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According to the Washington Times, the military reviewed the loss of Fallujah to Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists in 2004 to determine how the US lost control of the city. The Marine Corps should have beaten the terrorists in a straight up fight, but the Pentagon believes that the enemy had a lot of help from a surprising source -- surprising for everyone except those who watched it happen in real time: "The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion — coalition victory," read the assessment, prepared by analysts at the U.S. Army's National...

My blogging has been lighter than usual the past few weeks due to family time, Fox News duties, holiday chaos, holiday illness--and, yes, planning for a trip to Iraq. As you know, ex-CNN newsman Eason Jordan extended an invitation to me three weeks ago to go to Iraq to investigate the Associated Press/"Jamil Hussein" story. He offered to pay for a trip. As you'll recall, I asked if he would offer to cover travel and security costs for Curt from Flopping Aces--who broke open the story of AP's dubious sources on Thanksgiving weekend and continues to lead the blogospheric search...

Beginning Wednesday, November 15, the sometimes called "CNN of the Arab world," will be out to capture the rest of the world as Al Jazeera International debuts on TV screens globally - in English. The new satellite station will run 24/7, broadcasting 12 hours a day from Al Jazeera's home base in Doha, Qatar, with another four hours each from Washington DC, London and Kuala Lumpur. For star power it will have David Frost doing interviews, with Wednesday's "scoop" scheduled to be his talk with Tony Blair. In its decade on the air, Al Jazeera in Arabic has become the...

Big media was clearly on the defensive in 2005. Dan Rather left the CBS News anchor desk under a heavy cloud while other executives were fired in the wake of Memogate. The use of anonymous sources put journalists like Judith Miller and the NY Times in an uncomfortable spotlight. Newsweek's erroneous report that US Marines desecrated a Koran touched off a firestorm of deadly protests around the world. CNN news chief Eason Jordan was forced to resign over comments at an international forum. And an Al-Jazeera reporter was even convicted for his links to Al-Qaida. In each controversy, bloggers successfully...

RUSH: I want to continue on the sound bite roll here, because this next is just choice. Talked about this yesterday. The media being all upset about the fact that the Pentagon reportedly buying space, buying stories, planting good news in the Iraqi media. "We can't have that, why, we can't have good news in the Iraqi media. Who gave them a right to do that? We can't go shaping and bending the news like that." The media's got an idea the news out of Iraq is going to be all bad. The Pentagon says, "Hey, we're going to...

i-Newswire, 2005-05-24 - CNN/U.S. will air “Defining Moments: 25 Stories that Touched Our Lives” on Wednesday, June 1, an intimate recounting of the biggest television news events from the past quarter century as told by the newsmakers and journalists who lived through them. The two-part special airs from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. and then from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Special anniversary editions of Larry King Live, which is celebrating its 20th year, airs from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. All times Eastern. On June 1, 1980, CNN signed on the air as the world’s first 24-hour news network....

Note to the mainstream media: When one of your own finds itself in a deep ethics hole due to slinging accusations without truth, don’t grab the shovel and start digging one for yourself. Apparently, Newspaper Guild - Communications Workers of America President Linda Foley picked up the torch from former CNN news chief Eason Jordan to again accuse U.S. troops of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq, but Jordan’s unsubstantiated claims created a firestorm resulting in his resignation. But unlike Jordan’s comments February at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the recording of Foley’s comments Friday in St. Louis is...

The president of The Newspaper Guild has drawn intense flak from conservative news groups after it was disclosed that she had accused the U.S. military of targeting journalists in Iraq. In remarks made during a panel discussion at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis on May 13, Linda Foley said that not only U.S. journalists were being targeted. "They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like Al Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios, with impunity." The conservative website NewsMax.com charged that Foley had accused...

It’s Time to Bring Back the Sedition Act Ratheresque in Proportion, Newsweek Fabricates a Story about our Military. By N. Beaujon May 19, 2005 Last week Newsweek magazine printed a story alleging that soldiers at Guantamamo Bay routinely dropped their enemy captives' Holy Koran in the toilet during interrogations. The story, not surprisingly, set the Muslim world ablaze with rioting, violence and anti-American sentiment. Sixteen people died, one hundred were injured and “holy” Mullahs everywhere were calling for yet another jihad against the United States (a.k.a. - “The Great Satan”). What else is new? The story, as it turned out,...

NEW YORK - CBS said Wednesday it is cancelling the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes," insisting the decision was made because of poor ratings and not last fall's ill-fated story about President Bush's military service Dan Rather, the newsmagazine's lead correspondent, will contribute stories to the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes," said CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves. "This was a ratings call, not a content call," Moonves said Wednesday. The newsmagazine spinoff was where Rather reported last September that Bush skirted some duty while in the Texas Air National Guard and a commander felt pressure to sugarcoat an evaluation of him....

