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. . . MEDIA (THE) see "JOURNALISM" for related links Carefully the news media would consider some other pictures, showing loyal villagers hacked to pieces by enemy troops, and the naked bodies of U.S. Marines with their genitals burned off by enemy torturers. And the news media would, of course, withhold these pictures from the public. To show them to the American public would destroy their objectivity, and that just wouldn't be fair.... --Allen Drury The news media must take partial blame for incidents such as the Columbine shooting. The entertainment industry sells fantasy. We sell reality. By placing images of bloodied high school students on loop in an attempt to boost our ratings, we are telling potential killers that their criminal handiwork will help them achieve the attention and notoriety they seek. When we as reporters encourage grieving parents to abandon their families the day after losing their children to discuss how it makes them feel, we have lost our journalistic integrity. I no longer wish to be a part of this exploitation. --John Gibson, upon resigning as host of MSNBC's "Internight", 1999 Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism. --Graham Greene (1904-1991) English novelist, _Ways of Escape_ [1980] If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM. --Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) American Democratic statesman, President [1963-1969] - Not long ago, one of the nationally known picture magazines had a photograph of a man prostrate on subway stairs. For thirty minutes many people passed him by without ever a helping hand. The editorial comment was about the coldness of the modern man in the face of distress. What was forgotten was that the photographer of the picture magazine did nothing for thirty minutes for the afflicted individual except to snap pictures and make his own living. --Fulton John Sheen (1895-1979) Roman Catholic bishop; the first popular preacher to appear on television, _On Being Human_ [1982] ---- THE MEDIA (TOPICAL) Why Levee Breaches In New Orleans Were Late-Breaking News By JOE HAGAN and JOSEPH T. HALLINAN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL September 12, 2005 On Sunday, Sept. 4, Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press" asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain President Bush's statement that the government couldn't have anticipated breaches in levees in New Orleans. Mr. Chertoff talked about news coverage. "Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers, and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet,' " he said. "Because if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse. It was on Tuesday that the levee -- may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday -- that the levee started to break." But now it is known that major levee breaks occurred much earlier than that, starting in the morning of Monday, Aug. 29, the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Even as the storm veered off and many observers felt a sense of relief, the Industrial Canal levee in eastern New Orleans was giving way, and a rush of water swiftly submerged much of the Lower Ninth Ward and areas nearby, trapping thousands of people on rooftops and in attics. The 17th Street Canal levee also was breached early Monday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now believes, resulting in a slower-rising flood over a larger area. Yet it wasn't until Tuesday that most people across the country, apparently including Mr. Chertoff, realized that any levees at all had been breached. Did media outlets get it wrong, as Mr. Chertoff claimed? Some did, some didn't. A look at news reports of the events of Aug. 29 paints a picture of confusion, miscommunication and conflicting information among some government officials and news media. Several major news outlets, including Viacom Inc.'s CBS network and National Public Radio reported the breaking of the Industrial Canal and flooding on Monday, although not all of the reports acknowledged the extent of the devastation. The Wall Street Journal reported the Industrial Canal breach but no others. The New Orleans office of the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 8:14 a.m. Monday, saying "a levee breach occurred along the industrial canal at Tennessee Street. 3 to 8 feet of water is expected due to the breach." The media largely ignored it. The NWS's source of information was ham-radio transmissions by the Orleans Levee Board, a city-state agency. The 8:14 warning was the last one the local office issued before its communications were cut off. The statement was repeated only once more, at 10:52 a.m., by the National Weather Service office in Mobile, Ala. Yet some government officials certainly appeared aware of a breach and said so on network television. At 7:33 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, Gov. Kathleen B. Blanco said on NBC, "I believe the water has breached the levee system, and is -- is coming in." In its Aug. 29 online edition, the New Orleans Times-Picayune first reported a breach in the 17th Street Canal levee at 2 p.m., citing City Hall officials. No other major news outlets picked up that report. The newspaper's Web site also reported massive flooding near the Industrial Canal, writing that city officials "fielded at least 100 calls from people in distress in the Lower 9th Ward and eastern New Orleans." At about 2:30, it reported that the Industrial Canal had been breached, citing a National Weather Service report. But in the hours immediately following the storm, some news organizations seemed to play down the damage in New Orleans. Introducing "World News Tonight" on Aug. 29, anchor Charles Gibson said: "In New Orleans, entire neighborhoods are underwater, but the levees held. The nightmare scenario of an entire city underwater did not happen." A spokeswoman for ABC, a unit of Walt Disney Co., had no comment. Officials with the U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers said last week that one canal