Beeb Or Die
The evidence seems to strongly suggest that a BBC reporter has been sending death threats to an Afghani blogger.

Have you scared a lot? So timid you are. You are exactly like a wounded dog. Do you think I do not know you? You are the one who once used to grow longer hair. You are the one, whose last three digits of mobile number end with 033. Aren't you?...Your work has come to its end. I will very soon disclose your dirty name. Filths like you do not have any place in this land. You have to be buried in a muck grave. You and your complexes should be buried under debris of stone and clay. There were a number of people like you, who did not remain alive. They were all buried in graves. You have to be taken off from this land so that better human beings could take your place. For, you are dirty....The prize of the Worlds' most fashionable leader is granted to Hamid Karzai, the prize of best editor of the year is granted to Shukria Barakzai, who in every 20 to 30 days publishes only two page full of mistakes, the prize of Freedom of Expression is given to Same Hamid, who has NOT even written a page about freedom of speech/expression, and now the prize of defending Freedom of speech/expression is presented to a weblog, which has nothing to do except copying the news from other sites and insulting this one and that one.

Seems maybe just a little bitter about that prize. The BBC says they're taking it seriously and investigating.

It's Been Especially Hard On Ivan The Great
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, struggling to make good economic news into bad, is upset that we can't all be astronauts.

The St. Louis area added thousands more "bad" jobs than it did higher-paying "good" ones from 1980 to 2000, according to a report released by the Federal Reserve this week.

After this story ran, Post-Dispatch editors, who enjoy higher-paying "good" jobs, were shocked when they were approached by "Jim the donut guy" at their morning meeting, who explained that most Post-Dispatch employees are not actually editors. Also concerned were Bill the copy boy, Alice the receptionist, "Light Bulb Changin' Jim", and Bert down in the mailroom. (Via Brian J. Noggle)

Scott Burgess Ambushes Guardian, Takes Paper's Wallet
I didn't realize it was British blogger Scott Burgess who blew the lid off the Hizb ut-Guardian incident. Good for him. Burgess notes that the Guardian wrote a rather insane response ("Aslam targeted by bloggers"), and that Jim Treacher has written them back:

I think it's a good idea that the byline for this piece is merely "A staff reporter." You folks wouldn't want the reader to think that this remarkable piece of ice-cold reasoning is the opinion of a particular individual, rather than the stance of the Guardian staff as a whole. Also, thank you for pointing out that Scott Burgess 'spends his time indoors' as he's keeping track of which terrorism-boosters you're hiring because they're not pale and male. As is widely known, the Guardian staff always type away on their laptops as they sit in the grass under a big leafy tree.

Heh.

Good Thing We Watched That National Geographic Special On Firetrucks
The Australian AP, straining for a graceful way to deflect blame from Islamic terror, went with this:

On July 7 three trains and a bus in London killed 56 people - including the four suspected suicide bombers - and wounded 700.

"Freak Transit Accident: Suicide Bombers Coincidentally Among Dead"?

A solitary killer, the firetruck stalks its prey. The firetruck can consume eight times its body weight. The ambulances will have to wait their turn. - Family Guy

What is this media bias of which you speak, Mohammed?
It seems that employee background checks at The Guardian are perhaps a bit lax.

As you may be aware, there's been a bit of a stir raised by "sassy" Guardian trainee Dilpazier Aslam and his article published Wednesday.

Apparently, Mr. Aslam is, or was until very recently, a member of Hizb Ut Tahrir - an organisation which, according to the BBC, "promotes racism and anti-Semitic hatred, calls suicide bombers martyrs, and urges Muslims to kill Jewish people."

...and Reuters really knows how to party:

Top terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi made a "guest appearance" in a video prepared by the staff of Reuters news agency in Israel and the Palestinian Authority as a "going away" gift for a colleague, Ynetnews has learned.

Zubeidi's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have claimed responsibility for more than 300 terror acts in the last five years.

A Reuters spokeswoman confirmed the video's existence, but said the London-based news organization is "not associated with any group or faction in any conflict."

The screening, which occurred in a Jerusalem restaurant last March, involved the showing of a video during a private party.

"The video's theme was what Israel would be like in 10 years," said an Israeli government official who attended the party and viewed the video.

"All of a sudden, at the end, there is Zakaria Zubeidi, playing the head of Reuters. Zubeidi was sitting in Reuters' Jenin office, saying he was Reuters' chief," the official said.

May as well be.

Media Vs. America
James Lileks' 2001 self is talking to his 2005 self.

