What is the frequency, Kenneth?
CBS News has sent out their "Dan Rather Packet", which includes a timeline of milestones in his career. Instead of blacking out certain lines like you'd see on a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA, they seem to have simply left a few things out entirely. That's probably for the best, since getting out the ole' magic marker would probably arouse suspicion:

2004
Feb. 29, 2004 -- Rather moderates a live--and lively--debate of the top four Democratic presidential contenders: U.S. Sen. John Edwards, U.S. Sen. John Kerry, U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The debate is held at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York.

June 2004 -- Rather anchors the CBS EVENING NEWS from Washington, D.C., for the funeral of President Ronald Reagan.

June 2004 -- Rather returns to Iraq for the American handover of government to Iraq. He interviews Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in Iraq.

Sept. 1, 2004 -- Terrorists attack a school in Beslan, Russia. More than 300 hostages, including 156 children, die in the siege, and more than 700 people are wounded, according to Russian officials.

Sept. 3, 2004 -- Rather anchors the CBS EVENING NEWS from Florida as Hurricane Frances, a large, slow-moving storm, heads toward a region already hit with Hurricanes Ivan and Charley earlier in the year.

Nov. 2, 2004 -- President George W. Bush defeats Massachusetts Senator John Kerry to win reelection. Rather anchors CBS News' flawless election night coverage, calling the protracted and hotly contested contest in Ohio enough to "give an aspirin a headache."

Nov. 11, 2004 -- Yasser Arafat dies.

Nov. 23, 2004 -- Rather announces that he will step down as anchor and managing editor of the CBS EVENING NEWS. "I have been lucky and blessed over these years to have what is, to me, the best job in the world and to have it at CBS News," Rather said.

"Yasser Arafat dies."? He must've been pretty broken up. Here are some things CBS News forgot to include in their timeline, including a nifty Ra^thergate timeline and a more complete assessment of their "flawless" election night coverage:
Continue Reading

Don't Drink At Work
Especially in the newspaper business:

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times devoted its lead editorial to the proposition that Bono, the Irish frontman of rock band U2, "should be named the next president of the World Bank."

...and here is the editorial. Let's just pretend we didn't see that, because I'm pretty sure it's a sign of the apocalypse.

Stifle, Edith
Little Green Footballs notes the excuse making for refusing to list their blog over at Google News.

They've given us two different excuses: 1) they don't list "one person" blogs (we now have a staff), and 2) they don't list simple "news aggregators" that don't do original stories (this one is just silly; a look through Google News will find numerous examples of "news aggregators"). And they never responded to my email answering their claim that LGF doesn't break original news stories. (Maybe we should get references from Dan Rather and Maurice Hinchey?)

I was told that I can't be listed because I'm a one-man outfit and because I don't have an editorial policy. (Sure I do: Everything I put on this site must first be approved by me. Indeed, the mainstream media makes me question the value of having an editor every day.)

At the time, at least, they had happily added Daily Kos, despite the site formally renouncing any editorial responsibility for the content of it's "diaries". Other such bastions of journalistic integrity as "Occupation Watch" and "World Socialist Web Site" are currently included, the latter of which was quite a surprise when I first realized where a story that had come up in a search had come from.

I've been disappointed to watch my Google News searches become inundated both with far-leftist propaganda and, incredibly, a substantial number of tiny sites from both sides of the debate, the rationale by which they came to be included I cannot imagine. It seems like they pretty much make it up as they go.

Google really needs to take a position here: Google News is either a tool that aggregates all the work of "mainstream" professional journalism, the original reporting that the rest of us use for data sourcing, or it is a tool that aggregates news and opinion. As it stands, they simultaneously dilute the tool's value as the former and actively obstruct development as the latter. They need to establish a threshhold and adhere to it.

When I ran a poll on this some months ago, it seemed pretty clear at least most of the readers here would prefer for Google to choose the latter, but many were also open to the idea of Google keeping Google News as a hard news tool and developing a seperate search for opinion/blog pieces. In any case, the current situation is just silly.

Update: Heh, another fine news source included in Google News: Conspiracy Planet.