breach came to the attention of corps personnel early Monday, Aug. 29 and another by midday. But the "fog of war" and "massive logistical problems with communications in the hours after the storm hit" created some confusion, said John Rickey, a spokesman for the corps. No major newspaper printed a headline that literally said New Orleans "dodged a bullet," as Mr. Chertoff claimed. But some did say the city had escaped a direct hit -- which was true, but misleading --while others focused on the levees along the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, it was the levees along canals extending south from Lake Pontchartrain that gave way. "But the city managed to avoid the worst of the worst," read a front- page Washington Post article on Tuesday. "The Mississippi River did not breach New Orleans's famed levees to any serious degree, at least in part because Katrina veered 15 miles eastward of its predicted track just before landfall." Leonard Downie Jr., the Washington Post's executive editor, says the paper's reporting was hampered by communications problems caused by the hurricane. "Unfortunately, where our communication was good was where it wasn't flooding," he says. "All the media were hampered by the fact that people on the ground didn't know what happened." In the 5 p.m. news report on Fox News Channel, anchor Shepard Smith informed viewers of "late word" that the levees had held. But a few minutes later, in the same program, a public-health expert told the channel the exact opposite: "Well, the National Weather Service are reporting that one of the levees was breached. ... People have been forced out onto the roofs of their homes." Why the confusion? A Fox News spokeswoman says Mr. Smith was referring to levees near his "physical location," which was Bourbon Street in the French Quarter -- that is, levees on the Mississippi. Many reporters, working on foot, isolated in higher, drier sections and focused on the survival of the city's tourist districts, were unaware of the unfolding disaster in poor neighborhoods of New Orleans. It wasn't until Monday evening that a private helicopter company, Helinet Helicopter Services of Los Angeles, began feeding the first aerial images of New Orleans to Fox News, ABC, NBC, CNN and CBS. By early Tuesday morning, most major media had become aware of the awful extent of the destruction. [ . . . ] Some National Weather Service statements on Aug. 29 described levees in the Orleans and St. Bernard parishes as "overtopped." On its Aug. 29 "World News Tonight" broadcast, ABC News showed a computer-generated model of water pouring over a levee, but not breaking it. The wind-lashed correspondent in New Orleans, Jeffrey Kaufman, said, "It was simply the volume of rain that left many areas under water. ... This was not the apocalyptic hurricane that many had feared." -- Average Weekday Circulation Newspaper Sept. 2005 Circ Gain/Loss Change USA Today 2,296,335 -13,518 -0.59% The Wall Street Journal 2,083,660 -23,114 -1.10% The New York Times 1,126,190 5,133 0.46% Los Angeles Times 843,432 -33,184 -3.79% Daily News, New York 688,584 -26,468 -3.70% The Washington Post 678,779 -28,991 -4.09% New York Post 662,681 -11,708 -1.74% Chicago Tribune 586,122 -14,866 -2.47% Houston Chronicle (M-S) 521,419 -33,367 -6.01% Boston Globe 414,225 -37,246 -8.25% Arizona Republic (M-S) 411,043 -2,225 -0.54% San Francisco Chronicle (M-S) 400,906 -79,681 -16.58% Star-Ledger (N.J.) 400,092 50 0.01% Star Tribune (Minn.) (M-S) 374,528 -961 0.26% Atlanta Journal-Constitution 362,426 -34,674 -8.73% Philadelphia Inquirer 357,679 -11,635 -3.15% Detroit Free-Press 341,248 -7,590 -2.18% Cleveland Plain-Dealer 339,055 -15,845 -4.46% Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) 333,515 -4,192 -1.24% San Diego Union-Tribune 314,279 -20,908 -6.24% --Top 20 Papers By Circulation, According to New FAS-FAX, Editor and Publisher Just how quickly the landscape is shifting was demonstrated in the past two weeks. Google posted blowout profit numbers in the third quarter, with earnings rising sevenfold, handily beating estimates as its stock pushed the $400 mark. Rival Yahoo! saw revenues rise 42 percent in the quarter. [...] Yahoo!, which pulls together content from a wealth of sources and whose 400 million unique monthly viewers make it the world's most visited Web portal, is expected to post revenues of about $5.3 billion this year, up 47 percent over 2004, with a fat profit margin in excess of 40 percent. [...] And that's big bucks. Internet advertising is up by 26 percent this year to $14.7 billion (out of total advertising of $278 billion) and is expected to top $26 billion by 2010, according to research by Forrester Research. Google alone sold $6.1 billion in ads this year, double that of last year and more than any newspaper chain, magazine group, or television network. By 2006, its ad revenues are projected to top $9 billion, which would put it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales and ahead of such giants as NBC, Universal, and Time Warner. -- Betsy Streisand and Richard J. Newman, "The New Media Elites," _U.S. News & World Report_ http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/051114/14media.htm  ;void(0)) MEDIA BIAS . . see "JOURNALISM" for related links The best form of newspaper propaganda was not 'propaganda' (i.e.., editorials and exhortation), but slanted news which appeared to be straight. --Leonard W. Doob (19092000) American psychologist, educator, and author. ^^ The portrayal of lawyers in literature (if you can call it that), on TV, and in the movies has grown darker, more cynical. The same is true of law enforcement officers. At one time, police, detectives, and others of this breed were usually portrayed sympathetically. Once in a while, the police were shown as bumbling fools, as in the old silent movies about the Keystone Kops. In most "private eye" novels and movies the private eye, not the police, solves the case. This tradition is at least as old as Sherlock Holmes, whose instincts were always sounder than those of poor Inspector Lestrade. But