Category Archives: News Media

Parallax View

Posted on by

Partly following up the last post, “Why We Blog” — Take a look at this WaPo headline on an article by Jim VandeHei: “Blogs Attack From Left as Democrats Reach for Center.”

And then take in this first paragraph:

Democrats are getting an early glimpse of an intraparty rift that could complicate efforts to win back the White House: fiery liberals raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups vs. elected officials trying to appeal to a much broader audience.

My revision:

    “Blogs Demand that Democrats Be Democrats”

    Democrats are being put on notice that they can no longer ignore their base to appeal to right-of-center “swing” voters. Fiery liberals are raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups to tell elected officials that in trying to appeal to a “broader” audience, the party is in danger of losing all definition and becoming an amorphous, unidentifiable blob.

Some of what VandeHei claims is going on in liberal blogoland is a bit, um, wrong. “First, liberal Web logs went after Democrats for selecting Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to deliver the response to Bush’s speech next Tuesday,” writes VandeHei. Really? I hadn’t noticed, and I’m here pretty much all the time. But if you keep reading, you find that “liberal Web logs” is Arianna Huffington. I like her, but she’s hardly the entire liberal blogosphere.

VandeHei’s article describes a war between wild-eyed, far-leftist ideological commandos against the sober, realistic Democratic Party establishment professionals. If the Dems cater too much to us whackjobs, they risk alienating centrist voters.

Yeah, right. This is the same conventional “wisdom” that tells Dems they’d better be careful about criticizing Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, even though adults nationwide disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war by 58 to 39 percent (CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted Jan. 20-22, 2006). And this is the same conventional wisdom telling Dems to back away from Roe v. Wade, even though 66 percent of adults nationwide say they don’t want it overturned (ibid.).

But the fact is that our problems with the establishment Dems aren’t really about ideology. I agree with Scott Shields at MyDD:

To be fair, there is some tension between the Democratic Party and the progressive blogosphere. Unlike the rightist blogosphere, we tend to be a bit more independent and suspicious of power. But to pretend that we’re in an all-out war is silly. If that were the case, I doubt the majority of us would still consider ourselves Democrats. Some of our favorite Democrats are people like Jack Murtha, the pro-life Harry Reid, and Russ Feingold, who voted to confirm Chief Justice Roberts. As Markos has pointed out time and again, the tension doesn’t stem from ideology. It’s all about entrenched power and reform.

What we really want is for Dems to work with the liberal blogosphere and with progressive organizations like Moveon to form an effective liberal/progressive coalition to counter the Right. In other words, we in the blogosphere want to work with the party to form a Daou power triangle. The Republican Party uses rightie bloggers to get their message out; much of the Democratic Party runs away from us, screaming. But just exactly who these Dems expect to vote for them — if not people looking for an alternative to the GOP — is a mystery to me. As Peter Daou wrote,

Unfortunately for the progressive netroots, the intricate interplay of Republican persuasion tactics, media story-telling, and 21st century information flow seems beyond the ken of most Democratic strategists and leaders. The hellish reality progressive bloggers have acknowledged and internalized is still alien to the party establishment. Dem strategy is still two parts hackneyed sloganeering and one part befuddlement over the stifling of their message.

Maybe the Democratic establishment wants it so, maybe they don’t know better, but progressive bloggers and activists are starting to see the bitter reality of their isolation: the triangle is broken and they’re on their own until further notice.

Back to VandeHei:

“The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who advised Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. “The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left.”

We may or may not be representative of the majority the Dems need to win elections now, but what the Dems need to do is work with us to educate and persuade people that the GOP way of governing the country isn’t the only way.

How in the world did the extremist whackjob Right get itself framed as the “center,” after all? VandeHei provides a clue:

The closest historic parallel would be the talk-radio phenomenon of the early 1980s, when conservatives — like liberals now — felt powerless and certain they did not have a way to voice their views because the mainstream media and many of their own leaders considered them out of touch. Through talk radio, often aired in rural parts of the country on the AM dial, conservatives pushed the party to the right on social issues and tax cuts.

And we know, even if VandeHei doesn’t say so, that those 1980s righties were not howling in the wilderness, but were being mentored and funded and promoted by big bucks donors and right-wing think tanks. And pretty soon the only message most people heard though the allegedly liberal “MSM” was the rightie message. Thus, the Right runs everything now.

You’d think that would be a clue.

VandeHei again:

The question Democrats will debate over the next few years is whether the prevailing views of liberal activists on the war, the role of religion in politics and budget policies will help or hinder efforts to recapture the presidency and Congress.

In fact, the prevailing views of liberal activists on these matters are the views of a large part of the American public. Like most Americans we think the war was a mistake (although there are diverse views about how to get out), most of us support the separation of church and state as Thomas Jefferson described it, and we’d like to go back to the dear departed days of budget surpluses that we enjoyed in the Clinton Administration. In other words — this is not radical stuff. We are not trying to turn America into a socialist utopia. We’re just trying to pull the government away from the extreme Right and back toward the center. And we’d like to live in a nation in which progressive policy views can get a fair hearing in public, and are not shouted down by rightie goons.

