Posted 7:05 AM by Peter Fallow
PEARL'S MURDERERS CONVICTED: The Last Page weighs in with what she considers to be a fairer sentence than hanging. I tend to agree.

Posted 7:03 AM by Peter Fallow
PRESS FREEDOM IN ZIMBABWE: An American reporter has been found not guilty of knowingly publishing a false story about a political murder in Zimbabwe. However, he's been deported. While many elements of the left see "repression" in strongly expressed contrary opinions, there's little condemnation of Robert Mugabe's totalitarian crackdown on the media. I guess being a Third World socialist gives you a free pass to practice actual censorship.

Posted 8:13 AM by Peter Fallow
POWERS THAT BE: Another useful column by Bill Powers of the "National Jounal." This one takes journalists to task for a failure of original thinking in reporting on the scandals of the day:

The media can't and shouldn't control the fatuities of pols who wander into our space, but we can control our own impulse to turn all news into a rerun. Is it really necessary for every media person from Maureen Dowd to Bill O'Reilly to trot out the robber barons of a hundred years ago, whenever Enron, Martha Stewart, and WorldCom are under discussion? Are the constant references to the Gilded Age (or the "second Gilded Age," as Robert Novak called it) doing anything to make this story more compelling or understandable?

To me, they're doing the opposite. To label the current global political situation "the Great Game" -- a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling to describe a completely different world -- as The New York Times did recently in a headline is to cover it with dust and cobwebs. Aren't writers supposed to invent new ways of describing the world? Every time I see one of these creaking references, I get the same sinking feeling I have when a historian comes on TV to observe, with studied sagacity, that if you think the current scandal is wild, you don't know about Teapot Dome. It's all happened before, you see.

Just read the whole thing.

Posted 8:08 AM by Peter Fallow
FAKING THE NEWS: A group of anonymous leftists has placed fake issues of the local newspaper in the boxes of the "Seattle Times." The fakes are titled the "Seattle Crimes." Police are unsure if a crime has actually been committed. In an e-mail exchange, the editors of the "Crimes" reveal why they released their fake paper, which focuses on racial issues:

"The mainstream media... do not cover these issues adequately." said the Crimes' editors. "If they cover them at all, they do so with a bias, one that is very often racist. And the best way to call out racist media seemed to be to go right into their turf." The Crimes went into that turf with its own bias: The editors say there is police brutality and institutional racism at the Seattle Police Department. And they think the message got across to those who read the paper. "People seem to love it! Some of us have sat on buses or in restaurants or at our jobs watching people crack up as they read it. That's pretty cool," the editors wrote. "We've also watched people start up some pretty dope conversations about racism, police brutality, and related issues. Everybody should be talking to each other about these issues."

I wonder if those "dope conversations" include this uncomfortable topic. It certainly touches on the issues the "Crimes" raises.

Posted 7:41 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON THE LEFT: I must rush out and purchase the latest book by Martin Amis. It's called "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million." Here's what the "Los Angeles Times" says about it:

Koba the Dread ("Koba" was Stalin's childhood nickname) is about what Amis calls the "chief lacuna" of the 20th century: the failure of Western intellectuals to condemn the grotesque horrors perpetrated in the USSR even as they were happening, and their reluctance to fully repudiate some of their communist sympathies since. (To put this in perspective, the horrors include the murder of some 20 million people and the misery of almost everybody else.)

And this:

...the book does a brilliant job of rubbing the left's face in the mountains of corpses that resulted from its favorite political philosophy. That it has been done more thoroughly before isn't quite the point, since those who did it, most notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the historian Robert Conquest, are still sometimes seen as reactionary while a Marxist historian like Eric Hobsbawm is given an adulatory press.

Posted 7:02 AM by Peter Fallow
ACTUAL PROOF OF SLANDER: Just when I thought Ann Coulter was being a tad overblown about liberals slandering conservatives, here comes a story that at least partially confirms her charges. (Link via Romenesko.) NPR tried to connect the Traditional Values Coalition to last fall's anthrax attacks? I mean, I can see connecting the racist Christian Identity movement to the attacks, but the Traditional Values Coalition is fairly mainstream (even though I don't agree with many of their positions). This story ought to resonate with all the lefties who bitch and moan about their views being unfairly lumped in with radicals.

