MediaBloodhound

Exclusive: Pentagon Pursuing New Investigation Into Bush Propaganda Program

UPDATE BELOW

My latest in Raw Story's investigative series:

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.

Last May, the Inspector General’s office rescinded and repudiated a prior internal investigation’s report on the retired military analyst program, which had been issued by the Bush administration, because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” Yet in recent interviews with Raw Story, Pentagon officials who took part in the program were still defending it by referencing this invalidated report.

Gary Comerford, Inspector General spokesman for the Defense Department, told Raw Story last week that his office is conducting an investigation into the retired military analyst program and confirmed that the investigation began during the summer.

Asked when his office expects to conclude the investigation, Comerford said, “As a matter of policy we do not set deadlines since any number of variables or factors could result in a delay.”

He did confirm that investigators in his office have read Raw Story’s recent articles on the topic.

READ THE REST...

(And in case you missed any prior articles, here are Part I, Part II and Part III)

UPDATE: The Washington Post gives article a nice shout-out (scroll down to header "Pentagon's Media Probe").

Discussing Investigative Series on GRITtv with Laura Flanders

This was taped on Tuesday. The forthcoming article (part III) I refer to in the interview was published Thursday morning. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend watching the interview before reading it; I set it up a bit during our discussion. Here is also part I and part II in the Raw Story investigative series, in case you've missed anything or would like to refer back to what we've reported so far. Part IV, with more revelations, is coming next week.

Exclusive: Pentagon's Domestic Propaganda Program May Not Have Been Terminated

Latest breaking news in Raw Story's investigative series (read Part I and Part II):

Pentagon officials won't confirm Bush propaganda program ended

The covert Bush administration program that used retired military analysts to generate favorable wartime news coverage may not have been terminated, Raw Story has found.

In interviews, Pentagon officials in charge of the press and community relations offices — which worked in partnership on the military analyst program — equivocated on the subject of whether the program has ended.

Last May, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General issued a memorandum rescinding a Bush administration investigative report on the retired military analyst program because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” The now-retracted report had exonerated officials of using propaganda and referred to the program as just "one of many outreach groups."

Yet Donald Horstman, Pentagon Inspector General deputy director, also stated in the memorandum that his office wouldn’t probe further because the “outreach program has been terminated and responsible senior officials are no longer employed by the Department.”

Raw Story’s investigation, however, has shown that some “responsible senior officials” are still employed by the Defense Department, including Bryan Whitman, who remains a chief Pentagon spokesman and head of all media operations, and Roxie Merritt, who is head of the Pentagon’s community relations office.

Raw Story has discovered that Horstman’s other justification for not reopening an investigation at the time – “because the [retired military analyst] outreach program has been terminated” – remains an open question.

READ THE REST

Pentagon Used Psychological Operation on US Public, Documents Show

Part II in my investigative series for Raw Story:

Pentagon Used Psychological Operation on US Public, Documents Show

Figure in Bush propaganda operation remains Pentagon spokesman

In Part I of this series, Raw Story revealed that Bryan Whitman, the current deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations, was an active senior participant in a Bush administration covert Pentagon program that used retired military analysts to generate positive wartime news coverage.

A months-long review of documents and interviews with Pentagon personnel has revealed that the Bush Administration's military analyst program -- aimed at selling the Iraq war to the American people -- operated through a secretive collaboration between the Defense Department's press and community relations offices.

Raw Story has also uncovered evidence that directly ties the activities undertaken in the military analyst program to an official US military document’s definition of psychological operations -- propaganda that is only supposed to be directed toward foreign audiences.

READ THE REST...

Senior Official in Bush Domestic Propaganda Program Remains Obama’s Pentagon Spokesman

(UPDATED BELOW)

My latest for Raw Story (and a major reason for my scarcity in these parts) -- part one in a series of investigative articles:

A key senior figure in a Bush administration covert Pentagon program, which used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage, remains in the same position today as a chief Obama Defense Department spokesman and the agency’s head of all media operations.

In an examination of Pentagon documents the New York Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request — which reporter David Barstow leveraged for his April 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé on the program – Raw Story has found that Bryan Whitman surfaces in over 500 emails and transcripts, revealing the deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations was both one of the program’s senior participants and an active member.

Whitman’s conspicuous presence in these records is notwithstanding thousands of documented communications the Bush Pentagon released but for which names were redacted and an untold number the prior administration successfully withheld after its two-year legal battle with the Times.

Barstow’s Times expose revealed a comprehensive, covert Pentagon campaign — beginning during the lead-up to the Iraq War and continuing through 2008 — that shaped network military analysts into what internal documents referred to as “message force multipliers” and “surrogates” who could be trusted to parrot Bush administration talking points “in the form of their own opinions.” Barstow’s reporting also detailed how most of the military analysts, traditionally viewed as authoritative and independent, had ties to defense contractors with a stake in the same war policies they were interpreting daily to the American public.

The program was ostensibly run out of the Pentagon’s public affairs office for community relations, as part of its outreach, and attended to by political appointees, most visibly in these records by then community relations chief Allison Barber and director Dallas Lawrence.

But as Barstow noted in his report, in running the program out of that office rather than from the agency’s regular press office, “the decision recalled other Bush administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.” In addition to concealing the true nature of the program and the retired military officers’ participation in it, this tactic produced one other effect.

It provided Bryan Whitman, a career civil servant and senior Defense Department official who oversees the press office and all media operations, cover if and when the program was revealed.

Additionally, while political appointees tend to come and go with each new administration, Whitman would be there before the program and he would be there after it. His status as a career civil servant, the fact that he’s worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations – something he points out often in public settings and did at the close of his recent phone interview with Raw Story — has also served to buffer him thus far from scrutiny regarding his involvement in this program.

In a conversation with Mr. Whitman, he denied any involvement or senior role in the program, saying he only had “knowledge” of its existence and called the assertion “not accurate.”

Asked to explain the hundreds of records showing otherwise, Mr. Whitman replied, “No, I’m familiar with those documents and I’d just beg to differ with you,” though he did acknowledge being in “some” of them.

In defending his claim that he wasn’t involved in the program, Whitman reiterated numerous times that since it was not run out of his office, it was not under “my purview or my responsibility.”

Yet records clearly reveal that Whitman was not only fully aware of the program’s intent but also zealously pursued its goal of arming the military analysts with Pentagon talking points in an effort to dominate each relevant news cycle. He was consulted regularly, doled out directives, actively participated and was constantly in the loop.

Documented communications show that Whitman played a senior role in securing generals to brief the analysts, fashioned talking points to feed them, called analyst meetings to put out Pentagon and Bush administration PR fires, hosted meetings, determined which analysts should attend trips to wartime military sites (such as the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) and received frequent, comprehensive reports detailing the analysts’ impact on the air, in print and online.

READ THE REST (which includes examples of his involvement straight from the FOIA records).

UPDATE: Scott Horton at Harper's Magazine has a write-up about the article today.

Op-Ed Column: Tributes Censor Cronkite's Anti-Iraq War Stance

Cronkite Called War "Illegal from the Start," Slammed Network Silence and Would've Spoken Out Again from Anchor Desk

Walter Cronkite believed his "proudest" moment as a journalist occurred when he told the nation that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, despite rosy rhetoric from the Johnson White House and Defense Department. Following his death last week, various network news tributes replayed footage of Cronkite's influential '68 on-air editorial. Yet scrubbed from the memorializing were similar instances of Cronkite's journalistic candor regarding Iraq, such as his 2006 call for withdrawal from a war he went on to describe as "illegal from the start," initiated on "false pretenses" and a "terrible disaster" serving "no purpose" that has "probably made us less safe."

But the most revealing omission from these tributes -- especially in context to the pageant of eulogies extolling Cronkite's journalistic integrity -- may be his response to a reporter's question during a 2006 news conference.

As reported in The Independent UK at the time:

When a reporter asked [Cronkite] whether, given the chance, he would offer similar advice on Iraq [as he had on Vietnam], he did not even wait until the end of the question. "Yes," he said flatly. "It's my belief that we should get out now."

For Cronkite, the question was simple, his answer emphatic. No need to chew it over, to seek a mealy-mouthed moderate reaction to address the Bush administration's unprecedented extremism, brutality and lawlessness. Doing so would mean that he was operating within their narrative, not his.

It was at this same conference that Cronkite said, "The editorializing that I did on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and I think helped speed the end of that war, that was—that I'm proudest of."

Six weeks later, when asked if his words about the Iraq War would have the same effect as his statement to the nation on Vietnam, he demurred, "Well, I think it's a little late for that now." But then he added, "I would like to think it would be helpful in getting us out of there. Anybody who can put another match to that fire, to get us out would be, I think, welcome."

But he certainly wasn't holding his breath for any of his network news heirs to strike another match.

As The Nation journalist John Nichols reported last Friday:

As the war in Iraq went horribly awry, I asked Cronkite whether a network anchorman would dare speak out in the same way that he had?

"I think it could happen, yes. I don't think it's likely to happen," he said with an audible sigh. "I think the three networks are still hewing pretty much to that theory. They don't even do analysis anymore, which I think is a shame. They don't even do background. They just seem to do headlines, and the less important it seems the more likely they are to get on the air."

Nichols also asked Cronkite if he thought he would have spoken out against the Iraq War if he were still an anchorman. Cronkite's reply is not only, once again, unequivocal but a desperately needed correction to the warped view of journalistic principles that permeate today's network newsrooms, a sane and responsible recalibration of the meaning of "fair and balanced."

"Yes, yes I do. I think that right now it would be critical to do so," he told me a few months after the invasion in 2003. "I think that right now we are in one of the most dangerous periods in our existence. Not since the Civil War has the state of our democracy been so doubtful. Our foreign policy has taken a very strange turn. And I do think I would try to say something about that."

Nichols reported as well that Cronkite was concerned "that broadcast news -- his medium -- had grown too deferrent [sic] to power, too stenographic, too consolidated."

In his post "Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did," Salon's Glenn Greenwald rightly criticizes the procession of network news stars who praised Cronkite's career but have failed to adhere to Cronkite's journalistic standards and to reflect on the consequential glaring shortcomings of their own performance or that of their colleagues.

Underscoring the widespread abdication of traditional, democratic journalistic principles from network news coverage, Greenwald juxtaposes Cronkite's on-air Vietnam moment with a quote by Meet the Press moderator and former Bush 43 White House correspondent David Gregory's 2008 statement deflecting criticism:

"The Vietcong did not win by a knockout [in the Tet Offensive], but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. . . . We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . .

"For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. . . . To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past" -- Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, February 27, 1968.

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that [in the run-up to the Iraq War] . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role" -- David Gregory, MSNBC, May 28, 2008.

If reporting facts, providing substantive context and telling us when our elected officials are lying is not Gregory and his colleagues' role, then I respectfully suggest another title: public relations officer (PRO). The acronym seems fitting as well.

Incidentally, Cronkite also cautioned America about invading Iraq from the beginning. Another Iraq War-related casualty in the recreation of Uncle Walter's journey.

Just as the war was under way, Cronkite spoke at a Drew University forum, where, as reported in the Daily Record, he said "he feared the war would not go smoothly, ripped the 'arrogance' of Bush and his administration and wondered whether the new U.S. doctrine of 'pre-emptive war' might lead to unintended, dire consequences."

And that's the way it was.

---

Editor's Note: Some additional must-read news and views on Cronkite:

Chad at BuzzFlash informs me that Cronkite's "speaking out for democracy when he could have played it safe" after retirement is what earned him a BuzzFlash Wings of Justice Award.

Reese Erlich reveals Cronkite's "prescient" views on the then pending Iraq War in "Opinions Walter Cronkite Never Aired" at Truthdig (h/t Jon at Common Dreams), in which Erlich cites excerpts from an unpublished interview he did with Cronkite in 2002.

Norman Solomon punctures the myth that Cronkite was always "a courageous truth-teller" in his article "Beyond the Hype: Cronkite and the Vietnam War."

NYT Front|Back: Porn Plots vs. Detainee Rights

NYT Front|Back, a MediaBloodhound feature that showcases The New York Times' intermittent yet longstanding penchant for placing a supremely unnewsworthy story on its cover while burying a vital one in its back pages, rarely makes an appearance on this site anymore. It's brought back from mothballed hiatuses only for the most egregious and absurd examples.

Like this one:

FRONT:

In Sex Film Industry, Some Long for a Real Plot

No, this isn't satire. It's a cover story on our nation's paper of record. The critical issue at hand (pardon the expression)? The article opens:

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.

There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

Two wars. Jobless rate at nearly ten percent. Healthcare in crisis. And if that weren't enough to bear, now there are dwindling plot lines in our pornography! I believe it was Patrick Henry who originally said, "Give me liberty and intricately plotted pornographic entertainment, or give me death." Of course, that was before the edit (fortunately for Henry, he wasn't living in the dawn of blogging). 

Some more excerpts from this earth-shattering piece of journalism:

“The feature is not as big a part of the industry today,” [Wicked Pictures president Steve] Orenstein said. But he says he still plans two to three bigger-budget releases each year, including the recently shot “2040,” which is about the pornography business of the future. Mr. Orenstein described the movie as “an almost Romeo-and-Juliet story between an aging porn star and a cyborg.”

In lieu of plot, there are themes. Among the new releases from New Sensations, a studio that makes 24 movies a month, is “Girls ’n Glasses,” made up of scenes of women having sex while wearing glasses.

[...]

Ms. Samson, for example, said she took her acting seriously and used to prepare studiously for her roles, like the character she played in the 2006 movie “Flasher.”

She said she played a psychotic who, because of the way her mother treated her, “had an obsession with flashing and doing things in public.”

“I used to have dialogue,” said Ms. Samson, whose given name is Natalie Oliveros, and who is one of the industry’s biggest stars.

“Getting it on in one hardcore scene after another just isn’t as much fun,” she added.

BACK (page A18):

In Senate, Debate on Detainee Legal Rights

Apparently the Times thinks Americans are, as the kids say, so over the issue of detainee rights that the dearth of pornography plots trumped this story by 18 pages.

Intro:

Obama administration lawyers said Tuesday at a Senate hearing that detainees prosecuted by military commissions should have some of the same constitutional rights as American citizens tried in civilian criminal courts.

Republicans on the Armed Services Committee argued that foreigners now detained on terrorism charges at the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, did not deserve those constitutional protections.

“So you are saying that these people who are in Guantánamo, who were part of 9/11 or committed acts of war against the United States are entitled to constitutional rights of the Constitution of the United States?” Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, asked administration officials at one point.

Aside from this article's banishment to the back pages, the story fails to include a substantive factual rejoinder to Senator McCain's misleading statement. Scores of detainees have already been released by the U.S. after being held for years with no charge and incurring what the Times calls "brutal" interrogation techniques but the rest of the world calls "torture."

The Bush administration's process that swept up these detainees, ignored due process and embraced, as Dick Cheney famously said, "the dark side" -- which actually meant perpetrating systematic cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners -- should have no foundation of credibility in a country calling itself a democracy.

