Lies, Dammed Lies and CNN’s Mideast Reporting

Granted we are in a recession and all media outlets have trimmed staff, but CNN REALLY Needs a fact checker. Since Israel began the bombing of Gaza last week, the Cable Nonsense Network has been doing its best to spread misinformation about Gaza War. CNN’s Lies included blaming Israel for breaking the cease fire and accusing Israel of not letting necessary medical supplies into Gaza. But then again, CNN has never been big on the truth:

Who Broke the Ceasefire? CNN’s “Fact Check” Falls Short-CAMERA
by Alex Safian, PhD

In recent days CNN has been playing an interview with Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti in which he claims that Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas by launching an attack in November, and that the current fighting is therefore the fault of Israel rather than the Palestinians. Barghouti also charged that Israel’s supposed blockade of Gaza was a further violation of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

Barghouti’s charges are nonsense and easily disproved – but apparently not easy enough for CNN to disprove.

On Dec. 31, perhaps in response to complaints about the Barghouti interview, anchor Rick Sanchez made a great show of supposedly “fact checking” the charges “fairly [and] honestly.” Here’s the clip:

CNN’s intrepid fact-checkers found a few online articles confirming that there was an Israeli attack in November, and were satisfied and looked no further? Does CNN really believe finding such articles proves that Israel broke the ceasefire? 

Might there have been prior serious violations by the Palestinians? In fact there were many such violations, including dozens of rockets and mortars fired into Israel during the so-called ceasefire. And there was also sniper fire against Israeli farmers, anti-tank rockets and rifle shots fired at soldiers in Israel, and not one but two attempts to abduct Israeli soldiers and bring them into Gaza.

All of this was missed by Rick Sanchez, his co-anchor Jim Clancy, and the CNN fact-checkers. Here are some of the details:

(most of this data is from The Six Months of the Lull Arrangement, a detailed report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, an Israeli NGO)

From the start of the ceasefire at 6 AM on June 19 till the incident on November 4th cited by CNN, the following attacks were launched against Israel from Gaza in direct violation of the agreement:

• 18 mortars were fired at Israel in this period, beginning on the night of June 23.
• 20 rockets were fired, beginning on June 24, when 3 rockets hit the Israeli town of Sderot.
• On July 6 farmers working in the fields of Nahal Oz were attacked by light arms fire from Gaza.
• On the night of August 15 Palestinians fired across the border at Israeli soldiers near the Karni crossing.
• On October 31 an IDF patrol spotted Palestinians planting an explosive device near the security fence in the area of the Sufa crossing. As the patrol approached the fence the Palestinians fired two anti-tank missiles.

There were two Palestinian attempts to infiltrate from Gaza into Israel apparently to abduct Israelis. Both were major violations of the ceasefire.

• The first came to light on Sept. 28, when Israeli personnel arrested Jamal Atallah Sabah Abu Duabe. The 21-year-old Rafah resident had used a tunnel to enter Egypt and from there planned to slip across the border into Israel. Investigation revealed that Abu Duabe was a member of Hamas’s Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and that he planned to lure Israeli soldiers near the border by pretending to be a drug smuggler, capture them, and then sedate them with sleeping pills in order to abduct them directly into Gaza through a preexisting tunnel. For more details click here and here.

• The second abduction plan was aborted on the night of Nov 4, thanks to a warning from Israeli Intelligence. Hamas had dug another tunnel into Israel and was apparently about to execute an abduction plan when IDF soldiers penetrated about 250 meters into Gaza to the entrance of the tunnel, hidden under a house. Inside the house were a number of armed Hamas members, who opened fire. The Israelis fired back and the house exploded – in total 6 or 7 Hamas operatives were killed and several were wounded. Among those killed were Mazen Sa’adeh, a Hamas brigade commander, and Mazen Nazimi Abbas, a commander in the Hamas special forces unit. For more details click here.

It was when Israel aborted this imminent Hamas attack that the group and other Palestinian groups in Gaza escalated their violations of the ceasefire by beginning to once again barrage Israel with rockets and mortars.

In light of these systematic and serious violations of the ceasefire by Hamas and other Palestinian groups in Gaza, it is absurd to claim that Israel broke the ceasefire in November or at any other time.

That CNN took Barghouti’s charges seriously and repeatedly aired them calls into serious question CNN’s competence as a news organization. It is also notable that while Sanchez said that Israelis denied Barghouti’s charges, he apparently did not see the need to have an actual Israeli appear to deny the charges in detail.