On second thought, it probably won't resonate at all.

Posted 7:39 AM by Peter Fallow
SUMMER IN THE 'CITY JOURNAL': The ever-useful "City Journal" has finally posted its summer issue, and Heather MacDonald is on the case. This story is about black police officers who don't think media charges of "racist police brutality" hold much water. And check this passage out:

The long-running race racket that has so distorted our national discourse shows no signs of letting up, but that is only because we have been listening to the wrong people. For every Al Sharpton or Eric Adams, there is at least one Carl McLaughlin or Tony Barksdale, who speak of American opportunity and fairness. There is no inherent reason why only the victimologists should be granted legitimacy as representatives of black interests, especially since so few of them are elected. Why not at least give equal time to a Wilbur Chapman, say, when he argues that the “biggest impediment to minority advancement is white guilt” and asserts that, whatever the remaining problems in American race relations, “the bottom line is: no one can stop me from getting my piece of the American dream”?

Just go read the whole issue. There's a ton of good, blog-worthy material in there.

Posted 7:28 AM by Peter Fallow
MISSING MCGOWAN: This is interesting. The "New York Review of Books" has a review round-up of several recent books on journalism. It's written by the estimable Russell Baker. But noticeably absent is William McGowan's "Coloring the News." That's pretty ironic in light of the National Press Club award it just won (see item below). A couple of months ago, the "New York Times" said it wouldn't review McGowan's book because it is critical of the Times. (Here's a letter on that, and here's Nat Hentoff on the Times' refusal to review the book.) Draw your own conclusions.

Posted 7:09 AM by Peter Fallow
DEBATE ABOUT THE FUTURE OF PRINT: Arnold Kling sees newspapers slowly dying out as the Internet assumes even greater dominace. Sidney Goldberg disagrees. Joe-Bob says check it out.

Posted 7:05 AM by Peter Fallow
A POSITIVE SIGN: I was giving a quick look to this list of National Press Club award winners, and I noticed that William McGowan's "Coloring The News" won the Rowse/Press Criticism - Single Entry - Book award. That's good news. It means that the journalistic establishment is willing to seriously consider criticism of that most delicate newsroom subject - race relations. Frequent readers of this blog know I've been hyping this book for months as far more important than Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." For more on McGowan's book, check out his Web site.

Posted 6:53 AM by Peter Fallow
'FATHER, SON AND HOLY GOAT': I saw this on TV while on vacation, and I'm glad to see someone has commented on it. If you're just tuning in, it seems a goat was born in Florida with what appears to be a white No. 3 on its side. Now, for those of you who don't follow NASCAR, No. 3 was the late Dale Earnhardt's number. (I'm not a NASCAR fan, but being a Southern boy who worked in the sports department at three newspapers in the South, I'm familiar.) Apparently, people are flocking to see this magical goat named Lil' Dale, thinking that it is some kind of beyond-the-grave message from The Intimidator. (You'd think he'd have chosen something more intimidating than a goat.)

I don't think there's any more that I can add to this.

Posted 6:35 AM by Peter Fallow
PALESTINIAN BABY KILLERS: This will probably be blogged everywhere today, but the "New Republic" has an excellent column on that infamous picture of the suicide-bomber baby that surfaced a couple of weeks ago.

After first denying relation to the infant shahid, Redwan Abu Turki acknowledged both his grandchild and the authenticity of the photograph, even as he claimed the get-up was nothing but a joke. "The picture was taken just for the fun of it," he shrugged. After all, in the streets of Gaza and Jenin, suicide bombers are heroes. Wondered the baby's uncle, "What's all the fuss about?" Now, cultural humor is an elusive and arbitrary phenomenon. In the West, Stalinist atrocity is recalled far more blithely than Nazi horror ... Jewish culture--and Israeli culture in particular--has some spectacular black humor ... But in the Jewish case, the engine of laughter is the bleakest moment of victimhood, survival from which engenders humor as a coping mechanism. The Abu Turki family, by contrast, is having a chuckle over murdering Jews in bus shelters, supermarkets, nightclubs, and pizzerias. They laugh to celebrate murder--and the consequent death of their own child--not to overcome it.

