Posted on 09/18/2004 10:35:55 AM PDT by Pikamax
This Time Bill O'Reilly Got It Right
F a stopped clock is right twice a day, why shouldn't Bill O'Reilly be right at least once in a blue moon? When Fox News's most self-infatuated star attacked CNN for keeping James Carville and Paul Begala as hosts on "Crossfire" after they had joined the Kerry campaign, he fingered yet another symptom of the decline and fall of the American news culture. "In the wake of the vicious attacks on Fox News for allegedly being `G.O.P. TV,' I expected the media to brutally dismember CNN and the new boys on John Kerry's bus," Mr. O'Reilly wrote in his syndicated column. "But instead it's been the silence of the lambs from the press. Can you say media bias?"
Yes, you can, though it must be said in the same breath that Mr. O'Reilly is only half-right. Fox News isn't "allegedly" G.O.P. TV — it is G.O.P. TV. The campiest recent example of its own bias came during the Republican convention when Mr. O'Reilly played host to two second-tier G.O.P. publicity hounds, Georgette Mosbacher and Monica Crowley, as they whined that a straight-ahead, unexceptional convention photo spread that they had voluntarily posed for in New York magazine wasn't flattering enough. Presenting no evidence whatsoever, the two women (one of whom, Ms. Crowley, doubles as a Fox "analyst") bantered darkly with Mr. O'Reilly about how this "dirty trick" to present unglamorous portraits of them and such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and Al D'Amato was a conspiracy of "radical" and "Upper West Side" Democrats. (We all know what Upper West Side means, ladies.) This was G.O.P. TV raised to not-ready-for-prime time self-parody, lacking only the studio audience to yuk it up.
But is the response to an ideological news network like Fox an ideological news network with a liberal slant of its own? CNN, the inventor of 24/7 news, once prided itself on being a straight shooter. Now it and Mr. Carville have argued that the line wasn't blurred here because the liberal "Crossfire" hosts are unpaid, loosey-goosey Kerry advisers and their show is an opinion-mongering screamfest, not a news program. One might also add that with its 4:30 time slot, "Crossfire" has of late been seen only by shut-ins and barflies. Yet as CNN continues its ratings free-fall, humbled by Fox and occasionally by MSNBC as well, "Crossfire" remains one of its few signature brands. No matter how long the overlap between Mr. Carville and Mr. Begala's TV and campaign roles, that brand and CNN itself are now as inextricably bound to the Democrats as Fox is to the Republicans. The network has succeeded in an impossible feat — ceding Mr. O'Reilly the moral high ground. The Bush campaign doesn't have to enlist Fox hosts for its staff since they're willing to whore for it without even being asked.
CNN is hemorrhaging in quality and viewers so fast — for reasons that have more to do with its lugubriousness and identity crisis than politics — that this dust-up may prove but a footnote to its travails. But its casual abandonment of even a fig leaf of impartiality ratifies a larger shift in the news landscape that reached its historical watershed at the Republican convention. That was when Fox News for the first time scored a ratings victory over every other network, the Big Three broadcast networks included.
Fox's feat has since been trivialized by most of its rivals as the inevitable triumph of a partisan channel speaking to its faithful. But there's something else at work here. It's not just that Fox is so good at pandering to its core constituency but that its competition is so weak at providing the hard-hitting, trustworthy news that might draw an alternative crowd. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes aren't stupid. They have seized upon that news vacuum in the marketplace and filled it with fast-paced, news-like bloviation that can be more entertaining (and often no less informative) to watch than its rivals even if its bias gives you heartburn.
What much of the other news media have offered as an alternative has not been an alternative at all. At some point after 9/11, the news business jumped the shark and started relaying unchallenged administration propaganda — though with less zeal and showbiz pizazz than Fox. The notorious March 2003 presidential news conference at which not a single probing question was asked by the entire White House press corps heralded the broader Foxification to come. As Michael Massing, a frequent critic of this newspaper and others, put it on PBS's NewsHour, the failure of the American news media to apply proper skepticism to the administration's stated rationale for war in Iraq is "one of the most serious institutional failures of the press" since our slide into Vietnam. Mr. Massing attributes some of this to the fear of challenging a president then at the height of his popularity. Whatever the explanation — and there are many, depending on the news organization — the net effect was that the entire press came off as Fox Lite. The motive to parrot the administration line may not have been ideological, as it was at Fox, but since the misinformation was the same, news consumers can't be blamed for finding that a distinction without a difference.