in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in most novels about private eyes, the police were merely incompetent, or less acute than Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot or Miss Silver or the other amateurs; they were rarely if ever brutal and malevolent. Until roughly the 1960s, the FBI and the CIA were also invariably good guys heroic crime fighters, as shown on such programs as the FBI in Peace and War. But this is emphatically no longer the case. Portrayals of the police, the CIA, the FBI in the late decades of the century were negative, if not downright paranoid. This is true, too, of portrayals of government in general: movies, in particular, peddle the most extreme conspiracy theories: about the Kennedy assassination, or the machinations of the CIA. In The Manchurian Candidate, the Communists brainwash a man and train him to carry out an assassination that would turn the government over to evil conspirators. (The plot fails in the end.) The president is not immune from these images of darkness. True, in Air Force One the president (a handsome dog played by Harrison Ford) is as heroic as one can possibly get. In other movies of the 1990s, however, the president has been a villain; or even a deep-dyed criminal. Earlier, in Dr. Strangelove, the president was sensible enough, but he was surrounded by dangerous fools, and a lunatic in the air force set off a nuclear holocaust: this was a black comedy indeed. Popular culture is also quite ambiguous in the way it portrays the outlaw, the gunman, the Mafia the people on the other side of the law. Hays office rules insisted that crime must not pay; criminals had to be brought to justice. [ . . . ] --Lawrence M. Friedman (1930 ) _American Law in the 20th Century_ [2002] Ch. 20 "Taking Stock" pp. 593-594 ^^ During the course of this administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levied against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and sap its safety; they might, indeed, have been corrected by the wholesome punishments reserved and provided by the laws of the several States against falsehood and defamation; but public duties more urgent press on the time of public servants, and the offenders have therefore been left to find their punishment in the public indignation. --Thomas Jefferson (17431826) American statesman and president [18011809]. In his second Inaugural Address. A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets. --Napoleon I (17691821) Emperor of France [18041815]. TOPICAL - Too many people in the "American" media have lost any concept of loyalty to their country if they even consider it their country, rather than just their residence. Yeah, that's right, I'm playing the "patriotism" card. But not the way you think. Our country is at war. And it's a war in which victory absolutely depends on the Muslim world perceiving it as a war between the U.S and its allies on one side, and fanatical murderous terrorists on the other. If it is ever perceived as a war against Islam, then we have lost. The world has lost. So during such a difficult time, even people who think the Iraq War or even the whole war on terror is a horrible mistake still have an obligation of loyalty to the nation that offers them protection, prosperity, and freedom. I mean, what kind of idiot breaks a hole in the hull of his boat during a storm, just because he doesn't like the guy at the tiller and thinks the storm could have been avoided? --Orson Scott Card, "The Riots of the Faithful" [15 May 2005] And yet the irony is that the reason the radical Islamists hate the West so much is primarily because of the unchecked and uncheckable excesses of the Smartish. From Hollywood to news- people to the soft-subject professors in our universities, the culture that makes people like Osama bin Laden want to blow us up or crush us into dust is the culture of the R-rated movie, the anti-religion intellectual, the glorified abortionist, the babies- without-marriage crowd, and the what-me-worry media elite. Osama isn't much worried about Christianity. Why should he? If a Muslim converts to Christianity in a Muslim country, he'll just be killed. Christianity, despite our apparent numbers, has been reduced to nothing more dangerous to Islam than a swarm of gnats. It's a lot harder to keep dirty movies and atheistic Western ideas out of Muslim lands. That's the established church of the West these days liberty without responsibility, filth praised as "edgy" and virtue despised as "bourgeouis." If the Islamists ever ruled the world and only a fool thinks that history offers some guarantee against it then America's unpatriotic elite will realize ... No they won't. Whom do I think I'm kidding? They'll still blame it on Bush or the Christian right or the oil companies, because the central tenet of their belief is that their side can do no wrong. Wow. That sounds just like "my country, right or wrong." Only instead of a country with borders, they have Smartland, the nation of people who know far better how to order the world than those ignorant unwashed masses of voters that keep electing morons who can't pronounce "nuclear." They're fanatical Smartland patriots. So fanatical they don't hesitate long enough to get their facts right before running a story that seriously weakens America's position in a deadly war that has already blown up the two tallest buildings in the capital city of Smartland. Because they haven't recognized yet that Smartland only exists as a parasite, sucking the blood out of the Heartland that they have such contempt for. --ibid. - The list was so long that there was no time during the live shot to provide context. I read the information minister's points verbatim. Moments later, I was downstairs in the newsroom on the first floor of the Information Ministry. Mr. Johnson approached, having seen my performance on a TV monitor. "You were a bit flat there, Peter," he said. Again, I was astonished. The president of CNN was telling me I seemed less-than-enthusiastic reading Saddam Hussein's propaganda. --Peter Collins "Corruption at