The closet the article comes to noting the inherent mendacity in McCain's statement is relegated to a sentence in the second-to-last paragraph (incidentally, is this a new Times editorial decision -- "harsh interrogations or torture"?):

Lawmakers and administration officials have already agreed that statements taken through harsh interrogations or torture would not be allowed in a commission prosecution, but several witnesses suggested that the standards still needed to be clearer.

What should be stated clearly in this story, however, is that the exact number of detainees who confessed during torture remains unknown. So claiming these detainees are guilty of crimes without yet knowing if the confessions were obtained through torture is preposterous. A concept about which Kafka was well versed.

Glaringly absent from this article as well is the fact that the Bush administration's sanctioning of torture has endangered the lives of Americans and directly led to this legal predicament, in which some detainees might actually want to kill Americans, but since their confessions were coerced through torture they may go free.

It remains unclear what Constitutional rights will be afforded detainees tried in military commissions. Though the closing paragraph might give you an indication:

Vice Adm. Bruce E. MacDonald, the Navy's top lawyer, said at the hearing that evidentiary rules should not bar statements taken by soldiers from witnesses questioned under gunpoint on a battlefield. But, he said, those accounts should be weighed differently from statements taken from a detainee six months after his capture.

Key phrases: "battlefield" and "questioned under gun point." Remember all those "dangerous terrorists" rounded up on the "battlefield" during the Bush administration who turned out to be completely innocent, in some cases boys and old men, including this geriatric jihadist, a 71-year-old nearly blind man -- he may have been as old as 78 -- who had to shuffle around Gitmo for nearly five years in a walker before being released in August 2006?

Such context is nowhere to be found in this article either.

Op-Ed Column: CNN's Iran Timeline Omits US-Backed '53 Coup

It might be more difficult for Republicans to bash President Obama for being "timid" in his comments about the Iranian government's violence against protesters if the U.S. media didn't consistently censor US-Iranian history.

Take CNN's recent Iran timeline, titled "A brief look at Iran's history."

According to the timeline, which begins in 1979, Iran has "been at odds with the West and some of its neighbors" since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It refers to the Shah as having been "pro-Western." Yet in the mother of all omissions, CNN leaves out how the US government was directly involved in bringing the Shah to power in a 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

As a June 4 Agence France-Presse article details:

The CIA, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry, run until then in by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests. 

You might remember Obama owning up to this bit of history during his recent trip to the Middle East, in a speech to the Muslim world in Cairo: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government." Reality and honesty as olive branch. Something that would be anathema to the Bush administration and most Republicans holding office today.

The Agence France-Presse article also notes that it was "the first time a serving US president has publicly admitted American involvement in the coup."

So when Obama points out that he's been cautious to avoid saying something the Iranian government could use to try and convince the Iranian people that America is somehow driving these protests, our president knows from which he speaks. And when Obama says that he also doesn't want to steal the spotlight, so to speak, from the voice of the Iranian people leading these protests, our president, once again, knows from which he speaks.

Moreover, as opposed to George W. Bush -- who boasted that "democracy is on the march" but, in reality, whose words and foreign policy helped to solidify the power of extremists and tyrants the world over, proliferate terrorism, and lead to death and destruction on a genocidal scale -- Obama's caution in speaking about the events in Iran is not timid but prudent in light of America's past meddling.

CNN's woefully inadequate timeline obfuscates the truth of America's involvement in Iranian history, involvement that directly impacts the Iranian peoples' past and present. It's this kind of selective reporting on Iran that paves the way for the historically tone-deaf criticisms of Obama we've been hearing from Republicans.

The timeline also reinforces the critically misleading notion that far too many Americans believe: US-Iranian hostilities began in 1979.

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Story of the Day: Gene Randall 'Reporting,' Inc. (CJR Article)

My article published today in Columbia Journalism Review:

Former CNN correspondent-turned-PR consultant Gene Randall’s video “report” for oil giant Chevron might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism. But the Randall-Chevron production raises not only ethical questions, but also the question of whether a surge of newly pink-slipped reporters might go, as one media critic put it, “over to the dark side” and how that might further muddy the line between news and corporate advocacy.

As detailed in a recent New York Times article, when Chevron, America’s third largest corporation, heard that 60 Minutes was preparing a report about the $27 billion lawsuit filed against it for allegedly contaminating the Ecuador region of the Amazon rain forest, Chevron hired former TV newsman Randall to craft a video from the corporation’s perspective, which was posted on YouTube and Chevron’s Web site three weeks before the 60 Minutes report aired on May 3.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley’s investigation presented multiple perspectives while Randall’s included only Chevron officials and consultants. Everyone interviewed in Randall’s piece, in other words, was paid by Chevron, including Randall himself.

Randall’s video also clearly strives to resemble an authentic news report, employing classic stylistic TV news techniques, while never informing the viewer it’s a Chevron production. Most deceptive, however, is that Randall—looking like the consummate TV newsman—begins the video with the accompanying graphic “Gene Randall Reporting” and concludes with the voiceover: “This is Gene Randall reporting.”

Yet Randall, who was laid off from CNN in 2001 and runs the corporate consulting firm Gene Randall Enterprises, told The New York Times, “This is not a news report. This is a client hiring a provider to tell its side of the story.” Moreover, speaking with the National Journal Online, he said, “I don’t portray it as a piece of journalism, but I used journalistic techniques in telling Chevron’s side of the story.” (Reached by phone, Randall declined to comment for this article.)

Author and media critic Norman Solomon thought it was absolutely “deceptive” for Randall “to sign off with the claim that he’s been ‘reporting.’”

“And the whole effort by Chevron is just another attempt at media spin by a huge corporation with plenty to hide — with the added twist of hiring a former journalist to implicitly pretend that he’s being a journalist while flaking for Chevron to defend the indefensible,” Solomon wrote in an e-mail interview.

Kelly McBride, a media ethicist at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism training center in Florida, agreed that Randall’s use of the word “reporting” in the video was clearly intended to mislead.

“I guarantee you that is intentional,” McBride said in a phone interview. “He was hired to imitate journalism and that’s what he did.” Yet she was not surprised to see it and expected such techniques to become increasingly prevalent because of today’s ease of distribution.

Read the rest of the article HERE. (Don't miss the particularly devastating quote by Solomon on PBS NewsHour's relationship with Chevron.)

Story of the Day: NY Times Honors Reagan by Ignoring History

New York Times coverage of the unveiling of Ronald Reagan's statue in the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday reveals not only how myths are perpetuated in the media but also how the omission of critical context distorts history.

In the print version of Thursday's Times report, readers are at least given a terse idea of the man Mr. Reagan's statue was replacing -- Thomas Starr King, "the 19-century Unitarian minister known as the 'orator who saved the nation' for helping to keep California from seceding as a republic during the Civil War." Yet in the online version posted a day earlier, and a full 140 words longer than its printed companion, King is described only as "a 19th-century Unitarian minister and 'Orator Who Saved the Nation.'”

But aside from the appearance of the Times having done nothing more than to cut and paste from the first two sentences of King's Wikipedia entry (for which journalists and news outlets have already been burned recently), the historical significance of supplanting King's statue with that of Reagan's seems completely lost on our paper of record.

As usual, context is king, but it's in short supply in the print edition and non-existent in the online piece. Moreover, quite literally in this case, context is King. And also Reagan. The real Reagan, however, not the cartoonish log-splitting and horseback-riding grandfather who "won the Cold War" and "made us proud to be Americans."

Beyond the bizarrely inscrutable Times description "19th-century Unitarian minister and 'Orator Who Saved the Nation'" and even with the additional stingy mention that he happened to save the nation by "helping to keep California from seceding as a republic during the Civil War," Thomas Starr King was an American hero deemed so for actual virtuous, brave and patriotic deeds while Ronald Reagan's heroic status is almost wholly a myth created by the Republican Party and canonized by our mainstream media. (I say "almost wholly" because Reagan was admittedly a great politician -- a former actor who did much to convince many Americans to believe this myth; at the time, it wasn't only a media creation. Moreover, the American presidency itself confers certain intrinsic mythic qualities, ready-made for such a charismatic figure.)

McClatchy Newspapers reporter Rob Hotakainen supplies some of that much needed context about King.

Not everyone's pleased that Reagan is being put on a pedestal, particularly the descendants of Starr King, who helped keep California in the Union during the Civil War.

"Unfortunately, people say, 'Who was Thomas Starr King?' " said Ginny King Supple, Starr King's great-great-granddaughter, from Los Angeles. "He never got the public recognition after the fact. He was very well-known back in the 1800s and early 1900s. So it is disturbing."

She voted for Reagan, but she said: "From a historical perspective, Thomas Starr King had a lot more to do with the state of the state of California, as opposed to President Reagan. I'm not coming down on Ronald Reagan. He was basically a great man in many ways, but the history of California lies with Thomas Starr King. That's why he was chosen." [As both versions of the Times article notes, each state in the country gets two statues with which to honor its heroes.]

Starr King gave thousands of speeches, up and down the state, railing against slavery, poverty and oppression. Even though the state had banned slavery, many Southerners who had moved to California wanted slaves and threatened to split the state and form their own republic. Starr King corresponded with Abraham Lincoln during his speaking tour.

"More than anything, he kept California from seceding from the Union during the Civil War," King Supple said. "He was a great orator."

Hotakainen also touches on the politics behind the ousting of King's statue.

It also caps a five-year effort by California Republican Rep. Ken Calvert, who launched the campaign to remove Starr King shortly after Reagan's death on June 5, 2004.

"I thought, well, you know, he was a great person, but he's been here for a while. Maybe we can replace him with Ronald Reagan," Calvert said. "And one thing led to another. ... We were able to get it done."

[...]

During the state Legislature's debate, one California legislator said he didn't know who Starr King was, prompting [Thomas] Starr King V to say that the lawmaker would have been better off trying to bolster history education in the schools. He said legislators acted quickly to support the legislation, however, "so as not to appear anti-Reagan."

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Oakland historical author Jack Cheevers recently wrote:

It's never pleasant watching politicians try to manipulate history. Whether it's an ex-president blocking release of incriminating White House tapes, the Russian government closing a KGB archive to foreign researchers or Japanese officials forcing a school textbook author to excise references to World War II-era atrocities, the public's ability to learn the truth about historic events is hobbled.

The imminent removal from the U.S. Capitol of a statue of Thomas Starr King, a charismatic San Francisco minister and orator credited with helping keep California in the Union during the run-up to the Civil War, hardly qualifies as a major crime against history. Yet the successful effort by California Republicans to replace him in the National Statuary Hall Collection with a larger-than-life sculpture of Ronald Reagan is troubling nonetheless.

[...]

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who says the Gipper inspired him as a boy, orchestrated the move to bump King. No doubt the congressman and other Republican stalwarts feel they can honor their hero by strewing the land with as many smiling likenesses of him as possible.

But although Reagan arguably has been sufficiently memorialized (with an airport, a museum, highways, courthouses, post offices, state office buildings and parks named after him, and his own postage stamp), King needs all the exposure he can get.

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carolyn Lochhead also reveals an uncomfortable and quite pertinent historical note.

[House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, 69, came to Washington at the end of Reagan's second term, in 1987. He had infuriated gay activists for failing to acknowledge AIDS, although he had begun to do so by the time Pelosi arrived. She spent much of her first years in office fighting for funding to combat the disease, which by then was ravaging the gay community.

Of course that's only one of the many catastrophic contributions by Ronald Reagan.

Regardless of Reagan's support of genocide in Latin America during the eighties to his devastating long-term economic policies -- which are at the very heart of today's economic collapse -- good ol' Ronnie, even in his afterlife, has managed to retain his famous Teflon coating about which so many mainstream reporters used to acknowledge yet fail to uncover. (A report from Robert Parry, a standout mainstream journalist from that era who went against this grain, is the first link above and highly recommended reading. Parry reveals just a taste of Reagan's true legacy.)

Among the many sad ironies of Reagan's statue replacing Thomas Starr King's, a man who railed "against slavery, poverty and oppression," is that while King is credited with saving California from seceding from the Union, Reagan has become the hallowed symbol of a political party whose members today openly toy with the idea of secession.

Just don't expect the Times to point out this fact.

The Wounded-Courier: Larry King Writing Sequel to 'My Remarkable Journey'

In an interview with the Al Jazeera news network today, legendary talk show host Larry King revealed he's already writing a sequel to his new autobiography "My Remarkable Journey." King said the follow-up autobiography, with the working title "If You're Not Nauseous Yet, You Will Be," will disclose many juicy anecdotes and surprises he couldn't fit into his current book.

King, who's been making the rounds to promote "My Remarkable Journey," provided Al Jazeera with the following teasers that readers can expect to find in "If You're Not Nauseous Yet, You Will Be":

Geraldo Foiled Three-Way with Zahn

In 1999, over dinner at Katz's Deli, Paula Zahn invited King and Geraldo Rivera back to her apartment for a ménage à trois, but King and Rivera's bitter disagreement over which of them should pick up the check caused Zahn to rescind her offer and storm out.

"That really would've been something," King said wistfully. "Paula Zahn, you know? Wow. The body on her. Thanks for the cock block, Geraldo."

King added, "I hope the free pastrami was worth it, you schmuck."

Ate Sushi Off Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Caboose"

"You may not realize this now, but the great American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin used to be a knockout. A caboose on her like a summer peach." King went on to explain, "So this is back in the early eighties, we're at one of the first sushi restaurants in New York, and Doris and I are getting frisky over a bottle of sake. She'd slipped off her shoes and was rubbing her foot over my man regions. So we asked for our check, a doggy bag and escaped to her apartment. As soon as we got through the door, Doris stripped like a Technicolor cartoon. It was the first time I ever ate raw fish off a famous historian's tail lights."

Asked if that meant he'd eaten sushi off other naked people, King told Al Jazeera, "Does a Jew order Chinese food on Christmas? Of course. I've lapped sushi off the flesh of hundreds of legends."

King provided a short list, which included Charo, Richard Nixon, Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, former ABC Newsman Frank Reynolds, Cher, Margaret Thatcher, Spuds McKenzie, Bea Arthur, Judy Woodruff, Marlon Brando, Barbara Walters, Cary Grant, Ruth Buzzi, Dr. Phil, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George C. Scott, Kate Smith, Grace Jones, Tom Jones, Chuck Jones, Sharon Jones, Jim Jones, The Jonas Brothers, Judge Judy, Vincent Price, Julia Child and Jim Lehrer.

Turned Down Lead Role in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

"Little known fact, the original script called for a skeletal old man with a severe heart condition. It was, you know, a very different movie then. It wasn't until I passed on it and Harrison came aboard that they added the action sequences and a story that would draw an audience."

King grimaced, saying, "Look, I always promised Harrison I wouldn't tell anyone. But people know me as a truth-teller, the street guy from Brooklyn with smoked fish tucked under his arm and brass knuckles on each hand. I'm the original pimp, a sex machine, a hustler, a dope fiend, the latke gangsta. I killed a guy back in the sixties for a box of Crackerjacks. I didn't even like Crackerjacks -- I did it for the free toy."