Journalist Etiquette
Heh: John Fund, Wall Street Journal columnist and computer stealer.

Today within a period of 3 hours, John Fund thrice referred to his column as a blog - while making small talk with the credentialed bloggers - and then went on to violate their personal laptops to do whatever the jolly well he pleased on them.

The consensus among us bloggers is that he was doing this for his own convenience so that he would not have to stand in line on Internet row to access a TownHall.com computer that had been set up for CPAC attendees to do just what Fund wished to do.

Cox in a very coy voice asks Fund, "will you be long?"

Fund: "Nope I just need a minute more..." (he had already been on about 20 at this point...)

In the length of time that he persisted on Cox's machine I was able to snap the photos you see in this story and e-mail them one by one from my phone to myself.

Not long after that - Fund departs, no "thank you"s, no "I'm sorry for using your private computer, etc.".

As Cox began closing the browsers that Fund had left open on the laptop, a small window opened alerting Cox, or whoever else might have seen it - that they were still logged in - to the Dow Jones servers as an admin user for the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to that Fund had left his access to Outlook Mail opened with his full lists of e-mail waiting and ready to be read. To Cox and the rest of the bloggers' credit - none was accessed. We can reveal though that one of the e-mail subject lines read "Smokin' Hot Dancer".

I know that this entire escapade is ridiculous. But the fact that it was perpetrated against the bloggers twice over a matter of hours and as he could have well learned his lesson from the first swarm written on the matter - it really served to reinforce my point.

Bloggers have a right to make a statement about the arrogance of the big media with which we are treated. Whether they be for us or against us from an idealogical standpoint is really beside the point.

One blogger went especially light on Fund - for both offenses. The rest of us saw it for what it was - an invasion of a personal space that is more dear to the heart of a blogger - than the inside of a purse is to the woman who owns it (something I would think that blogger who went light on Fund would understand).

If you come onto my laptop without my permission it is in essence the same as breaking into my home or office.

In the age of the mobile office, that's precisely right. "Arrogance" is one possible word, but I can think of a couple others I'd use if I caught someone on my laptop. Somebody owes some people some written apologies. (Via Tim Blair)

If Only The People Would Shut Up
Tim Blair notes journalists who, echoing Antonia Zerbisias, are terrified of the blogosphere.

"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail," howled Steve Lovelady in the wake of Eason Jordan's resignation. Bloggers were denounced as "scalp hunters", "moon howlers", "trophy hunters", "sons of Sen. McCarthy", "rabid", and "pseudo-journalist lynch mob people." The New York Times noted widespread concern: "Some in the traditional media are growing alarmed as they watch careers being destroyed by what they see as the growing power of rampant, unedited dialogue."

God help us all, comrades: People are freely expressing opinions without supervision or approval! What's next, locusts?

I pretty much stayed out of the Eason Jordan issue, because, well, I'd already established for myself that Jordan was a creep, and I didn't follow it all that closely. However, what I did see of it had nothing to do with "trophy hunting" or anything similar. (This sounds like leftover sour grapes about Dan Rather. Eason Jordan isn't a "trophy": Few in the general public had any idea who he was until he resigned, and fewer still cared, even after.)

I saw a lot of denials from CNN, a lot of calls from the blogosphere to release the videotape proving that CNN was telling the whole story (quite reasonable, given the mass of eyewitness accounts to the contrary), and Jordan suddenly resigning. CNN being in the television news business, you'd think resolving the issue would've been child's play, if CNN were telling the truth. Eason Jordan destroyed his own career.

That said, if journalists want to be treated as public servants, that logically means they need to get over themselves and start serving the public again, rather than their own agendas. We depend on them to find the facts, not to tell us what to think about them, and it's certainly frightening that the New York Times and others see growing public "dialogue" as "destructive" to their careers. This fear and loathing at the public daring to think for itself seems to have become a running theme in the media, but the fact is that if your career can't withstand rather casual examination from a handful of outside observers with little or no special knowledge of your field, you're just a fraud.

Lies.com
Heh, the New York Times Company is purchasing About.com for $410 million dollars.

Undoubtedly, we will see an immediate and substantial improvement in quality.