The W.M.D. flimflam was hardly the last time that government propaganda supplanted journalism. Though the chagrined major newspapers have since worked hard to compensate for their prewar lapses, the electronic media that give most Americans their news have often lagged behind, especially cable. From Jessica Lynch to "Mission Accomplished" to, most recently, the bogus charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, there is a tendency to give administration-favored fiction credibility first, often cementing the spin into fact well before the tough questions are asked (if they're ever asked). It's a damning measure of the news media's failure to provide a persuasive dose of reality as an antidote to Washington fairy tales that so many Americans came to believe that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, not Saudis. A Newsweek poll just two weeks ago shows that 42 percent of Americans (among them, 32 percent of Democrats) still believe that Saddam was "directly involved" in the 9/11 attacks.
Writing in The Los Angeles Times, Ben Wasserstein dissected the Swift boat controversy as a case in point of how the process works in the right-wing press. After The Washington Post reported on Aug. 19 that the military records of one of John Kerry's principal Swift boat accusers, Larry Thurlow, "contradicted Thurlow's version of events and confirmed Kerry's," the scoop was either ignored entirely or distorted beyond recognition by The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and every Fox News talking head except one (John Kasich). From there, it was off to the races. Once Fox sets the agenda, and its allies in the administration, talk radio and the Internet ride herd, its rivals want to get in on the act, if only out of ratings envy and sheer inertia. Though the best-selling "Unfit for Command" was the work of a longtime Kerry antagonist and a writer best known for his anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic comments on a right-wing Web forum, its facts were challenged on TV at a far slower pace than the books of Seymour Hersh and Kitty Kelley, whose reporting was targeted in advance by administration talking points handed out before the books could even be read.
In this environment, even a beloved right-wing anecdote of flyweight content, like Teresa Heinz Kerry's "shove it!," can overwhelm all other headlines in the 24/7 news ethosphere. Afghanistan, tumbling into chaos, has all but fallen off the TV map. So to some extent has Iraq. How many Americans know just how much of the country has been ceded to the insurgents? Perhaps only Armageddon there or in North Korea can change the subject from George W. Bush's National Guard career, a story that has been known since The Boston Globe first reported it in May 2000, and whose embarrassing outline would remain the same even if "60 Minutes" had never done its piece.
Any sideshow that can turn the press itself into the subject, whether it's about typewriter fonts or "Crossfire" hosts doing double duty on the Kerry campaign, serves an administration that would like to distract attention from its defeats in the current war, from Abu Ghraib to Fallujah to Tora Bora. When the press isn't creating its own embarrassments, the administration will step in to intimidate and undermine journalists who don't regurgitate its approved narrative. That impulse was most nakedly revealed when a principal architect of the administration's Iraq policy, Paul Wolfowitz, blamed bad news from the occupation on the cowardice of reporters too "afraid to travel" beyond Baghdad to gather all the festive developments. (Mr. Wolfowitz later apologized, but only after he had been repeatedly chastised for slurring the some 30 reporters who had been killed covering his war.)
Between the White House and Fox's smears of the mainstream press and the mainstream press's own scandals and failings of will, the toll on the entire news media's position in our culture has been enormous. A Pew Research Center survey published in June found that the credibility of all news sources is low, in some cases falling precipitously since the start of the Bush administration: major newspapers, the broadcast networks, the cable news networks and PBS alike.
The news about the news could well get worse. One media critic, Tom Rosenstiel, believes we're seeing the end of network news altogether as its audience slips more and more into the Depends demographic and its corporate masters cut back its air time and budgets. His theory will be tested soon enough when the first of the Big Three anchors, Tom Brokaw, retires at NBC after the election. Mr. Brokaw's successor is Brian Williams, now most famous for the ridicule rightly heaped on him by Jon Stewart for his inability to articulate a single question for Al Sharpton during a live interview at the Democratic convention. The future of ABC News could also soon be in play, depending on who succeeds Michael Eisner at Disney — and under what fiscal imperatives from its board.
Should network news ride into the sunset, bargain-budgeted 24/7 cable will inherit the news franchise in our TV culture. That would be the final victory for Fox News. The only hope for a successful alternative is not to fight Fox's fire with imitation Fox fire in the form of another partisan network but to reinvent the wheel with a network that prizes news over endless left/right crossfire. Against the backdrop of what looks to be an indefinite war, there might even be a market for it. In the meantime, Carville and Begala, in keeping with the self-immolating tradition of the Kerry campaign, have handed the Bush campaign and its Fox auxiliary one hell of a gift.
You bet!
I was talkin to my mom last night and she told about an incident recently, where she ran into an old friend of hers, who she doesnt see much these days. Now this ex-friend is intelligent, an ex-teacher, and is an avid Catholic church going person. When she met my mom, she had a glare in her eye, a quiet rage I suppose, and she told mom how she was busy these days reading books on politics. Then, she added, "I dont suppose they would be of any interest to YOU !" in a smart, sarcastic, mocking manner. ( She knows my mom is for Bush). Now what does that tell you about the polarization in this country, its unlike anything Ive ever seen. Where are we gonna go as a country after this election?