I honestly believe that if most Americans could hear what we had to say, they’d realize we’re mostly right. And the Dems could help themselves in the long run by helping us.

Even if they disagree with their positions, Democratic candidates recognize from the Dean experience the power of the activists to raise money and infuse a campaign with their energy. On the flip side, the Alito and Kaine episodes serve as a cautionary tales of what can happen to politicians when they spurn the blogs.

Once again, there was not a Kaine “episode”; most of us were thrilled when Kaine won the Virginia gubernatorial race in November, and I for one look forward to what he has to say next week. But what really worries the establishment Dems is whether we’ll continue to let them use us as campaign ATM machines if they’re afraid to be seen with us in public.

Why We Blog

Posted on by

I started blogging in 2002 out of frustration with the shallowness, sloppiness, and bias coming out of what’s loosely called “news media” in this country. Although professional standards had been slipping for some time, coverage of the 2000 election made me fully realize the clowns were running the circus, as it were. By 2002 I had figured out how to use technology to publish a web page, and I decided it was time to stop mumbling to myself and start communicating.*

Now, the clowns are having to reckon with us bloggers.

If you haven’t been following the recent snarking between theWashington Post ombudsperson, Deborah Howell, and the liberal blogosphere — in a nutshell, Howell wrote in one of her columns that Jack Abramoff had given tainted money to Democrats as well as Republicans, which is not true. When that bit of sloppiness raised a firestorm of irate mail, she “corrected” herself — “I should have said he directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.”

What can one say, but — aaaargh.

Jane Hamsher:

No. What you should have said was that although Abramoff’s victims, the Indian tribes, gave money to Democrats it was much less than they did before Abramoff appeared on the scene and there is no indication that there was anything quid-pro-quo about it. Unlike the Republicans, who are up to their eyeballs in shit over this. To say anything else provides improper context and implies that legitimate contributions and illegal influence peddling are one, which they most certainly are not.

See also “Abramoff Clients Shifted Money to GOP” by Scott Shields at MyDD.

Anyway, discussion on the WaPo blog became so heated that comments were shut off because, said executive editor Jim Brady, too many comments contained profanity and other hate speech. (This started some crowing on the Right Blogosphere because, you know, righties never engage in profanity and hate speech. Cough.) Further, the nasty comments were being posted too quickly for WaPo staffers to read and delete them. So comments had to be turned off.**

Jukeboxgrad of Daily Kos posted analysis that shows this claim was bullshit. Among other things, Jukeboxgrad retrieved deleted messages that contained no profanity or personal attacks. He also explains why it wouldn’t have been difficult, much less impossible, for a WaPo staffer to “keep up” with messages as they were posted.

Thursday (I believe) there was an actual close encounter between Howell and bloggers at a National Press Club luncheon, which you can read about here on the Blogometer. “To summarize both sides’ point of view,” writes William Beutler, “the bloggers in attendance implored the press to ‘do your job’ while the establishment journalists argued that their mistakes did not warrant the harsh response.”

Except that their “mistakes” are hurting America, as Jon Stewart said. And it’s not just one mistake. It’s all the “mistakes,” the sloppiness, the pulling back from plain truth about the Right because of some skewed idea of “balance”; reporters obviously writing from GOP handouts (you can tell by the “framing”); reporters who plainly take dictation from White House officials; covering election campaigns like a horse race in lieu of providing meaningful information about the candidates; and giving George W. Bush’s serial bleep-ups one pass after another (except for Katrina; I guess even the blow-dried brigades can’t ignore dead bodies).

I’ve worked in print media for many years, and it’s a fact that everybody gets something wrong now and then, and mistakes will be made even by the careful. But we’re talking about a pattern here. And we’re sick of it.

You can take any political story that’s more complicated than man-bites-dog, and you’ll find that completely accurate, objective reporting is the exception rather than the rule. I don’t believe any single cable news reporter has ever gotten the Plamegate saga right, for example, and the print reporters aren’t much better. Some of them are, in fact, worse.

When I was in Wales and England last summer, I met a few natives who were baffled why Americans had chosen (as if) George W. Bush to be our leader. “You do know he’s an idiot?” one lady, gently, asked. There was anxiety in her voice, as if she thought mention of Bush’s name might cause us Yanks to transform from rational beings into beasts with claws and snouts that would dig up her garden.

Well, yes, we said. Lots of Americans realize that. But it’s … complicated. But it isn’t, really. The biggest reason we’ve got a pack of hard right extremists in charge of our government is that the American people aren’t being told the truth about them. And the Right has gotten wonderfully good at using media to scare the stuffing out of enough people to keep them in line.

In the words of the soc-psych study I cited here, Americans are being exposed “to a wide-ranging multidimensional mortality salience induction.” And the “MSM” is complicit.