"So yeah, I was the first Indiana Jones," he continued. "The cat's out of the bag. If Harrison has a problem with me saying that, he knows where to find me. Oh, by the way, I nailed Calista Flockhart in her prime."

He's a "Gentile Woman" and Marsupial

Another shocking revelation came when King admitted, "I'm actually a gentile woman and part marsupial."

King explained that a rare hormone condition and ubiquitous use of suspenders have helped him hide this from the public's eye.

"It will be a relief to finally stop using so much Yiddish and to openly schlep -- I mean carry -- my stuff in the pouch that the good Lord gave me."

Slept with Barbara Bush Too Many Times to Remember

"People always say, you know, Barbara resembles George Washington. Maybe," he said with a laugh, "this sounds strange to some people, but I always thought there was something hot about the father of our country. I mean that in a man-crush kind of way. All that unabashed doughy whiteness. I can't explain it exactly -- I'll leave that to psychologists -- but Babes and I had a torrid affair throughout the Reagan and first Bush administration."

King went on to describe their encounters in lurid detail.

"I'd close my eyes and pretend I was crossing the Delaware," he explained. 'What can I say? It was exhilarating. Here I am -- this schlub from Brooklyn -- with my putz in the first lady, pretending I'm schtupping the father of our country. And I'm thinking, 'How did I get here? What a life. What a life for me."

----

The Wounded-Courier is the satirical news division of MediaBloodhound.

The MediaBloodhound Interview: Greg Mitchell, Editor of 'Editor & Publisher' Magazine

Greg Mitchell, award-winning author and editor of the news industry trade magazine Editor & Publisher, brings four decades of journalism experience to his incisive media analyses in his E&P column “Pressing Issues” and on The Huffington Post. He was on the ground covering the bloody 1968 Democratic National Convention and, in the 1970s, became the senior editor of the legendary rock/political magazine Crawdaddy, where he helped write and publish the first magazine article about Bruce Springsteen.

Mitchell went on to author nine non-fiction books, on topics ranging from classic American campaigns (The Campaign of the Century and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady) to how the U.S. government molded public opinion after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hiroshima in America) to an exploration of capital punishment in America (Who Owns Death?). More recently, Mitchell’s book So Wrong for So Long -- hailed by Bill Moyers, Arianna Huffington and Glenn Greenwald -- explored the media’s failure to ask the right questions in the lead-up and first years of the Iraq War. (Springsteen, his friend now of 36 years, wrote the preface.)

His new book, Why Obama Won, is culled from his near daily analysis of the historic 2008 campaign and its aftermath while writing for E&P, The Huffington Post and Daily Kos. In Mitchell’s words: “[It] focuses on new media vs. old media, grassroots vs. mainstream, and all of the controversies, from Jeremiah the Preacher to Joe the Plumber. It’s also a window on the future.” Commenting on the book, Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the excellent news blog Attytood, wrote: "It really raises the question of how the 2008 campaign might have played out in an earlier era, before private citizens and small publications had the ability to get video and sound bites out to millions of people.”

Greg recently spoke with MediaBloodhound from his Lower East Side Manhattan office at E&P. In addition to the 2008 campaign, topics ranged from the dire state of the newspaper industry and its “dirty secret” to the impact of the U.S. media's censorship of graphic war images to whether Twitter and Sarah Palin will go the way of the pet rock.

The following is an edited transcript of our interview.

----

MediaBloodhound: A recent Pew Research Center survey seems to prove the thesis of your new book Why Obama Won. It found that more than half of American voters used the Internet for election news and that the Internet is now equal to newspapers and roughly twice as important as radio as a source of election news and information. What was your reaction when you read this?

Greg Mitchell: [laughs] Well, I wasn’t surprised of course. I follow things very carefully on the web and have for years. And I would imagine that even since the Pew survey, which I think was conducted at the end of last year, the trend has only increased and will increase. The details of the Pew survey breaks it down how Obama’s backers used the web two times as much or more than McCain’s people in all sorts of ways, from just texting for a rally to donating money to posting videos to using Facebook, MySpace and so forth. It’s just straight down the line. Every possible way that the web could’ve been used, the Obama backers did. So I think during the campaign there was a lot of attention to the more public and grandiose uses of the web -- celebrity use of YouTube videos, regular reports of Obama’s fundraising. So people certainly got the idea that this was going on. But I think the Pew survey and other things showed that, just on a day-to-day basis, what you didn’t see in the big stories in the press were these millions or tens of millions of people involved in the campaign who every day were texting and Facebooking and Twittering and everything else. And it’s good to see that being recognized now.

MediaBloodhound: Why do you think the McCain camp appeared to be so out of touch with this technology? It seemed like it was more than just a generational thing.

Greg Mitchell: Well, you know, McCain made national news when he went on Twitter. This was like a shot heard round the world -- a Tweet heard round the world -- McCain actually doing something like that. So it shows how out of it they were.

But to be fair, they did try. They had their websites and they had their videos and everything else. It’s just that they were very late to the game. They were kind of lame to the game. You know, their audience just is not too hip to all these things. In some ways there wasn’t that much they could do. A lot of the McCain backers would not be so comfortable with some of these things. But as we saw after the election, before the Republicans sort of went totally bonkers against Obama once he became president. There was a period after the election when there was some honest self-reflection among Republican leaders and activists. Before it turned into non-stop Obama bashing, they did have a few weeks after their embarrassing defeat in the congressional elections and the White House where the really did honestly say, “OK, we want to win. Forget about politics or ideology or how bad Obama is. Let’s just look at how we’re going to come back to power.”

They did have a few weeks where they were looking at these things and over and over different people would say, “We have to take better advantage of the web tools or we’re never going to make it if we don’t use them in a better way.” And, in fact, it’s way overblown. But there was talk that at least in the “Teabagging” [anti-tax protests] they did for local events, they did make use of Twitter. And there was a sense that, maybe even because it’s short and simple, I don’t know, that Twitter was going to be the GOP tool, just like blogs and Facebook became Democrat tools. That Twitter was going to be a kind of a GOP, far-right organizing tool. But I think that does come from a certain determination to make use of these things.

MediaBloodhound: What did you think of the media coverage of the anti-tax tea parties?

Greg Mitchell: Most amazing was that they tended to treat it like protests in the past. There have been national abortion rights protests and immigration rights protests and of course anti-war protests and everything spread out around the country. But never, that I’m aware of, has there ever been protests like this that were essentially promoted by a major news organization, that is Fox, who were actually promoting it, not just saying we’re going to cover this. And so it was almost like the mainstream media was afraid to sort of say, “Look, this is not just grassrootsy or even sponsored by a national organization.” It was also promoted by talk radio and promoted by the leading cable news network, which makes it a completely different thing than local activists who want to speak out. They’re going to a rally to see Glenn Beck. It’s a whole different thing. So I just thought the coverage should have noted that this was not your average grassrootsy thing in any way.

MediaBloodhound: Speaking of Twitter, you recently joined. What’s your view of it so far? And do you see it as more than a passing fad?

Greg Mitchell: I think Twitter is probably here to stay. For myself, I find it just useful for news tips and making use of scoops and things that I see out there, links that people have, and the ability to put new E&P links up there that people follow. So it’s partly publicity for E&P, getting my own work out there and getting quickly the newsbreaks from others. Now if it was just a matter of people talking about what movies they liked or, you know, best restaurants in Brooklyn...you know, how about those Yankees? There are too many other things to do. But, for example, I don’t do anything with Facebook. I’m enrolled in Facebook and LinkedIn and MySpace but I do absolutely nothing with them because I’m just not interested in networking so much. But with Twitter, I see a real news function to it. So that’s why I’m a fan at the present time.

MediaBloodhound: Your book has so many examples of Beltway talking heads and reporters who got the campaign completely wrong or floated the most embarrassingly absurd observations. In your previous book, “So Wrong for So Long,” you detail the mainstream media’s failure to ask the right questions in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Aside from Judy Miller, I can’t think of another mainstream reporter or pundit whose reputation suffered as a consequence. And the same could be said about those who flubbed the 2008 election. Why do you think there’s always a seat back at the table for these people?

Greg Mitchell: I don’t take the election as seriously as the war because the news coverage of the war led to a terrible six years of war for the country. With the election, a lot of people were wrong, but the end result was Obama got elected. But I think in any election there’s plenty of punditry that’s wrong. It’s just a matter of whether the outcome of the election was in some ways a reflection of the declining value and respect that these people in general are held. Even the people who kind of got it right, as a class, the Beltway pundits and campaign reporters have been deplanted now by online commentators and online coverage or even just viral things that people see and read about. So I think it’s more of that. I suppose a positive result is that kind of insidey Washington coverage and those people have vastly declined in the respect that they’re given now by people as a whole. People make up their minds based on other things and not so much what these pundits and editorial pages say.

MediaBloodhound: In your book, you also touch on the ABC News primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous were roundly and rightfully panned, even by some old media journalists. What impact, if any, do you think that had on the remainder of the debates or old media journalists’ coverage of the rest of the campaign season? 

Greg Mitchell: Well, I thought the debates were pretty bad in the fall, too. So it wasn’t like there was a sense at the end of the primaries that the media had not done a good job so in the fall they really got their act together. It is quite the opposite. But again, I think that the mockery that many people felt or expressed for some of these mainstream journalists who were handling the debates in the fall…again, it’s another nail in the coffin. These people have millions of dollars and weeks to prepare for these debates. When Tom Brokaw was handling the final debate, there was all this hype about, “We’ve got 100,000 questions we’re sending to our panel of experts and we’re picking the twelve best questions.” And then the questions were not only mainly weak but some of them were even repeats from previous debates. I just sort of shook my head and said, “This is the best they can do?” We’re supposed to have this deep respect for the networks and all the venerable people who work there, when it seems like the staff of The Daily Show might’ve been able to put together better questions in a week.

MediaBloodhound: Or a day. 

Greg Mitchell: I think that all feeds into it. It was a disastrous year for mainstream coverage and TV coverage of the election because they have such a high profile around the debates and the debates were so weak. I mentioned in the book that you could almost boil down the year to this one factor. In the fall debates, including the Vice Presidential Debate…normally these debates are very influential. They’re held and the mainstream pundits would weigh in for a few days or a week and they’d kick around who’s got the momentum and who did well and who exceeded expectations and who flubbed and whose makeup looked bad and who sighed and everything else. And then after a week or two, there might be a poll confirming. But the punditry for a solid week or more would hold sway and help push the polls that eventually came out.

This year, you had the same thing happen. The debates ended, all the pundits came on TV and nine times out of ten they would say, “Well, you know, McCain did better than expectations,” or, “It was a draw and this wasn’t going to help either candidate,” or, “Palin did better than expected. It’s probably going to boost McCain.” Now in the old days, that line would’ve had its own momentum for another week or two. But what happened this year was you had online commentators coming on right away on the web not only pointing to errors and misstatements but talking about how their candidate actually won. But more than that, you had the focus groups that were set up and instant polls were taken that showed within half an hour of the end of the debate that in all four cases the Democrat actually won easily, overwhelmingly. So the pundits were kind of left with egg on their face.

And that’s an incredible shift from past years, a total, what you might call, emasculation of the pundits because not only were they unable to exert their usual influence but in fact their statements were shown to be laughable within half an hour or hour of the end of the debates. And then, of course, those results were carried instantly in all forms of electronic media. So that by the time people went to bed that night or eight o’clock the following morning, most of them knew that something different had happened. That didn’t win the election for Obama. But in a normal year, the momentum that would’ve been asserted by the pundits for McCain’s and Palin’s performance would’ve boosted them in the polls no doubt and you might’ve come into Election Day in kind of a toss-up situation just from the fact of how the debates might’ve been spun.

MediaBloodhound: Without the Internet, the rise of the Internet, and how much influence it had in to the 2008 election, do you think that Obama would’ve won in the old days, pre-Internet?

Greg Mitchell: If he got the nomination, I think he probably would’ve won in November. But I don’t think he would’ve beaten Hillary Clinton. So if you want to say, “Would Obama have become elected president eight years ago or sixteen years ago?” I would say no because he wouldn’t have gotten past Hillary. So that was the key. Once he’d gotten past Hillary, it certainly was not determined that he would win, but McCain was a much easier opponent in many ways. And Obama’s web advantage was in place and it carried through to the end. But I don’t think he would’ve gotten past Hillary without the twelve solid months of web advantage he had over her.

MediaBloodhound: You also discussed in your book William Kristol’s Daily Show appearance during the presidential campaign, when Jon Stewart got him to admit that Obama wasn’t a radical and would probably be a “conventional president.” You point out that Stewart then asked Kristol why he and McCain continued to call Obama a dangerous radical if they didn’t mean it. Do you see the symbiosis between this conversation and the one Stewart had with Jim Cramer?

Story of the Day: NYT Public Editor Dances Around 'Brutal Truth' of Torture

(updated below: updates I-II)

Clark Hoyt's New York Times public editor column on Sunday, "Telling the Brutal Truth," brings the ongoing "debate" over whether waterboarding is torture to brave new heights of absurdity.

Hoyt opens the column:

A LINGUISTIC [all caps are Hoyt's] shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Reading this, you might think, "Finally, in its news pages, the Times is going to call waterboarding what it is and what it always has been since its first recorded use during the Spanish Inquisition -- torture. Plain and simple." Yet you would be gravely disappointed.

For Hoyt then writes:

Until this month, what the Bush administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “harsh” techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are “brutal.” (On the editorial page, they long ago added up to "torture.")

Such wordplay echoes the deadpan satiric riffs of The Marx Brothers, Monty Python and George Carlin. It's hardly a stretch to imagine Groucho, Cleese or Carlin, in the role of a buffoonish government official or a radio or TV anchor oblivious to the inanity of his own news copy, delivering these lines in which Orwellian jargon is dispensed to the breaking point of all reason and laughter is the only sane response...when such lines are intended as comedy.

Of course, the screamingly obvious subtext, the 800 lb. gorilla juggling chainsaws under klieg lights, if you will, is the absurdity that what's in question here is not whether to call the "techniques" such as waterboarding "torture" but rather whether to call them "harsh" or "brutal."

The following paragraph encapsulates Hoyt's stubborn unwillingness to actually fulfill his column's title -- "Telling the Brutal Truth" -- and the obfuscation he employs to keep the focus away from the 800 lb. gorilla called Torture. Simultaneously, and preposterously, when taking into account what's actually at stake here, he portrays the Times' editorial struggle over whether to use "harsh" or "brutal" as a noble journalistic enterprise worthy of praise. 

The choice of a single word involved separate deliberations in New York and the Washington bureau and demonstrated the linguistic minefields that journalists navigate every day in the quest to describe the world accurately and fairly. In a polarized atmosphere in which many Americans believe the nation betrayed its most fundamental ideals in the name of fighting terror and others believe extreme measures were necessary to save lives, The Times is displeasing some who think “brutal” is just a timid euphemism for torture and their opponents who think “brutal” is too loaded.