Haaah. Seriously, though, considering things aren't going so well over at the NYT, you can't blame them for trying to diversify.

Fun With The LA Times
The LA Times finally issues a correction:

SpongeBob - An editorial Saturday about children's literature and cartoons erroneously stated that James Dobson of Focus on the Family declared that SpongeBob SquarePants is a homosexual sponge. Instead, in a speech last month, Dobson criticized as pro-homosexual a tolerance video featuring SpongeBob, Big Bird and others.

It'd be better if they got stuff right the first time, but that's not what they do at the LA Times.

There are two people named Roger Simon. One is a columnist for U.S. News and World Report. The other is a popular blogger who I read regularly. The latter is more informative, but the LA Times automatically calls him "mainstream" because they assume he's employed by a mainstream media company. Winds of Change is hardly an obscure blog, but since the LA Times doesn't keep up with the blogs, they're well behind.

Heh, and naturally, in any article about neo-Nazis, they have to find a way to call them "conservative".

Don't let the door hit you...
Saddam-snuggling CNN news chief Eason Jordan has resigned.

Update: ....aaaaand the AP gets it wrong.

But the damage had been done, compounded by the fact that no transcript of his actual remarks has turned up.

In fact, the videotape of his remarks turned up. The Davos people simply refused to release it.

NYT vs. Reality
That whacky NYT:

Lawyers for a Canadian detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who was captured in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old asserted in a document released Wednesday that he was repeatedly abused by his American jailers.

The lawyers for the detainee, Omar Khadr, who is now 18, said he had been regularly shackled and left alone for long periods. During those periods he sometimes urinated on himself, after which guards poured pine-scented cleaner on him.

Well, he smelled. (Somehow, I doubt they poured Pine-Sol on him. There are a number of scented chemicals that are meant for exactly this kind of application.)

That's the first two paragraphs: So as not to taint any sympathy you might feel for his awkward situation, the NYT waits six paragraphs to mention that this "Canadian youth" was imprisoned after blowing up a medic in Afghanistan, where Canadian troops were, at the same time, taking fire from his "colleagues" and busily disarming their bombs.

But Mr. Khadr is also charged with throwing a grenade that killed an American medic near Khost, in eastern Afghanistan. Moreover, his father was said to have been a close associate of Osama bin Laden.

The military has said Mr. Khadr has confessed. But Prof. Richard J. Wilson of the American University Washington College of Law, one of Mr. Khadr's lawyers, said in an interview on Wednesday that the allegations of abuse should be enough to raise skepticism about any confession he might have made.

Note the phrasing. He didn't kill the medic, he merely threw the grenade, and the grenade killed the guy! That isn't the kicker, though: His father is "said" to have been a close associate of Osama bin Laden?

Years ago, father Ahmed Khadr was imprisoned in Pakistan for his role in a bombing plot, after which Jean Chretien personally flew to Pakistan to demand his release. He got his wish, and wrote Khadr a tax dollar grant for Khadr's "humanitarian" front group to build "refugee camps" in the mountains of Afghanistan. Canadian spies later discovered that Khadr's "refugee camps" were in fact Al Qaeda training camps. (Chretien claimed he had "not been properly briefed" on who Khadr was. In fact, the only people who had briefed him were radical Islamist lobbyist groups.)

Eventually, part of the Khadr family was caught up in a raging 12-hour mountain battle with the Pakistani military. As Cobra attack helicopters swarmed overhead and terrorist anti-aircraft missiles streaked across the sky, the elder Khadr was killed by Pakistani fire, and his 14-year-old son shot in the spine and paralyzed, putting him among the large number from that battle captured and held by Pakistani authorities for quite some time after.

Later, the family became the subject of a CBC special on terrorism, in which the family's survivors discussed, among other things, what it was like to live in Osama bin Laden's compound for a couple years, participating in weddings there, celebrating 9/11 with their fellow murdering Jihadists, what a good parent Osama is.

Another son, 21-year-old Abdurahman Khadr, was released from Guantanamo Bay late last year and now lives in Toronto. In the documentary he described bin Laden as quite normal.