But let’s go back to Deborah Howell. Jane Hamsher writes,

Matt Stoller and John Aravosis had a Deborah Howell encounter yesterday at the Washington Press Club. The Hotline Blogometer recounts the affair where after an hour and a half of listening to Howell and others describe her experience like she was the sole survivor of the Bismark, Matt Stoller grabbed the microphone and said “The antagonism here is coming from you guys….Nothing happened to you!” Aravosis says Stoller went on for a bit more — “You’re fine…it’s not like you were hit by a car…you’re sitting here, eating a nice meal” or words to that effect.

Atrios points out that the pros aren’t accustomed to anything like the instant feedback of the Blogosophere. “Boo hoo. People were mean. Welcome to my world.”

See also Steve Gilliard and Digby.

In other MSM v. bloggers news, NBC smeared Arianna Huffington because of Huffington’s criticisms of Tim Russert (like this). I say Russert is one of the most overrated hacks on television. (There are worse hacks, but Russert has a “rep” for being a real journalist and tough interviewer, which he is not.) “Personality” journalists in particular have been able to operate in their own protective bubble for far too long; they desperately need the kind of critical razzing the Blogosphere can provide. It would do them good; force them to work harder to get their facts right and to think about what they are presenting to news consumers. If the lords and ladies of the press stop getting the vapors for being criticized, maybe we can learn to work together to everyone’s benefit.

But, bottom line — this is why I blog. To get the facts straight and to get the truth out. If the “MSM” ever straightens itself up and does its job properly, I will retire.

(Click “more” for footnotes.) Continue reading →

Stop Chris Matthews

Posted on by

In the past few months I’ve taken up watching Hardball again after more than four years of avoiding it. I swore off in 2001 because host Chris Matthews was just too obviouly shilling for the VRWC.

More recently he had settled down a bit. Matthews still has shit for brains, but sometimes he has good guests. His interview style is based on the ten thousand monkeys principle — you know, if you leave ten thousand monkeys in a warehouse full of typewriters, eventually — it may take centuries, but eventually — random monkey typing will produce an actual sentence. In Matthews’s case, the technique is to spew out as many words as he can in the course of a program, and randomly some of the words come together to make points. Or not. But, like I said, recently he’s had some good guests.

But this week Tweety the VRWC shill is back in all his glory. I swear he spent his entire Tuesday and Wednesday programs wanking over Hillary Clinton and the “plantation” speech. I believe the only thing that kept him from going at it again for a third full night was the Osama bin Laden tape.

And the monkey mouth spake, thus: Bin Laden “sounds like an over the top Michael Moore here, if not a Michael Moore.”

I admit I heard this and let it wash past me like the noise that it is, but today Peter Daou writes that we should demand an apology. And he’s right.

One reason the Right gets catered to the mass media is that it throws a screaming fit over every little slight, real or imagined, of their inviolable world view. Today, for example, the Right Blogosphere is on the rampage over the caption of this Associated Press photo: “Exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden is seen in this April 1998 file photo in Afghanistan.”

The problem? Michelle Malkin: “Got that? Osama isn’t a mass-murdering terrorist mastermind. He’s just a poor, exiled dissident who disagrees with civilization.”

They’re on a rampage over this caption, I tell you. Check out the links at Memeorandum.

Now, I think bin Laden is a mass-murdering terrorist mastermind, but by journalism 101 rules he’s an alleged mass-murdering terrorist mastermind until found guilty in court. There are certain principles and practices that professional journalists are supposed to adhere to, and one of them is maintaining a dispassionate distance from one’s subjects. ObL is an exiled Saudi dissident, among other things, so it’s a factually objective caption.

But as Peter Daou says, “last I checked, Michael Moore didn’t massacre thousands of innocent Americans.” Matthews’s comment was not professional. It was not dispassionate or objective. It was shilling for the Right by slandering a well-known personality of the Left. Daou quotes John Kerry:

You’d think the only focus tonight would be on destroying Osama Bin Laden, not comparing him to an American who opposes the war whether you like him or not. You want a real debate that America needs? Here goes: If the administration had done the job right in Tora Bora we might not be having discussions on Hardball about a new Bin Laden tape. How dare Scott McClellan tell America that this Administration puts terrorists out of business when had they put Osama Bin Laden out of business in Afghanistan when our troops wanted to, we wouldn’t have to hear this barbarian’s voice on tape. That’s what we should be talking about in America.

So today I join many others and demand that Chris Matthews publicly apologize to Michael Moore. If you want to join in, you can email Hardball — [email protected] — and MSNBC TV — [email protected]. The phone number for the Secaucus studio from which Hardball originates is 201-583-5000, and the fax is 201-583-5453. Contacting your local MSNBC affiliates that carry Hardball might be even more effective, though.

Update: What James Wolcott says:

Michael Moore didn’t bring down the towers, Howard Dean isn’t responsible for Bin Laden remaining at large, and, unlike the fisking blogger, the overwhelming majority of liberal Manhattanites didn’t lose their nerve and flee the city after 9/11. They, we, stayed put. It’s the cowardly lions who curled up into a fetal ball and remain there today, talking tough and fooling no one but themselves.

