Category Archives: News Media

Us Versus Them

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David Neiwert seems to be taking some time off from blogging, so he hasn’t reacted to Cathy Young’s commentary on his Michelle Malkin series (first installment here) in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

After calling Michelle Malkin’s book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild “accurate and disturbing,” Young acknowledges that righties can get a little unhinged sometimes, too. Then she mentions Dave:

Dave Neiwert, a Seattle-based author and award-winning freelance journalist, has posted a rebuttal to Malkin on his website at dneiwert.blogspot.com. Neiwert documents a lot of nastiness on the right, including physical as well as verbal assaults. For every left-wing ”Kill Bush” T-shirt, he notes, there’s a right-wing ”Liberal hunting permit” bumper sticker.

I’ve never seen a “Kill Bush” T-shirt. Per Dave, this claim comes from Malkin. I’ll take her word for it that somebody has such a T-shirt for sale, but we don’t know if anyone bought them. Impeach Bush, on the other hand …

But this anecdotes illustrates another point that Young misses: Righties demonize liberalism far more broadly, and generally, than lefties demonize conservatism; see this old post for discussion and this post for an illuminating comparison of rightie and leftie book titles. Briefly, I argue that righties define liberalism in more broad-brush, demonic terms than lefties define conservatism. Although there is copious and robust snarking going both ways, I find it’s easier to find condemnations for liberalism itself on the Right Blogosphere than it is to find condemnations for conservatism itself on the Left Blogosphere. As I wrote earlier, “when liberals attack conservatives, liberals tend to be person- or issue-specific, and give reasons — This guy is a jerk because he did thus-and-so. This policy stinks because it’s going to have such-and-such effect.”

Comparing “shoot liberals” to “shoot Bush” illustrates my point. But let’s go on …

Young continues,

Neiwert makes a lot of excellent points, but unfortunately he can’t resist the temptation of arguing that right-wing nastiness is worse than the left-wing kind.

For instance, Neiwert argues that a number of leading conservative figures have employed rhetoric about rounding up the opposition. (Here’s Limbaugh again: ”Wouldn’t it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? . . . We’d get rid of Michael Moore, we’d get rid of half the Democratic Party. . .”) Such talk, Neiwert claims, has no real counterpart on the left. But was it much better when Garrison Keillor, who has an audience of nearly 4 million on National Public Radio, suggested taking the vote away from born-again Christians shortly after the 2004 election? Yes, it’s all in jest, but this is joking of a very poisonous kind.

I got news for you, honey lamb; the righties ain’t jokin‘. And notice we’re comparing violence (“kick them out of the country”) to non-violence (“taking away the vote”). I mean, we’re comparing raving mad, foaming-at-the-mouth Limbaugh to the courtly and often soporific Keillor, for pity’s sake. Give me a break.

Now we have another example. The LGF’ers are calling for James Wolcott’s decapitation. Yeah, beheading jokes are always knee-slappers.

The catalyst for this impromptu rally was my clinical diagnosis of Daniel Pipes as “a patronizing little shit,” which seemed to displease the footballers, not that any of them bothered to acquaint themselves with the causus belli (Pipes’ pipsqueak character smear of Muhammed Ali). Then again, the poor dears don’t seem to know the difference between an ocelot and an ocicat, another indictment of the limitations of home schooling.

This one sentence amid all that writhing distemper leapt out at me:

“May he [i.e., me] be kidnapped by ‘insurgents’ in Iraq then appear on an ugly net broadcast. I wonder, if in the moment before the knife started sawing into his fleashy neck if he might rethink his opinions on the GWOT.”

He later corrected the spelling to “fleshy,” lest anyone think I possess a flashy neck.

Y’know, I have called a lot of people names on this blog. I call them weenies and idiots and whackjobs. I describe their mental and educational limitations in colorful terms. But I honestly do not believe I have ever wished physical harm on anyone. And this goes for the many other liberal bloggers whose work I follow.

Our James W. continues,

More and more the rightwing militant “anti-idiotarians” (as they deludedly think of themselves)have been relishing the prospect of antiwar figures undergoing the Daniel Pearl treatment. They keep bringing it up as the retribution that’ll deliver certain choice heads on a platter. In a sick irony, Daniel Pearl’s marytrdom has provided a negative inspiration to certain super patriots professing to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

For example, Anna Benson, the bodacious wife of a Mets pitcher, recently burst her bodice giving full lusty cry to an aria painting the glorious prospect of Michael Moore’s neck being used as a log.

“You are a selfish, pathetic excuse for an American, and you can take your big fat ass over to Iraq and get your pig head cut off and stuck on a pig pole. Then, you can have your equally as fat wife make a documentary about how loudly you squealed while terrorists were cutting through all the blubber and chins to get that 40 pound head off of you.”