And this:

It doesn't surprise me," Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib enigmatically remarked about the picture. "I know exactly the mentality of the Palestinian people, and I know exactly the way they think." Khatib reveals the true horror of the photograph: its normative place in the Palestinian mind, at least as Khatib understands it. A baby set to detonate in a Jerusalem sandbox in order to establish a fundamentalist nightmare between the river and the sea is a punch line in Ramallah, to the eternal sorrow of Hanan Ashrawi and Sari Nusseibeh. Khatib's blasé testimony suggests, in a nauseatingly profound way, the depths of Palestinian acclimation to suicide bombing.

Posted 5:38 AM by Peter Fallow
WATCHDOG WATCHES HIMSELF: Via Romenesko comes this story of a newspaper hiring a city council member to cover the city council and the subsequent resignation of two of the paper's three full-time employees. It's a serious conflict-of-interest story, but one of the publishers is MAYOR of a neighboring town:

Barbara Bobo, who is in her fifth term as Millport mayor, said politics and journalism often "dovetail" at small weeklies such as the Northport and West Alabama newspapers. She said she believed Allison could remain unbiased in his coverage of town business. She cited herself as an example. "I write the town’s news. I don’t have a reporter there," she said of Millport. As a mayor-reporter, she said, "you have to use common sense in your coverage. It’s not like there’s a whole lot going on."

Readers are right to worry about examples of bias in the "New York Times" or the "Washington Post." But remember, there's a huge swath of the country that gets its news from podunk papers such as these, and they are absolutely loaded with their own bizarre biases. In the early days of this blog, I wrote about my how the powers that be at my first newspaper deemed the monthly meeting of a small civic club to be front-page news. Now, this wasn't a tiny weekly paper. This was a daily with a circulation of about 25,000 that had a heavy wire-service presence on its front page. However, every month, stripped across the top, would be that club's meeting, right above the latest news from the Middle East and the president's speech to Congress. And why? Because the publisher was a member. Unbelievable, but far too common.

Posted 6:55 AM by Peter Fallow
YENTA SANS STREISAND: Here's is a blog that is well worth your time. Check out the Media Yenta, who is "a mensch who works within the Hollywood system. Enjoy the commentary with creative typos." Funny stuff.

Posted 6:45 AM by Peter Fallow
'CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY TED RALLS': Sorry to paraphrase Che Guevara's famous call for a multiplicity of Vietnams, but that seems to be the point of this story from "The Nation." In the apparent atmosphere of incipient fascism goin' down in John Ashcroft's Amerikkka, brave editorial cartoonists of Rall's ilk are needed more than ever. Rall himself is trotted out to complain about "censorship" after many newspapers dropped his cartoon in the wake of his outrageous "Terror Widows" cartoon and people criticized him for his gross insensitivity. (There's that "strongly voiced criticism masking as oppression" argument again. As I've written before, many on the Left are really starting to sound like Ann Coulter.)

Posted 6:12 AM by Peter Fallow
FUN AT SPINSANITY: While I was on vacation, Henry Hanks e-mailed me a link to this Spinsanity story that attacks both FAIR and the MRC, media watchdogs of the left and right, respectively. Today, a reader criticizes Spinsanity for the piece, and Spinsanity responds.

Posted 5:56 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA BIAS AND THE MIDDLE EAST: Here's a long piece from the "American Journalism Review" on perceptions of either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli bias in the coverage of the Middle East conflict. I tend to agree with the author's conclusion that the "bias," such as it is, isn't a deliberate thing. It's more a function of ignorance:

"I think bias is a strong word and term to describe what's out there," says Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "There are problems – problems of ignorance, of lack of perspective. There are problems of people with no knowledge being parachuted into a situation and producing incomplete coverage.... But I am certainly not one to say that the American media is biased against Israel."

AJR also includes this related column on Mideast media bias. As I've written before, sometimes what the public perceives as "bias" in coverage choices is often the result of some entirely plausible breakdown in the newsgathering process - an assignment gets switched to another reporter or photographer, or an editor handling a certain beat is absent from work and another editor unfamiliar with that beat steps up to fill in. These snafus happen all the time.

