Entries Tagged 'media bias' ↓

John McCain had the great good fortune to fall into the hands of a NYT worm. The worm got his: David Shipley managed to give more publicity to McCain’s op-ed by refusing to publish it than it ever would have gotten in the paper itself.

Here it is (via CNN):

Here is the op-ed piece written by Sen. John McCain that the New York Times declined to run. The piece was released to CNN by the McCain campaign:

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City?actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military’s readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war?only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

Obama supporters didn’t have an easy time of it on the tube this Sunday morning. From Chris Matthews to George Stephanopoulos (no links to transcripts available yet for those two) to Howard Kurtz, every host made it plain that the former messiah is now deep in the muck.

At Contentions, Jennifer Rubin also mentions more of the displeased—the NYT’s Bob Herbert and MoDo and, most tellingly, Howard Dean.

These bear the tell-tale signs of scorned lovers’ rants. Their once beloved candidate is now reviled, mocked and tossed overboard while they prepare for the possible return of their “ex” with all the unpleasantness that entails. And who is joining them?

Well, none other than Howard Dean, who until recently seemed to pursue strategies designed to either end the race early (Obama liked that) or to encourage delegates to respect the pledged delegate count (Obama really liked that). Yet Friday, for the first time, Dean uttered this: “I think the race is going to come down to the perception in the last six or eight races of who the best opponent for McCain will be. I do not think in the long run it will come down to the popular vote or anything else.”

The bottom line in all this backing-and-forthing among pundits about whether they’re for Obama or for Clinton [e.a.]?

[I]t may be that these people have something in common: none of them really wants to be on the wrong side when the Democratic race ends.

In other words: pundits are just like the politicians they cover—first of all, they’re political animals and they operate in their own self-interest.

But you knew that … right?

I’m not particularly interested in political bias in the media—it’s impossible to prove, and, as we see in the endless arguments over Obama vs. Clinton, it is an absurdity to claim that the media has a “liberal” bias, since both candidates are (nominally) liberal.

What I am interested in, though, is the editorial judgment that resulted in the following: a story about General Petraeus, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton that is illustrated by a photograph of Barack Obama basking in the glow of the photographers’ flashes.

Here’s the picture:

Here’s the story:

Hearings Rife With Political Overtones

The war in Iraq collided with White House ambitions in a politically ripe hearing room on Capitol Hill Tuesday as two would-be commanders-in-chief — Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain – swooped in from the campaign trail to question the top American commander in Baghdad, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and to make veiled attacks on each other.

A third potential commander-in-chief, Senator Barack Obama, was set to duel with General Petraeus later today

Was the editor afraid that we’d be so swept away by McCain’s and Clinton’s words that we’d forget all about Obama for the one minute that it took us to read the article?

While Jeff Jarvis and Nicholas Lemann think out loud about how to improve journalism going forward***, CNN makes a laughingstock out of such agonizing efforts by doing the thinking for its “journalists.” The other day, on-air talent received instructions to be sure to remember to praise Fidel in its Cuba coverage. (Allegedly, the email reprinted below is authentic; I have no way of verifying this): 

 From: Flexner, Allison
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:46 AM
To: *CNN Superdesk (TBS)
Cc: Neill, Morgan; Darlington, Shasta
Subject: Castro guidance

Some points on Castro – for adding to our anchor reads/reporting:

* Please say in our reporting that Castro stepped down in a letter he wrote to Granma (the communist party daily), as opposed to in a letter attributed to Fidel Castro. We have no reason to doubt he wrote his resignation letter, he has penned numerous articles over the past year and a half.

* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.

* Also the Cuban government blames a lot of Cuba’s economic problems on the US embargo, and while that has caused some difficulties, (far less so than the collapse of the Soviet Union) the bulk of Cuba’s economic problems are due to Cuba’s failed economic polices. Some analysts would say the US embargo was a benefit to Castro politically – something to blame problems on, by what the Cubans call “the imperialist,” meddling in their affairs.