And just this morning, the day after Christmas and the second day of Hannukah, blogdom’s zestiest Zionist party girl elevated the discourse by dismissing the concerns of legal scholars perturbed about Bush’s domestic spying thusly:

“Someone ought to tlell those legal scholars not to worry…….it’s smooth sailing once those Radical Islmonazis saw through their jugulars.”

(Her excitable italics.)

I assume her excitable spelling, too. But, for the record, I don’t find jokes about sawing through jugulars all that amusing.

I am not going to claim that no leftie ever wished physical harm, or death, or beheading, on a rightie. But it is a whole lot less common. And Mr. Wolcott knows why:

When rightwing bloggers and posters conjure that under Islam, Democrats–which they’ve come to call dhimmicrats–will get what’s coming to them (i.e., the business end of a butcher’s blade), it’s as if it’s a horrible fate that couldn’t possibly happen to them*–because it’s a death wish directed outward. The Islamic terrorists serve as proxies and stand-ins in this imaginary theater of cruelty, enacting what they (the warbloggers) would like to mete out to us (their domestic adversaries). …

…(*as another LGF poster put it: “Funny thing, the liberal mindset: expend all energy on phantom ‘enemys’, meanwhile the real enemy pounds at the fucking gate, ready to chop off their heads.” Note: “their,” not “our.” LGF’ers have a touching faith in the undetachablility of their own heads under the grisly Islamofascism they spend so many hours daydreaming about.)[emphasis added]

I think it’s often the case that the things people say they are afraid of are actually what they wish for. Survivalists are a good example; they are often people who feel marginalized or intimidated by the society they live in, so they hope for a day when that society is wiped out. Today’s Right Wing might be defined as a selective survivalist cult. They don’t want the entire society to be wiped out, just the liberal parts. And they aren’t joking.

Not Knowing When to Quit

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This evening on MSNBC I saw the “Clinton did it too” defense of Bush’s secret wiretapping knocked down by Andrea Mitchell, believe it or not, who is guest hosting Hardball, and by Alison Stewart, who is guest hosting Countdown.

Seriously. There were actual experts who patiently explained that presidents Clinton and Carter followed FISA regulations regarding wiretapping, which is way different from what Bush is doing. And for the most part these people were allowed to speak at length without being interrupted by a rightie goon. I was astonished.

This hasn’t stopped the VRWC echo chamber from pumping out the now utterly debunked lie that President Clinton believed he had an “inherent authority” to order warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. Today’s new twist is the “Gorelick Myth,” which Judd at Think Progress takes apart here. I assume the Faux News crew and the radio righties are going along with the program, so that people getting most of their news from O’Reilly, Limbaugh, et al. will never hear the debunking. And, of course, rightie bloggers are obediently falling into line.

And according to Atrios, people watching CNN this evening didn’t hear the debunking either.

This means we’re at Stage 3 of the Daou Dynamics of a Bush Scandal, and we’re rapidly moving into Stage 4.

For the next few days the Right will work hard to continually repeat their storyline, or narrative, or excuse, or whatever you want to call it, over and over, often enough that most people will hear it and believe it to be true. The fact that it’s a flat-out lie will not, of course, discourage them.

However, for the most part, tonight two MSNBC programs got it right. Better than nothing.

Flacks and Hacks

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If you haven’t been following the flap over Dan Froomkin’s Washington Post column that began Sunday with this ombudsman article, you can catch up by reading a couple of Editor & Publisher articles, here and here. In a nutshell, somebody complained because Froomkin’s web-only column is not labelled “opinion.” And this is a problem because Froomkin’s outlook is (they say) liberal. Can’t have liberal opinion running around unchecked, you know; got to keep it on a leash.

Yesterday WaPo National politics editor John Harris made a colossal ass of himself in this post at the Washington Post “blog.” Then Jay Rosen interviewed Harris, and through this (via Jane Hamsher) we learn that one of the people whose complaints struck fear and contrition in the hearts of WaPo editorial staff was Patrick Ruffini, webmaster for the Bush/Cheney ’04 campaign site.

Ruffini is the embodiment of hackness; a prototypical example of the soulless hard-right putrefaction rotting away our national institutions. Follow the link to view the soft, baby face of nascent fascism.

Then Jane Hamsher writes,

But here’s the money quote. Rosen asks if White House officials are the ones complaining about Froomkin’s column:

    John Harris: They have never complained in a formal way to me, but I have heard from Republicans in informal ways making clear they think his work is tendentious and unfair. I do not have to agree with them in every instance that it is tendentious and unfair for me to be concerned about making clear who Dan is and who he is not regarding his relationship with the newsroom.