Deja Vu

Posted on by

Is it just me, or does it seem to you the Right is more frantic than usual these days?

This week, through the media echo chamber, the VRWC has fallen back to snapping at the Clintons. They’re on the third day of a rampage because Hillary Clinton said Congress is run like a plantation — Chris Matthews has been wanking over Hillary and the P word since Tuesday — and they managed to place “Clinton” and “Cover-Up” together in a headline in today’s New York Times. On page 1, right under the masthead, no less. Seems like old times.

Like the plantation flap, the Times‘s story — “Inquiry on Clinton Official Ends With Accusations of Cover-Up” — is one that begs the question, “What is it about the Clintons that drives righties batshit crazy?” Here’s the lede:

After the longest independent counsel investigation in history, the prosecutor in the case of former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros is finally closing his operation with a scathing report accusing Clinton administration officials of thwarting an inquiry into whether Mr. Cisneros evaded paying income taxes.

Yes, indeed; the investigation of Henry Cisneros, which cost taxpayers $21 million and lasted more than a decade, is finally closed.

You might recall that in the long-ago days of the Clinton Administration, Cisneros was indicted on 18 felony counts, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of lying to investigators, and eventually was pardoned by President Bill C. Yet the prosecutor, David M. Barrett, has been toiling away these six years since trying to pin more indictments on Cisneros, and he blames a Clinton cover-up for his inability to do so. (It couldn’t possibly be because Barrett is an incompetent investigator or that there wasn’t any more wrongdoing by Cisneros for an investigation to uncover, huh?)

Barrett’s final report will be made available today. The Times says is “reveals little new about the accusations that led to Mr. Barrett’s appointment” in the 1990s.

But, sure enough, the report was “leaked” to the New York Times early — “A copy of the report was obtained by The New York Times from someone sympathetic to the Barrett investigation who wanted his criticism of the Clinton administration to be known.” And it worked, too; the righties got their “Clinton Cover-up” headline.

In spite of the Times’s compliance with the VRWC program, some rightie bloggers are screaming about liberal bias. Makes me wonder what the Times would have to do to appease them.

The rest of the article consists of Barrett accusing the Justice Department and IRS officials of hiding evidence that would have incriminated Cisneros, and JD and IRS officials saying that Barlett is too incompetent to sort his own socks. The ever-optimistic Captain Ed writes that the story “will prove explosive to the 2006 re-election effort of Hillary Clinton, but even more damaging to her expected run at the Presidency in 2008.” So some good may come of it after all. However, seems to me that unless Barrett has actually uncovered something new it’s going to be hard for the Right to sustain this story long enough to impact the elections, no matter how hard the VRWC flogs it.

But, no question, today the VRWC wins on points. These are some of the stories not on the front page of the New York Times: “White House won’t discuss meetings between officials, Abramoff“; “Congressional Agency Questions Legality of Wiretaps“; and “Going Nuclear: Iran and North Korea seem determined to build up arsenals of nuclear weapons.” I say righties should enjoy success when they’ve achieved it.

More Liberal Bias

Posted on by

Seems to me that if the dreaded “MSM” were really hellbent on making the Bush Administration look bad, this story would have been more widely reported in the U.S. press. Had I not spotted it in The Guardian (UK) today I might not have noticed it at all —

Julian Borger of The Guardian writes,

An official assessment drawn up by the US foreign aid agency depicts the security situation in Iraq as dire, amounting to a “social breakdown” in which criminals have “almost free rein”.

The “conflict assessment” is an attachment to an invitation to contractors to bid on a project rehabilitating Iraqi cities published earlier this month by the US Agency for International Development (USAid).

The picture it paints is not only darker than the optimistic accounts from the White House and the Pentagon, it also gives a more complex profile of the insurgency than the straightforward “rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists” described by George Bush.

The USAid analysis talks of an “internecine conflict” involving religious, ethnic, criminal and tribal groups. “It is increasingly common for tribesmen to ‘turn in’ to the authorities enemies as insurgents – this as a form of tribal revenge,” the paper says, casting doubt on the efficacy of counter-insurgent sweeps by coalition and Iraqi forces.

Meanwhile, foreign jihadist groups are growing in strength, the report said.

The Guardian said this story was first reported in the Washington Post. Sure enough, it was — yesterday, buried on page A13. Walter Pincus wrote that the dire report was an annex to a request for contractors to bid on a $1.32 billion project to help stabilize Iraqi cities.

To prepare potential bidders for the task, USAID included an annex with the contractor application. It describes Iraq as being in the midst of an insurgency whose tactics “include creating chaos in Iraq society as a whole and fomenting civil war.” Many of the attacks are against coalition and Iraqi security forces, the annex says, and they “significantly damage the country’s infrastructure and cause a tide of adverse economic and social effects that ripple across Iraq.”

Is that supposed to encourage bidders?