HAVANA, Cuba (AP) -- Hundreds of thousands of Cubans answered Fidel Castro's call to file past the American mission early Tuesday in a "March against Terrorism," demanding that the United States arrest a Cuban militant in the deadly bombing of an airliner. Dressed in his traditional olive green military uniform and cap, the 78-year-old Castro showed up in the crowd outside the U.S. Interests Section minutes before the march was to start. "Down with terrorism!" Castro shouted in brief comments before he stepped off to lead the march. "Down with Nazi doctrines and methods! Down with the lies!" Marchers began...

SAF CALLS FOR ‘WAITING PERIODS’ ON PRESS FOLLOWING FATAL NEWSWEEK DEBACLE For Immediate Release: 5/16/2005 BELLEVUE, WA – More than 115 dead or injured, and now a lame “apology” from Newsweek; maybe it is time for the press to accept waiting periods before exercising its First Amendment rights in the same way the press has backed waiting periods on law-abiding Americans before exercising their Second Amendment rights. That’s the observation from the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) now that Newsweek has acknowledged its report about the desecration of the Koran by soldiers at Guantanamo Bay was bogus. “I wonder if Newsweek,...

In the past, U.N. agencies have also sponsored "traveling seminars" for journalists so they write positive stories about U.N. projects. When conservative commentator Armstrong Williams was exposed for taking money from the Bush administration, his credibility was cast into doubt and news organizations expressed regrets for having had him on the air to comment on public policy issues. Williams was tainted by a conflict of interest that should have been revealed to the viewing audience. He was said to be a channel for Bush administration propaganda.

In its upcoming issue, Vanity Fair has done an investigation into the current cause of the kooky left, the case of disgraced White House reporter Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. And reporters David Margolick and Richard Gooding have uncovered...nothing. No White House wrongdoing. No secret plotting or illicit Gannon affairs with White House staffers. No Karl-Rove-master-plan-to-undermine-democracy hijinks. Nothing. "As time passed, Gannon came to seem, to at least some of the [left-wing] bloggers, as more like a freelance zealot than the linchpin of some much larger conspiracy," Margolick and Gooding write. "They now admit that for them Gannon emerged as less a...

Journalist and former hostage Giuliana Sgrena says that the American military is lying about the shooting at a security checkpoint in Iraq that wounded her and killed an Italian intelligence officer. Days before the Pentagon is expected to release the results of its investigation into what happened at the checkpoint, Sgrena tells Correspondent Scott Pelley that shortly after her release by insurgents, American soldiers in Baghdad opened fire on her car without any warning. Pelley's interview with Sgrena will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Wednesday, April 13, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari negotiated Sgrena's release from...

Original story: I have an unconfirmed story that CBS is reporting an American satellite recorded video that shows the car carrying Giulliana travelling at over 60 mph! If this proves to be true her entire story falls apart. Update: It's confirmed, Pentagon sources maintain that the distance the car travelled (91 meters)and the time it took (3 sec.) means the vehicle WAS travelling at a speed greater than 60mph. So, as we suspected Giuliana Sgrena is a communist agenda driven hyper pacifist lying POS. Update II: It appears from the animation video that the approaching Sgrena car WAS warned with...

BBC Correspondent gives his first interview

Rony Abovitz didn't intend to be a media star, a darling of the right, a villain to the left. He just wanted to take in one of the more interesting sessions at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a panel called "Will Democracy Survive the Media?" He was drawn by the prestigious lineup of speakers: CNN Chief News Executive Eason Jordan; David R. Gergen, adviser to four presidents; U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.); Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC World Service; and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan's minister of foreign affairs. But as Abovitz listened at the January...

As a rule, when I write a piece about all the mistakes my newspaper, the L.A. Times, makes, I have to wait a week or even two to compile a selection large enough to make it worth our while. It’s not that they don’t come up with a ready supply on a daily basis. Heck, UPS doesn’t deliver the goods with such regularity. But some of the goofs are simply too boring to mention, as when they get the days and times of certain events wrong or when they simply misspell someone’s name. Sometimes, too, the corrections run even longer...

Pseudo-journalistic Web sites are another way conservatives get around “the filter” of mainstream media. It’s a new medium, but, for the Republican Party, it’s an old story. During one especially hectic week in mid-February, the Internet took three scalps in what appeared to be unrelated events. Liberal bloggers forced Talon News White House correspondent James D. Guckert, a k a “Jeff Gannon,” to resign after it was revealed that he was writing under a false name for a Republican activist group (GOPUSA), that he was not really a journalist at all, and that he had posed nude on the Internet...