The Border Crossings – Open or Closed?

Barghouti also claimed that Israel violated the ceasefire agreement by allegedly refusing to open border crossings to allow food, fuel and other goods into Gaza. This charge is also false – Israel did open the crossings and allowed truckload after truckload of supplies to enter Gaza. Closures until November were short, and in direct response to Palestinian violations, some of which were detailed above.

To quote from the ITIC report on the “Lull Agreement” linked above:

On June 22, after four days of calm, Israel reopened the Karni and Sufa crossings to enable regular deliveries of consumer goods and fuel to the Gaza Strip. They were closed shortly thereafter, following the first violation of the arrangement, when rockets were fired at Sderot on June 24. However, when calm was restored, the crossings remained open for long periods of time. On August 17 the Kerem Shalom crossing was also opened for the delivery of goods, to a certain degree replacing the Sufa crossing, after repairs had been completed (the Kerem Shalom crossing was closed on April 19 when the IDF prevented a combined mass casualty attack in the region, as a result of which the crossing was almost completely demolished).

Before November 4, large quantities of food, fuel, construction material and other necessities for renewing the Gaza Strip’s economic activity were delivered through the Karni and Sufa crossings. A daily average of 80-90 trucks passed through the crossings, similar to the situation before they were closed following the April 19 attack on the Kerem Shalom crossing. Changes were made in the types of good which could be delivered, permitting the entry of iron, cement and other vital raw materials into the Gaza Strip. 

... Israel, before November 4, refrained from initiating action in the Gaza Strip but responded to rocket and mortar shell attacks by closing the crossings for short periods of time (hours to days). After November 4 the crossings were closed for long periods in response to the continued attacks against Israel. (Rearranged from p 11- 12)

Day to day details of the supplies delivered to Gaza and the numbers of trucks involved have been published by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and are available here. The figures confirm that the passages were indeed open and busy.

CNN conveyed uncritically – multiple times – Mustafa Barghouti’s charge that Israel violated the cease fire by not opening the crossings. Unfortunately this charge, like his charge that it was Israel that violated the ceasefire, is entirely bogus.

Too bad CNN anchors Rick Sanchez and Jim Clancy, along with the network’s fact checkers, didn’t bother to really fact check anything. Too bad CNN didn’t bother to actually interview an Israeli official or expert who could debunk Barghouti’s charges with the facts.

Judging by Rick Sanchez and Jim Clancy, viewers who want accurate, factual news from the Middle East should avoid CNN like the plague.

Open Letter to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Affiliates, also The Arizona Republic, U.S.A. Today

Open Letter to ABC, CBS, NBC,  PBS and Affiliates, also The Arizona Republic, U.S.A. Today and The East Valley Tribune,

 

    I thank God for computers and e-mail, without which, I would only see and hear ONE side of the news. I do use the word “News” loosely.

    I’m from the old school where a Journalist reported the facts, all the facts. That means when someone says something, you check the facts before reporting it. Obviously the new school allows you to editorialize and choose which facts you deem pertinent. We the public used to count on you for the news. Not anymore. You have tarnished the name “Journalist.”

    The media is having a love affair with Obama and you are not even trying to report the news. The bias is so obvious it makes me sick. You let news of Obama’s ties with questionable people go so you can hatchet McCain and Palen for the least things. Are you hypnotized are just stupid with bias? Is your love that blind?

    Do you really think Socialism is what America needs. Do you really think this man is RIGHT for a country that he and his wife privately hate? Perhaps I gave you too much credit for being thinking and educated people.

    If it were not for Conservative Radio, the Drudge Report and all the e-mails I receive, I would never hear anything unflattering about Obama and I would not have heard anything flattering about McCain. For instance, all the flack about McCain being born in the Panama Canal. That got a lot of play. The fact that a law suit has been filed about Obama being born in Kenya has never been mentioned on your shows or in your papers. It’s been fair game to hit McCain and Palen with any and everything, but don’t mention Obama’s middle name, his wife, his kids, his ears, his race [which by the way is not black]. The man has ties to terrorist, bigots and Islam, but there are no questions from you.

    Do you realize how you have beaten down President Bush? Never do you mention that for the last two years he has had NO cooperation from a Democratic Congress. He is blamed for everything that’s gone wrong. You never mention how the Democrats contributed to the financial problems. The old school would at least show Honor to the Office. The new school has spent too much time with “academia,” another word for “Liberal.”