* While despised by some, he is seen as a revolutionary hero, especially with leftist in Latin America, for standing up to the United States.

Any questions, please call the international desk.

Allison

I’ve got some questions: why is CNN so shy about blasting a decrepit monster who has kept his people half-starving and cut off from the rest of the world for 50 years? why must CNN be “balanced” when talking about a megalomaniac who ruined the lives of three generations (if not more) of Cubans?

Christiane Amanpour, a loyal company soldier for CNN and the queen of moral equivalency (aka “balance”), apparently got TPTB’s memo and did her duty:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well as Morgan alluded to, look it is a desperate place for a lot of people there because it’s poor and it’s badly run if you like, in terms of people can’t afford to make ends meet. By and large, there are a lot of rationing going on in terms of food. But it’s never enough to allow them to meet their monthly requirements of food and medicine and the like.

So there’s a lot of difficulty in day-to-day living, not to mention the fact there’s plenty of political dissidents. There are journalists who are dissidents. There are people in jail just for wanting to write the truth or speak the truth or even to organize politically which they cannot.

So, that’s a fact of life in Cuba and it has been for the decades that Castro has been in power. And that offsets some of the genuine progress that he’s made in terms of education, health care. People have talked a lot about that. But day-to-day life for them is very decrepit and very hand to mouth and, obviously, they want change.

—————

*** It’s an effort I salute wholeheartedly. I come down on the side of wanting some kind of “expertise” from journos along with their journalism skills—and we might start with refresher courses in geopolitics, geography, and international relations for on-air “talent” NOW.

As for the future, every profession is becoming more specialized, and why should journalism be an exception? People will always want and need reliable, vetted up-to-the-minute information about the things that disrupt or intrude on (or threaten to) their daily lives (hard news). The news media is an extension of our (i.e., humans’) survival radar; it’s an early-warning system to alert us about those things we can’t see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears. That’s what journalism is for.

Those people who aspire to do long-form general-interest writing in periodicals like The New Yorker or The Atlantic, or who want to offer long-form commentary in political periodicals like The New Republic or The Nation, should be given a different title. It’s not that they don’t qualify as journalists. It’s that they serve a different function: Their function is to examine people or phenomena microscopically and to analyze them deeply, in the service of  a reader’s long-term knowledge.

The news, by contrast, serves a different demand: up-to-the minute information, along with instant “analysis” of what it might mean for the consumer. Being a good writer is not the same thing as being a good reporter.

As of this writing, CNN has been carrying Barack Obama’s rally speech in Texas for more than 40 minutes.

Hillary Clinton got 7 minutes or so.

I don’t have John McCain on tape. He got around the same amount of time as John McCain.
Clinton.

Just now Anderson Cooper said that the speech went for 44 minutes. Under what rules of journalism is this considered objective coverage?

Brian Williams clarifies that NBC wasn’t pulling for Obama the other night—the network’s reporters were just really, really excited:

Lee covers Obama for us, and we’re lucky to have him on our roster… he is one of the very best in the business. In the interview, which you can see right here, Lee admits “…it’s almost hard to remain objective…” which as he implies is our goal in our work every day. He’s referring to what all of us who have covered campaigns have felt from time to time: it’s impossible to get the long view…the view from 40,000 feet…while operating at sea level, and inside the bubble.

There’s a simple solution, BriWi: get outside the bubble, where the MSM belongs.

Williams wrote the blog post in response to attacks from “rival campaigns” of Obama’s:

Today we learned that rival political efforts were spinning this as some kind of “bias” on the part of either Lee, or me, or this News Division, and that’s just ridiculous.

What a great, professional word from a “newman”: ridiculous.

Actually, what’s ridiculous is something that Matthew Yglesias picked up on: that there was almost no coverage of the Republican side of the race last night—it was all about the Democrats:

It’s interesting how much more interested the press seems to be in the Democratic race than in the GOP one. When after Iowa there was tons of attention showered on Barack Obama and nothing on Huckabee, I figured that was just part of the vast pro-McCain conspiracy. But after the media got the McCain victory it was hoping for, there’s still more talk about the Democratic result.