"He has issues with his wife, and he has issues with his kids, financial issues, you know, the kids aren't listening, the kids aren't doing this and that. It comes down to (the fact) he's a father and he's a person," he said.

Khadr's 23-year-old daughter Zaynab, who lives with her mother in Pakistan, said bin Laden was athletic.

"He loved playing volleyball. And he loved horse riding... Kids played around him....And (when) they'd go shooting he'd go with them. If he missed his (shot), they'd laugh at him and stuff like that," she said.

He also takes really good care of his camels. The mother, Maha, explained how she hopes all her children would die the way her husband did. When asked why she took her family to live with Osama, she explained that she feels Canadians are all drugged out homos, and feared that her children would become drugged out homos too if she let them grow up there. (Proud citizens that they are.)

Zaynab compares Osama bin Laden to Mel Gibson's character in Braveheart. Abdurahman was partially disowned by the family after he decided the Americans are the good guys after his time at Guantanamo. (His family labels him "wacko".) He's since been kicked out of his Toronto mosque, and, last I heard, was still struggling to get on his feet.

So, yeah, the New York Times is right. Some people say the Khadr family has ties to Osama bin Laden. Like, for exampe, the Khadr family.

What's left of the Khadr family now resides "quietly" in Ontario, presumably with enough Mountie surveillance equipment tuned in to make the Pentagon look like an electromagnetic null zone. Yet all the NYT can do is treat the family's terrorist ties as a dubious allegation and question the validity of the son's confession. Somehow, I think they could've done a better job establishing the background of this story. You can contact the NYT's ombudsman here, not that they'll do anything about it.

Reality TV "Tantamount To Torture"
Suddenly, it's hard to take the media seriously.

A British TV channel is preparing "Guantanamo Guidebook," a show that will test the effectiveness of interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation which freed inmates say were used by the U.S. military at its camp in Cuba.

Channel Four, which brought the world reality TV hit "Big Brother," will film seven British volunteers as they are subjected to extreme temperatures and mild physical contact while being kept awake for long periods.

The techniques are based on information from declassified U.S. government documents, and will be carried out by expert interrogators from the United States, a Channel Four spokesman said, declining to provide additional details.

The program, due to air in mid-March, will examine the effects of the interrogation techniques over 48 hours in a London warehouse. It is part of a four-part series on torture hosted by news presenter Jon Snow.

It could be a useful way of showing viewers that seemingly innocuous techniques like sleep deprivation can have a devastating effect, said Steve Crawshaw, director of Human Rights Watch's London office.

"Without having seen it, my understanding of the Channel Four program is that it shows clearly that even a very small amount of these treatments can be seriously damaging."

Or, taken another way, it will be a useful way of reminding people that there's a huge proportion of people who, on half a night's sleep, will have nervous breakdowns over virtually everything that happens to them and tell you whatever you need to know if you just leave them in peace for a few hours. That's the whole point. Duh.

The publicly owned Channel Four is known for courting controversy with edgy programming. It drew fire from the Russian government last week for airing an interview with the Chechen rebel leader who masterminded the deadly Beslan school siege.

Did I say above that I just now found it hard to take the media seriously?

What We All Already Knew
Glenn Reynolds neatly sums up the Eason Jordan issue.

Worst case: Jordan said things he knew were probably false, in order to curry favor with influential people from countries that -- as CNN's American audience falls -- represent an important part of its market.

Best case: Jordan repeated rumors he had heard without knowing whether they were true or not.

In either case, CNN is run by slime, which is not news. Iowahawk imagines it went like this.

Jordan: Oh. Umm, okay, I think I see where you're going with that. Well, there are certainly accusations of that, and obviously we wouldn't be doing our jobs as journalists if we didn't recognize the existence of the accusations.

Frank: But you just stated it as fact.

Jordan: Well, duh. It's a fact: there have been accusations.

Unidentified Voice: I am a journalist, and the Imperialist American soldiers killed me.

Jordan: See [pointing]? Well, there you go. Jesus, Barney, what's with the third degree here?

Heh.

Yay Insurgents!