CNN" - We all tell the world who we are by our actions. If you can decipher my last three meals from the stains on my shirt, I am a slob. If you catch me with my hand in your pocket, I'm a crook. If I rip your clothes off and force you into sex, I am a rapist. When the report true or false, exaggerated or understated, deliberate policy or one bad apple when the report comes out that your most sacred religious book has been desecrated and you proceed OUT INTO THE STREET TO RIOT AND KILL PEOPLE, you are a 12th-century pre-civilized primitive. There's room for 12th-century pre-civilized primitives. The Sepik River Valley of New Guinea is full of them. So is the Orinoco Valley of Venezuela and the western Amazon of Ecuador and Peru. I want to help them with their material needs and at least expose them to a modern way of life they may gradually join. I don't want to get killed by them because I carelessly stepped on a holy twig while the witch doctor was in the sensitive part of his incantation during the half-moon. [...] It's hard to argue when the truth is simply too much to expect of the other side. In a world where Vladimir Putin thinks President George W. Bush fired Dan Rather because he was angry at his Air National Guard coverage, how can you expect an Afghan-Pakistani- Indonesian rioter to understand that Newsweek magazine is NOT an official organ of the United States government that prints only that which is approved by the rulers of America? [...] In Jihad, it's not what is, it's what your enemies can MAKE of what is. And we've seen a live, murderous demonstration of what the Jihadists can make of a throwaway rumor that Americans flushed the Koran down the toilet. Thomas Jefferson and the boys promised us a FREE press. They never promised us a fair press, a prudent press, a protective press, or a patriotic press. So, our American press is free free enough to refuse to burn a flag in a crowded theater. --Barry Farber, "Civilized vs. Uncivilized Cultures" - [It] is this inability [of network TV anchors] to see liberal views as liberal that is at the heart of the entire problem. This is why Phyllis Schlafly is the conservative woman who heads that conservative organization but Patricia Ireland is merely the head of NOW. No liberal labels necessary. Robert Bork is the conservative judge. Laurence Tribe is the noted Harvard law professor. Rush Limbaugh is the conservative talk show host. Rosie O'Donnell is simply Rosie O'Donnell, no matter how many liberal opinions she shares with her audience. And that's why the media stars can so easily talk about "right wing" Republicans and "right wing" Christians and "right wing" Miami Cubans and "right wing" radio talk-show hosts. But the only time they utter the words "left wing" is when they're talking about an airplane. --Bernard Goldberg, _The Wall Street Journal_ [24 May 2001] - Reporters ignored atrocities to get access in Saddam's Iraq John Leo September 22, 2003 John Burns, the great New York Times reporter, offers us a brutally blunt assessment of how badly Western correspondents covered Saddam Hussein's regime. His report, excerpted by The Wall Street Journal and Editor & Publisher, is spreading rapidly on the Internet and is bound to have an impact on the public's already low respect for most journalists. The compulsively candid Burns, until recently the New York Times bureau chief in Iraq, wrote his comments for the new book "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq" (The Lyons Press), a collection of first-person accounts by journalists in Iraq. Burns, who has covered China, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan and Bosnia, says the terror of Saddam Hussein's Iraq was unmatched anywhere in the world, except perhaps by North Korea today. Iraq was a vast slaughterhouse, he says, but most Western reporters worked hard to keep the news from getting out because they were afraid of losing access or getting expelled from Iraq. The monstrous savagery of life under Saddam the vast tortures and up to a million dead was "the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents," he writes. Burns laid some of this out earlier in the Times the bribes and gifts from journalists to Saddam's henchmen, with reporters turning over copies of their stories to show how friendly they were to the regime. "A rigorous system for controlling and monitoring Western journalists has been in place in Iraq for decades, based on a wafer-thin facade of civility," he wrote in the Times last April 20. In his "Embedded" article, Burns is more caustic about the payoffs by journalists. He says big shots at the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from TV reporters, "who then behaved as if they were in Belgium." Will these unnamed TV reporters be called to account? As an example of evasive noncoverage, Burns cites the reluctance of most reporters to say anything about Abu Ghraib prison, the heart of Saddam's reign of terror. Burns says he couldn't find a single colleague in journalism who had read the human rights reports about butchery at the prison. Last October, when President Bush's pressure caused Saddam to announce a limited amnesty at Abu Ghraib, the BBC didn't think it was worth sending anyone to the prison. Burns writes: "You had the BBC thinking it was inappropriate to go there because it means that it causes trouble." Of the reporters who did go to the prison, he says, "Ninety-eight percent of them had never heard of Abu Ghraib. Had no idea what it was." After the amnesty turned into a mob scene and a near-riot and unofficial jail break, some groups marched to the intelligence ministry. Burns says this was a phenomenal story, an actual protest in a terrorized land, but "some of my colleagues chose not to cover that." No use reporting real news if it's going to cause any inconvenience. "There is corruption in our business," Burns writes. "In the run-up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility." The usual rationalization by wayward correspondents is that Saddam's horrors couldn't be reported without jeopardizing the lives of