"It's a damning measure of the news media's failure to provide a persuasive dose of reality as an antidote to Washington fairy tales that so many Americans came to believe that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, not Saudis. A Newsweek poll just two weeks ago shows that 42 percent of Americans (among them, 32 percent of Democrats) still believe that Saddam was "directly involved" in the 9/11 attacks.
Even before the`9/11 report came out:````````````````````````````````````````````
from the news.telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr114.xml
12/14/2003
"However, the tantalising detail provided in the intelligence document uncovered by Iraq's interim government suggests that Atta's involvement with Iraqi intelligence may well have been far deeper than has hitherto been acknowledged.
Written in the neat, precise hand of Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and one of the few named in the US government's pack of cards of most-wanted Iraqis not to have been apprehended, the personal memo to Saddam is signed by Habbush in distinctive green ink.
Headed simply "Intelligence Items", and dated July 1, 2001, it is addressed: "To the President of the Ba'ath Revolution Party and President of the Republic, may God protect you."
The first paragraph states that "Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, came with Abu Ammer (an Arabic nom-de-guerre - his real identity is unknown) and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at al-Dora under our direct supervision.
"We arranged a work programme for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him . . . He displayed extraordinary effort and showed a firm commitment to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy."
There is nothing in the document that provides any clue to the identity of the "targets", although Iraqi officials say it is a coded reference to the September 11 attacks.
The second item contains a report of how Iraqi intelligence, helped by "a small team from the al-Qaeda organisation", arranged for an (unspecified) shipment from Niger to reach Baghdad by way of Libya and Syria.
Iraqi officials believe this is a reference to the controversial shipments of uranium ore Iraq acquired from Niger to aid Saddam in his efforts to develop an atom bomb, although there is no explicit reference in the document to this.
Habbush writes that the successful completion of the shipment was "the fruit of your excellent secret meeting with Bashir al-Asad (the Syrian president) on the Iraqi-Syrian border", and concludes: "May God protect you and save you to all Arab nations."
While it is almost impossible to ascertain whether or not the document is legitimate or a clever fake, Iraqi officials working for the interim government are convinced of its authenticity, even though they decline to reveal where and how they obtained it. "It is not important how we found it," said a senior Iraqi security official. "The important thing is that we did find it and the information it contains."
A leading member of Iraq's governing council, who asked not to be named, said he was convinced of the document's authenticity.
"There are people who are working with us who used to work with Habbush who are convinced that it is his handwriting and signature. We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's dealings with al-Qaeda, and this document shows the extent of the old regime's involvement with the international terrorist network."
This is the second document published by this newspaper that appears to highlight Saddam's links with al-Qaeda. Earlier this year the Telegraph published details of another Iraqi intelligence document that indicated Saddam's regime was attempting to set up a meeting with Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, who was then based in Sudan.
Intelligence experts point out that a memo such as that written by Habbush would of necessity be vague and short. "Trained intelligence officers hate putting anything down in writing," said one former CIA officer. "You never know where it might turn up."
Certainly the memo's detail concerning Mohammed Atta and Abu Nidal fits in with the known movements of the two terrorists in the summer of 2001. Abu Nidal, the renegade Palestinian terrorist responsible for a wave of outrages in the 1980s, such as the 1985 bomb attacks on Rome and Vienna airports, was based in Baghdad, under Saddam's personal protection, for most of his career.
Having briefly relocated to Libya, Abu Nidal returned to Baghdad at some point in early 2001. At the time it was assumed that Saddam had lured the Palestinian terrorist back to help the Iraqi leader plan a number of terrorist attacks aimed at destabilising American plans to remove him.
In particular, Saddam wanted Abu Nidal to revive his network of "sleeper cells" in Europe and the Middle East to carry out a new wave of attacks. During 2001 Abu Nidal lived in a number of houses in the Baghdad area, including a spacious home in the al-Dora district where he is reported to have met Atta.
The relationship between Abu Nidal and Saddam, however, quickly turned sour, mainly because - as the Telegraph reported at the time - the ageing Palestinian leader was reluctant to accede to Saddam's request to train al-Qaeda fighters in sophisticated terrorist techniques.
Abu Nidal was murdered in August 2001, although the Iraqis tried to claim that he had committed suicide. Habbush appeared at a hastily arranged press conference in Baghdad in an attempt to persuade the sceptical Arab media that Abu Nidal had taken his own life after Iraqi investigators had uncovered a plot to assassinate Saddam.
Although Western intelligence agencies have attempted to trace Atta's movements in the months preceding September 11, there remain several periods during which his precise whereabouts are unknown. Having moved to Florida from Hamburg in 2000, Atta is known to have made at least two trips from the US to Europe in 2001.