Posted 5:31 AM by Peter Fallow
'EMBRACE THE BLOG': Here's an interesting story from the "American Journalism Review." It tells journalists to view blogs as another avenue for disseminating information to the public. Here's some excerpts:

The simple, linear structure of Weblogs has long served the narrative needs of software developers and teenage diarists alike. Now blogging is confronting journalism, with the rise of current-events blogs that deconstruct news coverage, spew opinion and even scoop the big media from time to time. The best news bloggers are articulate, independent thinkers. In some ways, they are the antithesis of traditional journalists: unedited, unabashedly opinionated, sporadic and personal.

And this:

Blogs can be a rich resource, an easy publishing tool and a repository for notebook overflow. I seriously doubt they'll usurp online newspapers in five years--but newsrooms could borrow a few tricks from today's bloggers to make their own journalism better.

Posted 5:24 AM by Peter Fallow
BACK TO THE GRIND: After a delightful week's vacation, I'm back to work. A splendid time was had by all. I'm sorry to say I didn't miss the blogging all that much.

Posted 7:18 AM by Peter Fallow
OUT OF THE OFFICE: The Media Minder will be closed until Monday, July 8 for a well-deserved vacation. In the meantime, check out the fine bunch o' blogs to your right. I hope everyone has a happy and safe Fourth of July. Cheers!

Posted 9:40 AM by Peter Fallow
INTO ACADEMIA: Two articles of note in the "New Republic." First, Peter Berkowitz criticizes postmodern maven Stanley Fish for two pieces he wrote in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Here's part of Berkowitz's analysis:

His current argument about the relevance of postmodernism to September 11 and the world it created has this same, characteristically charming audacity about it. It is also rank sophistry. Either Fish is confused about exactly what postmodernism means, or he is willing to say anything--no matter how internally inconsistent--to win an argument. Or maybe both.

And here's the part that addresses campus speech codes. It ought to be relevant to those elements of the left who see "oppression" in strongly worded contrary opinions:

Hate speech--"speech hurtful to women, blacks, Hispanics, and gays"--is one thing, argues Fish. But political speech, such as criticism of the U.S. war effort, or the expression of sympathy for Al Qaeda, is quite another, he argues, noting that political speech lies at the heart of what is protected by the First Amendment. He's right on that last point. But Fish's flight into formal distinctions obscures the underlying reality. Campus speech codes encourage students, faculty, and administrators to recharacterize political opinions with which they disagree as statements that are hurtful and oppressive and which therefore must be forbidden. This produces habits of mind and intellectual norms that, when the winds shift, are easily extended to other topics and issues, posing a looming menace to the free inquiry to which our universities should be unflinchingly committed.

Next, Eric Arnesen deconstructs advocates of "whiteness studies" in a very long piece. A key excerpt:

If, after a decade of "theorizing," the concept of whiteness remains a muddled catch-all, something that seeks academic and political legitimation as a cover for its intellectual incoherence, its proponents' goals, too, remain unclear. In response to the left's perennial question--"What is to be done?"--Roediger might answer: bring about a withering away of whiteness, or alternatively, an abolition of whiteness. Ian F. Haney Lópezhas argued that whiteness, since it "perpetuates injurious racial identities," "should be abandoned." Whites should "renounce their racial identity as it is currently constituted in the interests of social justice." That scholar-activists of whiteness and its abolition can seriously advocate these outlandish propositions is surely a reflection of their disillusionment with the often naïve class politics that they once advocated, and a rejection of the romanticized white working class that they once championed. It also reflects, to some degree, a methodological preference among some segments of the academic left for the cultural studies-ish interpretation of texts over "old-fashioned" archival research.

Just read the whole thing.

Posted 8:50 AM by Peter Fallow
LEAKS AND BOUNDS: Jack Shafer of Slate has an interesting piece today on the "Washington Post" trashing one of its own stories in order to protect secret sources. It all revolves around that June 20 story on the NSA receiving messages about the Sept. 11 attacks on Sept. 10. Apparently, that angle had been reported as early as 11 days after Sept. 11.

Posted 8:42 AM by Peter Fallow
REGISTER A COMPLAINT: J.D. Lasica of "Online Journalism Review" has a series of articles on newspaper Web sites and those damned intrusive registration forms we've got to fill out.