What's the main story? The smallpox quarantine? Fallout from the Iranian - Israeli exchange contaminating Indian crops? A series of bombings in heartland malls?

"Well, no - the big story today has to do with soldiers mishandling terrorists' holy texts at a detention center."

Mishandling? How? Like, you mean, they opened it up without first checking to see if it was ticking, and it blew up -

"No, they handled it in a way that disrespected it. Infidels are supposed to use gloves."

Oh. So we lost, then.

Well, the press is really trying. Lileks goes on:

Don't get me wrong. I want us to do the right thing. I don't think there should be a policy that permits interrogators to treat the Qur'an like it was, oh, a Bible discovered in the Saudi airport customs line....But if an infidel touches the book with the wrong hand and people react like a two-year-old whose peas are touching the mashed potatoes, well, I understand why this matters, but when measured against the sins of headchoppery and carbombs, it pales to an evanescent translucence. Odd how the story isn't about the rules and the precautions and the spine-cracking efforts to bend over backwards to make sure infidels get out the tongs when approaching the sacred book of the terrori - sorry, the detainees - Sorry, the murderous gynophobic gay-hating fundamentalist theocratic cultural imperialists. No, the story is the infinitesimal number of times in which the rules were breached over the course of years.

Not to mention that those infinitestimal breaches had a tendency to include discipline, and that there were more incidents of the detainees mishandling their own Korans then there were of guards doing it, or is this like how minorities can't be racist? Fun thought experiment for leftists: If a detainee, for example, crams the pages of his own Koran down a toilet to clog it up to get attention, do we have to assume that this is automatically proper Islamic behavior because he's Muslim and we're not and he therefore knows more about it than we do, or in the name of respecting diversity and embracing multi-culturalism, do we have a moral obligation to give the proper radical Islamic detainee a trial under proper radical Islamic Sharia law, complete with whatever stone-age variation on the death penalty his local Taliban officials required for desecration of the Koran?

I'm just asking. Maybe we should let the detainees run free inside Guantanamo, and let them truly exercise their, uh, cultural rights by letting them set up a miniature Islamic theocracy. I'm sure that'd make Amnesty happy: It's almost like they're back home in Afghanistan before the war! Then we can broadcast the whole thing on FOX as a reality show. First contest is to decide who gets to be Caliph, and there is no voting off the island, because elections, as we've repeatedly been told, are Satanic.

In any case, at this point, they could discover a memo from Rumsfeld ordering topless, menstrating female guards to, laughing, actually put Koran into the commode, defecate into said commode, mix it around a little, and give the detainees swirlies. Somehow, it'd still seem anti-climactic, because the tone has been one appropriate only for something many orders of magnitude worse. From the breathless reporting, if you didn't know it was about the Koran thing, you'd think they'd uncovered 10,000 corpses from biological weapons experiments. That's how far the media's obession with defending their own incompetence and bias has run this whole thing into the ground, and I know I'm not alone.

Seventy-four percent of those surveyed in Gallup's 2005 confidence poll said they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the military - more than in a full range of other government, religious, economic, medical, business and news organizations.

The Gallup organization noted that public trust in television news and newspapers reached an all-time low this year, with 28 percent of responders expressing high confidence in them.

It's rather amazing: They've forced a whole lot of people through the throes of a scandal without there actually being one, and people are so tired of the falsehoods and endless panic that when an institution is attacked by the media, it actually increases our faith in that institution. This, really, is the "Michael Jackson" of the war on terror: Nobody cares about this except the reporters, who, angry at the little people for calling out their colleagues for getting 17 people killed with their irresponsibility, are desperately scrambling to find some way to make their point. Worse yet, they don't mind claiming black is white to drag the rest of us down with them. Whole thing reminds me of this old Transterrestial Musings post on how today's media would cover World War II.

Risking civic anarchy and destruction of the ancient fabled and beautiful city by Hitler's rockets of vengeance, "Allied" forces recklessly entered Paris yesterday...

Led by the Second Armored Division of the "French Army," commanded by "Major General" Lecleric, the troops marched up the Champs Elysee, reportedly to at least scattered cheers and throwing of flowers. Of course, the Paris natives have had a rough few years, and almost anyone, even the "Allies," might at first seem preferable to the Germans, against whom there are serious but unsubstantiated allegations of human rights abuses, including "genocide."

Editor's note: can we come up with a less judgmental word? One man's genocide is another's freedom fighting.

"There was one GI on a truck who kept pointing toward Germany, and then lifting a finger and slashing his throat," Katzander wrote. "The crowd loved him."