Of course, Pew’s studies have been showing for months and months that the MSM skews toward covering the Dems.

BriWi’s grumbling about “rival” (Dem) campaigns doesn’t take possible complaints from the Republican side (not to mention the independent, nonpartisan, interested “news” viewer side) into account at all.

Recently, Katie Couric asserted that everyone in the audience at the National Press Club with her thinks that Bush lied, so people died:

“Everyone in this room would agree that people in this country were misled in terms of the rationale of this war,” said Couric, adding that it is “pretty much accepted” that the war in Iraq was a mistake.

When people accuse the media of having a liberal bias, this is what they mean. It is Couric’s default position—and her colleagues’ default position, she says—that the Bush administration acted in bad faith in deposing Saddam. That is the “liberal” position she parrots—that Bush lied us into war in order to secure his reelection in 2004. Why, Frank Rich wrote a book about it, so it must be true.

I put “liberal” in quote marks because there is in fact nothing liberal about this position. Indeed, it requires an unusual degree of cynicism and detachment—some might called it a deranged detachment—from reality to actually believe this, if you really think about it. Which, I suspect, most people who claim to hold this view haven’t done, because most people don’t think politically: that is to say, they have opinions, but they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their positions (see Louis Menand on Bryan Caplan)

Because if you say that Bush acted in bad faith (by “misleading” us into war), you are also saying that the president of the United States deliberately took us into war heedless of the potential disaster both to Iraq and to America. I understand that this position is usually spouted by people who also think that Bush is stupid or following God’s orders or under the control of evil neocons who want to make the world safe for Israel—all the more reason to consider them perversely detached from reality, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you seriously believe this—that Bush lied and that he lied us into war purely for his party’s political benefit—then it is incumbent on you to persuade me, first, that a president would actually do this. And no matter what you say to me—even if you remind me of, say, Richard Nixon’s evil “Jew count,” which is about as creepy as a president can get—I’m going to tell you to get a goddamn grip, because you may think it’s oh-so-sophisticated to be of this view, but what it really is, is ignorant and embarrassing.

Back to Couric. Having established that all of her colleagues in the room are ill-informed and detached “liberals” like her, she then goes on to admit an ignorance and incuriosity so complete that since 2003, she has never even tried to understand the Bush administration’s case for war:

“I’ve never understood why [invading Iraq] was so high on the administration’s agenda when terrorism was going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that [Iraq] had no true connection with al Qaeda.”

Couric continues to enumerate the now familiar talking points:

Further, Couric said the Bush administration botched the war effort, calling it “accepted truths” that it erred by “disbanding the Iraq military, and leaving 100,000 Sunni men feeling marginalized and angry…[and] whether there were enough boots on the ground, the feeling that we’d be welcomed as liberators and didn’t need to focus as much on security.”

Here’s the kicker: she envisions a time when she may be called upon to admit to these brave but dangerous ideas in front of a camera, and she courageously volunteers to do it.

She added “I’d feel totally comfortable saying any of that at some point, if required, on television.”

She is a total embarrassment to her profession. I don’t know which is more humiliating—her claim to speak the undisputed truth that “everyone knows” or her belief that she might be called upon to testify in a future HUAC.

Listen up: I’m a big Leonard Cohen fan too. I agree that

… everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But theres gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

But until that plague comes, when I happen to be home at 6:30 and feel like watching a news show, I’ll be tuning in to Charlie Gibson, who’s a grown-up.