This flap is brought to you courtesy of the Republican Party, who will not stand to see itself criticized by a major media outlet without seeking to take down the one who is doing so. And John Harris bends over and spreads ’em. Of course, considering Harris’s past as one of the people who hijacked the nation and started speaking in tongues over rumors of penis-shaped ornaments on the Clinton Christmas tree, this is hardly surprising.

Dan Froomkin’s column (visit today’s here) is consistently the best feature of the WaPo web site, mostly because Froomkin is one of the few prominent “MSM” writers who can approach the subject of the Bush Administration without kneepads and chapstick. I’m only surprised the VRWC hasn’t gone after him before. In the next few days expect to see Froomkin’s name linked to Michael Moore, Moveon.org, Cindy Sheehan, and everyone else the Republican Party doesn’t control.

See also:

Brad DeLong: “The Future of the Washington Post”

Marty Kaplan: “Journalism’s Slo-Mo Suicide”

Digby: “Bada Bing“

Bedfellows

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Viveca Novak’s account of what she told Bob Luskin about the Plamegate investigation is up at Time. And it reveals much about why what passes for “jounalism” is clueless.

Washington “journalists” and Washington “government officials” and their “attorneys” are all one big happy family. They have drinks together. They meet for dinner. They go to the same parties. They bump into each other at posh vacation spots. And loyalty to one’s source-buddies comes first — before employer, nation, or truth itself.

This has been apparent of the television “punditocracy” — Cokie et al. — for years. But after the Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, and now Viveca Novak episode, it is apparent more humble print reporters have crawled into the same compromised bed.

As Jeralyn, Kevin, and Jane point out, the impact of Novak’s testimony on Karl Rove’s future depends a lot on what other information Patrick Fitzgerald might have. But the corruption of journalism is crystal clear. I sincerely hope that every working reporter covering Washington politics — and politics elsewhere — is doing some heavy-duty soul searching right now.

Greg Mitchell writes at Editor & Publisher:

Where will it end, and when will reporters pay with their jobs? First we learn that Bob Woodward failed to tell his editor for years about his role in the Plame/CIA leak case. Today, we find out that Time reporter Viveca Novak not only kept her editors in the dark about her own involvement, but even had a two-hour chat with the special prosecutor about it well before telling her superiors.

At the end of her first-person account at Time online today, we are told in a brief editor’s note that she is by ”mutual agreement” now on a “leave of absence.” Has she been taken to the woodshed and, if not, why not?

Swopa writes,

… as it turns out, just for the sake of stalling Rove’s indictment for a month or two, Luskin has torched Novak’s career with Time (which notes as the end of her article that she is on a mutually agreed “leave of absence”). It seems that Viveca didn’t tell her bosses about her chats with Luskin to begin with, nor even when she first was interviewed by Fitzgerald — and when she did admit her involvement after being asked to testify under oath, they weren’t happy.

There should be an object lesson there for Washington, D.C. reporters playing the “access journalism” game … the sources who you’re covering up for even as they give you lies and personal smears will burn you in the blink of an eye if it helps them in the slightest.

Then again, that seems to be a larger message that the Bushites are all too happy to send to the media. What the latter thought was merely an occasionally distasteful exchange of information was really a blackmail ring. In the Corleone administration, reporters aren’t expected to keep quiet out of duty to the First Amendment — they’re expected to do so because they’ll be destroyed by any means possible if they don’t.

Reporters, please note: “Sources” are not “buddies.” And sources who try to use you to manipulate news, by feeding you lies and smears, are not worthy of protection. Got that?

Good News from Iraq!

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We know there’s good news from Iraq, because U.S. propagandists plant it in the Iraqi press! Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi write in today’s Los Angeles Times:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.

Every day we do get more and more like the old Soviet Union, don’t we? Note this:

U.S. law forbids the military from carrying out psychological operations or planting propaganda through American media outlets. Yet several officials said that given the globalization of media driven by the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Pentagon’s efforts were carried out with the knowledge that coverage in the foreign press inevitably “bleeds” into the Western media and influences coverage in U.S. news outlets.

Who’s in charge of this effort, you ask?

The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group’s Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

The Lincoln Group bills itself as a “strategic communications and public relations firm providing insight & influence in challenging & hostile environments.” Macho propaganda. According to Source Watch, Lincoln Group and two other firms received contracts from the Pentagon to conduct “psychological operations” in Iraq. The contracts combined could add up to as much as $300 million over five years.