       In Orissa, India, killings of Christians and 5,000 homes have been burned, but we have not been informed by you of this condition. Where did you go to school? Better yet, did you go to school? You don’t even try to hide your feelings. Your bias is so apparent that it makes your reports unbelievable. 

    I think you must take responsibility at this time for the division in our country . I am seventy-five years old and have never been as angry with the opposition as I am this time and it’s 90% your fault. If our country is divided, guess who’s to blame? You have continually fanned the fire with your bias reports. No wonder the newspapers are in trouble and the television news ratings are down.       

                                        Bettye H. Simmons

Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline

Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why

Column By MICHAEL S. MALONE

Oct. 24, 2008 —

 

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living — and when I knew her, scary — grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I’ve spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist,” you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there’s always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word “said” — muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. — to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can’t achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty — especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the ’60s I saw a lot of subjective “New” Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from “real” reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I’d spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else’s work — not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I’d always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes — and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who’d managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation’s leading newspapers, many of whom I’d written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith — and I know the day and place where it happened — was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I’d already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

 

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass — no, make that shameless support — they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather — not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake — but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far — such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain’s daughter’s MySpace friends — can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side — or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer — when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

 

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn’t agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it’s because we don’t understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide — especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

 

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country &

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation’s best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world’s largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling “Virtual Corporation.” Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, “The New Heroes.” He has been the ABCNews.com “Silicon Insider” columnist since 2000.

 

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

CNN media scandal publishes bogus report

CNN media scandal publishes bogus report

 

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//081021/480/73d55d014e2e4685a1271966f725973d/      PHOTO of woman holding a sign, . . . .”I’m not JOe the Plumber but I am Nan the small business owner

 

Media Scandal: CNN Tries to Suppress Colorado Vote(?) As Palin Sets Attendance Records

CNN reported yesterday incorrectly that the McCain Camp is ceding Colorado to Marxisant radical Barack Obama.
The report by CNN on the Colorado election was not true.  
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/politics/17766400/detail.html?rss=den&psp=news

And, it came at the wrong time…

A Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber supporter in Grand Junction, Colorado on Monday.
(AP /David Zalubowski)

CNN published this bogus report as VP Candidate Sarah Palin was setting all-time attendance records in Grand Junction just yesterday.
22,000 supporters showed up to see Governor Sarah Palin break a Grand Junction record!

“First Dude” Todd Palin is making four campaign stops in western Colorado and Denver on Tuesday. Todd will be at a Village Inn Restaurant in Glenwood Springs, the Eagle Diner in Eagle and the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Eagle on Tuesday morning.

Michelle Malkin has more on this outrageous fraud.

CNN’s “overwhelming” Obama bias

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/06/cnns-overwhelming-obama-bias/

When Watchdogs Snore: How ABC, CBS & NBC Ignored Fannie & Freddie

 

When Watchdogs Snore: How ABC, CBS &
NBC Ignored Fannie & Freddie

     The two mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — seized by the government September 7 before they went completely bankrupt, at a potential cost to taxpayers of more than $25 billion — have been in obvious trouble for much of the past five years — with criminal investigations, accounting scandals, firings, resignations, huge losses and warnings from the Federal Reserve that their huge portfolio of mortgage securities posed a risk to the overall financial system.

     But prior to this year, the watchdogs at ABC, CBS and NBC found time for only 10 stories on the financial health and management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A review of the three networks’ morning and evening news programs from January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2007 found nine anchor-read items or brief references to the companies troubles, plus one in-depth report by CBS’s Anthony Mason on the May 23, 2006 Evening News, after Fannie Mae was fined $400 million for accounting fraud.

     [This item, by the MRC's Rich Noyes, was posted Thursday afternoon on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ]

     It’s not that the networks eschew business news. A 2005 report from the MRC’s Business and Media Institute found heavy coverage of the scandal surrounding Enron, but no interest in the growing scandal surrounding Fannie Mae: “A LexisNexis search of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN on the term ‘Enron’ from the nine months around when the story first broke — Oct. 1, 2001, to July 1, 2002, produced 3,017 hits….A similar LexisNexis search was performed for the term ‘Fannie Mae’ for those same media, from June 1, 2004, to March 1, 2005, again during the time the story was breaking. This search discovered a paltry 37 matches.” See: www.businessandmedia.org

     But the networks should (presumably) be more interested in monitoring these mortgage behemoths, since they’re not normal private companies but rather Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) chartered by Congress to promote the specific cause of promoting home ownership. This special status, along with the presumption that taxpayers would bail out the firms if they got into trouble, amounts to an implicit federal subsidy that the Federal Reserve in 2003 calculated was worth between $119 and $164 billion a year.