Although President Bush and senior administration officials tend to see the enemy primarily as Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists, the USAID analysis also places emphasis on “internecine conflict,” which includes “religious-sectarian, ethnic, tribal, criminal and politically based” violence.

The Sunni-vs.-Shiite violence goes back centuries. Today, the differences are being exploited on both sides as Sunni bombings of Shiite sites along with kidnappings and killings have been matched by Shiite retaliation and revenge killings of Sunnis.

“It is increasingly common for tribesmen to ‘turn in’ to the authorities enemies as insurgents, this as a form of tribal revenge,” the paper says.

The activities of religious extremists against secular Iraqis were also noted by USAID. The paper describes how in the southern part of Iraq, which is dominated by Shiites, “social liberties have been curtailed dramatically by roving bands of self-appointed religious-moral police.” In cities, women’s dress codes are enforced and barbers who remove facial hair have been killed, and liquor stores and clubs have been bombed.

Get this:

The USAID paper describes some findings that in the past were carried only in classified briefings, congressional sources said.

In other words, it’s not like the White House and Congress are utterly unaware of this. They just aren’t telling us. And neither is most of the “liberal” media.

Which leaves us with getting the truth from Riverbend, who posts today about Iraqi reconstruction, then and now.

In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, southern Iraq was badly damaged.

What happened in the south in 1991 is similar to what happened in Baghdad in 2003- burning, looting and attacks. The area fell into chaos after the Republican Guard was pulled out to different governorates for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, the US was bombing the Iraqi army as it was pulling out of Kuwait and the Tawabin were killing off some of the Iraqi troops who had abandoned their tanks and artillery and were coming back on foot through the south. Many of those troops, and the civilians killed during the attacks, looting, and burning, were buried in some of the mass graves we conveniently blame solely on Saddam and the Republican Guard- but no one bothers to mention this anymore because it’s easier to blame the dictator.

But I digress- the topic today is reconstruction. Immediately after the war, various ministries were brought together to do the reconstruction work. The focus was on the infrastructure- to bring back the refineries, electricity, water, bridges, and telecommunications.

The task was a daunting one because so many of Iraq’s major infrastructure projects and buildings had been designed and built by foreign contractors from all over the world including French, German, Chinese and Japanese companies. The foreign expertise was unavailable after 1991 due to the war and embargo and Iraqi engineers and technicians found themselves facing the devastation of the Gulf War all alone with limited supplies.

Two years and approximately 8 billion Iraqi dinars later, nearly 90% of the damage had been repaired. It took an estimated 6,000 engineers (all Iraqi), 42,000 technicians, and 12,000 administrators, but bridges were soon up again, telephones were more or less functioning in most areas, refineries were working, water was running and electricity wasn’t back 100%, but it was certainly better than it is today. Within the first two years over 100 small and large bridges had been reconstructed, 16 refineries, over 50 factories and industrial compounds, etc.

It wasn’t perfect- it wasn’t Halliburton… It wasn’t KBR…but it was Iraqi. There was that sense of satisfaction and pride looking upon a building or bridge that was damaged during the war and seeing it up and running and looking better than it did before.

So how does the U.S. reconstruction measure up?

Now, nearly three years after this war, the buildings are still piles of debris. Electricity is terrible. Water is cut off for days at a time. Telephone lines come and go. Oil production isn’t even at pre-war levels… and Iraqis hear about the billions upon billions that come and go. A billion here for security… Five hundred million there for the infrastructure… Millions for voting… Iraq falling into deeper debt… Engineers without jobs simply because they are not a part of this political party or that religious group… And the country still in shambles.

Let’s skip back to Walter Pincus in WaPo.

Paul Pillar, the CIA’s former national intelligence officer for the Middle East and now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, said the analysis conveyed “the reality that the violence in Iraq is complex and multi-faceted.”

One weakness of the paper, Pillar said, is the underplaying of the “resentment of the foreign occupation.” He said there are Iraqi “nationalists” beyond just the Sunnis who resent the presence of U.S. and other foreign troops. “There is a valid basis for some of the pro-withdrawal arguments,” he said, referring to recent statements by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.).

Seems to me Riverbend makes a case for putting Iraqis in charge of Iraqi reconstruction, also, and then getting out of their way. However, given the mess the U.S. has made of nation-building, and the fact that the Iraqi government is still trying to get on its feet, one wonders if the Iraqis could bring the same focus to rebuilding infrastructure this time.

(Cross-posted to The American Street)

Update: See Jeanne at Body and Soul.

18 Deaths Cancelled!

Posted on by

Rightie blogger Thomas Lifson says the New York Times ran a fake photo on its web site. A fake staged photo, even.

Is a fake staged photo fit to print? What if it staged in a way that makes the US forces fighting the War on Terror look cruel and ineffective? The evidence argues that yes, it can run, and in a prominent position – at least in the case of the New York Times website.

I did some detective work and learned more about where the fake staged photo came from. But first let’s let Mr. Lifson rant for a while about media bias.

The photo has since been removed from the home page, but still can be seen here.

