28 January 2009 @ 9:01AM >> The View’s Joy Behar, who considers herself a comedian, was asked by Larry King about the possibilities presented by the Age of Obama:

King: [I]s this administration going to be hard for the comics to have fun with?

Behar: Yes. And all I can say is thank you for Joe Biden, because he is going to always give us some laughs. He’ll say something crazy and out there, and it will be fun. And Sarah Palin, you know, we can always rely on her to come back and give us some material. But it is really not easy to make fun of the Obamas, because they’re really — they’re kind of really perfect, aren’t they?

Perhaps our new president really is too perfect for mockery. Obama’s disciples, however, are another story.

19 November 2007 @ 9:17AM >> On a recent airing of CNN’s The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer attempts to explain why good news out of Iraq—such as the sharp decreases in violence seen over the last few months—goes unreported:

[TERRY] JEFFREY[, CYBERCAST NEWS SERVICE]: You know, there’s sort of a catch-22. As the war starts to succeed, as the surge is working, violence is going down, U.S. casualties are going down in Iraq, it’s not news.

When Americans aren’t killed there, it’s not on the front pages of the newspaper. It’s not heavily in the cable news coverage. And people start to forget about it. They don’t realize necessarily that things are going well.

But to the degree that it’s not an issue, it’s good politically for Republicans.

[WOLF] BLITZER[, CNN CORRESPONDENT]: You know, I’m — I’m always reluctant to say things are going well. I hope they are going well in Iraq. Always reluctant to even say it, because I’m afraid of a jinx, because, the next morning...

[DONNA] BRAZILE[, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST]: Absolutely.

BLITZER: ... you could wake up and there could be a horrible, horrible disaster over there.

(Emphasis added.)

Blitzer’s admission came up in a discussion of poll numbers, which he kicked off by asking, “How are things going for the U.S. in Iraq? Thirty-four percent say it’s going well. Sixty-five percent say it’s going badly.”

The polls largely reflect the media’s reporting, so if positive trends go unreported—and by Blitzer’s own admission, they do—then those positive trends will not be reflected in the polls.

It’s really laughable that good news goes unreported because it might jinx the war effort. If that were the case, one would expect the media to hold back on bad news, too; after all, bad news has the effect of driving down public support for the war, which also damages the war effort.

But, of course, the media’s newfound reporting restraint only seems to apply when discussing positive developments out of Iraq.

12 June 2007 @ 9:59AM >> I will be on a panel discussing Congressional earmarks, pork-barrel spending, and socialized medicine. It doesn’t sound like I’ll get a chance to plug my film, but apparently Michael Moore’s new celluloid fellation of Fidel Castro will be one of the topics covered.

The show airs between 8PM and 9PM ET. I’m not sure when this particular segment will appear.

Update: The producers needed to trim some fat from the schedule, so we won’t be discussing Michael Moore or socialized medicine.

22 March 2006 >> TV Newser reports that the publishers of the Gallup poll have dropped CNN as a partner. The reason, as stated in a memo by the CEO of The Gallup Organization:

CNN has far fewer viewers than it did in the past, and we feel that our brand was getting lost and diluted combined with the CNN brand.

Ouch.

Not willing to take such a humiliating public dumping without spitting back, CNN responded:

[Gallup CEO] Jim Clifton’s statements are not only unprofessional but in every respect untrue.

Breakups can be rough. Let’s hope the boiled rabbits are kept to a minimum.

And now, for the conspiratorially-minded:

A small fire broke out in the Atlanta studio of CNN Headline News this afternoon.

Nobody f*cks with Gallup.

22 November 2005 @ 12:49PM >> My earlier post on CNN’s X-ing of Cheney has been picked up by a number of websites and is driving a lot of readers here who are unfamiliar with my site. Some people are interpreting my position as a sign of my own bias. One reader e-mailed:

Puh-leeze....if Fox News had pulled this stunt by placing a “X” over Bill Clinton or Hillary or any Democrat for that matter, all hell would break loose. For you to give CNN a pass is showing your bias against Cheney.

The day I am accused of bias against Vice President Cheney is a day that I let out a robust belly laugh. But it is also a sign that people on the right can be too overzealous with their charges of media bias. Anyone who has read this site consistently knows the work I’ve done to document the media’s left-leaning slant. The key word there is document. Absent of any evidence, you can’t just assume that an apparent video glitch is the same thing as a doctored quote, an omitted set of facts, or an artfully crafted phrase. In those cases, a conscious act must be committed by the journalist in order to skew the reporting. We can’t tell whether the “X” mark is the result of a conscious act.

I am willing to be proven wrong on this, but it will take evidence to do so. In the meantime, I hope that conservatives don’t go too far down the road of conspiracy-mongering. Recently, that has been the exclusive domain of the left, much to their detriment. Such a mentality can be equally destructive to conservatives if they’re not careful.

22 November 2005 >> Apparently, either a video glitch or not-glitch resulted in a few flashes of an “X” over Vice President Cheney’s face while he was delivering a speech. A number of conservative bloggers are criticizing CNN under the assumption that the glitch (or not-glitch) was both deliberate and an example of political bias.