On a related note, Lincoln Group Executive Vice President Chrstian Bailey was also New York City co-chair of the 2004 Republican National Convention. See also Billmon from last June–great background stuff. (I wrote about Lincoln Group last June also, but the post was one of about ten days’ worth of content my old web host “lost.” I should probably investigate.) Anyway, according to Billmon,

According to O’Dwyer’s Newsletter, a PR industry tip sheet, the Lincoln Group was formerly known as Iraqex, but changed its name in March to match that of its corporate parent, the Lincoln Alliance Corporation, a DC-based “business intelligence” firm. …

… in October 2004, the firm was awarded a one-year $6 million contract from the Pentagon to do PR work for the military in Iraq, with three six-months options for another $12.2 million. O’Dwyer editor Kevin McCauley was quoted as calling it “a blockbuster — in terms of dollars — for PR . . . Those are big numbers, even if one is operating in a war zone.”

From the beginning, Iraqex/Lincoln Group has been strangely tight-lipped about its work in Iraq, refusing to talk to the press except through its own hired mouthpiece, who had this to say to the industry trade mag PR Week (11/14/04):

    “For various different security reasons, we can’t disclose information except to say we are very qualified to work on the ground in Iraq,” [the spokesman] said. “We have more experience working in Iraq than any other firm or organization anywhere in the world.”

Puffery aside, though, some details of Iraqex’s operations have made it into the press, such in as this story from the Chicago Tribune (“Word Warriors, 2/4/05), which inadvertently highlighted the fact that the most experienced firm in Iraq has a penchant for hiring GOP political hacks with absolutely no experience in Iraq:

    When [Jonathan Blessing] and another political consultant who had been working for the Bush campaign in Illinois heard about an opportunity to work for a company doing public relations in Iraq, the two jumped at the chance . . .

    Blessing and Swift are working for a private company called Iraqex, a subcontractor for the U.S. Department of Defense . . . Swift worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign in Illinois, and Blessing worked for the state GOP.

Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into Iraqex’s hiring policies — other than that the company clearly knows the buttered side of the bread from the dry. But things get more interesting when we look at the Lincoln Group’s corporate parent, Lincoln Alliance.

Lincoln is, if anything, even more shadowy than Iraqex, as is the relationship between the two. The Lincoln Group’s website — while offering virtually no info about the firm’s history, owners or officers, does mention that it was formed in 1999 — long before Iraqex was even a gleam in Christian Bailey’s youthful eye. And it clearly has interests that extend far beyond trying to spin the latest collateral damage in Iraq.

Billmon goes on to speculate what those “interests” might be, and it’s fascinating stuff. But now let’s go back to the Los Angeles Times — apparently, the State Department has been running workshops on how to be a free-press, American-style journalist, and the revelations about planted news stories are embarrassing.

“Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we’re breaking all the first principles of democracy when we’re doing it,” said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media.

And they aren’t just planting stories:

Military officials familiar with the effort in Iraq said much of it was being directed by the “Information Operations Task Force” in Baghdad, part of the multinational corps headquarters commanded by Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were critical of the effort and were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

A spokesman for Vines declined to comment for this article. A Lincoln Group spokesman also declined to comment.

One of the military officials said that, as part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the last year, the task force also had purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and was using them to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece.

And Big Brother loves you, too.

Adventures in RightieWorld II

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In what was either an innocent glitch or a prank pulled by a techie somewhere in the employee labyrinth of CNN, yesterday an X flashed onscreen over the face of Dick Cheney while he was speaking at the American Enterprise Institute.

Whereupon the entire Right Blogosphere erupted in hysteria.

You can find links at Memeorandum. Top executives at CNN deliberately slammed the Vice President! With an X that lasted 2 frames or 1/15th of a second! And a subliminal message that reads, Transition begins after 5 frames of black.

“Transition begins.” Hmm, clearly a reference to either an act of terrorism or an armed takeover of Congress by Jack Murtha. “After 5 frames of black” obviously is secret code to let the cells of leftie Bush haters know when to strike.

Righties: I’m kidding.

One rightie blogger proclaimed that CNN has just driven another nail into the MSM coffin. And he’s not kidding. “[T]his ought to convince a lot of holdouts that traditional, ostensibly objective media sources are increasingly unreliable and agenda-driven,” he says.

No wonder you can’t have a rational converstion with these people. They’re nuts.

See also World o’ Crap.

Earth to Tweety: Ya Think?

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Get this:

Four years after 9/11 and the “crazy zeitgeist” that permeated the United States, most Americans have still not learned to know their enemies instead of just hating them, U.S. political journalist Chris Matthews says.

In a speech to political science students at the University of Toronto yesterday, the host of the CNBC current affairs show Hardball had plenty of harsh words for U.S. President George W. Bush, as well as the political climate that has characterized his country for the past few years.

“The period between 9/11 and Iraq was not a good time for America. There wasn’t a robust discussion of what we were doing,” Matthews said.

As I remember, the period between 9/11 and Iraq marked the time I swore off watching Hardball because of the crap Tweety was presenting in lieu of a robust discussion.