(Via SondraK)
Update: I was having a little too much fun with the original play on words in that title, might have been taken the wrong way.

The Power of Fact-Checking
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Just plain slandering people.

The second bit of "evidence" offered by Moyers was, in a sense, even odder. He harkened back to the early 1980s, when James Watt was President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior. Moyers painted Watt as a harbinger -- sort of a John the Baptist, since we're talking theology -- of the "let's destroy the environment" movement. Here is what Moyers said about Watt:

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Yes, that actually made it to print, citing an "online environmental journal" as the sole source. Of course, you can't be reminded of something you never heard, and you can't hear something that was never said. Read the whole thing.

Update: Heh.

Earlier this afternoon, Bill Moyers called James Watt and "apologized profusely" for misquoting him and misrepresenting his views on the environment. Moyers says he will produce a written apology and think about ways to make the apology as public as the smear was.

Good for Moyers. That puts him easily in the top half of his field.

Journalists Is So Smrt
From the New York Times:

An editorial on Monday about the new jumbo Airbus misstated the weight of the airplane. Its takeoff weight, fully loaded with passengers, freight and fuel, is hundreds of thousands of pounds heavier than the Boeing 747, depending on the configurations, not 30,000 tons heavier. It's an aircraft, not an aircraft carrier.

That's 60,000,000 pounds. Remember this when they try to tell you we don't need Social Security Reform: They can't count. (Via Instapundit)

Fighting Man From Head to Toe
Oh no, what if they behead him:

Iraqi militants claimed in a Web statement Tuesday to have taken an American soldier hostage and threatened to behead him in 72 hours unless the Americans release Iraqi prisoners.

The posting, on a Web site that frequently carried militants' statements, included a photo of what appeared to be an American soldier in desert fatigues seated with his hands tied behind his back. A gun barrel was pointed at his head, and he is seated in front of a black banner emblazoned with the Islamic profession of faith, "There is no god but God and Muhammad is His prophet."

These are photos of the soldier, John Adams, both as he appeared in the video and in a photo taken shortly after his purchase at Toys'R'Us.


Yes, ladies and gentleman. Reuters, the Associated Press, MSNBC, and numerous other media outlets were hoaxed by a knockoff GI Joe action figure.

Just think: Someone, somewhere, took the time to paint that tiny black banner.

Update: At Instapundit, hilarity ensues.

Update: Scrappleface - "Captive US Soldier Doll Rescued by Bush Doll"

Update: I have a new blogad out there!



Update: Rare moment of humor at Jihad Watch: "GI's Mother Pleads for Son's Life"

Update: Excerpted from John Adams' combat journal.

I only knew my men by their code names, but even in that short space of time we shared a bond that only six-inch plastic combatants can truly understand....One night we all melted the tips of our fingers and became plastic brothers.

As I huddle in the shoebox that will soon define the four corners of my world, my thoughts turn to my wife, Barbie; my brother, Fireman Rescue Hero; and my son, Lego Luke Skywalker. I must be strong for them.

I'll get you for this, Evil Bert.

31 January 2005: Today my captors took my picture outside, in front of a special banner that was deliberately repetitive and misspelled in order to honor the stuttering illiterates of Iraq.

"There's no way that America's mainstream media would ever fall for such a ruse. The second you post that picture on the Internet, crack investigative teams from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and The New York Times and, above all, CBS News will be on hand to check facts, verify data, and offer uncompromising insights into the validity of your photograph, even if doing so will force them to lose a potential scoop while indirectly aiding the Bush administration."

"No, no," replied Evil Bert, "American soldier not use humor to build bond between himself and captors.

1 February 2005: I have bribed a guard to fax this document....I am sending this fax to the only person I can trust: Lucy Ramirez, somewhere in Texas.

How will we know when we've gone too far?

Accuracy in Media
Hooray for the BBC:

The BBC has apologised for incorrectly broadcasting figures which suggested more Iraqi civilians had been killed by coalition and Iraqi forces than by insurgents.

The information was based on figures given by the Iraqi Ministry of Health to the BBC's Panorama programme. The statistics concerned the number of people killed in conflict-related violence in the second half of 2004.