I HATE registering for sites. HATE IT! It's complete bullshit so that my e-mail inbox can get flooded with spam. And here's the clueless newspaper executive defending the decision to go to registration:

"Two years ago if you asked anybody in the industry, the response would have been overwhelmingly negative," says Elaine Zinngrabe, executive producer of Latimes.com. "In 2002 we've come to realize that it's a business necessity. Consumers are becoming savvy about opt-out and privacy policies, and they've come to expect this sort of customer interaction."

What hogwash.

Posted 8:31 AM by Peter Fallow
BIAS AND FAIRNESS: Susanna Cornett has an excellent post today on this story from the "Washington Post." Susanna says everything I would have said, so go check it out.

Posted 6:07 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON THE LEFT: Here's an e-mail from a reader about yesterday's Warbloggerwatch post:

Dear Media-minded.

When you write this sentence.

"While we're at it, it's worth checking out Gitlin's much-blogged article from a couple of months ago on the knee-jerk anti-American left."

Its clear that you are endorsing Gitlin's view that there is an anti-american element to the left. WARBLOGGERWATCH! was within bounds to make this point.

Geez. Some on the left are really starting to sound like Ann Coulter. One more time: There certainly seem to be certain elements of the left that are anti-American. And elsewhere on the left side of the political spectrum, there are people whose views, while not anti-American per se, certainly qualify them as "useful idiots" of terrorists. To paraphrase George Orwell "Pacifism is objectively pro-Islamofascist."

Meanwhile, here's another article from a prominent leftist decrying the anti-American tendencies of many on the left. Michael Walzer of "Dissent" wrote "Can There Be a Decent Left?" about the response of many on the left to the attacks of Sept. 11. Check it out. And here are endorsements of Walzer's piece from (gasp!) David Horowitz and "National Review."

Posted 5:22 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON COURIC-COULTER: Here's Lloyd Grove's report. And Henry Hanks has been all over the story.

OK, so Couric wasn't being honest in the exchange about calling Reagan an "airhead." I'm still not a Coulter fan, because she practices the same scorched-earth policy she accuses liberals of engaging in.Not only that, Katie looks 1,000 times better in a short skirt than Ann does.

Posted 10:27 AM by Peter Fallow
FACT-CHECKING A-GO-GO: Tim Blair looks into some dubious-sounding quotes from Shimon Peres that were reported in the Australian media. Was it a mistranslation, or a deliberate attempt to distort the news? Check it out.

Posted 8:11 AM by Peter Fallow
KEEP THE LETTERS COMING: The "Boston Globe" has a story today on how pro-Israeli advocates are pressuring media outlets to provide more balance in their coverage of the Middle East. Here's two telling quotes:

''I've never seen anything like this,'' said WBUR-FM general manager Jane Christo. ''The rhetoric and the hysteria [are] really high.'' Added NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin: ''It's just part of the landscape now. I don't think any journalism organization worth its salt can do this kind of story without coming under criticism.''

Keep the pressure on them.

Posted 7:49 AM by Peter Fallow
I MADE WARBLOGGERWATCH! Hey! I've arrived! And I'm not even a "warblogger." One of the twits at Warbloggerwatch is taking me to task for referring to the "knee-jerk anti-American left." However, the idiot ignored (deliberately or undeliberately - it's hard to tell with these guys) the painfully obvious fact that I was referring to this article from veteran leftist writer Todd Gitlin that appeared in "Mother Jones" back in January. Gitlin was the one writing about the "knee-jerk anti-American left." I was just agreeing with him. So much for expecting intellectual honesty from some of my critics.

It's so ironic. Neale Talbot outlines a slew of standard leftist positions that apparently are above criticism, then blames me for pointing out one of the most trenchant criticisms of some of those silly ideas from a leading man of the left. Check out what Gitlin wrote:

But in the wake of September 11 there erupted something more primal and reflexive than criticism: a kind of left-wing fundamentalism, a negative faith in America the ugly. In this cartoon view of the world, there is nothing worse than American power—not the woman-enslaving Taliban, not an unrepentant Al Qaeda committed to killing civilians as they please—and America is nothing but a self-seeking bully. It does not face genuine dilemmas. It never has legitimate reason to do what it does. When its rulers' views command popularity, this can only be because the entire population has been brainwashed, or rendered moronic, or shares in its leaders' monstrous values.