sources and reporters. CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, offered that lame excuse in a notorious New York Times op-ed piece on April 11. It was a devil's handshake: CNN got to stay in Iraq; Saddam Hussein got good press. Eason said he knew all about the beatings and electroshock torture. One woman who talked to CNN was beaten daily for months in front of her father, then torn limb from limb. Her body parts were left in a bag on her family's doorstep. But CNN's viewers hadn't been told. Burns has no patience with excuses like Eason's. He is a reporter who was jailed for six days for his reporting in China and who risked being killed by Saddam's regime in its dying days. At one point, he wondered whether he would wind up in Abu Ghraib himself. He says of Iraq: "We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. They (reporters) rationalized it away." Though President Bush chose to make weapons of mass destruction his principal argument against Saddam, Burns writes, "this war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights alone. This was a grotesque charnel house, and also a genuine threat to us. We had the power to end it and we did end it." Even if as many as 5,000 Iraqis died in the war, Burns writes, that's fewer than would have died if Saddam's killing machine had gone on as usual during the six-week period of battle. The war should have been justified on this basis, he says, "but you'd never have known it by reading most of the coverage of the war by those correspondents." Criticisms like this are often shrugged off as sour outbursts by conservatives who don't understand the press. What happens now that the outburst is coming from the best reporter to serve in Iraq? - - Former CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter said Thursday that Dan Rather's liberal bias has so permeated the "CBS Evening News" that even he can't stand to watch anymore. "I stopped watching it some time ago," the ex-network news boss writes in today's Los Angeles Times. "The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me." --Carl Limbacher, Ex-CBS News Prez Can't Stand Rather, [January 2005] - - The Path to Hysteria By Cyrus Nowrasteh _The Wall Street Journal_ September 18, 2006 I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe. What I am is a writer who takes his job very seriously, as do most of my colleagues: Also, one who recently took on the most distressing and important story it will ever fall to me to tell. I considered it a privilege when asked to write the script for "The Path to 9/11." I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. The American people deserve to know that history: They have paid for it in blood. Like all Americans, I wish it were not so. I wish there were no terrorists. I wish there had been no 9/11. I wish we could squabble among ourselves in assured security. But wishes avail nothing. [ . . . ] It would have been good to be able to report due diligence on the part of those who judged the film, the ones who held forth on it before watching a moment of it. Instead, in the rush to judgment, and the effort to portray the series as the work of a right-wing zealot, much was made of my "friendship" with Rush Limbaugh (a connection limited to two social encounters), but nothing of any acquaintance with well-known names on the other side of the political spectrum. No reference to Abby Mann, for instance, with whom I worked on "10,000 Black Men Named George" (whose hero is an African-American communist) or Oliver Stone, producer of "The Day Reagan Was Shot," a film I wrote and directed. Clearly, those enraged that a film would criticize the Clinton administration's antiterrorism policies though critical of its successor as well were willing to embrace only one scenario: The writer was a conservative hatchetman. In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, "No." I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response. The hysteria engendered by the series found more than one target. In addition to the death threats and hate mail directed at me, and my grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger, there developed an impassioned search for incriminating evidence on everyone else connected to the film. And in director David Cunningham, the searchers found paydirt! His father had founded a Christian youth outreach mission. The whiff of the younger Mr. Cunningham's possible connection to this enterprise was enough to set the hounds of suspicion baying. A religious mission! A New York Times reporter wrote, without irony or explanation, that an issue that raised questions about the director was his involvement in his father's outreach work. In the era of McCarthyism, the merest hint of a connection to communism sufficed to inspire dark accusations, the certainty that the accused was part of a malign conspiracy. Today, apparently, you can get something of that effect by charging a connection with a Christian mission. [ . . . ] Despite intense political pressure to pull the film right up until airtime, Disney/ ABC stood tall and refused to give in. For this for not buckling to threats from Democratic senators threatening to revoke ABC station licenses Disney CEO Rober Iger and ABC executives deserve every commendation. Hence the 28 million viewers over two nights, and the ratings victory Monday night (little reported by the media), are gratifying indeed. [ . . . ] Mr. Nowrasteh wrote the screenplay for "The Path to 9/11." - - On September 30 2000, two days after Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel's opposition Likud Party, went for a walk on Temple Mount, Palestinians mounted a demonstration at Gaza's Netzarim Junction. A 55-second piece of video footage of that demonstration, transmitted that day by the French TV station France 2, was to cause unprecedented violence in the Middle East and throughout the world. The footage, with a voice-over by France 2's Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, showed what was said to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura by Israeli