The picture shows a sad little boy, with a turbaned man next to him, a little bit further from the camera, amid the ruins of a house. Other men and boys peer in from the background. The photo is captioned

    “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.”

The story it accompanies is about the apparently failed attempt to take out al Qaeda’s #2 man al Zawahiri, with a missile attack from a Predator drone.

“How sad!” readers are encouraged to think. “These poor people are on the receiving end of awful weapons used by the clumsy minions of Bush. And all to no avail. Isn’t it terrible? Why must America do such horrible misdeeds? Bush must go!”

The only problem is that the long cylindrical item with a conical tip pictured with the boy and the man is not a missile at all. It is an old artillery shell. Not something that would have been fired from a Predator. Indeed, something that must have been found elsewhere and posed with the ruins and the little boy as a means at pulling of the heartstrings of the gullible readers of the New York Times.

I’ll take Mr. Lifson’s word about the artillery shell; I don’t know artillery shells from spinach. But I do know something about photograph attribution, and this one clearly says “Getty Images” in the lower right-hand corner.

This means that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., did not personally order up a staged fake photo from New York Times photographers. Rather, it was purchased (probably for one-time use) from Getty Images. I found the image (Image #56593062) in the News database. The Getty Images caption reads,

Bajur, PAKISTAN: Pakistani tribesmen stand by a unexploded ordinance at their house which was damaged in an alleged US air strike the day before in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border, 14 January 2005. Thousands of tribesmen protested against an alleged US air strike targeting Al-Qaeda’s second in command that killed 18 people near the Afghan border, witnesses said. AFP PHOTO/Thir KHAN (Photo credit should read THIR KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)

How This Stuff Works is that Getty purchased the photograph from photographer Khan, who is probably a freelancer or stringer, and added it to its database for view and purchase. Some web site editor at the Times pulled the photo off the Getty database with a company credit card and put it up on the web site to accompany the story. I couldn’t find it in yesterday’s or today’s print edition, so I assume it only went on the web site.

If indeed the image was fake staged by the photographer, it seems both Getty Images and the New York Times were scammed. There were other heartstring-tugging photos in the database that possibly were not fake staged. See, for example, # 56596136, which I think is a better photograph on an artistic level than #56593062. But no; the Times went with #56593062. Too bad.

Mr. Lifson comments,

So the formerly authoritative New York Times has published a picture distributed around the world on the home page of its website, using a prop which must have been artfully placed to create a false dramatic impression of cruel incompetence on the part of US forces. Not only did the editors lack the basic knowledge necessary to detect the fake, they didn’t bother to run the photo past anyone with such knowledge before exposing the world to it.

The fact is that the drones who throw the web site and most of the newspaper together do not routinely run anything by the big shots, at the New York Times or any other newspaper; there’s no time. The Times web site editors trusted Getty Images. I would have made the same mistake, since Getty Images is a long-established source of news photos and is usually reliable.

Although I think Getty Images is more at fault than the Times, I notice the New York Times caption writer called the ordnance in question “the remains of a missile,” whereas the Getty caption calls it “unexploded ordinance [sic].” I suspect sloppiness on the part of the New York Times web caption writer, no doubt a recent English Lit graduate, who just guessed the pointy-ended thing was a missile. After the web editors got some complaints about the photo, they pulled it. Again, that’s How This Stuff Works.

I see at Memeorandum that the righties are having fits about the New York Times, however. Hugh Hewitt says the shell destroyed “what’s left of the New York Times‘ Reputation.” Scott at Power Line posted the image and commented,

The Times’ caption said: “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.” Only it’s not the remains of a missile, it’s an old artillery shell. Which means the photo was deliberately faked by the people depicted, probably with the knowing aid of the AFP photographer. I think the villagers were lying about not hosting members of al Qaeda, too.

ONE MORE THING: The photo is still up at Yahoo News Photos, but with a changed caption that now says the men are shown standing next to “a unexploded ordnance.” Yes, probably from the 1980s. No doubt the picture will be reproduced in many newspapers around the world.

One, Getty Images says the photo was taken 14 January 2005 [update: I guess we’re a year off, aren’t we], although I ‘spect they were taking the photographers’ word on that. Two, Yahoo News credits the image to Agence France-Presse (AFP). They didn’t get it from the New York Times and apparently not from Getty Images either. I don’t think AFP and Getty are subsidiaries; possibly the photographer sold the same image to both agencies. Maybe AFP got scammed, too.

But the good news here is that because (I trust) there is one fake staged photo, the entire news story about 18 innocent people being killed has been cancelled. The villagers were faking the story; they were probably lying about not hosting al Qaeda also. We can now dismiss the whole episode as so much spin, as if it never happened. I know you are relieved.