Or this passage:

Soft anti-Americans, by contrast, sincerely want U.S. policies to change—though by their lights, such turnabouts are well-nigh unimaginable—but they commit the grave moral error of viewing the mass murderer (if not the mass murder) as nothing more than an outgrowth of U.S. policy. They not only note but gloat that the United States built up Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan as a counterfoil to the Russians. In this thinking, Al Qaeda is an effect, not a cause; a symptom, not a disease. The initiative, the power to cause, is always American. But here moral reasoning runs off the rails. Who can hold a symptom accountable? To the left-wing fundamentalist, the only interesting or important brutality is at least indirectly the United States' doing. Thus, sanctions against Iraq are denounced, but the cynical mass murderer Saddam Hussein, who permits his people to die, remains an afterthought. Were America to vanish, so, presumably, would the miseries of Iraq and Egypt.

This inability to exercise self-criticism, the anti-Americanism wrapped in moral piety and the dishonest manner in which debates are framed encapsulates why I parted ways with the left a decade ago, and it seems a nice summation of the numb-nuts at Warbloggerwatch. For what it's worth, I never meant to write that I consider all elements of the left to be knee-jerk anti-Americans. However, there are still plenty of doofuses out there that piss me and others off when they spout their nonsense, and we're going to continue to call them on their bullshit.

Posted 6:51 AM by Peter Fallow
COURIC VS. COULTER: Ann Coulter, who called Katie Couric the "Eva Braun of morning television" in her new book, "Slander," was just interviewed by Katie on the "Today" show. Didn't see all of it, but it looks like Katie managed to keep it on an even keel. Coulter didn't come off as very credible, in my opinion. I say that even though I agree with the thesis of "Slander": Conservatives are far too often portrayed as semi-Nazis or worse.

Posted 6:41 AM by Peter Fallow
INTERNET POWER: I missed this yesterday. Slate reports on Thomas Mallon, who wrote a scathing review of "Portraits of Grief," the vignettes of the World Trade Center victims that ran in the "New York Times" in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Mallon wrote his piece in the small-circulation journal "American Scholar," and the article wasn't available online. Tim Noah, who wrote the Slate story, has his own theory on why there weren't howls of outrage over Mallon's dissent.

Chatterbox interprets this not as shocked silence but as a reluctance by the public to acknowledge what is so obviously true about the "Portraits."

Another possible explanation: The power of the Internet (and not just the Blogosphere). If the piece had appeared online, I'm certain it would have been linked to by someone (Arts and Letters Daily probably would have done it). E-mails would have started flying, and in a week or so, there might have been a story in a newspaper or magazine somewhere. Now that Noah's piece has appeared on Slate, I'm sure Mallon will get a response. After all, the guy is saying nasty things about dead people he didn't know personally, so what does he expect?

Posted 6:29 AM by Peter Fallow
OH MY OMBUDSGOD! There's a new media blog out there tracking what newspaper ombudsmen do. It's the OmbudsGod. Check it out.

Posted 5:43 AM by Peter Fallow
ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE LEFT: Todd Gitlin bemoans the rise of anti-Semitism among some elements of the left in this excellent article:

This is no incidental issue, no negligible distraction. A Left that cares for the rights of humanity cannot cavalierly tolerate the systematic abuse of any people -- whatever you think of Israel's or any other country's foreign policy. Any student movement worthy of the name must face the ugly history that long made anti-Semitism the acceptable racism, face it and break from it.

While we're at it, it's worth checking out Gitlin's much-blogged article from a couple of months ago on the knee-jerk anti-American left. Here it is.

Posted 5:30 AM by Peter Fallow
WHEN OMBUDSMEN ATTACK! Two interesting ombudsmen-related pieces worth pointing out today.

The first is from "Washington Post" ombud Michael Getler, who works in a dig at FAIR for running with a false story of free-speech oppression at President Bush's commencement address at Ohio State University, a story that has been thoroughly debunked.

Next, "Boston Globe" ombud Christine Chinlund gives clueless Beantown readers a primer in spotting the difference between an opinion column and a genuine news column. Hey, sometimes it's hard for us in the business to tell the difference, Christine.