marksmen. Viewers saw the child crouching in terror behind his father, Jamal, as they sheltered next to a barrel under what Enderlin said was Israeli gunfire, and then slumping to the ground as Enderlin pronounced that he was dead. [...] But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55-seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israels name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder. It was, in short, a modern-day blood libel, an updated version of the medieval calumny that the Jews target gentile children for murder which itself caused the murder of thousands of Jews over the centuries. How do we know the footage was a lie? Because many of us have seen the evidence for ourselves in a French courtroom. Ironically, this blood libel was only exposed to public view because France 2 and its correspondent Enderlin brought a libel suit against a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, for saying that the "killing" was "pure fiction" and that al-Dura wasnt dead at all. [...] I was in the Paris court on the day France 2 reluctantly complied and I saw the footage (minus a few minutes that Enderlin had excised and which are said to be even more explosive). This showed clearly that the whole thing was a set-up from start to finish. The cameraman said the Israelis had fired continuously for 45 minutes. Yet the footage did not show people falling under fire. It showed instead Palestinians demonstrating, throwing rocks and so forth, in a positively carnival atmosphere. Youths strutted about, giving declamatory interviews and grinning at the camera; boys rode by on bicycles. And no one showed any sign of injury. There were no wounds; there was no blood. From time to time, demonstrators were pushed on to stretchers and into ambulances but with no evidence of any disturbance to their anatomy. Enderlin said he had cut out the scenes of al-Duras actual death agony because "it was unbearable". But when the footage was shown, it became clear no such scenes existed. There was no agony and no death. Al-Dura and his father showed no sign of any wound or injury throughout. Supposedly riddled with bullets, their bodies remained totally unmarked. There was no blood anywhere. A red stain on the child turned out to be a piece of red cloth, which suddenly materialised. You see the boy slumping to the ground. But before he does so, while he is still hanging on to his father and screaming, a voice shouts in Arabic: "The boy is dead! The boy is dead!" Asked to explain this astounding prescience, Enderlins team replied that the Arabic in fact meant: "The boy is in danger of dying." At this, the courtroom laughed out loud. After Enderlin pronounces the boy to be dead, the corpse mysteriously assumes four different positions. You see the cameramans fingers making the "take two" sign to signal the repeat of a scene. And then you see the lifeless martyr raise his arm and peep through his fingers presumably to check whether his thespian services are still required or whether he can now get up and go home. --Melanie Phillips, Faking a Killing, Standpoint.Online, July 2008 - - There are two ways, I suppose, one could inform readers of the Geneva Convention stipulation against using places of worship to conduct military attacks. One might be to headline saying that Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques. That would be one way to present the information. Another might be to say: Mosques Targeted in Fallujah. That was the Los Angeles Times headline this morning. --Donald Rumsfeld (1932- ) American Secretary of Defense [19751977] & [20012006]. DoD news briefing, April 27, 2004 - - Are we about to see a dramatic shift in the political landscape? If the findings of a new CBS News/New York Times poll are accurate, the answer may well be yes....The Republican-controlled Congress gets even lower marks, an approval rating of only 23 percent. That's just a little better than [the 20 percent approval in] 1994 when dissatisfaction was running so high that Republicans wrested control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. --Bob Schieffer on the May 9, 2006 CBS Evening News. One week before the elections, Americans are confused about the present, pessimistic about the future and cynical about the ability of government to make things better....Republicans seem to be failing in their effort to make these elections a referendum on the President [Clinton].... It's hard to gauge who'll be helped or hurt by all this gloom come Election Day. --Bob Schieffer on the Nov. 2, 1994 Evening News, first reporting the same poll referenced above showing the Democratic-controlled Congress at 20 percent approval. - I think this is another reflection of the overwhelming journalistic tilt towards liberalism and those programs. --Time Washington contributing editor Hugh Sidey responding to a caller who asked if journalists are in favor of affirmative action, [21 July 1995] C-SPAN Washington Journal. - When the issue is gun control, you may have heard innumerable times that murder rates are much lower in countries like Britain or Germany, which have more restrictive gun control laws than ours. But how often if ever have you heard that murder rates are much higher than ours in some other countries like Russia or Brazil that also have more restrictive gun control laws than ours? How often have you heard that murder rates are lower in some countries, such as Switzerland and Israel, where gun ownership is more widespread than in the United States? Not very often, if at all, because liberals in the media leave the impression that gun control is a key to the murder rate. They have every right to believe that. But that does not include the right to filter out facts that go against their theory. --Thomas Sowell (1930 ) American economist and author. - - You gotta admire the way the media stayed on the Democrats' sinking California ship right to the very end. On the CNN Web site, even after Gray Davis had conceded, they were sticking to the loser's talking-points: "Schwarzenegger, who, like Hitler, is a native of Austria ..." CNN? Oh, that's that network with Larry King, who, like the Son of Sam, is a native of Brooklyn. Used to be owned by Ted Turner, who, like the Cincinnati Strangler, is a native of Cincinnati. Now part of Time Warner, founded by the Warner Brothers, the oldest of whom, Harry Warner, like many Auschwitz guards, was a native of Poland. --Mark Steyn, "Desperate Dems no match for Arnie", _Chicago Sun Times_ - The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naοve, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third- rate decade, the nineteen-sixties. --Norman Tebbit (1931 ) British Conservative politician. In _Independent_ [24 February 1990]. There is a liberal bias. It's demonstrable. There is a, particularly at the networks, ... there is a liberal bias. There is a liberal bias at Newsweek, the magazine I work for....