Time magazine’s Richard Stengel first exposes to the light of day Ahmadinejad’s formidable PR campaign and then acts as a force multiplier for it by falling—hard—for the charm offensive:

The invitation was on creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy: The Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran “requests the pleasure” of my company to dine with H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. …There are about 50 of us, academics and journalists mostly. There’s Brian Williams across the room, and Christiane Amanpour a few seats down. …

This is now an annual ritual for the President of Iran. Every year, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he plots out a media campaign that — in its shrewdness, relentlessness, and quest for attention — would rival Angelina Jolie on a movie junket. And like any international figure, Mr. Ahmadinejad hones his performance for multiple audiences: in this case, the journalists and academics who can filter his speech and ideas for a wider American audience.

Hmmm. Angenlina Jolie is of course a gorgeous movie star, so I can see why the press slavers over her. But what’s Stengel’s excuse for drooling all over Ahmadinejad’s smooth performance when he is a seasoned reporter, who is expected—and paid—to be shrewd, skeptical, and analytical? And, of course, when the stakes are considerably higher than merely giving devoted attention—and a platform—to a run-of-the-mill fame whore.

When it comes time for him to address the comments, he does so by citing each speaker by name — 23 in all, he notes. In contrast with what he calls the lack of respect and dignity accorded to him at Columbia — where, he says, he found it odd that an academic institution which prizes tolerance would treat him without any — he addresses each person carefully and patiently.

Why, his manners were impeccable, in contrast to our rudeness! And surely that’s all that matters when everything else out of his mouth is an odious lie!

Early on—before the “how ruuuuude” meme broke out in the MSM—George Packer had quite a different view on this [e.a.]:

Some Columbia students condemned Bollinger’s withering introduction—as if free speech should also be free of consequences. They didn’t understand that they had just witnessed a small victory for intellectual freedom and liberal values. One student who got the point, Stina Reksten, of Norway, told the Times, “I’m proud of my university today. I don’t want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom.” Ahmadinejad was given a chance to hold forth, but it was not a free ride. In inviting him, the university didn’t surrender its powers of judgment: his monologue of sophistry and lies was preceded by hard truths. Bollinger demonstrated that universities don’t have to cave in to their critics on either the right or the left—that certain principles are stronger than political opportunism.

I couldn’t agree more. And here’s what one TNR commenter—who has family and friends back in Iran—had to say about that [e.a.]:

I applaud Bollinger’s rudeness, because someone has to be. It sure as hell ain’t gonna be any Iranians - those in Iran are cowed the rest of us abroad have families and friends who could be terrorised to buy our silence.

I applaud Bollinger’s candour because for far too long, we in the Liberal West have applied our “notions of hospitality” without once thinking of the broader consequences. How many tyrants and dictators have we coddled out of politeness?

No, Sir: Bollinger was right in bring to Ahmadinejad’s attention what it is that any right-thinking man or woman finds offensive about him. And, in fact, he got the answer he was hoping for, the supreme expression of Ahmadinejad’s stupidity: “there are no homosexuals in Iran, not like here.” In a sense, of course, he is right - “not like here” - because they get hanged; but it was the broader implication that was the issue, and he got the response he deserved in the laughter and sniggers of the audience.

It is not necessary to [overanalyse] what happened. Columbia should not have invited the jackass; having done so, it should not have molly-coddled him. And Ahmadinejad should know next time not to accept invitations such as this, or expect brutal candour.

Indeed.

But ETP’s Rachel Sklar had by far the best angle on this story—on what a snooze it must have been for the participants to spend hours and hours in that room while A’jad and 23 academics droned on and on.

So that puts Ahmadinejad opening his mouth to speak at about 9pm. By now, dinner is long gone, so you can’t even toy with food on your plate. You may be on your second, third, fourth cup of tea and/or water, just because it’s in front of you. Are you allowed to leave the room to go to the bathroom, or will that offend His Craziness? (But if you do go to the bathroom, at least you can be sure that no one from the Iranian delegation will play footsie with you in the stall, ’cause they don’t have gay people there). Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad is just now warming up, “with a half-hour ode to the relationship between man and God that might have been dictated by the Persian poet Rumi.” Aaaaah can this even be distilled to a soundbite? I would be pinching my thighs under the table to stay awake at this point.