Colleagues under fire but U.S. media mute My complaint about the compliant ANTONIA ZERBISIAS You have to wonder what Eason Jordan thinks about last Friday's attack on the car that took Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena from her kidnapping ordeal to her close call at the Baghdad airport. Jordan is the CNN news chief who in January made controversial remarks about U.S. troops targeting journalists, comments which led to his resigning "to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq." Alarming indeed: at least...

Journalists under fireLONDON -- With Eason Jordan's resignation from CNN, newly powerful bloggers reveled in their unseating of another mainstream-media powerhouse. The term "Easongate" briefly entered the English language. And world attention was distracted from the serious issue of journalists' safety.

Democrats ask White House for documents on conservative blogger BY ELANA SCHOR Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - (KRT) - U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the House's top Democrat for homeland security, has found an unlikely place in need of his protection: the White House press room. Thompson and four colleagues, all senior congressional Democrats, have petitioned Bush administration officials to release classified documents about James D. Guckert, a conservative activist who was a daily fixture at White House press briefings. Calling himself Jeff Gannon, Guckert asked President Bush questions at televised news conferences as a representative of Talon News Service,...

Over the weekend, I caught CNN removing a damning quote from a story about Italian Communist journalist Guiliana Sgrena, recently released from some form of captivity in Iraq for a reported $6 million ransom, about why she was in Iraq in the first place. She was there, in her own words, to agitate against America and the war-- Sgrena said she "risked everything" to challenge "the Italian government, who didn't want journalists to reach Iraq, and the Americans," who she said don't want the public to see "what really became of that country with the war, and notwithstanding that which...

During one especially hectic week in mid-February, the Internet took three scalps in what appeared to be unrelated events. Liberal bloggers forced Talon News White House correspondent James D. Guckert, a k a “Jeff Gannon,” to resign after it was revealed that he was writing under a false name for a Republican activist group (GOPUSA), that he was not really a journalist at all, and that he had posed nude on the Internet in an effort to solicit sex for money. Conservative bloggers, meanwhile, created a firestorm after Eason Jordan, the chief news executive for CNN, made controversial remarks during...

WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday said it was "absurd" for a former hostage in Iraq (search) to charge that U.S. military forces may have deliberately targeted her car as she was being rushed to freedom. ~snip~Responding to Sgrena's statement that the car may have been deliberately targeted, McClellan said. "It's absurd to make any such suggestion, that our men and women in uniform would deliberately target innocent civilians. "That's just absurd," McClellan repeated. He said the airport road "has been a place where suicide car bombers have launched attacks. It's been a place where regime elements have fired...

Bill Clinton's remarks at Davos may end being more controversial than Eason Jordan's. Other blogs, especially Little Green Footballs, have been all over the story. Here is the latest. It is now fully evident that a gloablist left-leaning elite uses Davos as an exercise to get similarly-inclined Americans to denounce their own country and pay homage to the icons of "progressive" politics - meaning, basically, anti-Americanism. How anyone could classify the mullahs of Iran as "progressive" and keep a straight face is beyond my understanding. It demonstrates how illogical and twisted a group the global anti-Americans have become.

ROME Mar 5, 2005 — Italy demanded answers Saturday as former hostage Giuliana Sgrena was taken off a flight from Iraq wrapped in a plaid blanket and hooked to an intravenous drip for a shoulder wound inflicted when American troops fired on a car taking her to the Baghdad airport. The Italian agent who negotiated her freedom was hit and died in her arms. The shooting at a U.S. checkpoint in Baghdad stoked anti-war sentiment in Italy, where the public was widely opposed to the government's decision to send 3,000 troops to help U.S.-led efforts to secure the country from...

“There is not one of you who dare to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street looking for another job. . . . The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn...

Jeddah: George Soros is warning all oil-producing countries about pegging their currencies and oil revenues to the dollar. "The US dollar is weak, and is expected to deteriorate more," said Soros. The famous currency trader and financier warned Russia and other oil-producing countries to sell their oil and price it in euros rather than US dollars, because the US dollar continues to fall against the euro. The US dollar poses a danger to oil-producing countries and their economies, he said. Many central banks intend to peg their currencies to the euro and increase their balances of European currency against the...

I surfed a political information board when the Dan Rather National Guard document forgery scandal broke. The suggestion that Lt. Col. Jerry Killian produced a document, 30 years earlier, that exactly resembled a Microsoft Word creation - on Word default settings no less - ignited an explosion. Bloggers and message board posters almost in unison said the equivalent of, "Hey! Let me see that!" - and on the Internet, they could! A couple of mouse clicks and the document appeared on screens nationwide. Discussion of fonts, old typewriters and software made an online investigation by ordinary people more curious than...