Thus, the preponderance of this column lies almost wholly within these pointless parameters, as ludicrous as two emergency room doctors pedantically debating whether the point-of-entry of a new patient's gunshot wound was his chest or his back as the patient bleeds to death on the operating table.

Hoyt provides he said/she said examples to show how the public has reacted. But in doing so, in this context, he turns the very idea of news reporting -- that it should be based on fact rather than opinion -- on its head and, in effect, concedes that Times editors, on news stories as serious as torture, are allowing public sentiment to color their reports.

Robert Ofsevit of Oakland, Calif., asked, “Why can’t The New York Times call torture by its proper name?” He added, “Please find more backbone and fulfill your journalistic responsibilities by describing these immoral and illegal practices for what they were.” Theodore Murray of Cambridge, Mass., said that if The Times fails to adopt the word torture, “you perpetuate the fantasy that calling a thing by something other than its name will change the thing itself.”

But Cynthia Jacobson of Phoenix said The Times is “outrageously biased” to use a term like brutal. “The Times has simply placed itself as one actor in a political fight, not a neutral media outlet,” she wrote.

And herein lies the crux of what Hoyt -- who is supposed to be the Paper of Record's ombudsman, not its cheerleader -- should be addressing in this column: 1) If the Times called techniques such as waterboarding torture in its reporting, which it should based on U.S. and international law, legal experts, historians, military judges, combat veterans and human rights organizations, and described, however briefly, what that torture entailed, then the use of modifying adjectives such as "harsh" or "brutal" would not only be superfluous but, in a news story, better left out; and 2) isn't the Times (along with any news outlet that has failed to report these acts as torture) directly responsible in some way for inspiring the kind of response it received from readers like Cynthia from Phoenix? If readers are not provided the facts -- a) waterboarding is torture and b) torture is illegal -- while Times editors are simultaneously ascribing arbitrary descriptors to it like "brutal" or "harsh," then the Times is not only denying its readers the necessary information to understand the issue but this denial may also lead directly to accusations of bias.

There's a reason, of course, why people who get their news from FOX and Rush Limbaugh are clueless, nearly 100% of their vitriol ill-informed.

In an effort to, as Hoyt says, "describe the world accurately and fairly" (and I'd place emphasis on "fairly"), Times news editors and Mr. Hoyt have hedged their way into a euphemistic fog, relying, in the context of the "torture debate," on describing the surface effect -- "harsh," "brutal" or otherwise -- of a criminal act involving torture without reporting as fact the act is either torture or criminal.

The more Hoyt gives us behind-the-scenes details into these editorial decisions, in an effort to defend them, the more ridiculous and damning they appear. And the more he inadvertently makes the case that this approach has infected his newsroom, muddied the facts and invited arbitrary decision-making where it doesn't belong.

The word ["brutal"] had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently, on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods” since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed.

First, Hoyt blithely skips over the most telling fact here: Jehl censored Shane from reporting that these techniques were "widely denounced as illegal torture." (Never mind even that description is misleading -- torture is illegal. Period. But "illegal torture" may give the impression that these techniques were "widely denounced" as such, while other forms of torture are legal.) Moreover, Jehl's edit seems influenced by two of the Bush administration's most utilized rhetorical tools on the topic of torture: 1) the U.S. doesn't torture (OK, delete "torture") and 2) the U.S. instead calls it "enhanced interrogation techniques" (insert "interrogation methods").

The bizarro world of this editorial process continues.

A week later, Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, came to her own conclusion that the facts supported a stronger word than harsh after she read just-released memos from the Bush-era Justice Department spelling out the interrogation methods in detail and declaring them legal. The memos were repudiated by President Obama.

“Harsh sounded like the way I talked to my kids when they were teenagers and told them I was going to take the car keys away,” said Abramson, who consulted with several legal experts and talked it over with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. Abramson and Baquet agreed that “brutal” was a better word. From rare use now and then, it had gone to being the preferred choice. The result of that decision was this top headline in the printed paper of April 17: "Memos Spell Out Brutal C.I.A. Mode of Interrogation."

Maybe when Abramson "consulted with several legal experts" she should have been more concerned with verifying that such techniques were indeed torture, and brought that to her Washington bureau chief, instead of dithering over the relative meaninglessness of which adjective best described her article's subject, torture, which, ipso facto, had occurred but which she and her paper nonetheless still refuse to report.

Hoyt then notes another reader's dissatisfaction with Abramson and Baquet's editorial -- or is that "adjectorial"? -- decision-making.

That offended Daniel Pilon of Solon Springs, Wis., who said he agreed that the article described brutality but did not want The Times making that judgment for him. “Presenting the facts and letting the reader decide how to characterize what happened would be more in the spirit of objective journalism,” Pilon said. He said The Times should have dropped all adjectives in this case.

Once again, however, Hoyt manages to elide the substance of the criticism. What offended Daniel from Wisconsin was less the adjective's application than the machinations behind it and the effect of its use in context. A fine point, maybe, but an important distinction.

Daniel's stated opinion is pretty much dead-on: "Presenting the facts and letting the reader decide how to characterize what happened would be more in the spirit of objective journalism." I'd replace the present-day loaded word "objective", pertaining to news reporting, with "responsible and accurate." But other than, Dan from WI makes my point -- that is, as long as the Times was "[p]resenting the facts" so the reader could "decide how to characterize what happened," which it wasn't and hasn't in regards to "torture," "waterboarding" and other known torture techniques.

But Hoyt then obfuscates this point with the help of a linguistic expert's false equivalency.

I asked Deborah Tannen, an author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, what she thought of a suggestion like Pilon’s. “The search for words that are not in any way evaluative is hopeless,” she told me. “All words have connotations.”

Tannen's statement fails to address the reader from Wisconsin's point and only further muddles what's at stake. But it's Hoyt's responsibility for placing her answer in this context and for not making clear to Tannen what the reader was actually driving at: "[t]he Times should have dropped all adjectives in this case." Drop the adjectives and the only "evaluative" words are either insufficient and misleading nouns such as "interrogation techniques" or the insertion of evaluative words that impart concrete, universally recognized meaning: dead or alive, hot or cold, up or down, torture or interrogation, legal or illegal.

Hoyt goes on to write:

I was not sure I saw a huge difference between harsh and brutal — my dictionary says one meaning of harsh is brutal. Tannen said there is a big difference, and she noticed the change in The Times right away. Brutal suggests something animal-like and “goes beyond the way humans are supposed to act,” she said.

Yes, "beyond the way humans are supposed to act," just don't call it "torture." And no, in the context of a news story, in which editors refuse to call a criminal act by its name, there's not a "huge difference between harsh and brutal." That's the point. But once more it's buried under Hoyt's narrow gaze.

Finally, Hoyt addresses the "T" word head-on (well, mainly vicariously through Washington bureau editor Douglas Jehl):

And why not, then, go all the way to torture? Jehl said that when the paper is discussing what is generally regarded as the most extreme interrogation method the C.I.A. used, waterboarding, “we’ve become more explicit in saying in a first reference that it’s a near-drowning technique” that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and many other experts "have called torture." But he said: “I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court. This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?” Jehl argued for precision and caution. I agree.

First, history has long ago reached a "verdict" on waterboarding, charges have been "filed," "legal judgment rendered" -- from the U.S. trying and hanging Japanese soldiers after WWII for torture that included waterboarding, to the Khmer Rouge's crimes against humanity which favored the torture technique, to the court martial of a U.S. soldier in 1968 after he was captured supervising the waterboarding of a North Vietnamese solider in a photo by the Washington Post, to a Texas sheriff and his three deputies' conviction and sentence to four years in prison in 1983 for waterboarding prisoners. And this, of course, is hardly an exhaustive history.

Second, when any non-partisan expert is asked if waterboarding is torture, the response is a unanimous "yes." Moreover, framing in a news story that those who believe it's torture include "Obama and the Attorney General Eric Holder" instead of just citing, say, "most legal experts and historians," is the very gruel that has fed this intellectually dishonest and historically blind "torture debate." It actively, if unintentionally, politicizes something in a news story that is widely accepted as an historically and legally indisputable fact.

This justification by Jehl and Hoyt's acceptance of it is nothing short of shameful and shameless, a abdication of their job as journalists under the guise of "caution" and to the detriment of "precision."

A couple of paragraphs later, Hoyt begins to lay down his final verdict.

Reporters and editors need to leave moral and political judgments to editorial writers and readers, but they cannot be so detached that they appear oblivious to the implications of the facts.

How's that for a rhetorical sleight of hand? "...but they cannot be so detached that they appear oblivious to the implications of the facts." But Hoyt doesn't mind, in this context, if his reporters and editors appear oblivious to the facts directly, i.e. waterboarding is torture and torture is illegal, as long as these omitted facts are supported in their absence by tough modifiers such as "brutal."

His last lines sum up the weaselly nature of this whole enterprise, of both the roots of this bogus "torture debate" and why it continues to plague our discourse, our country and our Paper of Record.

The Times should strive to tell readers exactly what a given interrogation technique entails, as Shane does with waterboarding. But that is not always practical, as in a headline. When the paper needs a short description, the word brutal is accurate and appropriate, whether you think the acts were justified or not.

In effect, Hoyt is also saying: The Times shouldn't tell its readers which "interrogation techniques" are historically and legally known forms of torture. Strong adjectives that confuse the matter and are relatively arbitrary, having little reason to be in a news report, are preferable at the paper to calling criminal acts by their proper name. And even if you're a fan of torture, the adjective "brutal" is still appropriate in the context provided.

If we continue down this path, where mindless false debates trump the rule of law and where editors err on the side of "caution" by concealing facts that might anger members of a particular political stripe, we might one day be availed of other sensibly middle-of-the-road editorial decisions," such as referring to rape as, say, "savagely lustful techniques" or murder as "bloodthirsty heart stoppage enhancement."

While that might sound satirical now, who of us foresaw nine years ago that today, in the United States of America, there would not only be national debates over whether waterboarding is torture but also over the efficacy of torture itself?

That's the brutal truth.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan provides excellent additional background on why waterboarding is irrefutably torture and asks, "Can Doug Jehl Read?"

UPDATE II: Garrison Keillor says, "Let War Crimes Be Bygones." I've been a fan of Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion for years. I haven't, however, followed his political commentary very closely. But I was surprised by this piece, which serves up each bogus reason why we shouldn't prosecute those who tortured -- it would be seen as retribution, a partisan witch hunt, we must only look forward, and we needed strongmen to bend the rules after 9/11.

If you're a fan of his radio program, which is not political but always seemed to impart a general sense of decency and generosity of spirit, reading Keillor's opinion on the "torture debate" is a truly disturbing experience. That voice, which I'd always found good-humored, wise and, even at times, arch -- a seeming descendant of Twain -- makes his explication of why no one should be prosecuted sound all the more twisted and incongruous with reality.

But by far these lines are the most abominable:

Remember that the country was in high post-9/11 jitters when the dreadful memoranda were written by the lawyers whom some Democrats want to haul into court. Apocalyptic visions were afloat of subway bombings, germ warfare, nuclear devices wiping out a major city -- I remember walking around Manhattan and thinking much too vividly about such things -- and in that atmosphere of painful vulnerability, the great bustling city practically indefensible, zealous men might consider desperate measures in the name of security. As Orwell said, "We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." I think the American electorate knew whom they reelected in 2004. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney did not run on a human-rights platform. They ran as rough men who would guard our sleep. So go talk to the voters of Ohio about war crimes.

Story of the Day: Mark Danner Schools David Gergen on CIA Torture

(updated below -- updates I -V)

During a recent segment on CNN's AC 360, journalist and professor Mark Danner torpedoed CNN senior political analyst David Gergen's attempt to minimize new revelations of Bush administration CIA torture tactics released by the Obama administration.

Host Anderson Cooper and Danner first discussed the CIA torture memos, which included techniques such as waterboarding (as much as 183 times on one detainee in the same month), sleep deprivation for up to eleven straight days, and placement in a "confinement box" in which "stinging insects" were tossed to terrorize but not cause "death or severe pain."

Then Gergen opined:

GERGEN: At the same time, he [President Obama] made a very, very calibrated decision; we're not going to prosecute those people in the CIA who undertook this. And I think he showed some respect for the argument that Mr. Hayden and Mr. Mukasey made today in The Wall Street Journal.

That, in fact, there may have been some benefit to the United States from these interrogation techniques. And very importantly, when we sort of take this broad brush and sort of paint this as sort of villainous, that, in fact, the number of people who were interrogated with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was fairly limited.

It was of the thousands of people who were captured it was about some 30 or 35 whom these techniques were used. And they make the argument -- and I don't know why we should question them -- that about half of what we know about Al Qaeda came out of those interrogation techniques.

First, Cooper deserves credit for not taking a generic phony Devil's advocate stance. He actually set up Danner's response to Gergen's allegations with...facts and context. Refreshing, no?

COOPER: Well, Mark, let me ask you about that. Because I think I've read a figure about 65,000 people were rounded up at one time or another in Iraq or in Afghanistan.

It seems that in the light of day, a lot of the people who were rounded up were just kind of -- there wasn't much investigation done. They were handed over by Northern Alliance troops or others in the case in Afghanistan. And a bunch of people ended up getting killed in U.S. custody.

Do we know how many people died in U.S. custody? I've read reports of more than 100 or about 100 or maybe about a quarter of those were being investigated as actual homicides.

Of course it would've been nice if Cooper confirmed these figures before airtime (doesn't he have researchers for this?), but the intellectual honesty was refreshing all the same.

Now Danner:

DANNER: I think the rough figure is slightly more than 100 and 30, 29 or 30 were actually investigated as homicides. I think you're quite right, that the interrogation -- the general interrogation program after 9/11 was a complete disaster.

And it worked against what was supposed to be its ultimate goal, which is finding intelligence that would help protect the country.

Then he pointedly refuted Gergen's claims:

DANNER: I have to take strong issue with what David Gergen said a moment ago, that President Obama, in making public these documents, in some way nodded toward the argument that these techniques were helpful to national security.

I should point out that on his first full day in office he signed executive orders renouncing in the strongest terms the use of these techniques. He closed the black sites. He declared that he would close Guantanamo.

This is very odd behavior for a newly-elected President who is trying to protect the country and who believes that torture, according to David Gergen, is useful. He clearly doesn't believe that.

[...]

And I have to make one other point. David Gergen and I are both old enough to remember the Church Committee. What we have here is a haunting, in a sense, from the Church Committee. The Church Committee made deniability impossible. It made it necessary for the President actually to sign findings for covert action.

When President Bush came to the CIA after 9/11 and said we want to use these harsh techniques, the CIA, remembering the Church Committee of the '70s, said you know what? If you want us to do this, you're going to have to make it legal. We need a document that will show us it's legal.

And we are now at that point. We're looking at legal documents that purport to make what is plainly illegal legal. And they make -- supposedly make legal activities carried out over years...that plainly were illegal. And this is the new deniability, and something has to be done about it, I'm afraid.