Such stories, if true, indicate that the American soldiers were allowed to inflame the passions of the Parisian populace, which no doubt led to many of the atrocities and murders against the unarmed German officials, and also against French who had collaborated with them....

No doubt.

Secret Political Prison Identified
Roslyn Guy, the education editor for the Melbourne Age:

Cubans, once ill-educated and poor, are now almost universally literate and have more doctors per capita than almost anywhere on earth. But they are still poor and they live in a one-party state that abhors opposition. Like the US, it jails dissidents...

Absolutely amazing.

Offend Muslims in America, Offend Americans in Japan
Gaijin Biker has some serious questions about the, er, differences between Newsweek's American edition and their Japanese edition.

If I were to offer Newsweek a suggestion, it would be this: Any story or cover you're ashamed to run in America probably shouldn't be used in other countries, either.

Hey, it's not like they're biased, or anything.

Update: Translations here.

They're Totally Screwed Without Raymond
CBS News is doing away with 60 Minutes II.

CBS said Wednesday it is cancelling the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," insisting the decision was made because of poor ratings and not last fall's ill-fated story about President Bush's military service.

Cause and effect, people. Crappy stories cause poor ratings. Dan Rather will be contributing to the Sunday edition. In a related story, Danny Boy got himself a prize:

CBS News' Dan Rather accepted broadcast journalism's most prestigious honor on Monday for the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story that exposed the shocking conditions inside Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Rather received extended applause after telling the crowd, "Never give up, never back up, never give in while pursuing the dream of integrity filled journalism that matters."

"Never back up" is right. Last I heard, Rather is still insisting the memos were real. Sarcasm aside, and I could be wrong here, but wasn't the Abu Ghraib story brought out by some yahoo who stole the photos from the military investigation evidence file? It's not like Rather disguised himself as a prisoner to get the inside story or something.

Newsweek Lied, People Died
"We cannot verify the source of the memos."

Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it may have erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to victims of deadly violence sparked by the article.

Well, many of the victims are dead now, but they appreciate the thought. An Instapundit reader says Newsweek isn't the problem:

The problem is that people will kill over a book being desecrated. Actually, over a anonymous report buried within a third rate weekly magazine. There is something wrong when people value a book, of which there are millions, over human lives. This is the real problem, and Newsweek isn't the source of it. The problem is an ignorant and violent subculture within the islamic world, and the general lack of tolerance about religion therein.

That's certainly true, but it doesn't change the reality that Newsweek blew it, and knows it. Newsweek's Mark Whitaker:

I suppose you could say we should have foreseen the consequences of the report, but we didn't.

Sure, your bad, Mark. As the Professor noted before, there's precedent:

This was entirely predictable given that (1) Al Qaeda propaganda turns on stuff like this; and (2) Historically, such rumors have been used to stir up trouble in the region (remember the Sepoy Revolt, based on false rumors that the British greased their cartridges with pig fat?). If the folks at Newsweek are too ignorant to realize this, or too sloppy to care, then they shouldn't be in the news business.

Nah, they were just having fun! Then there's the other side of the coin:

If bloggers had done this, you'd see the news media calling for sweeping restrictions on online publication by "non-professionals." Indeed, the media would be going after bloggers so long and so hard that it'd be pushed to the top of the reporting for weeks until another white woman goes missing.

Obviously, what we need here is licensing for proper journalists, which wouldn't violate freedom of the press since licensing for gunowners doesn't infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms... Er, wait...

Of course, Hubrisblog raises the same question I was thinking about this morning: Have you ever actually tried to flush a book down a toilet? (Probably not...) Or even pages of one? People who accidentally flush even a paper towel are usually cruising for disaster. Glenn Reynolds:

Really, I don't want to hear another word about the superior "responsibility" of Big Media. Not one more word.

Heh, indeed.

Update: IMAO tells how it went:

Bush angrily flipped through a few more pages. "The Bush Administration is disrespectful to Islam," Bush read aloud, "Unnamed White House officials tell of how the toilet paper in the bathrooms of the White House have been replaced with pages torn from the Koran. Also at the White House is a painting depicting Jesus strangling the prophet Mohammed. This is all just part of a pattern of behavior of Bush who had the sign supposedly pointing in the direction of Mecca at the Guantanamo Bay prison actually point to the nearest Porta-Potty." Bush threw down the magazine in anger. "Barely any of that's true at all!"

* * * *

"Omar, I've been hardly angry at anything lately."

"Me too, Ahmed. Also, I'm starting to like America."