Sorry guys, I don’t see it. I recognize the possibility, but I also recognize a much larger number of possibilities for actual glitches in video production. True, I don’t work in live video, but I’ve seen software bugs and unintuitive behavior cause bizarre flashes where one video track has been accidentally merged onto another. It looks to me like something similar happened with CNN. This could have happened at the venue, or anywhere between bouncing the feed up to a satellite and back to earth, or maybe in CNN’s studios in Washington or Atlanta. It could have been because someone was sitting on a button or briefly brushed one a few times.

If you watch the video, additional text seems to appear below the X, partially obscuring the news ticker on the bottom. The online version isn’t of high enough resolution to make that text legible. But perhaps someone who recorded it can decipher the rest. My assumption is that a placeholder track got superimposed on the live feed by mistake.

There are plenty of examples of media bias that are far more provable. To latch onto a few flashes of an “X” as major evidence of bias—when no such evidence exists beyond the act itself—undercuts the possibility of being taken seriously when talking about the more tangible stories.

Maybe CNN should get the benefit of the doubt. There’s an old saying: Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Given CNN’s recent performance in the marketplace, that statement seems apt.

3 November 2005 @ 10:05AM >> When you turn on the news or open the paper for reporting from Iraq, what do you see? These days, news coverage is little more than a recitation of the latest casualty reports on our side. One solider was killed by a roadside bomb. Another soldier was killed in a helicopter crash. Do you ever wonder what these soldiers were doing while they were alive? You’ll rarely hear that. Are you ever curious about any of our military operations? If we still had the media of World War II, you might actually learn something beyond the latest death count. But today’s media can’t be bothered with that.

And how about the political progress in Iraq? There have been two historic national elections, one to fill a parliament, and another to ratify the country’s new constitution. Iraqis literally risked death just to vote, and they still had higher turnout than American elections do. Yet I saw more media coverage of long lines at polling places in Ohio than these two Iraqi elections combined. It’s pretty damn remarkable that a country went from a brutal dictatorship to a struggling but hopeful democracy in two years. So why aren’t we hearing more about it?

Whether it’s bias, laziness, incompetence, or just a fascination with the bloody, if you get all of your news from the establishment media, you’re getting a pretty skewed vision of the new Iraq. Many people have noticed this for a long time, soldiers especially. Recently, CNN interviewed one soldier who gave a critique on the media’s coverage:

[I]t is kind of disheartening sometimes to see everything focused on just the, the death and destruction and the IED strikes and not focused on how well the U.S. and coalition forces are doing building up the Iraqi police services and the Iraqi army. It really is a tremendous effort being put into that infrastructure and building a self-sufficient government over there. And they’re absolutely making progress.

But you almost never see that progress covered. Instead, you see the exact same story—with a few variables changed—repeated over and over.

The media’s decisions about what to cover and not cover are made by a handful of people in New York and Washington, DC. If they all share similar views, that may explain why virtually all coverage of Iraq is identical: the latest death count, and little more. It’s been this way for so long that even journalism students are beginning to notice. In the Columbia Journalism Review, certainly no bastion of neo-conservatism, one columnist questions the state of Iraq reporting:

[T]he 2,000th military death in Iraq happened to fall on exactly the same day as the Iraqi constitution was officially passed. The constitution story, though appearing on many front pages, paled in placement and headline size to the 2,000-death story, with many papers boldfacing and enlarging the number “2,000,” so that it eclipsed any other nearby story. As one would expect, conservative critics jumped at this as further proof that, once again, the liberal media was trumpeting the bad news and suppressing the good news.

The columnist did a quick search and found that “[i]n the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times there was just one story each about the constitution passing. Whereas the 2,000 deaths story inspired three to four stories and a couple op-eds and editorials per paper.”

In my mind, every soldier who dies is significant. The first, the fiftieth, and the five-hundredth death are equally worthy of our sorrow and our gratitude that some people are willing to sacrifice their lives for others. But the 2,000th death is a story only because we happen to use a base-10 counting system. Is one number a bigger story than another because it has a few zeros on the end? Is it a big enough story to eclipse something as historic as a freed people voting themselves a new constitution?

In the media’s reporting, the storyline for each event in Iraq is set even before it happens. To the small clique of media bigwigs who make these decisions, negative stories get prominence and virtually everything else gets ignored. So what happens when reality doesn’t quite fit the predetermined model? Well, that’s just a minor inconvenience that can be fixed with a little selective editing. Take, for example, The New York Times and its body count watch for the 2,000th soldier killed in Iraq. The Times coverage mentioned Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr, who died earlier this year on Memorial Day. Starr left a note for his loved ones to be read in the event of his death. Here’s some of what he wrote:

Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I’m writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

Here’s how the Times reported Starr’s statement:

Sifting through Cpl. Starr’s laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the Marine’s girlfriend. “I kind of predicted this,” Cpl. Starr wrote of his own death. “A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.”

Starr’s words posed a problem for the predetermined storyline, so the Times just left most of them out. That’s how a statement in support of the operations in Iraq became a simple fatalistic prediction of death. And that’s far from the first time the Times has shaped quotes to fit its worldview.