Gergen accepted Danner's correction, acknowledging that Obama never "directly approved" of or said these techniques were "useful." Yet Gergen continued to downplay the torture committed, defended agents for just following orders and made another error for Danner to correct.

GERGEN: And I also think, Anderson, there's a temptation here to sort of lump Abu Ghraib, which was clear violations of the rules by a lot of other people with these more limited CIA techniques.

I just think that the conversations in this area have gotten so broad brush that it sort of paints a sort of villainous picture of the agency which I don't think -- I don't think is really fair to a lot of the people who were trying very hard, as Mark Danner himself said, to figure out what was legal in these very, very difficult circumstances.

As Danner jumped on this, Cooper, once again to his credit, didn't impede the flow of information with contrived balance nor did he bail out Gergen, his longtime CNN colleague. Rather, Cooper facilitated and contextualized Danner's response, closing the discussion by disproving Gergen's assertions with just the facts.

DANNER: It's now -- I must say that what is described in these memos and in the Red Cross report is worse than Abu Ghraib because it was...

COOPER: And it does seem that there was movement between what happened in Bagram to then what happened at Abu Ghraib and also what happened at Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib. And they do seem to have some similarities, no?

DANNER: Absolutely.

COOPER: Yes.

DANNER: There's no question about that.

COOPER: Yes.

DANNER: We have a full record of it. People should read what was done.

COOPER: Yes.

DANNER: I think what was done in these reports as described was worse because high officials signed off on it.

COOPER: We've got to go. But Mark Danner has written extensively about this great article in The New York Review, books, you should read. David Gergen, thank you as well.

This was not your normal CNN news program segment during which two guests spout differing opinions and the host plays the "fair and balanced" referee.

Cooper's approach in this circumstance, his effort to ferret out the facts from his guests and put those facts in context -- however absurd it is that this should be unique -- is unique for a CNN program, just as it still is for far too much of broadcast and cable network news shows.

On the other hand, Gergen's repeated defense of CIA agents who tortured -- they were just following the "rules," or orders -- is fairly shocking for such a student of history.

When Gergen witnessed historically racist code words being used against Obama during the 2008 campaign season, he was unequivocal in his denouncement of such age-old divisive and demeaning tactics.

But now that CIA torturers are hiding behind an historically indefensible justification for committing acts of cruelty and inhumane treatment, Gergen, along with many apologists in the media, has turned his back on history.

Nothing could put the future of the United States in more jeopardy.

UPDATE: A new Associated Press report directly dispels Gergen's assertion that "there's a temptation here to sort of lump Abu Ghraib, which was clear violations of the rules by a lot of other people with these more limited CIA techniques."

From the AP report:

The brutal treatment of terror detainees and prisoners by members of the military followed directly from the CIA's use of harsh interrogation techniques, according to a Senate report that is likely to add fuel to the debate over the United States' use of torture.

[...]

The report documents the Bush administration's growing reliance on harsh interrogations that began just two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It also ties those unyielding interrogation policies to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military authorities at the Abu Ghraib prison as well as to interrogations at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan.

You can download the full 232-page Senate Armed Services Committee report here (Part I) and here (Part II).

UPDATE II: Peter Hart at FAIR has an excellent related catch he found in a recent New York Times article: 

Today the New York Times is reporting that waterboarding was used far more often than we have been told--almost 300 times on two prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah. This stands in rather stark contrast to what we heard about the instant, positive effects of waterboarding--as the Times notes:

A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

Of course, someone who relented in "35 seconds" would not need to be waterboarded 83 times. And as [sic] been several accounts discussed, the information Zubaydah offered was of debatable value.

UPDATE III: Richard Blair finds this bottom line in the Senate Armed Services Committee report:

[T]he whole game was initially constructed to make the linkage between bin Laden and Saddam, because U.S. intelligence could not, in the aftermath of 9/11/01, make the connection. The development of Bush administration policies on torture had very little to do with actually preventing another attack on U.S. soil.

UPDATE IV: Battochio at Vagabond Scholar has an excellent roundup of videos on torture and the ongoing "torture debate."

UPDATE V: An absolute must-read by Glenn Greenwald today: Three Key Rules of Media Behavior Shape Their Discussions of "the 'Torture' Debate." I've been thinking a lot lately about what Greenwald discusses in this piece. Largely, the mainstream media has framed the "to prosecute or not to prosecute" those who committed war crimes in terms of "left" or "right" politics. Such frames have the best chance making the average American feel like this is just one more "political food fight," as NBC's Chuck Todd, Greenwald notes, called it the other day.

For those of us who make it our business, so to speak, to stay on top of this stuff every day, it's important to take a breath and realize that most people in this country do not. And it is not necessarily because they are bad citizens -- many simply don't have the time, the stomach or are overwhelmed by the endless permutations of such an unfolding story.

Karl Rove, the old direct mail advertiser, is a master at distraction, at shooting off flares right at the moment attention should be paid elsewhere. It is extremely disturbing that many in the mainstream media, eerily similar to the Bush years, continue to take their lead from Rove and some of the worst elements of the GOP, particularly when it comes to something as serious as the crime of torture.

It is crucial for independent journalists, bloggers, historians and all mainstream journalists who refuse to play in Rove's nether reality -- where this torture issue is either reduced to partisanship or defended for its "effectiveness" at extracting information -- to keep the focus on what is actually at stake here: of what happened and why, of how it is torture and why it is against U.S. and international law, and how history shows that the only hope to prevent or discourage such acts from happening in the future is to seek the painful truth, wherever that takes us, and hold those accountable, not just those who sanctioned cruel and inhumane acts but also those who agreed to follow orders.

Those Americans who don't keep track of this stuff daily may not be able to either wrap their heads around the distracting politics of this issue or penetrate that muck to understand what's truly at stake -- and it is Rove and company's aim to maintain that impenetrability, to keep that wall from tumbling down. But most Americans understand right and wrong; they understand torture when they hear the tactics that have been described in detail in recent days and they understand that those responsible were sitting in the highest offices in the land when they see the documents that confirm their signatures green-lighted this barbarism.

Plain and simple: It is up to those of us who do follow these issues daily to make sure that the politics surrounding the current "torture debate" is relegated to the sidelines and that the legal and human implications of torture remain at the forefront. Not an easy task when the predominance of mainstream coverage of any issue in this country has long been dominated by the sideshow of political wrangling instead of how an issue is actually affecting human beings.

Story of the Day: Howard Kurtz's Octomom Hypocrisy

He Was Against Exploiting It for Ratings Before He Was for It

(updated below)

Washington Post and CNN media critic Howard Kurtz dedicated an entire segment of this past Sunday's Reliable Sources to a gratuitous pie fight between two players involved in Nadya "Octomom" Suleman's never-ending nationally televised freak show. But a little over a month ago, Kurtz decried the media's exploitation of the octuplet mother for ratings and for doing so under the false pretense that concern for her babies' well-being drove their 24/7 coverage.

What a difference a few weeks make.

In a February 15 edition of Reliable Sources, Kurtz asked Headline News host Jane Velez-Mitchell, "Jane Velez-Mitchell, you've been talking about this constantly on cable for more than a week. All right. Let's be blunt here. Aren't the media feasting on this terrible situation?"

Addressing the former editorial director of Star magazine, Bonnie Fuller, in the same segment, Kurtz asked, "Now, surely, Bonnie, you're not suggesting that we, in the media, are doing this purely out of our own good-hearted concern for these little babies and that ratings and grabbing attention has nothing to do with it?"

Other key quotes from this February 15 Reliable Sources segment:

KURTZ: Bonnie, Jane, certainly willing to give the media some share of the blame here. So I'm wondering, you know, should "The Today Show" have put her on, because obviously, that kick-started this story into the stratosphere? And now people are saying, well -- and I think you suggested, well, she just went on TV so she can get a book deal and try to basically make some money off the situation. [...]

KURTZ: Jane Velez-Mitchell, here's what drives me crazy. We've kind of touched on it here. I wonder if we've reached a point with these cable melodramas where at some -- we cross some sort of invisible threshold, where it's no longer about Nadya Suleman. It's no longer about the 14 kids. It's about continuing an argument that we can package and sell. You know, "Coming up, should the kids be taken away?" And it just takes on a momentum of its own, whether there's any new developments or not. [...]

VELEZ-MITCHELL: So this idea that we're all doing this for some altruistic purpose is nonsense. We're doing it for ratings, and let's be real about that.

KURTZ: All right. Well, I'm glad to have you admit that right up front.

Then, in a CNN article published prior to and promoting Sunday's segment, Kurtz began by reiterating his prior issue with the media capitalizing off the octuplet saga.

While almost no one defends what Suleman did -- having eight babies after already giving birth to six children, with no financial means of supporting them -- I began to feel that the media were demonizing her. Pundits and pop psychologists analyzed her, trashed her and accused her of aping Angelina Jolie, all the while capitalizing on America's latest soap opera.

He even cited Velez-Mitchell's quote from the February 15 segment.

As HLN's Jane Velez-Mitchell acknowledged on my program several weeks ago, "This idea that we're all doing this for some altruistic purpose is nonsense. We're doing it for ratings, and let's be real about that."

But then came this curiously self-serving and timely twist:

But I lost my last remaining traces of sympathy when Suleman turned down free care from a group of volunteers, which had been arranged by Phil McGraw, the syndicated talk show host. Maybe Dr. Phil was grabbing the limelight, too, but at least the overwhelmed mother got something out of it.

The volunteer nurses came from the group Angels in Waiting, and [Gloria] Allred, their lawyer, went to Suleman's California home to check on how things were going. It was there that she got into a shouting match with Suleman's lawyer, Jeff Czech.

It was a media mob scene, with a horde of cameras, wires and microphones while the Angels tried to care for the first two premature babies to be brought home from the hospital. Allred and Czech blamed each other, as they recounted in a clash this week on Dr. Phil's program. [...]

Needless to say, I've got plenty to ask Allred on CNN Sunday morning, including why one of the nannies called the police to have her thrown out of the home.

So Kurtz initially calls out the media for extreme bottom-feeding and for defending their actions with disingenuous claims of altruism. Then he announces his plans to troll the same cesspool, justifying his actions by borrowing the same bogus defense.

What's more, Kurtz then manages to end this article with a mind-boggling lack of self-awareness, returning to his original criticism.

Everyone involved claims to be primarily concerned about the babies. But media outlets also seem to be feasting on the tragedy as it drags on through yet another ratings period.

Got that?

With his latest Reliable Sources Octomom segment this past Sunday -- a Crossfire-like vapid shouting match between Angels in Waiting lawyer Allred and Ray Richmond, television writer for The Hollywood Reporter -- Kurtz purports to examine questionable media coverage in which he, the media critic, jumps into the shallow end of the cesspool to also feast "on the tragedy as it drags on through yet another ratings period."

Kurtz confirmed his concern for the children and the media circus surrounding the Suleman story in a Twitter message he posted on Sunday at 9:21 a.m. after his article became the "Most Popular on CNN." Less than an hour before the Allred/Richmond spectacle aired on Reliable Sources, Kurtz wrote:

My Octomom story on CNN.com got 550,000 hits in one day. Wowza. Now I know what people are *really* interested in.

Kurtz seems to signal that he's in on the joke. So, you know, it's okay. The problem is, he's not just in on the joke, he's part of the joke of which he's supposed to be critiquing. 

How might Kurtz have better spent a segment critiquing the media?

Obviously scores of worthy topics were open for a substantive media discussion, as they are weekly. But to mention just one glaring example, he might have covered the fact that, according to LexisNexis, not one broadcast or cable network news program -- including CNN -- reported last week's revelations that Bush administration prosecutors tried to pressure former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, after years of being brutally tortured and having never been charged with a crime, to sign a statement saying he was never tortured and that he committed terrorist acts he didn't commit in return for his release.

Sure, it's no Octomom. It's merely the kind of story that, consciously or not, affects every single American when millions of them are deprived of its coverage.     

It's "wowza" that really matters.

UPDATE: Two related must-reads on Kurtz today: Eric Boehlert's "Howard Kurtz plays dumb about...Howard Kurtz" over at Media Matters and David Ehrenstein's "How to Succeed in Journalism Without Really Trying," which ends with this hilariously apt film clip:

Story of the Day: Officials Say Feds Involved in Nevada ACORN Raid

Part of the reason I've been off the radar here for so long -- my latest investigative report for Raw Story:

Federal agencies were involved in the decision to raid the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Nevada last October, just weeks before Election Day, the offices of Nevada’s Secretary of State and Attorney General say.

The allegations raise questions of whether politics played a part in the raid and calls into question assertions by the US Attorney’s office that they were uninvolved. Federal guidelines instruct agencies investigating election fraud to avoid action that might impact the elective process.

Bob Walsh, a spokesman for Nevada’s Secretary of State, and Edie Cartwright, a spokeswoman for Nevada’s Attorney General, said that not only were the Nevada US Attorney’s Office and the FBI involved in investigating Nevada ACORN on allegations of voter registration fraud but that all four agencies jointly made the decision to conduct the raid. Both the investigation and the raid were conducted as part of the joint federal-state Election Integrity Task Force announced last July, the spokespersons said.

In initial conversations with Raw Story, Walsh wouldn’t specify the federal agencies involved in the decision to raid the ACORN office. But after being presented with previous statements he'd made in which he said the US Attorney and the FBI were involved, he said, “My comments don’t come with an expiration date.” Asked to confirm if that meant he did indeed stand by every statement he made in an earlier report, Walsh added, “Yeah.”

Cartwright corroborated Walsh’s two main assertions: that Nevada's US Attorney and the FBI were involved in the investigation of Nevada ACORN as part of the joint federal-state Election Integrity Task Force, and the decision to raid the ACORN office was made between these four agencies. Asked to confirm that her office agreed with Walsh, Cartwright answered without hesitation, “Yes, that’s right.”

Their statements appear to contradict those previously made by Nevada US Attorney Greg Brower's spokeswoman Natalie Collins. In October, Collins said the US Attorney’s office and the FBI “have not been, and are not, at the present time, involved.” Collins later said she was misquoted. (Brower is pictured above right.)

Told of the alleged involvement of the Nevada US Attorney’s Office and the FBI in the ACORN raid, Justin Levitt, an election law expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, expressed concern.

“The manual governing how federal prosecutors are supposed to act with respect to election crimes says you should do everything in your power to conduct your investigation so that the investigation does not become an issue in the election,” Levitt told Raw Story in a recent interview. “The raid is certainly not that.”

Read the rest of the story HERE. (Many other interesting connections follow.)

Story of the Day: Woodruff Parrots GOP Talking Points to WH Budget Dir

In a primer on how to conduct an interview relying almost solely on Republican talking points, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff discussed the new budget plan with White House Budget Director Peter Orszag on Wednesday night.

Woodruff's first question isn't necessarily a Republican talking point, but it might as well be.

JUDY WOODRUFF: $3.66 trillion, is that a number you can actually grasp?

