Posted 8:32 AM by Peter Fallow
BASEBALL'S BACK: Life is good again.

Posted 8:00 AM by Peter Fallow
WORST OF THE YEAR: The Media Research Center has handed out its DisHonor Awards for the "Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2002.” Check it out.

Posted 7:48 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON THE WAR: Hugh Hewitt blasts the Los Angeles Times for its coverage of the war. Money quote:

The Los Angeles Times and other papers and media outlets have made conscious decisions to express opposition to the war in their editorial pages. That opposition is, less than two weeks in, seeping into the news coverage. It is a first for American media to turn against a war so quickly and abandon objectivity so thoroughly. Although Operation Iraqi Freedom is the farthest, fastest major advance of U.S. military forces in history, with the fewest casualties, and although the prospect is still in front of us of a decisive victory within three months, nevertheless the doomsayers on Spring Street are working overtime to create an alternative vision of the war. This vision evidently requires the front page to be kept clear of all reports of victory.

That's a little harsh, but I think there is a bit too much doom-and-gloom in the reporting on this war. Is it going well? Absolutely. Could it be going better? Sure.

Posted 7:05 AM by Peter Fallow
ARNETT CANNED: NBC fired Peter Arnett for going on Iraqi TV and saying the American war effort has failed.

Good for them. In my opinion, what he did crosses the line into providing aid and comfort to the enemy, even if Arnett meant no harm.

Meanwhile, the National Review weighs in on Arnett.

Posted 7:01 AM by Peter Fallow
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WRITE: Here's the inside story on that Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter who was fired for sending a scathing e-mail to a conservative group. I realize that maintaining at least an air of objectivity is important to newspapers, but it seems to me they could have just written the guy up or something. Hell, he was basically fired on the spot. That's wrong.

Posted 6:52 AM by Peter Fallow
EMBED WITH THE MILITARY: Howard Kurtz looks at the criticism "embedded" reporters are facing both from their colleagues and those in the public opposed to war. The thrust of the criticism is that "embedded" reporters are reporting on people whom they eat and sleep with, but I have to wonder: what's the alternative? Reporters dutifully raising their hands at military-controlled press conferences in Qatar or the Pentagon? Or wandering on their own through Iraq, subject to attack or capture by paramilitaries? It's a tough call, but considering the alternatives, I think the embedded program has worked fairly well.

Posted 7:34 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON THE WAR: The National Review has two worthwhile pieces on the media and the war. The first, by Victor David Hanson, excoriates doom-and-gloom pundits who expected this war to be over by now. The second, by Karl Zinsmeister, blasts embedded reporters for being out of touch with military types. Zinmeister doesn't appear to like these journalists very much:

Alas, many of the journalists observable in this war theater are bursting with knee-jerk suspicions and antagonisms for the warriors all around them. A significant number are whiny and appallingly soft. Most club together, passing far too much of their desert sojourn gossiping with fellow reporters, mocking military mores in snide jokes and wise-guy observations, chafing at the little disciplines required by the military’s life-and-death work, banding off as a group to watch DVDs on their computers in the evening, ganging separately in the mess hall during meals, rolling their eyes at each other when ideas like honor, sacrifice, or duty enter the conversation, and otherwise failing to take advantage of this unparalleled opportunity to enter deeply and perhaps sympathetically into the lives and minds of superlative fighting men.

And this:

Typical reporters know little about a fighting life. They show scant respect for the fighter’s virtues. Precious few could ever be referred to as fighting men themselves. The journalists embedded among U.S. forces that I’ve crossed paths with are fish out of water here, and show their discomfort clearly as they hide together in the press tents, fantasizing about expensive restaurants at home and plush hotels in Kuwait City, fondling keyboards and satellite phones with pale fingers, clinging to their world of offices and tattle and chatter where they feel less ineffective, less testosterone deficient, more influential.

Ouch.

Posted 7:17 AM by Peter Fallow
BEHIND THE EMBEDS: The Weekly Standard explains how the Pentagon launched the embedded-reporter program. Give it a look.