"Well, let's check the newest copy of Newsweek to see what's going on in the world." Ahmed purchased a copy from the newsstand and flipped to the main story. After reading a paragraph into the story, Ahmed ripped the magazine apart and shouted, "Jihad!"

* * * *

"Blood, chaos, mayhem - that is what journalism is about," said the evil editor of Newsweek. "These stories that enrage the Muslims are causing destruction and increasing sales since they tend to rip apart the first copy in anger and then buy another to remember what they're angry about. Do we have anything else for the next issue?"

"I have a story on how Bush snuck into Mecca and spray painted his gang sign there," said one writer.

"How many sources do you have on that?"

"0.3"

Except, it ends with Bush starting a blog.

Credibility Roughly Equal
Taliban thugs tell Afghans that Guantanamo interrogators flushed a Koran down the toilet, and nobody cares because it's the Taliban talking.

Newsweek repeats the allegations with, er, little supporting evidence, Afghans riot, some are killed, buildings are destroyed.

Thanks, Newsweek! Maybe next, they can reprint "Dr". Susan Block's "The Rape of Iraq", a mistranslation of which apparently inspired a suicide car bombing in Turkey.

Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism
Patterico notes that the Los Angeles Times appears to be deliberately editing articles to twist the story in favor of their bias, in this case carefully removing passages from a Reuters article that prove the American side of the Giuliana Sgrena debate.

Today's L.A. Times reprint of the article edits out that passage, which suggests that there is definitive proof that the car was speeding - a critical issue in the controversy.

Today's edit proves that yesterday's suppression of this information was no accident. It was part of an ongoing effort to hide this evidence from the paper's readers. After all, The Times still has not told its readers about this evidence, even though CBS News aired it Thursday night, and it's now Sunday morning.

Well, heck, it's now Wednesday morning. If Reuters and CBS News aren't biased enough of sources for your newspaper, you're a tabloid.

Full of Snot Since Forever
Fun Trivia: In 1919, Robert H. Goddard published, through the Smithsonian Institution, A Method Of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, which presented Goddard's theories on how a rocket could be used to travel into outer space. In 1920, The New York Times published an editorial sarcastically attacking Goddard:

Professor Goddard does not know the relation of action to reaction, and for the need to have something better than a vacuum to push on. He seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in our schools....[His ideas are] pardonable enough in him as a romancer, but its like is not so easily explained when made by a savant who isn't writing a novel of adventure."

The NYT challenged Goddard's credentials as a scientist, compared his ideas to the extraordinary fantasy of Jules Verne, and ridiculed the Smithsonian for entertaining his notions, oblivious that Goddard had long since built a vacuum tube and launched a rocket within it.

49 years later, with Apollo 11 en route to the Moon, the New York Times issued a retraction:

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

There's still hope for all of us.

Note to New York Times
Plagiarizing from Wikipedia is really stupid, because it shows up on Google. (Via Instapundit)

Update: I removed a typo-laden comment left by a guy in the middle of the night because, hey, if you comment so drunk that you misspell your own website ("http://http;//brian.carnel.com") and the newspaper in question ("MYT") while hurling out a free-floating insult or two, that's what'll happen, but he was factually correct. Appears somebody copied the offending line from the New York Times during the day, the original New York Times bit was merely dubious, not plagiarized. (Calling the Marburg virus "highly contagious", even if medically correct, implies something else entirely.) Outwardly, the story appeared legit. I probably should've hand-checked this before I linked to it, but the standards are so low at the NYT these days that there was no reason to be suspicious. I mistakenly assumed the original post had homework behind it, which was my own fault.

Brian's attacks on Instapundit are uncalled for, though, given that Glenn, like the rest of us, has a life outside the blog. There are always mistakes, in the NYT, on Instapundit and here (though most blog errors stem from quoting mainstream media stories that were in error to begin with). The difference is that blogs are known to issue corrections when we find out about the lapses. The New York Times, like most of the rest of the MSM, is, shall we say, less consistent, and they do this for a living.

Update: Poor Derek Rose, "a member of the NYC press corps", is mad at me and, presumably, all bloggers:

Hey Free Will - if "having a life outside your blog" means you're too busy to do basic research before accusing others of dishonesty, then don't make those kind of allegations.

Being intellectually honest requires a little more than simply retracting allegations when they're proven wrong.

Derek's point is perfectly fair, of course: Hence the lengthy retraction. I linked it from Instapundit without double-checking the original source, and I was mistaken to do so. [Insert Dan Rather joke here.] Of course, this was Derek's position just a few days ago on a bumbling error made by the Washington Post:

I think the mainstream press should survive the blogospheric onslaught ... as long as we're willing to be a little more nimble, interact more with readers, and admit errors more readily.