Distant Thunder

Posted on by

Unfortunately, in this editorial the Washington Post is more right than wrong about the Alito hearings:

Democratic senators often seemed more interested in attacking the nominee — sometimes scurrilously — than in probing what sort of a justice he would be. Even when they tried, their questioning was often so ineffectual as to elicit little useful information. Republican senators, meanwhile, acted more as fatuous counsels for the defense than as sober evaluators of a nominee to serve on the Supreme Court. On both sides, pious, meandering speeches outnumbered thoughtful questions. And the nominee himself was careful, as most nominees are, not to give much away. The result is that Americans don’t know all that much more about Judge Alito than they did before.

There were some exceptions among the Dems — Senator Schumer comes to mind — but unless you were curled up in front of the TV for gavel-to-gavel coverage, you didn’t see Senator Schumer. More casual news consumers saw the clip of intra-senatorial snarking between senators Kennedy and Specter (although clear explanations of what the snarking was about were hard to come by). They saw Mrs. Alito bolt from the chamber in apparent distress. They saw Senator Biden wearing a Princeton cap. That’s about it.

Although I don’t agree with the editorial that the Vanguard and Concerned Alumni of Princeton issues were frivolous, I’m afraid they came across to most news consumers as frivolous. The Senate Dems rumbled away like distant thunder while Judge Alito sat, unperturbed, in the shelter of a Republican majority.

E.J. Dionne writes,

It turns out that, especially when their party controls the process, Supreme Court nominees can avoid answering any question they don’t want to answer. Senators make the process worse with meandering soliloquies. But when the questioning gets pointed, the opposition is immediately accused of scurrilous smears. The result: an exchange of tens of thousands of words signifying, in so many cases, nothing — as long as the nominee has the discipline to say nothing, over and over and over.

Alito, an ardent baseball fan, established himself as the Babe Ruth of evasion.

What news consumers did not hear is that Alito is a guy who doesn’t understand why the strip-search of a ten-year-old girl is a big deal (disagreeing even with Michael Chertoff, for pity’s sake). They didn’t hear that he thinks police were correct to kill an unarmed 15-year-old boy by shooting him in the back of the head. The boy, after all, had not obeyed an order.

By now, only the brain dead don’t realize that Alito is itching to overturn Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity. But it seems hardly anyone outside the Left Blogosphere gives a damn about Alito’s alarming — and un-American — theories about presidential power.

I realize that these issues were probably brought up by some Dem or another during the hearings, but they’ve been left out of the “story about the hearings” as told by news media. So the public isn’t hearing about them.

Paul Brownfield writes in the Los Angeles Times,

The hearings are monumental enough to be carried live on cable news, home of the video sound bite and the whir of instant dissection, but entirely ill-suited to the constant churn of a 24-hour news network.

Inside the Hart Senate hearing room, we watched two competing shows — the Republicans making like Regis Philbin, plugging Judge Alito’s latest vehicle (“So tell me about this Supreme Court nomination … “), the Democrats conducting an episode of CBS’ missing persons drama “Without a Trace,” poking at Alito’s past decisions and his membership in the conservative Concerned Alumni of Princeton but unable to place him, in the present.

Alito’s membership, and the fact that his wife Martha broke down in tears over the controversy Wednesday, gave the networks something to chew on, which is to say a way out of penetrating the gamesmanship of the hearings — senators preambling their way to question the discursively elusive witness.

Martha’s running mascara was the perfect diversion. Even if it wasn’t staged, something like it will be next time there’s a hearing on something the GOP doesn’t want you to know about.

Brownfield continues,

To watch the hearings at any length has value, but only if you watch them at any length — the straight stuff on C-SPAN, preferably, if you can stomach it. Because then you can see the chasm that exists between the dense thicket of speechifying and stonewalling in the hearing room, and the way it’s squeezed down and sized to fit our many-screened lives, above the crawl that tells you the “gay cowboy movie” “Brokeback Mountain” took home the Critics’ Choice Award or that Lindsay Lohan, distancing herself from her own sort of controversial membership, denied statements attributed to her in Vanity Fair about battles with bulimia.

Fact is, the Republicans do the sound-bite, made-for-TV-camera-moments thing extremely well, and the Dems can barely do it at all. That’s why, John Dickerson writes at Slate, the White House wants hearings on Bush’s NSA warrentless wiretapping. Bush wants hearings not because he wants to explain and defend his policy. Rather, Dickerson writes, “He’s inviting Democrats to another round of self-immolation.”

In 2002, the Republican Party used the debate over the Department of Homeland Security to attack Democrats in the off-year election by arguing the party was soft on terror. The president and his aides hope the NSA hearings will offer the same opportunity in 2006. …

… Bush and his aides are eager to talk about the National Security Agency’s activities because they think the issue benefits them politically. While Democrats are often confusing, with too many leaders and no clear message to push back against the commander in chief, the president is passionate when he talks about fighting terrorists, and a majority of voters still approve of his handling of the issue. And because the spying program was initiated soon after 9/11, it offers Bush an opportunity to discuss his more popular days as a take-charge executive after the 2001 attacks. “We’re very comfortable discussing the issue for as long as they want,” says Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett.