Posted 7:15 AM by Peter Fallow
AND NOW FOR SOME BAD WAR COVERAGE: The View from the Core points out a Los Angeles Times report that accepts as fact the statements of an official Iraqi "media handler." Check it out.

Posted 7:10 AM by Peter Fallow
POWERS SURGE: The excellent William Powers looks at how the Washington Post is kicking the New York Times' ass in war coverage. Along the way, he makes a typically sharp observation:

The most surprising media truth to emerge in the last week is that having 600-plus reporters cover a war from inside deployed military units, plus untold hundreds running around the region on their own tether, doesn't necessarily clear up the fog of war back home. It can actually make the story harder to follow.

I think that's true to an extent. But it's also true that we're getting the kind of immediate news coverage that people crave.

Posted 7:02 AM by Peter Fallow
WHERE THE JOURNALISTS ARE: This is kind of cool. Poynter has a map of Iraq showing where the embedded reporters are located. Check it out.

Posted 6:58 AM by Peter Fallow
CONFLICT-OF-INTEREST WATCH: A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle has been fired for taking part in an anti-war protest. Specifically, he was dismissed because he took a sick day to go march:

Joe Brown, the Chronicle's director of public relations, said Norr was suspended for notating sick time on his time card to cover his day in jail March 20.

But Norr and his union say he was up front with his bosses about what he was doing and would have taken a day off or a vacation day if told that was appropriate.

``They had every opportunity to come back to me and say, `You can't take that as sick time,' '' he said.

I'm not saying this guy should have been fired because he took part in the march, and the paper certainly should have cut him a break. But I think it's interesting that he thought holding on to a vacation day was more important than using one to go protest. Here's the most generous thing I can say about this:

He obviously made a conscious decision that demonstrating wasn't going to put a crimp into his lifestyle. And that's pretty weak.

A media talking head makes an excellent point about journalists and outside interests:

The question of whether a journalist forfeits rights to fully participate in public debate is ``an enormously complicated question,'' said Cynthia Gorney, a former reporter for the Washington Post and associate dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley.

``Should a reporter have the right to hold political views, to vote, to quietly contribute to political campaigns? To most people the answer is yes,'' she said. ``On the other hand, should a staff reporter assigned to cover a political issue take a position on the board of an advocacy group directly involved in that issue? Most everyone says no.''

Somewhere in the murky, oft-debated topic is the middle ground that guides most papers.

That makes sense to me.

Posted 7:57 AM by Peter Fallow
WATCHING THE 'TIMES': Here's a new site that could be very useful. Times Watch, a new project by the Media Research Center, is going to take over where the Smarter Times left off. It's being run by Clay Waters, who was blogging before this new opportunity arose.

Posted 7:28 AM by Peter Fallow
WE NEED PERSPECTIVE: Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard cracks open his military history book to remind us that even the most staggeringly successful military campaigns took longer than eight days to complete. Check it out.

Posted 7:21 AM by Peter Fallow
FOREIGN MEDIA & THE WAR: The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on how foreign media outlets are covering the war in Iraq. The difference between there and here is staggering, to say the least.

We've been able to watch Al-Jazeera on one of the half-dozen TVs in the office. I don't speak or understand Arabic, but the images speak loudly enough. Yesterday, during my eight-hour shift, the network repeated the same horrific footage over and over and over again. There were images of two dead British soldiers, and an absolutely horrible sequence from a hospital of an adorable little girl who may have been injured in that missile attack on Baghdad that the Iraqis claimed deliberately targeted civilians.

This precious child had a deep, bloody wound on her arm that looked like a huge shark bite, and the Al-Jazeera cameraman lovingly zoomed in and out on the wound. The only reason I can see why this was done was to whip up anti-American sentiment among the network's target audience. It's probably working, too.

Posted 8:29 AM by Peter Fallow
SILENCING THE 'SILENCING OF DISSENT': Writing for The American Prowler, blogger David Hogberg excoriates the New York Times for a silly editorial about the "silencing of dissent" regarding the war in Iraq. One killer passage:

Conservatives do not need reminding of the importance of free speech: most are acutely aware of the silencing effect that political correctness has had on conservative voices at our nation's campuses over the last fifteen years. That the editorialists think that we need this scolding reveals nothing about the political right in this country but reveals plenty about the Times' own sense of moral superiority.