Clearly, that's what the WP should do in this case.

If "having a job at a major national newspaper" means you're too important to do basic research before accusing others of hypocrisy, then don't make those kind of allegations.

Being intellectually honest requires more than insisting your critics should adhere to standards you yourself won't demand of your own colleagues.

Hilariously, Rose also believes that the "need some comment from supporter" gaffe in the NYT's Papal hit-piece just shows "the Times' admirable committment to fairness, balance, etc."

Let he who lives in a glass house cast the first stone.

Update: Captain Ed has a relevant post.

Jack Shafer pens an interesting look at the similarities and differences between blogs and the Exempt Media, and postulates that parity may be coming between the two. In his opinion, the Schiavo memo shows that both sides can get stories equally incorrect, and that both sides should have the latitude to do so -- as long as corrections are published in a quick manner...

Quick and prominent.

New York Times: "We Hate The Pope"
The New York Times authored a piece on what a terrible man the Pope was for being so "conservative", and accidentally published it uncompleted:

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II's admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

"The situation in the Catholic church is serious," Hans Kung, the eminent Swiss theologian, who was barred by from teaching in Catholic schools because of his liberal views, wrote last week. "The pope is gravely ill and deserves every compassion. But the Church has to live. ...

In my opinion, he is not the greatest pope but the most contradictory of the 20th century. A pope of many, great gifts, and of many bad decisions!"

Heh, "need some quote from supporter" indeed. No bias here! Follow the link for a screenshot.

Update: Also fearing the evils of Popery is Slate Magazine, continuing a tradition of not even waiting until the guy's cold that they started with Reagan. (The author of this piece, Christopher Hitchens, is the same guy who wrote the piece "Reagan's Stupidity" in that screencap.) Amazing.

Secret Lives Of Firearms
Remember, a few weeks ago, you noticed your car keys were missing, and caught your handgun hurriedly trying to unlock your gun safe to let all the other guns out to go for a joyride? Thanks to this Edmonton Sun headline, you now know what they were up to:

Guns kill two in Toronto

Two more innocent victims of North America's rampaging gangs of drug addicted guns. When will the killing end, when will the guns finally be silenced?

Q: How many guns does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Guns don't change lightbulbs, people change lightbulbs.

It's like Maximum Overdrive out there, guys. Watch yourselves.

Update: Heh:

Canada has universal gun registration, so, obviously, the perpetrators have already been caught.

Stop laughing!

Media Biased, Also Stupid
Sydney Morning Herald:

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington think tank affiliated with Columbia University's school of journalism, looked at more than 2000 stories in newspapers and on television and websites.

Most were "straight" news reports, according to the survey's director, Tom Rosenstiel, with 25 per cent of the stories positive and 20 per cent negative.

The survey is unlikely to pacify conservative critics of the mainstream media...

Of course, as Tim Blair notes, they have it backwards.

Over all, across all media studied, stories about the war were just slightly more likely to carry a clearly negative tone than a positive one (25% negative versus 20% positive).

Not that this isn't all highly subjective, but the president of Democrats.com appears to believe that conservative bloggers now rule the world.

Media On Trial
Aussie "journalist" Margo Kingston explains the "standards" to which she believes the media should be held.

In short, it's "Oh yeah? Prove we're lying!"

Stalkers Welcome
New York Times reporters are so irresponsible.

("How irresponsible are they?")

Irresponsible enough that they included the name, age, and college of one of the Lefkow family's daughters, in a story about her family being targeted for murder.

I have a lady friend who was once the subject of a New York Times story on moving into Manhattan apartments. Naturally, they thought it would be appropriate to include her name, the name of the building she'd moved into, and what floor she was living on, with a photo. Imbeciles.

Beloved Television Personality Has Lost Mind
Dan Rather, speaking on the David Letterman Show, still wants you to believe.

Rather said that to his mind, two of the panel's most important conclusions were that it could not demonstrate that political bias played a part in the stories or conclusively account for the origins of the documents in question.

"Although they had four months and millions of dollars, they could not demonstrate that the documents were not authentic, that they were forgeries," Rather said.

That's because that isn't what they were brought on to investigate, Dan. As Little Green Footballs observes:

...even though they had "four months and millions of dollars," the CBS investigators never even contacted LGF, Powerline, and Dr. Joseph M. Newcomer - the very people who provided definitive proof that the documents are blatant, obvious fakes...

Indeed they didn't. This was an internal affair, not meant for mere audience members.