So what does this all mean? For now, it means that the media’s artificially negative portrayal of Iraq is sapping U.S. support for the war. But in the long run, it’s proof that the establishment media is willing to destroy itself in the process of furthering a political agenda. The media’s only real asset is their credibility, and they’re pimping out that credibility every time they try to jam current reality into a Vietnam-era model of the world.

Psychologically, it is understandable. The media has never been as powerful as it was when it turned the nation against the Vietnam war. Some people have a hard time letting go of their glory days. But for an industry that’s already in decline, selling a product with so many obvious flaws makes about as much sense as shooting yourself in the head while you’re jumping off a skyscraper.

---

(Correction: An earlier version of this post erroneously referred to Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr as the 2,000th U.S. soldier who died in Iraq. His profile was included in New York Times coverage of the 2,000 mark, but was not himself the 2,000th soldier killed.)

29 June 2005 @ 12:21PM >> A columnist for Newsday (Long Island, New York) thinks that CNN should hire Dan Rather. Among the author’s arguments is that Dan Rather would bring “credibility” to CNN.

12 February 2005 @ 6:40PM >> Embattled CNN news chief Eason Jordan has resigned in the wake of the the scandal surrounding his accusation that journalist battlefield deaths in Iraq are the result of targeting by the U.S. military.

While it is true that Internet media was responsible for keeping the heat on Jordan, the heat would have dissipated quickly if not for the principled truth-telling of two liberal Democrats from New England: Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, and Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut. They could have kept silent or stonewalled in the same fashion that Jordan and CNN did, but instead they spoke out and refused to let Jordan get away with his baseless and incendiary accusation. Good for them. While they may take stances that I disagree with, in my book, their actions here will always be a credit to their character.

8 February 2005 @ 4:15PM >> You may know the name Eason Jordan. As the chief news executive at CNN, he made headlines a couple years ago by admittting in a New York Times op-ed piece that CNN deliberately ignored atrocities committed under Saddam Hussein so that the network could maintain a staff in Iraq:

Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.

[...]

I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.

[...]

Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for “crimes,” one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family’s home.

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

Nearly two years after admitting that CNN covered up Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, the network still hasn’t covered them extensively. And now, instead of trying to correct CNN’s journalistic fraud, The New York Sun reports that Eason Jordan is committing more:

The head of CNN’s news division, Eason Jordan, ignited an Internet firestorm last week when he told a panel at a World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, that the American military had targeted journalists during operations in Iraq.

Mr. Jordan, speaking in a panel discussion titled “Will Democracy Survive the Media?” said “he knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy,” said Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts who was on the panel with Mr. Jordan.

[...]

Mr. Jordan’s comments — prompted by a broader discussion of the dangers of covering the war in Iraq, in which some 63 journalists have been killed — left Mr. Frank, usually an outspoken war opponent, speechless.

“I was agog,” he said. “I took a few seconds and asked him to basically clarify the remarks. Did he have proof and if so, why hadn’t CNN run with the story?”

Good point. If CNN has evidence to back up Jordan’s claims, they should run the story. And if CNN doesn’t run the story, it amounts to an admission that Jordan’s assertions have no basis in fact, in which case Jordan owes one huge retraction and apology.

Congressman Frank wasn’t the only one to be taken aback by Jordan’s shocking accusation:

The panel’s moderator, Harvard University professor and columnist David Gergen, did not return a call seeking comment, but he told online columnist Michelle Malkin yesterday that the remarks left him “startled.”

“It’s contrary to history, which is so far the other way. Our troops have gone out of their way to protect and rescue journalists,” Mr. Gergen said. He told Ms. Malkin that the remarks could have been due to Mr. Jordan’s recent return from Iraq, where he was likely “caught up in the tension of what was happening there.”

The office of Senator Dodd, a Democrat of Connecticut who attended the panel, released a statement that said he “was not on the panel but was in the audience when Mr. Jordan spoke. He — like panelists Mr. Gergen and Mr. Frank — was outraged by the comments. Senator Dodd is tremendously proud of the sacrifice and service of our American military personnel.”

[...]

Mr. Jordan’s remarks might have shocked the American attendees, but they certainly played well among some in the audience. The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, who covered the panel for his paper, told the Sun that after the panel concluded, Mr. Jordan was surrounded by European and Middle Eastern attendees who warmly congratulated him for his alleged “bravery and candor” in discussing the matter.

So, not only does it appear that Eason Jordan lied, but his lie is now being embraced by America’s opponents and will undoubtedly be used as anti-U.S. propaganda. Jordan had the chance to cover Saddam Hussein’s actual atrocities, and he declined to do so. Instead, he’d rather falsely accuse the United States of imaginary atrocities.

Is it any wonder why some people believe the establishment media not only distorts the news to suit a left-wing agenda, but actively opposes the actions of the United States?

3 July 2003 >> As errors and distortions plague the traditional news media, Internet outlets have emerged as an important watchdog, checking the power of the press and providing some much-needed media accountability. What impact has this new “open-source media” had, and what does it mean for the future of reporting? More >>