Tonight on the Fox Show "Foxwatch," its weekly show on the media itself, a letter from a Freeper was read concerning Easongate. Kristinn from the D.C. Chapter was sharp enough to catch it, and call me. Here is the entire e-mail. They read all or part of the first paragraph as being from "John in Highlands, NC." That's me. I hope I spoke for most of you in what I said: Lordy, Lordy, folks, Of course the bloggers forced Eason Jordan out. We tried to force him out years ago when he published his mealymouthed justification for slanting the CNN...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Slovakia leader hits media on Bush slantBy Bill SammonTHE WASHINGTON TIMESPublished February 25, 2005 BRATISLAVA, Slovakia -- The prime minister of Slovakia yesterday blamed the media for unfairly turning the European public against President Bush by negatively slanting coverage on Iraq.     After meeting with Mr. Bush twice in less than a week, Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda told reporters that the president also blamed the press for portraying him as eager to invade Iran to eradicate its nuclear program.     "President Bush told me in Brussels: 'I am so unhappy that media creates the picture that Bush wants...

It took the Eason Jordan scandal to finally get the mainstream media up in arms about the phenomenon of blogging. And now Big Media appears resolved to take bloggers down a notch by any means necessary. Those means include trying to portray bloggers as some kind of vicious collective dedicated more to "collecting scalps" than contributing to the national discourse. Thus we have Steve Lovelady of the Columbia Journalism Review stating that bloggers are "salivating morons" who are part of a "lynch mob." (Lovelady claims that his remarks were "taken out of context" and not meant to apply to all...

Two leaders of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee want the federal prosecutor investigating the Valeria Plame case to subpoena a personal journal of controversial White House reporter James Guckert, following Editor & Publisher's disclosure yesterday that Guckert claims he kept the journal for the past two years. "It is clear that a primary obstacle to the ... investigation is uncovering a precise chronology of when, and to whom, classified information was leaked," Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), one of those seeking the subpoena, told E&P. "The revelation by Editor & Publisher that Mr. Guckert kept contemporaneous records of his 'reporting' activities...

By Sayed Mahdi Almodarresi Our greatest tragedy may be that we tend to forget our tragedies The killed were killed, the captured were killed, and the injured were killed as well. No one was spared. Jews were victims of Nazi oppression and “ethnic cleansing”, the result of which was the extermination of over five million Jews. By perpetrating such a heinous crime Hitler engraved his name in history as one of the most notorious criminals who immersed himself in the blood of innocent people... We are not going to dispute that. In fact, we, more than anybody can fully grasp...

Last year, the very smart political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio completely unwrapped the orthodox newsroom view of religion and politics. Writing in First Things magazine, the authors conclude that secularists and religious people have been struggling against each other for many years, but in the newsroom accounts, one struggler (secularism) essentially disappears, leaving the religious side as oddly divisive people who want to take over the culture and "impose" (vote) their values. The authors believe newsrooms have been partisan in the debate for many years, partly because so many reporters are Democrats who do not go to...

WHO'S NOT.... 3. CNN & REST OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA Yet another major media mogul has lost his job after going public with fictional fantasies that cast aspersions on U.S. leaders or institutions. The latest dispenser of disinformation to bite the dust is Eason Jordan, the Chief News Executive of the CNN cable network -- a self-inflicted casualty of the same hubris and insular mentality that earlier had brought down CBS propagandists Dan Rather and Mary Mapes. Prior to the latest incident that finally cost him his job, Jordan was probably best known for his revelation -- in a remarkable 2003...

The Public Editor: Wake up and smell coffee blogs brewing By Armando Acuña Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, February 20, 2005 It was mid-morning on Feb. 2, and the man on the telephone had an urgent question. A friend had just told him about a CNN story that said the U.S. military had a policy of deliberately killing reporters in Iraq. What did I know about it? Sell It Yourself Whoa. What was that again? I replied, thinking to myself the incendiary premise was preposterous. I put the caller on hold. I called up CNN's Web site. Nothing there. I...

Bloggers go big-game hunting As Internet `journalists' bag another prize, Tim Harper considers the consequences for mainstream media TIM HARPER Often witty, sometimes racy, certainly irreverent, frequently sanctimonious, the blogosphere has been bulking up for years. But the mainstream media have long taken a largely dismissive approach to this world of online political journals: Open. Peek. Chuckle. Close. No more. The growing army of American cyber-pundits hunched over their search engines has begun to wield strength that no one predicted. The bloggers have brought down the powerful. They have unmasked an impostor in the White House briefing room. Perhaps most...