In early January he flew to Madrid for a few days. His next confirmed trip was to Zurich in early July. In between, American investigators have concluded from a detailed examination of Atta's credit cards and phone records, that he spent most of the spring and early summer of 2001 in Florida, interspersed by occasional domestic trips. The only confirmed sighting of Atta during this period, however, was on April 26 when he was pulled over for a traffic violation in Florida.
This traffic offence, taken with other evidence collated by FBI agents, is one of the reasons that CIA officials have discounted the report that Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague earlier in the month (the Czech authorities claim Atta was in Prague on April 8). Yesterday the New York Times reported that Ani, who was taken into US custody last July, had told American interrogators that he had not met Atta in Prague.
"The Prague meeting does not appear very convincing," said Lorenzo Vidino, a terrorism analyst at The Investigative Project, a non-profit organisation that investigates international terrorism, in Washington. "But even if that meeting did not take place you have to remember that Atta used a large number of aliases when he travelled. It is not inconceivable that Atta slipped out of the US undetected sometime in the first half of 2001."
The US Congressional report into the September 11 attacks states that Atta used 16 to 17 known aliases, although American intelligence experts concede that there may have been others.
It is entirely conceivable, then, that Atta secretly made his way to Baghdad to undertake training with Abu Nidal a few months before the September 11 attacks. But as long as Saddam and his senior intelligence operatives remain at large, it is impossible to assess just how much they knew about, and were involved in, the planning and execution of the September 11 atrocities."
•Con Coughlin is the author of Saddam: The Secret Life (Macmillan)
this is just one tantalizing clue. Many have been found, approved or disproved...we will some day see a direct link from Saddam to 9/11 if only thru his minions. Meanwhile, the belief that the MSM scoff at, that 42% believe a direct connection, isbased on OUR GUT INSTINCTS that these bastards want to kill us, and are all in it together.
First the NY Times fabricates a lie that "finding stockpiles of WMDs" was a stated reason for the war, and now they bitch about the Old Media not attacking that "stated" reason.
'A Pew Research Center survey published in June found that the credibility of all news sources is low, in some cases falling precipitously since the start of the Bush administration: major newspapers, the broadcast networks, the cable news networks and PBS alike.'
Duh.
After seeing what happened after the 2000 election, there are very few intelligent people that believe the Democrats will not try ANYTHING it can to reverse the trend towards conservatism.
Very few believe the Old Media anymore. And Rich is a great example of why it should not be trusted.
Personally, I find the fact that Tucker Carlson is supposed to represent the "right" on Crossfire, even thought he recently wrote that he's not voting for Bush because W didn't rush back to DC on 9/11, much more odious. Tucker's been representing the Republican side for three years since he decided he won't vote to re-elect Bush! That's the real outrage.
Besides, they were absolutely right about New York magazine. When I heard about the plans to do a photo spread on New York Republicans, I knew it was a bad idea. A few months ago, New York magazine had a picture of Rush Limbaugh on the cover regarding celebrity scandals, and they picked a 10-year-old, fat, unflattering picture of him, while all the rest of the celebs on the cover had good pictures of them.
Anyhow, the Repubs were justifiably outraged about the pics New York magazine took. They were so unflattering they looked like mug shots, for goodness sakes. New York magazine never prints unflattering photographs of anyone unless they are Republicans. If that isn't bias, I don't know what is.
>>60 Minutes was the foundation of investigative TV and has 30 years of distinguished journalism behind it.
That's debatable. 60 Minutes almost destroyed Audi in the U.S. with their "Unintended Acceleration" story, blaming same on the vehicle, rather than operator error, the true problem.
It is just like Lefties to blame an inanimate object, rather than the human. There are distinct parallels with how the lamesteam media and the Left regard firearms.
The odd factoid that I have on Dowd is that she is dating the druggie producer of the West Wing that has been a democratic shill machine for years. I can't remember his name, but I recall that he was caught with a suitcase full of mushrooms in between rehab visits.
If it were only true....unfortunately we have to listen to liberal drivel from Alan Colmes, Susan Estrich, and Juan Williams while we are trying to hear the truth from Hannity, Brit Hume, et. al..
So now we're sure the New Yawk Slimes is not a timepiece, broken or otherwise.
Wow, he's a windy old commie, isn't he?
"...Though the best-selling "Unfit for Command" was the work of a longtime Kerry antagonist and a writer best known for his anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic comments on a right-wing Web forum, its facts were challenged on TV at a far slower pace than the books of Seymour Hersh and Kitty Kelley, whose reporting was targeted in advance by administration talking points handed out before the books could even be read."
Is there ANY reasonable support for these charges of anti-Semitism and -Catholicism against Mr. O'Neill? Otherwise, this is the cheapest shot of the article.
-- Joe
Someone change Rich's diaper. It's full.
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