[ABC White House reporter] Brit Hume's bosses are liberal and they're always quietly denouncing him as being a right-wing nut. --Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas in an admission on Inside Washington [12 May 1996]. - Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election. The second and third waves in May and September were, in retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was. --Bui Tin, Colonel, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam's army, received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. Interview of Bui Tin conducted by Stephen Young "How North Vietnam Won the War," _Wall Street Journal_ [3 August 1995] - America is often portrayed as an ignorant, unsophisticated sort of place, full of bible bashers and ruled to a dangerous extent by trashy television, superstition and religious bigotry, a place lacking in respect for evidence based knowledge. I know that is how it is portrayed because I have done my bit to paint that picture... --BBC's Washington correspondent Justin Webb - When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1. --"Finding Biases on the Bus", _The New York Times_ [1 August 2004] The misreporting [of the Tet offensive], along with Communist and North Vietnamese agents in the United States, led to demonstrations in the streets by Americans in protest of the war. Gen. Giap later wrote in his book, that the news media reporting and the demonstrations in America surprised them. Instead of seeking a conditional surrender, they would now hold out because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of victory could be theirs. http://www.1stcavmedic.com/tet_offensive_of_1968.htm The media had no reticence last year about making sure their readers and viewers understood that the Trent Lott who belonged to a racially-discriminatory fraternity was part of the Southern rise of the Republican Party, but in announcing the Wednesday passing away of former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, the racist, segregationist who led the state in the late 1960s, the networks refused to inform their viewers that he was a Democrat. ... Below, a rundown of the Wednesday non-identifying of Maddox's party, starting with ABC, CNN, FNC and NBC in the morning (CBS's Early Show didn't mention it, the MRC's Brian Boyd informed me), and then the evening reports on ABC, CBS, CNN, CNBC and NBC. http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2003/cyb20030626.asp#1 - Key U.S. Ally on Iraq Wins 4th Term in Australia -- headline, _The Washington Post_, Oct. 10, 2004, **p.A34** Spanish Socialists Oust Party of U.S. War Ally -- headline, _The Washington Post_, March 15, 2004, **front page** - - Newsweek's false, retracted story about American guards flushing the Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo doesn't necessarily mean the magazine's staff hates America or Bush, or wants us to lose in Iraq. To be charitable, let's just chalk that one up to sloppy journalism. But I'm at a loss to explain this, from the February 2 issue of Newsweek's Japanese edition: [see picture at URL below] As you can see, the cover story shows an American flag, dirtied and tossed in a trash can, its staff snapped in two. The large white text reads, "Amerika ga shinda hi", which translates to "The day America died." The equivalent international edition of Newsweek, the January 31 issue, featured a picture of Bush on the cover, with the caption "America Leads ...But is Anyone Following?": [see picture at URL below] Both of the above editions featured a cover-story article by Andrew Moravcsik, titled "Dream on, America". (This was translated into Japanese as "Yume no kuni Amerika ga kuchihateru toki", which is even harsher; it means, roughly, "America, the dream country, is rotting away".) According to Newsweek itself, the article described "the world's rejection of the American way of life." Moravcsik's article did not run in the American edition of that same issue. The cover was also a bit different. It featured Hilary Swank, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx, with the title "Oscar Confidential": [see picture at URL below] If you look carefully, you'll see that one of the articles from the other two editions is mentioned in a small blurb at the top: Fareed Zakaria's "High Hopes, Hard Facts" - here billed as "A reality check on Bush & 'Freedom'". Sure, they put scare quotes around "Freedom", but pretty tame stuff, all things considered. It's one thing for Newsweek to actively promote the notion that America is a "dead", "rotting" country overseas. But it's quite another thing indeed to hide those efforts from its American readers. If Newsweek really thinks America is dead, and our flag belongs in the trash, why won't it tell us? 