EXCERPT: In this sense, Eason Jordan got fired for blogging. Except, of course, he's not a blogger. And nobody's ever been fired for blogging. But his words getting taken out of context and resulting in his resignation from his position put him in an untenable, unemployable position, at least to those who choose a false clarity over the nuance and understanding any of us would extend to the people we care about. <snip> And about Eason Jordan: More myopic blogger triumphalism. Dear political bloggers, most people, even in the blogosphere, have never heard of the whole kerfuffle, let alone the...

Beat the metropolitan elite with the tactics of US conservatives For decades the national conversation in most western countries has been directed by a few talking heads. Newspapers play important roles but all the evidence suggests that broadcasters have possessed the greatest potential to frame public debate. British politicians have known that communicating their message depends upon getting the nod from a small number of powerful figures in the broadcast media. The editor of BBC1's six o'clock news bulletin can make a minister's day by putting his department's latest announcement at the front of the bulletin. Hearing Huw Edwards say...

American media vs the blogs By Kevin Anderson BBC News Website, Washington Eason Jordan came under blog-based scrutiny for comments at Davos Bloggers. Truth-tellers or vigilantes? Trophy-hunters or watchdogs? With the abrupt resignation of CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan, the American media are struggling with how to respond to bloggers. Some see the bloggers as an explosion of free speech, a democratic counterbalance to media arrogance and a much needed call for greater transparency in the media, while others see bloggers as vigilante partisans bent on discrediting and destroying the media. Blogswarm The furore was touched off after bloggers...

Bloggers will rescue the right Beat the metropolitan elite with the tactics of US conservatives Iain Duncan Smith Saturday February 19, 2005 The Guardian For decades the national conversation in most western countries has been directed by a few talking heads. Newspapers play important roles but all the evidence suggests that broadcasters have possessed the greatest potential to frame public debate. British politicians have known that communicating their message depends upon getting the nod from a small number of powerful figures in the broadcast media. The editor of BBC1's six o'clock news bulletin can make a minister's day by putting...

The news of the last week has encompassed, one way or another, the need for liberal reformers in the Middle East and people saying stupid things that get them in media trouble. We have seen a leading reformer be assassinated in the same week the Top Dog at CNN stepped down because he let his true colors show. When the themes of these two general news items collide, the obvious conclusion is to give that region Howard Dean. He is the undisputed king of unrestrained shrieking at inopportune moments, and a liberal reformer in a country with plenty to spare.......

Richard Sambrook of the BBC, David Gergen of Harvard, and Senator Christopher Dodd have all weighed in their initial measures on Easongate. Much of this can be followed at Michelle Malkin's site, Hugh Hewitt, and Rebecca MacKinnon. We now understand that the WEF is mulling over the release of the videotape of the session with Jordan, and that there is a small debate brewing regarding the "on" or "off" the record nature of the session. I have also heard from the WEF's Head of Media, Mark Adams, just a few hours ago. Mark was kind enough to reply to an...

FOR TWO WEEKS Eason Jordan has been engulfed in a blogswarm. During remarks at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the now-former CNN executive accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq for murder. The unleashed fury of the blogosphere eventually overcame a media blackout to force Jordan from his job, discredit the American media, and start a debate on the nature of blogging that derived directly from the mainstream media's attempt to cast the entire effort as a partisan witch hunt.But the media has no one but itself to blame--as it stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence...

<p>Even the Promised Land's notorious early summer heat was no match for the terror attacks Israel was facing in June 2002, when this newspaper's editors met with Eason Jordan, whose illustrious career as CNN's chief news executive has now come to an abrupt end. What brought Jordan to Jerusalem back in 2002 was his network's coverage of one terror attack Continues...</p>

Hey kids, check out my nifty new tagline above. (Thanks to my web guru, Mark Jaquith, for the design.) You like? I think it's a keeper. If you don't get the allusion, click on the asterisk for a refresher and then come on back here and read on. I've got a calm, cool, and collected bit to say about this. Wall Street Journal editorial writer Bret Stephens appeared on Hugh Hewitt's radio show last night to defend his paper's strange and snotty treatment of the Eason Jordan "kerfuffle." (Full transcript at Radioblogger.) I found the following remarks, in which the...

Their latest victim: Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive. He resigned on Feb. 13 after conservative bloggers feasted on a controversial statement he made in late January at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, about the U.S. military. His allegation -- that coalition soldiers in Iraq mistook journalists for enemies and killed them -- brought down a storm of criticism on him and his network.