     Writing in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Charles Calomiris and Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute explained how these two GSEs — plus members of Congress who refused to hold them accountable — are “largely to blame for our current mess.” An excerpt:

Many monumental errors and misjudgments contributed to the acute financial turmoil in which we now find ourselves. Nevertheless, the vast accumulation of toxic mortgage debt that poisoned the global financial system was driven by the aggressive buying of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, and mortgage-backed securities, by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The poor choices of these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) — and their sponsors in Washington — are largely to blame for our current mess.

How did we get here? Let’s review: In order to curry congressional support after their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed to increased financing of “affordable housing.” They became the largest buyers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages between 2004 and 2007, with total GSE exposure eventually exceeding $1 trillion. In doing so, they stimulated the growth of the subpar mortgage market and substantially magnified the costs of its collapse….

In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby. The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006. All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.

Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on “deregulation.” This is a canard. There has indeed been deregulation in our economy — in long-distance telephone rates, airline fares, securities brokerage and trucking, to name just a few — and this has produced much innovation and lower consumer prices….

If the Democrats had let the 2005 legislation come to a vote, the huge growth in the subprime and Alt-A loan portfolios of Fannie and Freddie could not have occurred, and the scale of the financial meltdown would have been substantially less. The same politicians who today decry the lack of intervention to stop excess risk taking in 2005-2006 were the ones who blocked the only legislative effort that could have stopped it.

    

The peasants are revolting

Rosslyn Smith

The national press corps is beginning to get a taste of the anger they have created among a large percentage of the American public over their treatment of Sarah Palin. It will take some longer than others to grasp the magnitude of the disaster they have created for their failing industry.

 

Joe Curl of the Washington Times reports  that angry crowds vigorously booed the media in Cedarbug, WI:

 

Hundreds of angry people in this small town outside Milwaukee taunted reporters and TV crews traveling with Sen. John McCain on Friday, chanting “Be fair!” and pointing fingers at a pack of journalists as they booed loudly.

 

Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer is not happy at the amount of attention her incredibly snide, error filled September 1 column A woman – but why this woman? has garnered.

A handful of people wrote to say that I had captured exactly their reaction to the Palin nomination. But the rest of the responses were vehement or venomous… And more than 316,000 people viewed the column on The Baltimore Sun Web site. That number — more than 100 times the attention I normally receive – actually frightened me.

 

Newsbusters‘ Warner Todd Huston notes

 

She was “actually frightened,” you people! Give me a break. What? Is she crying? There’s no crying in journalism.

 

He then dissects Reimer’s original bit of feminist snark before taking her and her colleagues to task over the clueless bubble they seem to occupy.  

 

To close my discussion with you, Reimer, I have to ask: don’t you see the hatred that you expressed for this woman? Don’t you see that your snide comments about her Down Syndrome child and your abhorrence with every American that votes Republican — which is half the electorate, by the way — just might raise a bit of ire out there? Can you really be so shocked that your spittle specked rage was met with a bit of resistance?

If not, well, you really aren’t as smart as you might like to imagine.

 

It may still be uncertain who will win this campaign, but it is clear who already has lost: the legacy media.

Posted at 11:20 AM | Email | Permalink

Negative U.S. media linked to increased insurgent attacks

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080324/FOREIGN/259963993/1001