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. --Riding Sun, "Newsweek: America is dead" - - In April 2004, when Spain's new premier announced a withdrawal of Spanish forces from Iraq, it was front-page news in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. A year later, when Silvio Berlusconi hinted he might start bringing Italian troops home, that was also a page-one article in the Times. The Post gave front-page treatment to a July 2004 piece about the pending departures of coalition members Norway, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines, and the probable exits of Holland and Poland. We could go on, but you get the point: When a U.S. ally pulls out of Iraq, it's a Big Story another sign of George Bush's "dwindling" coalition; a further "blow" to the war effort. But what about when an ally, or two, re-ups? Well, that's No Big Deal. Earlier this month, Japan decided to keep its contingent in Iraq for another year until December 14, 2006. Meanwhile, Prime Minister John Howard said Australia's 450-troop team, which is guarding Japan's task force in southern Iraq, would stay past its May deadline and remain as long as the Japanese did. Good news for the coalition, good news for the Iraqis. Yet somehow wonder of wonders this story warranted zero coverage in both the Times and the Post. Okay, maybe it wasn't A1, above-the-fold material. But to not mention it at all? In fairness to the Times and the Post, most other major U.S. newspapers including the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times ignored the story, too. --"The Scrapbook," _The Weekly Standard_ [26 December 2005] - - "Cooking the books on Iraqi deaths" Las Vegas Review-Journal [14 January 2008] Study that influenced election now largely discredited Three weeks before the 2006 midterm elections gave Democrats control of Congress, "A shocking study reported on the number of Iraqis who had died in the ongoing war," the National Review notes in its Jan. 4 cover story. Published by The Lancet, a venerable British medical journal, that study estimated the number of "excess" Iraqi deaths after the 2003 U.S. invasion at 654,965. Almost 92 percent of the dead, the study asserted, were killed by bullets, bombs or U.S. airstrikes. The stunning toll was more than 10 times the number of deaths that had been estimated by the Iraqi or U.S. governments, or by any human-rights group. Those predisposed to oppose U.S. policy in Iraq seized on the numbers and trumpeted them giddily. CBS News called the report a "new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq." CNN said, "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports." The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times generated large stories that gave the study results credence. Democrats who had opposed Mr. Bush's Iraq campaign embraced the report. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., issued a statement saying that the "new study is a chilling and somber reminder of the unacceptably high human cost of this war. ... We must not stay on the same failed course any longer." Such remarks, amplified by myriad articles and broadcasts, helped cement Americans' increasingly negative perceptions of the war. "For those who wanted to believe it, it gave them a new number to circulate, [and] it was a defining moment" in attitudes toward the war, said pollster John Zogby in a CNN interview. But it now turns out the report was financed by wealthy leftists including George Soros, and that its authors (Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts) are anti-war activists who requested their studies be published shortly before the U.S. elections which the editor of The Lancet agreed to do "with an expedited peer review process and without seeing the surveyors' original data," Neil Munro and Carl Cannon report in the National Review. Furthermore, after an exhaustive investigation, Messrs. Munro and Cannon conclude the studies' authors may have performed their field research "improperly or not at all." The 2006 study relies on a system of multiplication, in which each death supposedly recorded by the survey teams in the small number of "sampled" neighborhoods is multiplied by the number 2,000 to reach an estimate for the number of deaths nationwide. A car bomb attack in Sadr City that killed at least 60 people appears to have been counted by the researchers, even though it happened a day after the survey was supposed to end, critics say. Multiply that one incident by 2,000, and it adds 12,000 statistical "car bomb deaths" nationwide as though car bombs are as frequent and as deadly in rural areas as they are in heavily contested Baghdad (and as though internecine car bombings are the same thing as innocent civilians strafed and killed by chortling monsters in U.S. uniforms.) Both the 2006 and a prior 2004 Lancet study of Iraqi war deaths by the same authors rely entirely on data provided by Lafta, who operated with little American supervision and has rarely appeared in public or been interviewed about his role, the National Review reports. Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Until last fall, Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite religious leader whose Mahdi Army militia crippled Sunni insurgent groups in Baghdad during 2006, controlled the health ministry, which employed some of Lafta's researchers. "The authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data," says David Kane, a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University. In plain English, the Lancet study on civilian deaths was absurd making up fairy tale graveyards containing hundreds of thousands of bodies that no one can locate and when asked to see their data, the authors have responded either by making stuff up, or claiming, "The dog ate my homework." Yes, wars cause unintended "collateral" death and destruction among civilian populations. But the fantastic and fanciful Lancet numbers were promoted without skepticism by branches of the news media that welcomed them precisely because they told a story those media wanted to tell. A story designed to hurt an administration they despised, promoted despite the fact it also strengthened our enemies, and may have contributed to the loss of U.S. lives. Political opinions were formed based on those credulous reports. A little, "Whoops, have we got egg on our face" at this late date, is hardly sufficient to right that wrong. - end page | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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