defeatists. Now denial is no longer an option; the neocon fantasy has turned into a nightmare of fire and blood. What do you do?

You could admit your error and move on — and some have. But all too many Iraq hawks have chosen, instead, to cover their tracks by trashing the war's critics.

They say: Pay no attention to the fact that I was wrong and the critics have been completely vindicated by events — I'm "sensible," while those people are crazy extremists. And besides, criticizing any aspect of the war encourages the terrorists.

That's what Joe Lieberman said, and it's what his defenders are saying now.

Now, it takes a really vivid imagination to see Mr. Lieberman's rejection as the work of extremists. I know that some commentators believe that anyone who thinks the Iraq war was a mistake is a flag-burning hippie who hates America. But if that's true, about 60 percent of Americans hate America. The reality is that Ned Lamont and those who voted for him are, as The New York Times editorial page put it, "irate moderates," whose views are in accord with those of most Americans and the vast majority of Democrats.

But in his non-concession speech, Mr. Lieberman described Mr. Lamont as representative of a political tendency in which "every disagreement is considered disloyal" — a statement of remarkable chutzpah from someone who famously warned Democrats that "we undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

The question now is how deep into the gutter Mr. Lieberman's ego will drag him.

There's an overwhelming consensus among national security experts that the war in Iraq has undermined, not strengthened, the fight against terrorism. Yet yesterday Mr. Lieberman, sounding just like Dick Cheney — and acting as a propaganda tool for Republicans trying to Swift-boat the party of which he still claims to be a member — suggested that the changes in Iraq policy that Mr. Lamont wants would be "taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England."

In other words, not only isn't Mr. Lieberman sensible, he may be beyond redemption.
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