I can see it already. The GOP will be prepared in advance to smear and discredit anyone who testifies the program is illegal. Anyone tuning in to Meet the Press or The Situation Room or Hardball (and don’t even think about Faux Nooz) will see the usual conservative shills expounding long-discredited nonfacts and junk legalosity to argue the accusations of illegality have no merit. And Tim, Wolf, and Tweety will nod, politely, and frame their questions in a way that legitimizes GOP talking points, however frivolous.

“Democrats will be frustrated and antagonized,” writes Dickerson. “The president hopes they will get red-faced and obstinate.” The Dems will rumble away like distant thunder, and White House representatives will sit, unperturbed, in the shelter of a Republican majority.

And if, by accident, someone on the Dem side actually lands a blow, expect Condi to spring a leak and dash for the door.

Update: See also Steve Soto, “Democrats Punt Another One Away On Alito.”

Howling in the Wilderness

Posted on by

Unfortunately, Peter Daou is right —

This, then, is the reality: progressive bloggers and online activists – positioned on the front lines of a cold civil war – face a thankless and daunting task: battle the Bush administration and its legions of online and offline apologists, battle the so-called “liberal” media and its tireless weaving of pro-GOP narratives, battle the ineffectual Democratic leadership, and battle the demoralization and frustration that comes with a long, steep uphill struggle.

There is absolutely no coordination — and precious little contact, from what I see — between the Democratic Party and the blogosphere. And don’t even talk about how well we don’t mesh with the so-called “liberal media.” Compare/contrast Jane Hamsher’s post, “This Is How It’s Done,” in which she shows how the Republican Party, a substantial part of news media, and the Right Blogosphere all coordinate their efforts and march in lockstep to get their message out.

Peter Daou continues,

Unfortunately for the progressive netroots, the intricate interplay of Republican persuasion tactics, media story-telling, and 21st century information flow seems beyond the ken of most Democratic strategists and leaders. The hellish reality progressive bloggers have acknowledged and internalized is still alien to the party establishment. Dem strategy is still two parts hackneyed sloganeering and one part befuddlement over the stifling of their message.

Maybe the Democratic establishment wants it so, maybe they don’t know better, but progressive bloggers and activists are starting to see the bitter reality of their isolation: the triangle is broken and they’re on their own until further notice.

Dems? Hello? Dems?

Howie Gets … Something

Posted on by

If you remember the late, great site Media Whores Online, you might remember the place of honor held there by Howard Fineman. He was 2002 (I think) Whore of the Year for his sickeningly obsequious commentary on George W. Bush. Had MWO remained online, he might well have taken the title in 2003 and 2004 as well. He certainly earned it.

Today, although Howard is far from shrill, he seems to be struggling toward some approximation of reality.

Calling the Abramoff scandal “the biggest influence-peddling scandal to hit Washington in recent times,” Fineman lists winners and losers. Among the losers:

The Republican Party: The semi-conventional wisdom here is as follows: Some Democrats are likely to be stained by ties to Jack Abramoff; polls show that the public has a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude toward wrongdoing in Washington; therefore, the GOP won’t be hurt in November. I don’t buy it. Republicans are the incumbent party in the Congress. They are led by a less-than-popular president in the traditionally weak sixth year of his presidency.

Wow, that’s … right. Way to go, Howie.

Other losers are the DeLay-Hastert Crowd — “Look for a major shake-up in the GOP House leadership, perhaps soon.” — and the Bush-Rove White House — “Rove will have a hard time claiming now that he didn’t know how the machinery worked, especially since Abramoff himself became a major contributor to Bush’s re-election campaign.”

Among the winners is a third-party reform movement. I found this startling until I read Fineman’s description–

If Sen. John McCain doesn’t win the Republican presidential nomination, I could see him leading an independent effort to “clean up” the capital as a third-party candidate. Having been seared by his own touch with this type of controversy (the Keating case in the ’80s, which was as important an experience to him as Vietnam), McCain could team up with a Democrat, say, Sen. Joe Lieberman. If they could assemble a cabinet in waiting — perhaps Wes Clark for defense, Russ Feingold for justice, Colin Powell for anything — they could win the 2008 election going away.

McCain-Lieberman. Gag. Feingold-Clark … now, there’s a ticket.

Still, Howard has shown other flickering moments of promise. In another recent Newsweek column, he wrote,

As controversy rages over the war in Iraq, as his poll numbers shrink to new lows, as American leadership of the West comes under fire in ways we haven’t seen in a generation, you have to wonder: who does Bush think he is?

Now he asks.

These are murky times in Washington, when getting a handle on the truth seems especially difficult.

What do the Pentagon generals really think about how Iraq is going? Are Condi Rice’s denials about CIA torture camps to be taken at face value? What is really happening in Iraq outside the Green Zone in Baghdad? Bush and Vice President Cheney insist that American forces will stay until the war there is “won.” But what do they really mean by victory?

Hey, Howard, see that door over there? The one marked “Shrill”? Go ahead and walk through it. You know you want to. We’ll be waiting for you on the other side.