Posted 5:22 AM by Peter Fallow
ANN LANDERS, RIP: As you all know, advice columnist Ann Landers died the other day. She was a newspaper staple. We'll miss her.

Posted 7:29 AM by Peter Fallow
'THE BILL OF RIGHTS IS NOT A SUICIDE PACT': That quote crops up in this column, and its theme is echoed in this column by Jonah Goldberg. Read them both, and see which one makes more sense.

Posted 7:07 AM by Peter Fallow
WE DIG THE DIGGING OF DIRT: William Powers has another excellent story today. It's about how recent scandals (Enron, Catholic bishops, even Martha Stewart) have journalists salivating:

We live to see proud people brought down, exposed for all their hideous weaknesses and failures. It's a sick pastime and quite ruthless. But it's our way of rooting out corruption, and generally speaking, it works. It's working right now, which is why, for journalists, it's a glorious time to be alive.

Posted 6:45 AM by Peter Fallow
LOONY NOONAN? Here's an interview with Peggy Noonan that makes her sound like a complete loon. Don't quite know what to make of it.

Posted 6:32 AM by Peter Fallow
GERMANY 1, USA 0: Damn. So close. Oh, well. It's still our best World Cup performance ever. Thanks, guys.

Posted 3:28 PM by Peter Fallow
THE ARGUMENT AD NAZIUM: I was perusing Jonah Goldberg's column today, and I saw that he re-linked to what I consider one of his best pieces. It's titled "Springtime for Slanders" and its about the infuriating tendency of too many on the left to equate ANY conservative position with the ultimate expression of modern evil. Here's the best passage:

If you’re too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic, and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn’t advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn’t assume he’s a Nazi and you should know it’s pretty damn evil to call him one.

And one last point I feel compelled to point out. I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: “Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?”

Posted 2:57 PM by Peter Fallow
NEW LINKS: I've added the Global News Watch and The View from the Core to the perma-links. Go check 'em out.

Posted 6:59 AM by Peter Fallow
BUSY AT CUT ON THE BIAS: Susanna Cornett has a couple of good posts today. First, she delves into whether the "deeply religious" get a pass when they commit a crime. Read it here.

Then, she takes up the issue of the media's responisibility when it comes to helping police solve crimes. Read it here.

Posted 6:44 AM by Peter Fallow
COULTER'S UZI WEIGHS A TON: Here's a story on Ann Coulter's new book, "Slander," which she says will counter the "liberal lies about the American right." Lloyd Grove characterizes Coulter as a "human Uzi," and that sounds about right.

Regular readers of this site know how I feel about the ways conservatives are regularly misrepresented in the media. But I don't know if calling Katie Couric (?!) the "Eva Braun of morning television" is the most effective way of correcting this. We'll have to see how well Coulter backs up her vitriol with facts.

Posted 9:57 AM by Peter Fallow
POLL YOURSELF: I took this political poll on how conservative/liberal I am and scored a 23, which means I'm more conservative than Colin Powell but not as conservative as George Bush Sr. See how you do. (Via Susanna Cornett via Global News Watch.)

Posted 9:37 AM by Peter Fallow
BLOGISTAN, A RIGHT-WING REGIME: Brendan O'Neill sent me a heads-up on his recent post about right wingers predominating in the blogosphere. As usual, he makes some good points. And just as usual, I disagree with a lot of what he's written.

Well, I certainly think that right-wing positions on many issues have been marginalized. My newsroom is a perfect example of a place where, in O'Neill's words, "we're all supposed to be caring, sharing, non-argumentative, environmentally-aware centre-lefties." (At least in public. I'm not the only stealth Republican in the place.)

However, I think Brendan is wrong when he writes that the right can't compete and thus is forced into the shadows of the blogosphere, where, in his words, "they can throw insults at their enemies without having to challenge them fundamentally." I enjoy the bloggers I like precisely because there's some meat behind their dissection of liberal shibboleths. Insults are occasionally fun, and I've gotten screedy a few times here on my own blog, but the best bloggers have some substance behind what they write. (I'm including O'Neill in that group, even though I often disagree with him.) And besides, I don't think many bloggers will ever be given a chance to debate Edward Said or Noam Chomsky in a public forum, so blogging seems a bit more effective than a letter that gets discarded or e-mail that gets deleted. It certainly makes me feel better.