Seriously, members of the mainstream media need to stop acting like they suddenly have the vapors over big government spending. The Republicans weren't the only ones to preside over the most reckless spending in our government's history over the last eight years, on a war of choice and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in an environment of profligate deregulation and zero investment in infrastructure and our citizens' future. Mainstream news outlets and their anchors and talking heads watched it all unfold while expressing little or no concern at the time.

Woodruff's second question is like a GOP talking-point smorgasbord.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, just two of the terms I heard applied to it today were, number one, "radical," and the other one was "taking from the rich to give to the poor." Is this about redistributing wealth in this country?

I guess she couldn't fit "socialist" in there. (When did Judy Woodruff start sounding like a Fox News anchor?)

Orszag explains, rather, that the Obama administration's aim is "a greater sense of shared responsibility" and later reveals that roughly only 5% of Americans would see their taxes rise while 95% would receive a tax reduction. You know, what Obama ran and handily won the election on -- a more equitable system. But suddenly this is shocking, the election and his mandate ancient history.

Woodruff then dispenses with what she "heard," figuring it's easier to quote the talking points verbatim:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, the person President Obama had asked to be his commerce secretary, Senator Judd Gregg -- who later, as we know, backed out -- had this to say today about your budget proposal. He said, "This plan is once again a missed opportunity for American taxpayers." He said, "It raises taxes on all Americans, implements massive new spending, and fails to make any tough choices to control the deficit."

Of course this has the extra gotcha benefit of coming from the guy Obama originally tapped to be his commerce secretary.

Next, once again Woodruff is "hearing" more criticism. But as opposed to "two of the terms" she "heard applied to it today" without providing any attribution for them, this time she specifies the criticism comes from Republicans but oddly prefaces her comment with "I guess." It's unclear whether she does this to deflect the transparency of her reliance on GOP talking points or as a consequence of not doing her homework. Or both.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, the most frequently repeated criticism, I guess, from Republican [sic] I've been hearing is they say you want to raise taxes on the nation's entrepreneurs, small-business owners, at the very time when the country's in a recession. And they're saying, what's the incentive going to be, then, for these people to grow their companies and hire and create jobs?

Woodruff's line of questioning, one GOP economic meme after another, continues nearly unabated throughout the remainder of the interview. Woodruff, a veteran journalist who's done some excellent work over the years, is better than this. Sadly, these days she seems more willing not just to fill in for Jim Lehrer but to follow in his frequent autopilot footsteps when questioning guests, giving the often false NewsHour impression that the quality of an interview is due to its length instead of its depth.

Just how reliant is Woodruff on parroting Republican talking points? Want to guess how many times she poses a question citing a criticism of an actual economist rather than a Republican?

Zero.

Yes, in an eight-minute-plus discussion about the new budget plan, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, PBS NewsHour and Woodruff don't have time not to play politics.

(Ed. note: There is a discussion between two economists on the same program here, which could be a separate post of its own. One of the two best economists NewsHour could find to discuss the budget plan? Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former economic policy adviser to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign...no bias there. Incidentally, he's also the genius who famously claimed that Senator McCain "helped create" the BlackBerry.)

Story of the Day: Lawrence Wright on Bush Admin Wiretapping Journalists (...And Whatever Happened to the Russell Tice Story?)

While the battle over the stimulus bill raged on, New Yorker reporter Lawrence Wright recently spoke with Brooke Gladstone of NPR's On the Media. Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, reported last year that he knew the Bush administration had been spying on him. Wright's conversation with Gladstone, coupled with the statements of NSA whistleblower Russell Tice and New York Times reporter James Risen on MSNBC's Countdown last month, appear to confirm what many have long suspected.

The Bush administration targeted American journalists in its wiretapping program, in addition to millions of innocent American citizens.

As Gladstone herself rightly notes in the interview with Wright, "We were a little surprised that there was so little coverage and less outrage over Tice’s allegation." You can say that again. Since Tice's revelations on Countdown, this story has disappeared. [Ed. note: As my friend Eric Alterman just wanted to make clear to me, it didn't disappear in alternative news circles; for clarity's sake, "disappeared" was intended to reference mainstream news coverage. Be sure to read Eric's and George Zornick's excellent Jan. 29 piece "Think Again: Spying on Journalists? Why The Silence?"]

You might think Tice's bombshell appearance would precede a flurry of news coverage, of Tice popping up across the airwaves, from morning news shows to nightly news lead stories to the front pages of our most respected newspapers.

Yet according to a LexisNexis search performed by MediaBloodhound, no broadcast network nightly news programs reported Tice's allegations (including, oddly enough, NBC Nightly News) in the following days after Tice's appearance or in the three weeks since. CNN and PBS Newshour also failed to find his revelations newsworthy. The New York Times, Risen's own paper, the one that broke the NSA's illegal wiretapping story? Nothing. Not a single story reporting Tice's allegations.

Granted, Risen may be diligently working on a related story of his own, but Tice's statements demanded to be reported in our nation's paper of record just as a vital wire news story, not reported by Times journalists, makes its way into Times' pages.

Here are some highlights of Gladstone's interview with Wright:

Wright's Daughter, The Terrorist

BROOKE GLADSTONE: His [Wright's] first clue came from one of his sources in the intelligence community who told him he'd read a summary of a phone call Wright had made to the Middle East. Later, two federal agents showed up at his door with questions about another phone number he'd called.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: And they wanted to know, first of all, who was it? I looked it up on my Palm Pilot and it belonged to a solicitor in London who represents some of the Jihadis that I had been interviewing for my book.

And then they began asking if the person on our end of the call, my end, was named Caroline. And that’s my daughter’s name. And they asked, you know, is her name Caroline Brown? And I said, no, she’s, you know, a student at Brown. But I said, her name’s not on any of our phones. How do you know this information? Are you listening to my calls? And they just shut their briefcases and left.

I thought, as an American citizen, that the law was that they would not be listening to my calls unless they had a warrant. And I thought it was very unlikely that they would be able to obtain one because I'm a legitimate reporter.

But a year later, there was a New York Times story breaking the news that there were illegal wiretaps on American citizens, and I realized then what was going on.

"Not Just Individuals But Entire News Organizations"

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So was there anything in what Russell Tice said that surprised you?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: No. What disturbed me is the law, as it stood, was that when American citizens or American persons – that including anybody who’s in America at the time – when they're overheard in a conversation, that portion of the conversation is supposed to be what they call “minimized” – in other words, redacted.

So I might be having a conversation that is monitored with a source. If that source is a foreign source, then the American intelligence community can report on it. But my part of it, supposedly, is taken out.

What Tice was saying is that where American citizens are involved, they would put it into a discard pile, but, he said, that was the pile that they were monitoring. And that really concerned me, because his allegations included the idea that they were monitoring not just individuals but entire news organizations.

Gov't Sources Warned ABC News to "Change All Their Cell Phones"

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what would be the point?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Well, for one thing, the reporters are doing the work that American intelligence has failed to do. Here’s what worries me about it. I might be writing about al-Qaeda one week and I might be writing about the government the next week, our government. How do I know what the intelligence community is listening for and what use they're going to put it to?

These revelations came out, you know, about the illegal wiretapping at a time when the Bush Administration was leading a campaign against the press. ABC News, for instance, broke a story, I think, in 2006 that they had been warned by government sources to change all their cell phones because they and The New York Times and The Washington Post were all being closely monitored for possible sources that they might have inside the intelligence community.

I'm worried about not just my own privacy but I'm worried about my sources.

The Effect on Journalists and Their Sources

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that that chilling effect you felt was felt among journalists who cover government and foreign policy?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Well, I've talked to other colleagues and we've discussed, you know, how do we behave in this? Do we behave like terrorists? Do we go out and, for instance, buy phone cards and discard the phones after we have an interview?

What really concerns me is that I think it’s had a chilling effect on the sources themselves because they're more jeopardized now than they were in the past. [...]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: When the journalists brought their lawsuit back in 2006 and it was dismissed, what they were charging the government with doing was illegal, but you’re saying that now, in 2009, because of acts of Congress, it would be legal?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: It’s a little unclear. You remember last year all the thunder and lightning that was going on in Congress about the illegal wiretaps, and then the laws that they approved essentially rubber-stamped what the Bush Administration had done.

There’s another consideration if you’re a reporter or a news organization and you want to bring suit because you feel like your privacy’s been invaded. Then the government is entitled to discovery. That is, they can begin to look through your phone records and find out who else you've been talking to.

Let's say that I'm doing an article for The New Yorker. The fact-checkers also call my sources. Well, they also call Sy Hersh’s sources. So where does it stop? Will all of our sources be uncovered in the pursuit of a lawsuit that we have very little chance of winning?

You know, there’s not much incentive for a person like me to go out and sue the government if it’s going to have the result of throwing my sources in jail, and perhaps me as well.

What Lies Ahead?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Obama Administration has been very explicit about wanting more transparency in government and about reestablishing the rule of law. Do you think this is less likely to happen?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: I don't see anything happening in this. I happened to just file a couple of Freedom of Information suits on a story that I'm working on, and they were blanketly rejected. I just don't think that the government is moving in the direction that the president has indicated.

Blogroll Amnesty Day

It's that time of year again, where deserving blogospheric voices are given a leg up -- Blogroll Amnesty Day (B.A.D.) Jon Swift discusses what inspired the occasion here. Skippy, Jon Swift and Blue Gal, some of the nicest kids on the block and longtime friends of MBH, cordially host the festivities. Participants are asked to spread some blogroll links and love to smaller blogs.   

Here's my B.A.D. roundup, a diverse bunch I hope you start visiting daily:

Pen and Sword (aka, Jeff Huber's blog) - On the topic of foreign affairs, Jeff's long-form posts are a must-read -- experience, wisdom and wit abound in every well-crafted piece. He's also a nice guy.

Town Called Dobson - You want a reason to visit this political cartoonist's site? Well, this won me over instantly with its fearless Ted Rall-like immediacy and truthfulness.

NPR Check - A blog after my own heart, NPR Check holds National Public Radio's feet to the journalistically accountable fire. Keep in mind that this public service must also be a time-consuming task: between all that listening and transcribing -- radio transcripts are slim pickens, folks! -- it's certainly a labor of love and positively channeled outrage.

The Unapologetic Mexican - Myriad reasons beckon your readership. Here are just three -- for the writing, for the perspective and to give Lou Dobbs the virtual finger. OK, one more: racist and xenophobic GOP and Bush administration policies, hatched under the guise of the "war on terror," have disrupted and, in some cases, ruined or ended the lives of Mexican Americans for years. Here lies the road to a brighter future and a better America.

Zuky - Proprietor Kai Chang explains, "Zuky comes from the Japanese word zuki meaning 'punch' or 'hand-strike.'" Which is exactly the effect of Chang's electric prose and incisive commentary, a shot to the solar plexus of received wisdom.

Visit, read, link, prosper. Enjoy!

Story of the Day: Matthews Repairing 'Balanced' Cred with...Imbalance

If you're Chris Matthews and you're attempting to regain a reputation for being "fair and balanced" after famously exhibiting excitement about Barack Obama and his presidential campaign, what do you do? How about facilitating a discussion about Obama's proposed stimulus plan with two lawmakers from the same party, the Republican Party?

That's precisely what Matthews did during a segment on his January 27 edition of Hardball, inviting only Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) and Representative Mike Pence, the House Republican Conference Chair, to discuss the plan.

Not enough? How about a segment exploring whether Rush Limbaugh is the "new voice of the GOP" but once again facilitating the "balanced" discussion with two people on the right and no one on the left or even center? (Never mind that Limbaugh has been the voice of the Republican Party for two decades and counting.) In the very same broadcast, Matthews did this as well, bringing on MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan and right-wing radio talk show host Heidi Harris (you might remember that Harris, appearing on Hardball during the election season, had told Matthews that women vote for Democrats because they "tend to think with their hearts and not with their minds").

Want more? How about, in the process, framing a question based on Rush Limbaugh's assertions and posing it to these two other right-wingers while prefacing the question with the words "let's get back to the facts here"?

MATTHEWS: Look, let's get back to the facts here. Does he [Limbaugh] have something here by saying that Barack Obama is trying to get the Republicans to join him, or at least a handful of them, so that he can share the blame if it [stimulus plan] doesn't work? Is that a reasonable claim?

This kind of fairness and balance not only rivals Fox News but threatens to out-Fox it.

Does anyone doubt that Matthews once again feels a thrill running up his leg? It's official: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Matthews is back!

----

Latest Media Must-Reads:

• Somolia, Like Russia, Is Killing Off Its Journalists (at-Largely, 1/29)
• CBS' Bill Plante and the White House Press Corps' Double Standard (Media Matters/Eric Boehlert, 1/29)
• REPORT: GOP Lawmakers Outnumber Democratic Lawmakers 2 to 1 in Stimulus Debate on Cable News(ThinkProgress, 1/28)
• Another Journalist Is Murdered in Russia: Anastasia Baburova (at-Largely, 1/28)
• News You Can Endow (NYT, 1/27)
• Liberal? New York Times Buries Rove Story on Page 23, Beneath Octuplets (Raw Story, 1/27)
• Richard Cohen Fulfills the Role of the American Journalist (Salon/Glenn Greenwald, 1/27)
• Hung Out to Dry: The National-Security Press Dug Up the Dirt, But Congress Wilted (CJR/Laura Rozen, 1/22)

The Wounded-Courier (EXCLUSIVE): Leaked Menu of George Will's Catered Dinner Party for Barack Obama

Conversation at the recent dinner party thrown by conservative pundit George Will for Barack Obama may remain shrouded in secrecy. But one thing will not: the menu. And there was no shortage of food. An anonymous source leaked the detailed catered menu to The Wounded-Courier today. (Other conservative pundits in attendance included William Kristol, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Larry Kudlow, Paul Gigot, Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone and Rich Lowry.) Here is what was served:

Hors d’oeuvres

Skewers of Unmitigated Gall

Fingerless Sandwiches

Record Dow Asiago-Spinach Dip

Mercury-Infused Bay Scallops with Deregulation Coulis

Chickenhawk Balls Wrapped in Old Glory

Choose one from the following courses:

Soup du Jour

Torture Chowder

Intellectually Dishonest Bisque

Puree of Lying Sack of Potato Soup

Salad

Segregated Greens with Reaganesque Croutons

Cryto-Fascist Pasto

Appetizers

Heartless Artichoke Tartine

Propagandistically Stuffed Mushrooms

Clams in a Half Cell

Indoctrinated Shrimp Cocktail

Entrees

Beef Orwellian

War on Terror Risotto 

Shredded Constitution with Well-Placed Leeks

Bipartisan Turducken™

Cold Shoulder of Pork and Earmark Dumplings

Tax Refund Gruel with Coal Ash Croquettes

Half-Baked Change over Discouraging Pilaf

Dessert

Illegally Wiretapped Tiramisu

Cinnamon Renditioned Flan 

Wingnut Brittle Gelato

Quid Pro Quo Cookies

Trickle-Down Huckleberry Sorbet

----

The Wounded-Courier is the satirical news division of MediaBloodhound.