The figures said that 3,274 people had died in that period, 2,041 of them as the result of "military operations".

The other 1,233 deaths were attributed to "terrorist operations".

The BBC reported the figures as suggesting that coalition and Iraqi forces could be responsible for up to 60% of conflict-related civilian deaths in Iraq.

However, the Iraqi Ministry of Health then clarified that the figures included not just civilians, but also insurgents and Iraqi security forces. And it said that the phrase "military operations" referred to Iraqis killed by insurgents as well as coalition or Iraqi forces.

How isolated from reality, how completely free of instinct, does a journalist have to be not to know, right off the bat, that their claim was impossible and that it needed to be checked out?

Who Screwed Whom
Donald Sensing has more on the botched reporting of the Airbus dispute between Thailand and the EU. Once in a great while, the EU does get portrayed unfairly.

Outrageous Media Outrages
The Chicago Tribune reports that Muslim-Americans live in fear of ink.

But when the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, part of the Homeland Security Department, demanded fingerprints from about three dozen Muslim-Americans returning from Toronto, photographing some as well, it set off alarm bells throughout the Muslim community. Officials said the additional screening was intended to prevent terrorists from entering the country.

With an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 American Muslims having gone on the hajj this year, and with many returning this week, a lot of the pilgrims fear they will face the same treatment before being allowed to re-enter the United States.

The horror. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports on the savage methods of American troops in Iraq, searching a neighborhood after a bomb blast:

The soldiers went to search his bedroom. He heard laughing, and then they called for him, he said. Imaad went to his room and saw that the soldiers had ... found several magazines he kept hidden from his mother. They had pictures of girls in swimsuits and erotic poses. Imaad said the soldiers spread the magazines on his bed and put his Koran in the middle.

It's another Abu Ghraib! Imaad, presumably mortified that his mother now knows he's into porn, takes it hard:

"It was a nightmare," he said. "I will never forget those bad soldiers when they put the Koran among the magazines."

Within 20 minutes, the soldiers left without arresting him or his mother. While the soldiers went next door to search his neighbor's house, Imaad began to slap his mother, he said. "The American people are devils," Um Imaad recalled her son repeating.

He left her and went to a mosque to spend the night. "I asked God to forgive me," Imaad said, "because I could not prevent American sins."

"I used to have a good opinion of the Americans," Imaad said. "But they are the enemy. They are bad."

Oddly, Imaad didn't ask God to forgive him for perusing nudie mags or beating his mother. In fact, Imaad smacking his mum silly is the only violence in this entire "horror story".

If you read the article, you'll note that Imaad (if he even exists, since he conveniently wouldn't give the WaPo his full name) is an unemployed 32-year-old who not only abuses, but also still lives with, his mother. In the face of his "crisis", his mother attempts to get him professional help, which he refuses, because he believes "the Jews" are somehow involved. As a function of his outrage, Imaad has not decided to join the insurgency, rather, he's decided to look for a job. (?)

This is the Washington Post's primary source.

Rip Off
The New York Times publishes yet another bold-faced lie. One that travelled around the world and will likely never be publicly challenged, at that.

One of these days, there's going to a class-action lawsuit, and everyone who ever bought a copy of the NYT will be an eligible member.

Also, Wild Cheering
America According to Reuters:

"Mock Coffins and Jeers as Bush Sworn In"

Flag-draped coffins and jeering anti-war protesters competed with pomp and circumstance on Thursday at the inauguration of President Bush along the snow-dusted, barricaded streets of central Washington.

Some turned their back as the president drove slowly past. Others yelled, "George Bush, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide." Among the forest of protest signs, some read "Blood is on your hands" and "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam." Others called for electoral reform, gay rights, abortion rights and the use of renewable energy.

Protesters also traded insults with the more numerous, cheering Bush supporters, many of whom wore fur coats and paid for the best viewing spots at the first inaugural parade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Many of whom wore fur coats? Calling the supporters "more numerous" is an understatement. The protests appear to have come out much smaller than ANSWER and their terrorist-fellating associates had anticipated. Good for Reuters to tell "the other side of the story", huh?