Also, the situation in England must be different, because, compared with Europe, it seems to me that the right here in America is fairly strong - protestations of many on that side of the spectrum notwithstanding. (Of course, I wish we were stronger, but the give-and-take of democracy decrees that we've got to put up with the other guys occasionally. And I'm OK with that. The alternative of the absence of dissenting opinions is too awful to ponder. After all, what would we have to blog about?) Here's O'Neill's summary:

In short, I think blogging is a right-wing thing as a result of the right's increasing isolation - and as a result of right-wingers' fancy for short, sharp, pithy attacks on an enemy that, in fact, they don't feel like they can take on.

Again, I think he's way overstating the case. Yes, we feel our views aren't taken seriously in the mainstream media, but so much of the best right-wing blogging involves debunking - often with serious fact-checking - ideas that are accepted as gospel by liberals. The "sharp, pithy attacks" are fun, but they need to be backed up with facts and strong, well-reasoned arguments. And speaking for myself and thousands of other amateur writers, I think the Blogosphere has done fairly well for itself in a short time. We can "take them on," and even occasionally win.

I agree that Mr. Micklethwait is exaggerating the impact bloggers are having on the mainstream media, but the explosion in blogging isn't even a year old yet. Let's see what's happening in, say, five years. At that time, it's possible every major daily newspaper or media outlet could have a blogger sifting through its stories and publishing intelligent, well-researched rebuttals. (It's already started here in the States.) Such a development might not spark a revolution, but it would be hard to ignore. So maybe Mr. Micklethwait is on to something.

Update: Here's a blogger who really doesn't like O'Neill.

Posted 6:34 AM by Peter Fallow
BEST OF SCOTT SHUGER: I was saddened to read of the death of Slate's Scott Shuger. To honor his work, Slate has posted a "Best of Scott Shuger" feature that is worth checking out.

Posted 7:16 AM by Peter Fallow
YOU CAN'T KEEP REGURGABLOG DOWN: Scotum Sobieski has moved! He's now called Horologium, and he's located here. Adjust bookmarks accordingly.

Posted 7:13 AM by Peter Fallow
CORNETT ON THE JOB: Susanna Cornett of Cut on the Bias links today to a report on management's alleged blocking of coverage of the plant shooting at the "Providence Journal." Check it out.

Posted 7:09 AM by Peter Fallow
CORE VALUES: The View from the Core sent in a link to a blog by a man who was posting dispatches from the recent Catholic bishops meeting in Dallas. Here's the relevant quote:

This morning I was seated for a while next to a wire-service correspondent. I happened to notice that he was preparing his final story on the meeting — writing an account of the final vote, several hours before that vote was scheduled to take place.

On the surface, this may appear problematic. However, it's been my experience that this has more to do with trying to meet a deadline than anything sinister. It's very common for reporters facing tight deadlines to prepare two (or even more) versions of a story, especially in a situation (such as a vote) where you can be reasonably sure something is going to come out either one way or the other. Sports guys do this all the time, because they are routinely writing stories right on deadline.

Posted 6:35 AM by Peter Fallow
SOME DARE CALL IT TREASON: Dennis Pluchinsky, a senior intelligence analyst with the Diplomatic Security Service in the U.S. Department of State, has written an article accusing the U.S. media of treason. Kind of.

Pluchinsky is decrying the media's post-9/11 trend of laying out every possible terrorism doomsday scenario in excruciating detail, thereby giving terrorists ideas. Pluchinsky has a point, but I believe he's overstating it. Many of the terrorism scenarios that the media have spelled out were already available in a variety of government reports that smart terrorists would have already perused. And his suggestion to allow the government to "certify" (license?) media outlets as being security-friendly will soon be provoking howls of outrage among my brethren. From where I stand, the worst effect of the media's terror-mongering campaign was the increase in the public's fear.

Posted 6:10 AM by Peter Fallow
USA, USA, USA: Unbelievable. The U.S. World Cup soccer team is in the quarterfinals following a comprehensive 2-0 victory against Mexico. Now we'll play Germany on Friday, and, sadly, that could be it. But you've gotta have hope.