Story of the Day: Denial of Early Dr. King Creates Another Mythology (Two TV Appearances from 1957)

As his Nobel Peace Prize bio states, "In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action."

The following interviews, two of Dr. King's earliest extensive televised media appearances, show him at the beginning of that journey in 1957, a soft-spoken young man who handled both substantive and silly questions will equal poise and purpose.

Look Here - Part I

Look Here - Part II

Look Here - Part III

MediaBloodhound's 2008 Fact or Fiction Challenge

The following are quotes and headlines culled from this past year at MediaBloodhound (keep in mind some were said or written prior to '08 but noted here during the year). Some are real (fact) and others are from satirical articles (fiction) posted under "The Wounded-Courier." See if you can distinguish between the two. Once you've answered all the entries -- but not before because multiple entries may come from the same post and checking one might give away another -- you'll find the answer key at the very bottom.

All right, news junkies and media mavens, the 2008 Fact or Fiction Challenge is on:

1) “Hey, tell Brokaw to suck it.” - Chris Matthews, following Tom Brokaw's on-air dressing down of Matthews during MSNBC coverage of the Democratic primary race

2) “If we had a state-run media, how would it be any different?" - Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman

3) “Worse than seventeen Donna Rices sitting on Obama’s lap on a luxury yacht called ‘Monkey Business.” - Gary Hart, one-time Democratic presidential hopeful, on John Kerry’s endorsement of Barack Obama

4) “Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.” - Frank Baker, Associated Press Los Angeles Assistant Bureau Chief, in a memo to staff

5) Headline: "McCain Threatens Bombing China Over U.S. Flag Sales"

6) "Two hundred and thirty-two years to get a black man in the White House, and the one they choose disenfranchises an entire nation of comedians! Can't a brother catch a break?!" - Chris Rock

7) Headline: "Obama Said to Pick Newly Created 'Leakmaster General'"

8) "As my father used to say, Brit, just because you can turn water into wine, it doesn't mean you can build a birdhouse." - Karl Rove speaking with Fox News anchor Brit Hume

9) "Senator Obama, what is more patriotic -- paper or plastic?" - ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson during Democratic primary debate

10) "No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know." Hillary Clinton responding to whether she believed Obama was a Muslim

11) “The main rationale [for invading Iraq] was not based on intelligence.” - Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense

12) "Look, I don't come to your office at the Times, elbow my way through that Third World newsroom of Marxist homosexual terrorists, and stand over your desk telling you how to type! So, please - please - my friend, don't tell me how to win a war!" - John McCain's infamous blow-up with New York Times reporter Elizabeth Bumiller

13) "If I learned to play an instrument, it would take away from what I do..." - Rap mogul Puff Daddy

14) "I must say, I'm a little envious....It must be exciting for you...in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger." - President George W. Bush addressing U.S. military and civilian personnel stationed in Afghanistan

15) "My friends, Senator Obama talks about cutting spending with a scalpel. We need more than a scalpel, my friends. We need a hatchet. A hatchet and a sledgehammer." - John McCain

16) "They could not succeed in eliminating WMDs because they did not exist." - Hans Blix, a chief U.N. weapons inspector

17) Headline: "Why Obama's Bowling Would've Lost Dr. King's Support"

18) "Praise the Lord, and pass the political ammunition. We're in it now." - Blogger Taylor Marsh as the mainstream media's focus on Reverend Jeremiah Wright gained traction

19) "This is further proof that Senator John McCain has what it takes to lead this country - a limited yet firm grip of the facts, a tenuous hold on reality, and Bunyanesque balls of stainless steel. Senator McCain, if posing as your patsy to win this war is wrong, then I don't want to be right. Hand me a Crave Case of White Castles and an elephant tranquilizer gun, and I'll take down Michael Moore for you, sir!" - Stephen Colbert

20) "We believe that [the Pennsylvania primary result] will show that Hillary is ready to win, and that Sen. Obama really can't win the general election."  - Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's chief strategist

21) "As Democrats and Independents weigh who they want to run against John McCain in the fall, answer this question. Can you support a candidate who is friends with terrorists?" - Counter-terrorism expert and blogger Larry Johnson

22) "If I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States -- I’d just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts." - Lara Logan, CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent

23) "Against the law? I'll leave that to legal scholars. But it's certainly good politics." - CNN senior political reporter Candi Crowley

24) Headline: "McCain, Obama Agree on 'Dark Knight'"

25) "Is the American flag Barack Obama's Willie Horton?" - CNN anchor Anderson Cooper

26) Headline: "McCain Camp Launches NameIsMcCainNotMcSame.com"

27) "Whether on our own soil or in a distant land, explosions, gunfire and random acts of violence bind us as Americans. To deny this is to reject the American people outright, to lodge metaphorical shrapnel deep into the heart of our frontier soul." - Washington Post columnist George Will

28) Headline: "Owners Cuddle, Dress Pets...Then Fry Them"

29) "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." - John McCain addressing his wife Cindy

30) "Let's face it, George W. Bush was comedic welfare. None of us really had to work very hard. Hell, our writers would often just send me links to The New York Times and then hit the peep shows." - Late Show host David Letterman

31) "The Tiger Woods injury story was of major importance and we felt we needed to devote time to it as the lead." - Rick Kaplan, Executive Producer of CBS Evening News

32) "I knew I'd miss Bush, but I thought I could rely on McCain-Palin and the millions of bile-filled, pitch-fork-waving, infuriatingly ignorant and virulently racist bat-shit crazy Americans to maintain comedic stability in the White House. I was wrong." - Stephen Colbert

33) Headline: "Elephant Warms to Baby She Stomped"

34) “During ‘blackout week,’ the AP didn’t mention [Paris] Hilton’s second birthday party at a Beverly Hills restaurant, at which a drunken friend reportedly was ejected by security after insulting Paula Abdul and Courtney Love. And editors asked our Puerto Rico bureau not to write about her visit there to hawk her fragrance.” - Frank Baker, Associated Press Los Angeles Assistant Bureau Chief, on AP's journalistic restraint in covering fluff

35) "A sieve with legs." - John Podesta, Obama transition chief and former Clinton White House chief of staff, describing Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton and longtime Hillary loyalist

ANSWERS:

1) fiction; 2) fact; 3) fiction; 4) fact; 5) fiction; 6) fiction; 7) fiction; 8) fiction; 9) fiction; 10) fact; 11) fact; 12) fiction; 13) fact; 14) fact; 15) fiction; 16) fact; 17) fiction; 18) fact; 19) fiction; 20) fact; 21) fact; 22) fact; 23) fiction; 24) fact; 25) fiction; 26) fiction; 27) fiction; 28) fact; 29) fact; 30) fiction; 31) fact; 32) fiction; 33) fact; 34) fact; 35) fiction

So how did you do? Better than you expected? Worse than you expected? Any entries that particularly tripped you up or caused you to snarf your beverage of choice? Keep it going -- send to your friends, family and co-workers and see who comes out on top (caution: due to John McCain's verbal expression of family values, this year's challenge is not suitable for children).

Story of the Day: AP Reporter's Tough Gaza Questions Disappeared

During Monday's State Department press briefing, Associated Press State Department Correspondent Matthew Lee posed the most pointed question about the conflict in Gaza and the Bush administration's position: "What’s wrong with an immediate cease-fire that doesn’t have to be sustainable and durable if, during the pause that you get from an immediate cease-fire, something longer-term can be negotiated?" Lee didn't tread lightly either when Deputy Secretary of State Sean McCormack failed to provide a sufficient answer and continued to challenge McCormack on the same point in Tuesday's press briefing.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to print: the substance of these exchanges never made it into Lee's corresponding articles.

First, here's the main exchange between Lee and McCormack on Monday:

LEE: If it’s true, as you say, and I think that you agree because you do say this humanitarian situation is dire, that lives are at stake, that there have been civilian casualties despite the efforts to minimize them.
MCCORMACK: Right.
LEE: What’s wrong with an immediate cease-fire that doesn’t have to be sustainable and durable if, during the pause that you get from an immediate cease-fire, something longer-term can be negotiated?
MCCORMACK: Well --
LEE: I don’t understand the calculus. If you say you want to save lives and protect people, why not accept something that is less --
MCCORMACK: Right.
LEE: -- than perfect if you can get to that point?
MCCORMACK: Right.
LEE: If you can use that to get to a point that is (inaudible)?
MCCORMACK: I guess the calculation is, Matt, fundamentally that you’re not going to get to that point under those circumstances.
LEE: How do you – how do you figure? How do you --
MCCORMACK: Well, you know, we’ve gone through circumstances like this before, and it – look, it’s – well, there are no sureties in these things. You know, you take a look at the facts, you take a look at history, and you make your best set of calculations and you do what you think is right in order to achieve the objectives that you have laid out. And it doesn’t – it perhaps helps the situation in the immediate term --
LEE: Well, if this is something that can perhaps do that, what’s wrong with that?
MCCORMACK: That’s exactly my point, Matt. Are you trading off against lives in the future that will be lost if you don’t go for a durable, sustainable cease-fire? We’re not willing to do that. Now, this may – of course, we have seen various protests, you know – capitals in the region as well. We’re aware of that. And we’re aware of the fact that lives have been lost, innocent life has been lost. In none of this are there any easy decisions. But you have to take the set of decisions that you believe will ultimately best benefit the people of the region, whether it’s the Palestinians or the Israelis. And people may disagree with our approach, our --
LEE: But isn’t the best benefit keeping people alive?
MCCORMACK: It is, Matt, but I – you know, I --
LEE: If there’s a chance that you can save some lives by going for an immediate cease-fire rather than one that is going to be – you know, that you know is going to be long-term and that meets your conditions, I don’t understand what’s wrong with that.
MCCORMACK: Well, again, Matt, there are people who are advocating that position. I understand that. But ultimately, we don’t think that you address the underlying issues if you don’t try to get a sustainable, durable, non-time-limited cease-fire. And if you don’t get that, you’re going to be right back here again, whether it’s – and you’re going to have somebody else up here three months from now, four months from now, five months from now, talking about the same kind of tragedy. Again, nobody wants to see the sort of humanitarian suffering that you’re seeing in Gaza. We’re not blind to that. We’re trying to address the immediate circumstances, as well as to try to address something that is more durable, so those people in Gaza and the people on the other side of the border can maybe perhaps have some more semblance of a normal life.

Lee also has some other fine moments in this press briefing, including this follow-up to another State Department correspondent's question about what signals the administration gave Israel regarding the military action in Gaza and if it approved of the newer ground incursion. McCormick answers the other correspondent and then Lee jumps in with a dose of reality regarding US foreign policy.

MCCORMACK: Well, this is – you know, this is a question that always comes up. We don’t give green lights, red lights, yellow lights. I think you heard from the Vice President they’re – they didn’t seek our permission or advice, and we didn’t seek to offer any of that. As I – as I said --
LEE: You know, that’s not – that’s just manifestly not true.
MCCORMACK: As I – yes, it is.
LEE: No, no – maybe in – maybe in this, but all over the world you are involved in giving green lights, red lights and yellow lights. I remember when –
MCCORMACK: Am I talking --
LEE: -- when Musharraf --
MCCORMACK: Am I talking about anywhere else in the world, Matt? Am I talking about a specific circumstance? Look --

According to a LexisNexis and Google News search, Lee didn't publish a report after this briefing on Monday.

Lee returns to his original question in Tuesday's press briefing:

LEE: The point is, though, Sean, that if it – if what is proposed has a time limit or you don’t think it’s durable or sustainable, you’re not going to support that; correct?
MCCORMACK: That’s correct.
LEE: That – so while you want one immediately --
MCCORMACK: Right.
LEE: -- you will not accept one that is just a short or a temporary pause?
MCCORMACK: Again, we have deep concern for the humanitarian situation in Gaza and for the innocent lives on both sides --
LEE: Well, if you do --
MCCORMACK: -- both sides of --
LEE: If you do --

[...]

LEE: Sean, can I go back to the question I asked yesterday?
MCCORMACK: Yeah.
LEE: I don’t – I still am not sure I understand your reasoning as to why, if innocent life can be saved --
MCCORMACK: Right.
LEE: -- even one innocent life can be saved by a temporary pause --
MCCORMACK: Right.
LEE: -- ceasefire, what’s wrong with that? Why --
MCCORMACK: There’s – look, I know that that is a point of view that is supported by many. And we value every single life, absolutely. But you also don’t want to get into a situation where you are trading off – you know, trading off saving even one life now, against losing 30, 40, 50 or more in the future and being right back in the same situation.
LEE: But you don’t know that you’re going to --
MCCORMACK: I know, Matt. Look, there’s no cookie-cutter approach to trying to solve these problems, absolutely not. And I would be the first one to acknowledge that these are tough, sometimes gut-wrenching decisions when you see some of the humanitarian suffering on the ground there. I fully acknowledge that. But we have to stand back from that and try to make what we believe are the best decisions possible that will improve the situation in the region for Israelis, Palestinians, and others who have an interest in seeing a different kind of Middle East. And I know there are different points of view on this matter, and I fully respect those points of view. But we are pursuing the course that we believe is in the best interests of the United States, as well as the people in the region.
LEE: But do you understand the impression that that gives or the – that that gives? I mean, that position that you take appears to many people to be a – the proverbial green light for the Israelis to go ahead and do whatever they want until they think that they’re done.
MCCORMACK: Look, you know, I can – all I can do is try to disabuse people of those impressions and those perceptions. Whether or not they listen to what I have to say or the reasoning behind it, I can’t control that. Look, we have seen this – you know, we have been in – the United States has been in similar circumstances -- you can cite many throughout history – of making very, very tough decisions. We had to make similarly tough decisions, for example, back in 2006 when there was a war between Israel and Hezbollah, one provoked by Hezbollah. At the end of that process, as difficult as it was, we believed that the status – you know, the status quo is much preferable and better than the status quo ante. As difficult as that was, and as great as the costs that were incurred in terms of human life and other ways--
LEE: And you’re saying that – so you’re saying that you have the same – that the calculus is the same in this case? That the status quo – what is happening on the ground right now is preferable to what it was before?
MCCORMACK: No, that’s not what I’m saying, Matt. Listen to what I’m saying. What I’m saying – the situation at the end of the conflict between -- you know, between Hezbollah and Israel, and currently, is better and preferable. It’s better for the people of Lebanon. It’s better for the people of Israel. It’s better for the region than the status quo ante.
LEE: So at that --
MCCORMACK: That’s not to say – that’s not to say there weren’t great costs that were incurred in that and that there weren’t difficult decisions that were taken in that regard. But what we can do, and what we have to do as stewards of our national interest as well as doing what we think is best for the interests of the people in the region, is the course that we are currently on.
LEE: So if we take that – this situation, you believe that once Israel is finished with what it’s doing, whatever it’s going to do, the situation in Gaza is going to be better than it was before?
MCCORMACK: You know, again, you’re viewing it through a particular – you know, the particular prism of somehow the United States is offering some sort of counsel about Israeli military operations. We are not.
LEE: No, no, no.
MCCORMACK: Our interest is in bringing about a durable, sustainable ceasefire so that the – what you have after conflict has ended is better than what you had before conflict began. Yeah.