Media Target: The US Military

By Gerd Schroeder

The US military, the last bastion of creditability in the war, is now the primary target of the media and the enemies of the war.  Almost like a plan. Not hatched as a coherent and complete arrangement in some dark, smoke filled room. No conspiracy is alleged. Rather, There is a certain momentum that is a product of groupthink. This confluence of widely-shared perceptions and attitudes has taken on a life of its own, the like-minded feeding off the ideas of others, then amplified in the media.
They smell blood in the water, and turn their attention to the military.  Their reasoning is that if they can turn the American People against the military, then the war effort will become unsustainable.  But they must be very careful in manipulating the story.  They have learned their lesson from Viet Nam.  The backlash from attacking the troops directly robbed them of much of their credibility.  They will not make that mistake again. 
Seize on critics from within
This time the plan is discredit the military from the inside.  They do this by seizing on genuine critics, disgruntled retirees, infighting dissidents, and a few dupes and naive people in the military to discredit the organization as a whole.  This is where we are right now.        
After writing an article in the Armed Forces Journal titled A failure in generalship  lambasting the general officer corps for not only failing in Iraq but lying to Congress and the American People many people may think that the author, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yinling is on the highway to hell with his carrier in the military.  If you figured that, I believe that you have figured wrong.  It is rooted in popular miss conceptions about what the military is like from an outsider’s point of view, which has been carefully built and manipulated by pop culture and the media for years. 
That is not to say that I agree with LTC Yinling.  I think that many of his arguments are, quite frankly, bull; but the military is really a very introspective organization.  Anyone that has seen an After Action Review of a military operation or training event understands that.  They are brutally honest and open.  No one is spared.  We all understand that respecting thin skins is a recipe for death.  The reviews are not personal attacks; they are honest assessments.
LTC Yingling’s arguments are not new. The points in his article have been debated in the Army for many years.  It is not a bombshell indictment of the military leaders the media is making it out to be.  He used Clausewitz, and other military thinker’s writings and ideas to make his point.  Look at the article Toxic Leadership, by Colonel George E Reed.  The article, written in 2004, takes on many of the same points that LTC Yingling’s article does, albeit in a more tactful manner. 
For me, the article is very stimulating, though very flawed.  Through articles like LTC Yingling’s Col. Reed’s the military stays vital and improves thought debate and exchange of ideas.
Instead, let us look at why the media has suddenly picked this story up after it has been debated in the military for years.  The media are all in a flutter because they think that they can spin this article as an indictment of the war.  They do this by pointing at the generals, and in a sly, almost unperceivable way, the media almost seem to whisper in our ears: “see, the military is bad, they aren’t worthy of our support, they failed, we can’t trust them, we need to get out of Iraq before anyone else dies because of these fascist brutes.”  Some few have come right out and said it, but most just allude to it. 
The military’s image
The military image for many people is of an environment with no freethinking, and creativity.  The image is one of an organization of mindless, strict adherence to illogical and outdated thinking and morals.  One of heavy-handed, overbearing, egotistical Neanderthals bent on world domination, violence, and hate. Backwoods rednecks.  Unintelligent dead-enders.  Look at movies like A Few Good Men, Stripes, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now.  This is the image propagated by the pop culture. 
You may say: “that may be true for some, but not for me.”  I ask you then to think back to when you considered the military.  Most men and a few women do this at some point.  For some it is just fleeting.  For others they study it deeply, but I think most, if not all, men at some point or another have considered joining the military.  Why do so few out of so many in this country actually serve?  Is it because of the ideas that have been formed from our experiences with American pop culture? 
A high percentage of the serving military has a close family member that served or is serving.  It is a generational tradition of pride, and a feeling of duty.  That is not to say that those that don’t serve are any less of a person for taking a different path; clearly not everyone can serve even if they wanted to.  However; if you reflect on it you will find than many of your ideas about the military that are unflattering have probably come from pop culture and the media.  The enemies of the war in the media use the pop culture’s long cultivated prejudice of the military to forward their objective against the war.   
Over the last year, maybe two, it is increasingly difficult to find not any positive reporting on Iraq and the larger war on terrorism, or any positive stories of the US Military at large.  There are some rare exceptions with some local news outlets.  Google “Iraq” it and see for yourself.  It is even more pervasive in the international media.
More examples
Look at the resurrection of the Jessica Lynch, and the Spencer Tillman stories as show trails against of the military in Henry Waxman’s House Committee last week.  The message: ‘The military lied,  The generals ordered the lies.  This in turn promotes the thought: ‘The military is bad.’ 
There is not need to rehash the continuing assaults by the press and the pentagon officials that leak politically motivated falsehoods about the Marines in Haditha.  John Kerry, and John Martha’s attacks on the military are like a drum beat. 
How about retired generals like MG Batiste, used willingly, in mock impeachment trails by Democrats; or BG Janis Karpinski, used by the press as a martyr, sacrificed by the military for Abu Grab, testifying to hostile governments about the evil US military.
Refer back to the countless stories about Guantanamo Bay, and false accusations of torture; many in the media choosing to believe accusations of known terrorists over the military, and false stories of Koran desecration causing riots across the Islam World. 
Look at the personal attacks on the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General Pace, because he dared voice an opinion on homosexuals.  They implied that the general was unfit because he dared have a personal moral judgment; or attacks by retired Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General (Retired) Shalikashvili, on the military’s policy of the so-called ‘Don’t ask don’t tell policy’ of which he oversaw the implementation.  
Now the latest insult by Senator Reid (D-NV) that the war is lost and General Petraeus is lying if he says the surge is working. 
The press is conducting an information war against the military to discredit it, and by so doing hopes to collapse the remaining support for “Bush’s War”.
All reasonable people understand the absolute critical need to win the war in Iraq.  It is helpful, desirable, and needed to debate in good faith as long as the joint objective is winning in Iraq.  Without a doubt, the key to winning this war is the will of the American People to continue supporting the fight.  Each downtick in the polls for support of the war by the American People lowers the possibility that the military will be able to carry on the war to a victory. 
It is not that we lack the capacity.  We, in the military, have the will in spades.  But we are, in the end, the Military of the American People, and must have their support; not only to fund the war, but also to maintain morale and a strong fighting spirit.  This support of the US Military by the American People is the goal that most in the mainstream media hope to undermine.  Why they would do this is a topic for a different article.  The fact is that they are actively trying to discredit the US Military.     