After this Tuesday briefing, Lee wrote up and filed his story. With the misleadingly hopeful headline "Rice Traveling to UN to Push Gaza Cease-Fire" (please note: traditionally speaking, reporters don't write their own headlines), the article opens:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to New York and the United Nations on Tuesday in a bid to broker a sustainable cease-fire as soon as possible to end the crisis in Gaza.

Lee knows there's a stark difference between a "ceasefire" and the administration's "sustainable" or "durable" ceasefire. Most of his back and forth with McCormack for two days pivoted on these semantic but very consequential points of distinction. AP editors surely know this as well.

Yet the AP -- America's leading newswire service -- either carelessly or willfully misled its readers and all the news providers it supplied with this headline, many of which, as is often the case, then use it to frame this unfolding story. A headline much closer to the truth would've read "Rice Traveling to UN to Push Conditional Gaza Cease-Fire." Omit "conditional" or some such synonym and the headline gives the false impression that Rice is coming to the Palestinians' rescue. Lee and his editors at the AP realize as well that Rice is coming to the Palestinians' rescue like she came to the Lebanese civilians' rescue in 2006.

The piece continues:

Rice plans to hold several separate meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Arab and European foreign ministers to lobby for a three-tiered U.S. truce proposal and will then attend a U.N. Security Council meeting on Gaza, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

The talks are intended "to further her efforts to bring about a cease-fire that is sustainable and durable concerning Gaza," he told reporters. The U.S. wants to see three key elements in any agreement: an end to rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza and securing border crossings between Gaza and Israel and between Gaza and Egypt.

[...]

McCormack said it was not clear if the council would adopt any resolution on Tuesday and said the United States could only support an immediate cease-fire if it is not time-limited and addresses the three U.S. points.

"We would like to see the violence end today," he said. "But we also want to see it end in a way that is sustainable and durable."

At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino repeated that position.

"We want to get to a durable cease-fire as soon as possible," Perino said. "And if that is immediate, then we would certainly welcome that." [...]

Lee pressed McCormack on this administration position for two days, pinpointing and questioning the transparency of its illogic and brutal disregard to what is now a full-blown humanitarian crisis. But none of Lee's related questions, or McCormack's answers framed by those questions, ever appear in this article. Nor do they appear in Lee's article published the next day, "Rice Extends UN Visit Amid Gaza Truce Debate," which opens:

The Bush administration held off Wednesday from backing an Egyptian-French ceasefire proposal in Gaza, but urged a lasting agreement that would end ongoing violence between Israeli and Hamas forces that have killed more than 670 people.

If you watch or read what Lee said during the corresponding press briefings, it's hard to believe he decided to scrub those exchanges with McCormick. Of course it's possible. But the only thing that's certain is somewhere between Lee's exemplary work in those two prior press briefings and the AP's editorial process, someone decided to censor the pertinent truth about the reckless stupidity and grisly inhumanity of the administration's current Gaza stance.

Happy New Year from MediaBloodhound!

Wishing you all a peaceful, healthy and fulfilling new year. Now that you've heard the traditional version of "Auld Lang Syne" last night and throughout your life, the following are some very different interpretations.

This first version is the one intended by Robert Burns, the man credited for original song:

Here's a punk-rock twist:

/p>

Nicki Jaine's music has been described as existing "...in its own universe, one in which Kurt Weill and Nico orbit a shadowy planet like twin moons..." Here's Jaine's take on the song, playing a musical saw (OK, the beginning sounds a little like a cat crooning but stay with it to the end...my pick for most original interpretation):

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Finally, Aretha Franklin and Billy Preston give it a soulful spin. Must click here to see (embedding for this video was disabled).

Happy Holidays from MediaBloodhound

(updated below)

UPDATE: Well, this video did work. Apparently this just went into effect. Blame Warner Music Group for excellent holiday timing.

Story of the Day: Threatened Rove IT Guru Dies Tragically, MSM MIA

(updated below)

Philosophical corporate media question: If the biggest potential whistle-blower since "Deep Throat" dies an untimely death and the mainstream media doesn't cover it, did it really happen?

Last Friday evening, Michael Connell, a top IT consultant to Karl Rove, the Bush administration and the Republican National Party died when his single-engine plane crashed into a vacant house in Ohio. No one else was on board. Connell, Rove's IT guru, created the alternate email system for the White House -- the one about which the Bush administration claims an untold number of emails were destroyed -- and was set to testify as a key witness in a lawsuit claiming fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio, in which he was alleged to have helped electronically flip votes.

It is Tuesday morning, four days after Connell's plane fell from the sky. What could possibly be the mainstream media's justification for so conspicuously ignoring a story of this magnitude?

According to a LexisNexis search conducted by MediaBloodhound, the extent of US national media coverage, in which Connell is both named as the man who died in the crash and is at least acknowledged to have worked for the Bush administration, consists of one 130-word Associated Press story. It called Connell a "Republican media consultant who helped operate campaign Web sites for President Bush and former presidential nominee John McCain." It also reported, "Connell was the CEO and founder of Cleveland-based New Media Communications, which built campaign Web sites for Bush and McCain, according to the company's Web site. The site says the company also worked with the Ohio Republican Party, the Republican National Committee and other political groups."

That's it. The rest of the information regarded details of the plane crash.

All suspicions of foul play aside -- and while none are being alleged here, it would be neither responsible nor logical, given the context, to rule anything out until more facts are known -- consider what we already do know.

Investigative journalist Larisa Alexandrovna has since gone public that Connell was a major source in her investigation into the email system he set up and related matters. Pertaining to the "destroyed" White House emails, she said that "what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all "known" Karl Rove accounts."

Alexandrovna also wrote, "I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman" and "Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened." She said she visited Connell's home and he'd confided to her that he was being threatened, "something that his attorneys also told the judge in the Ohio election fraud case."

We have the email that attorney Cliff Arnebeck sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey on July 24, 2008, expressly requesting protection for his client: "We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to 'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations." (Read full email here; scroll down after jump.) Five months passed; Mukasey never provided protection.

19 Action News in Cleveland reported that Connell "was apparently told by a close friend not to fly his plane because his plane might be sabotaged." Calling Connell's death "untimely," 19 Action News reporter Blake Chenault also reported, "And twice in the last two months Connell, who is an experienced pilot, cancelled two flights because of suspicious problems with his plane."

Connell was allegedly a linchpin in the biggest maze of White House scandal this country's ever seen, yet the national news media is a no-show.

What caused Connell's crash is only one piece of this story. One that, as in many such stories, may or may never be confirmed. Pilot error? Aircraft malfunction? Weather conditions? Foul play? Suicide? Heart attack? A thorough investigation needs to take place. Part of what the media should be doing is making sure that happens.

But everything that has already been confirmed, having nothing to do with the crash, should also have the national media covering this with at least as much gusto as "BlaggoGate" or, say, Britney's comeback or Brangelina's pre-nup. So far, though, in a replay of journalistic fecklessness rife during the Bush years, mum's the word.

UPDATE: Apparently, not long after I posted this piece, CBS/AP actually published a fairly substantive article (h/t Brad Friedman) on the Connell story. This is encouraging, and CBS and the AP deserve credit for getting the ball rolling in the mainstream. Let's hope such coverage builds and doesn't end here. We'll definitely check back after some holiday cheer and see how this shakes out in the coming days.

Op-Ed Column: AP Trivializes Iraqi Death Toll, Amplifies Censorship

(updated below)

From the aftermath of the 2003 "shock and awe" bombing campaign all the way through Thanksgiving Day 2008, major US news outlets have nearly uniformly blacked out or downplayed reports of the Iraqi death toll. But a recent Associated Press article reveals the depths to which these outlets are still willing to delve to censor this information.

In the November 27 article "Iraqi Parliament OKs US Troops for 3 More Years," by Christopher Torchia and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP editors approved the following characterization of Iraqi deaths suffered since the US invasion:

The war has claimed more than 4,200 American lives and killed a far greater, untold number of Iraqis, consumed huge reserves of money and resources and eroded the global stature of the United States, even among its closest allies.

How's that for a statistically rigorous accounting?

With the exactitude of a third-grader's book report cribbed from a novel's dust jacket copy, the AP -- America's #1 wire news service -- blankets US news outlets with a quantification of Iraqi casualties that would've made Stalin proud.

Seriously, it's 2008. Everybody knows the emperor has no clothes and no clue. Barack Obama is the President-elect. Reality, thankfully (however tentatively), is in vogue. Yet America's "most respected news sources" are still treating the Iraqi death toll as if we're living in a pre-neoconned world.

As MediaBloodhound reported last April, when Opinion Research Business (ORB), a well-regarded non-partisan British polling agency that has conducted studies for the BBC and the British Conservative Party, released its January 2008 follow-up report estimating over 1 million Iraqi deaths since the US invasion -- which both reconfirmed its September 2007 estimate as well as supported prior findings of the 2006 John Hopkins study published in the British medical journal Lancet (650,000 deaths) -- a LexisNexis search showed no US mainstream news outlet carried the story.

MediaBloodhound also pointed out at the time that, writing in FAIR's newsletter Extra!, Patrick McElwee cited an "Associated Press poll in February (2/24/07) that asked Americans how many Iraqis have died received a median response of less than 10,000."

The November 27 AP article in question, which glibly and mindlessly quantifies Iraqi deaths since the invasion as merely a "far greater, untold number" in comparison to Americans killed in the war, reflects how AP's February 2007 poll respondents could be so clueless.

Even Iraq Body Count's estimates, proven to undercount for a few reasons (for one, they only attempt to account for "noncombatants"), were tens of thousands of casualties higher than the median estimate provided by respondents in the 2007 AP poll. Today, the Iraq Body Count estimates around 100,000 Iraqi deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) published its estimate of Iraqi dead last January, though its count only covered the time from the beginning of the war through June 2006. Its findings then, which wouldn't account for nearly two and a half years of the war since? The WHO estimated between 104,000 and 223,000 deaths, with a median of 151,000.

Whenever citing the Iraqi death toll since the 2003 invasion, the AP, and any news outlet wishing to be seen as credible, should at the very least either a provide a range of estimates from viable sources (e.g., 200,000 to over 1 million) or a median estimate (e.g. roughly 600,000).

As McElwee stated nearly a year ago, "If Americans are to make informed judgments not only about the invasion of Iraq and whether the occupation should continue, but also about future wars our government may wish to start, then we need to have good information about the war's impact on Iraqis."

Major US news outlets, with their number #1 wire service now leading the way in censoring the Iraqi death toll, continue to report on this subject, the rare times it surfaces in articles, as though it's still 2003. It was wrong then. Today, it should at least be grounds for editors to be reprimanded or lose their jobs and for immediate corrections to be printed.

It's 2008. Enough is enough. Give us the damn facts and get out of the way.

UPDATE: Today's New York Times article "More Iraqi Dead Last Month, But Fewer Than Last Year," by Alissa J. Rubin, keeps up this grand tradition of censoring the Iraqi death toll in a report about the Iraqi death toll. Here's the lede:

The numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths and improvised explosive devices increased in November, although there were still fewer of each than in September, according to statistics from the Interior Ministry.

The number of civilian deaths last month was 148, compared with 118 in October and 156 in September.

The number of I.E.D.’s was 108, compared with 79 in October and 113 in September. Most measures of violence remain much lower than last fall.

As far as numbers go, that's all our paper of record provides. No range of estimates on the number of Iraqi dead. No median calculation derived from that range. Not even a reference to the overall Iraqi lives lost since the US invasion. AP's "far greater, untold number" may be woefully deficient yet Times editors managed to ignore the topic altogether, as though counting Iraqi deaths is only possible in monthly increments, microcosmic snapshots that conveniently keep the genocidal numbers out of sight and out of mind.

Editor's Note: Happy Thanksgiving from MediaBloodhound

Sorry for the even lighter than usual posting here of late. I've been working on new investigative articles, two of which should see publication before the year's through. But look for new original pieces up here next week.

Until then, two things:

First, I just wanted to make sure you saw this year's Project Censored Top 25 censored news stories. It came out about two months ago, but I never got around to posting on it here. Since this site's focus is media criticism, I'd feel remiss for not practicing due diligence in putting your, and more, eyes on these stories:

# 1 Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
# 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
# 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
# 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
# 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
# 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
# 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
# 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
# 9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
# 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
# 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
# 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
# 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
# 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
# 15 Worldwide Slavery
# 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
# 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
# 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
# 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
# 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
# 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
# 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
# 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
# 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
# 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

And on a lighter note, let your cats work out tomorrow. It's Thanksgiving:

The Wounded-Courier: Obama Said to Pick Newly Created 'Leakmaster General'

After days of leaks coming from the Obama transition team, the President-elect has reportedly decided to go the path of least resistance, embracing the enlarged prostate flow of chatter with the new cabinet position of Leakmaster General.

Former Clinton administration officials involved in the transition, who declined to give their names because "that would kind of spoil a leak," say the Leakmaster General's duties will be to deliver all leaks, however nonsensical, through a central command -- the Office of Leaks, Gossip and Utter Horseshit (OLGUH).

Other Clinton administration officials close to the transition efforts say that Obama has chosen Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton and longtime Hillary loyalist, to fill this new cabinet position. Reached for comment, Davis declined to confirm the leak. A few minutes later, however, he called back from another number, disguised his voice, gave his name as "Gustav Demetri Jones Jr. III," and said, "If Lanny Davis wants this position, it's his for the taking."

According to acquaintances of friends of anonymous children of Clinton insiders once associated with the transition team, John Podesta, Obama transition chief and former Clinton White House chief of staff, hand-picked Davis for the position himself, calling him, "A sieve with legs."

But a high school classmate of Obama's, Heddy Sipperstein, told The New York Times this afternoon, "These reports of Obama going with the flow, don't believe 'em. I just spoke with some Clinton insiders last night at an underground DC rave fundraiser for baby boomer lobbyists with Restless Leg Syndrome. They say Obama is mad pissed, Bubbeleh, and this Leakmaster General post is just a ploy to play it cool."

A red-haired man dressed like a court jester outside a Greyhound bus station in Detroit said he was contacted by aliens in his head who are friends with current Hillary Clinton supporters attached to the transition process.

"They say nothing is what it seems like, man. The ghosts are in the machine, you know. Big Bird for Secretary of Defense. Wolf Blitzer for Minister of the Beard. Wolf Boy for Secretary of Norelco. Number nine, number nine! Bill Clinton is not W.C. Fields but Mrs. Fields cookies never put country first. Knock-knock. Who's there? Can only tell you on condition of anonymity. Th-the-the-the-the-that's all, folks!"

Asked if Hillary Clinton would make a good Secretary of State, the man replied, "Sure, as long as she's willing to work for President Obama and put any future presidential aspirations on the back burner."

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The Wounded-Courier is the satirical news division of MediaBloodhound.