A final question for the media

What would happen in the war in Iraq and to the terrorists across the world if our press put as much effort into supporting the war that they do in trying to sabotage it?             
Gerd Schroeder is a Major in the United States Army; he has served in Iraq and Afghanistan.  His personal views do not represent the views of the US Army or Department of Defense

Media Lynch Mob

By Ray Robison

Jessica Lynch was on Capitol Hill to talk about her experience in Iraq as a POW and subsequently as a media darling. This article from the Charleston Daily Mail typifies the coverage given to this topic by the media for years now. It portrays Lynch as a victim of military propaganda that pushed her forward as a hero.
The recent hearing was to cover Lynch’s 2003 kidnapping and rescue in Iraq, which the Department of Defense painted as a story of heroism, despite a differing account from Lynch.
There are two facts that get left out of this type of reporting:

a) Jessica Lynch is a hero just by serving her country whether she fired a shot or was knocked out immediately during the ambush that injured her severely and

b) the story of her shoot-out with Iraqi forces was not a product of the US military but of the US media.

The US media created this recounting of her exploits from vague, unofficial statements by “undisclosed officials” and having been revealed as rumor mongers started looking for someone to blame. Who else would they pin it on but the US military?
We all know it is hard to prove a negative, in this case that the US military did not create the shoot-out scenario reported by the media. So we have to instead ask questions. If the US military did so, who specifically did it? Do we have a name in all this media hype about the misleading Pentagon reporting? Where was the claim first made? Who was the source?
This USA Today article from July of 2003 is a hint. It states:

Lynch had been mythicized during the war. An initial report in The Washington Post said Lynch had killed several Iraqis. Later, government officials said she had killed no one.

The fact is it wasn’t “later” that the government warned against this fight-to-the-death story line, it was at the time of the initial reporting by the media. And as the USA Today article has correctly identified, The Washington Post did run the story first:

‘She Was Fighting to the Death’
Details Emerging of W. Va. Soldier’s Capture and Rescue
By Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, April 3, 2003; Page A01
Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.
“She was fighting to the death,” the official said. “She did not want to be taken alive.” Lynch was also stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in on her position, the official said, noting that initial intelligence reports indicated that she had been stabbed to death. No official gave any indication yesterday, however, that Lynch’s wounds had been life-threatening
Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be assessed. Pentagon officials said they had heard “rumors” of Lynch’s heroics but had no confirmation. [emphasis added]

So let’s get this straight, The Washington Post single-sourced this story from one official that they couldn’t even identify. Ask yourself why they couldn’t identify a military official praising a soldier. Is that really a secret? This isn’t a whistle blower or Bush Administration insider. It would more than likely be an officer or NCO at the tactical operations center if this person existed.
So why couldn’t The Washington Post name the source? The answer is obvious; because the reporters don’t even know who it was, or if the incident even occurred. It sounds very much like one person’s ruminations in passing, chatting about rumors from unofficial sources. Then The Washington Post ran with the information despite army officials warning them about the veracity of such rumors. And this is the military’s fault? Are you kidding me?
Isn’t the media supposed to be superior to citizen journalists because of all the editorial safeguards and fact checking? But yet in this reporting, one unidentified source who may indeed be a fiction – a literary device to whom to attribute overheard conversation – trumped the military spokesperson. I challenge The Washington Post to identify this source so that this person can be questioned in the current proceedings.

Ray Robison is co-author of the book Both in One Trench, a blogger, and a frequent contributor to American Thinker.