Give it a gander.

Posted 7:01 AM by Peter Fallow
PARODYING ALTERMAN: Speaking of the New York Press, check out Russ Smith's Mugger column this week. If you scroll down, there's a hilarious parody of Eric Alterman's Altercation blog. It's got it all: the endless self-promotion, the inability to resist plugging What Liberal Media at every turn, the preening moral outrage, the casual dropping of Bruce Springsteen's name. It also captures the sloppy writing style of Alterman's blog, which is such a contrast to his well-edited pieces in The Nation.

Anyway, it's pretty funny. Check it out.

Posted 6:49 AM by Peter Fallow
LOATHE THEM: This is just pure, snarky fun. The New York Press has its annual list of the "50 Most Loathesome New Yorkers." Read it and enjoy.

Posted 9:22 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON ALTERMAN: I don't usually venture over to Eric Alterman's blog, but this item from the other day caught my attention:

BUSH AS MICHAEL CORLEONE?

Thanks to Tapped for calling our attention to this incredible piece of reporting that The Washington Post pulled from the paper “to accommodate coverage of the start of the war in Iraq.” It’s not just Howie Kurtz and the editorial page anymore. I am beginning to think that Ari Fleischer has secretly been made acting editor-in-chief of the entire Post newsroom. Of course, Ari can’t be everywhere, and so this piece of non-administration approved reporting made a brief appearance.

I think the "media critic" needs a lesson on how newspapers actually work.

First of all, Eric, take a gander at the date on the story in question. You'll see that it appeared in the paper of Friday, March 21. Got that? Now, let's look at that note at the top of the Post's story: "Editor's note: This article was withheld from later editions of yesterday's paper to accommodate coverage of the start of the war in Iraq."

Still with me, Eric? What that means is that the article originally appeared in the paper of Thursday, March 20 -- the day the war in Iraq began. Obviously, once the bombs began falling, the Post radically changed big sections of its inside pages. (It's called "breaking news," Eric.) So a fairly timeless "trend" story on the harsh manner in which the Bush administration keeps Republican allies in line gets yanked from Thursday's late editions and, apparently, is re-run in its entirety in Friday's paper, possibly in all editions. That's not a "brief appearance." That's the same damn story in the paper two days in a row, depending on which edition you get.

Don't get me wrong; I think it's a fascinating, well-reported piece. But it deals with events that have been going on for months. (Indeed, the most recent news is about an event at the National Governors Association's White House dinner, which took place a month ago.) Considering that there's a war going on, holding that story for a day, or even a week, wouldn't have affected its impact.

Of course, it's telling that Alterman is so concerned about making sure partisan blood gets spilled in the pages of the Washington Post at the very moment American blood is being spilled in a foreign land.

Posted 8:21 AM by Peter Fallow
TURN TO PAGE: The Last Page, who is one fantastically cool chick, has a neat new redesign for her blog. Drop by and pay her a visit.

Posted 7:48 AM by Peter Fallow
OBSCURING THE PAST IN THE 'TIMES': Ronald Radosh rips into the New York Times for an obituary that soft-pedals the hard-core Stalinism of prominent historian Herbert Aptheker:

If you read the Times’ article, you would have learned only that Aptheker wrote pioneering words on black history, was an "outspoken" defender of civil rights, "one of the first scholars to denounce American military involvement in Vietnam," and that as a result of his views—portrayed unobjectionably as rather decent- the U.S. government threatened to revoke his passport. Columbia University historian Eric Foner was quoted as calling one of his works "a landmark in Afro-American history," and that his editing of the papers of W. E. B. DuBois was "greeted with wide praise."

You would never know from Lehmann-Haupt’s summary of Aptheker’s life that he was in fact the "chief theoretician" of the Communist Party, that all of his writings were completed under the discipline and censorhip of the Party, and that he was given the DuBois papers to edit, because DuBois himself became a Party member at the end of his life. (Eric Foner’s uncle Philip was the Party’s labor historian).

Radosh reveals that Aptheker's intellectual life was much more dubious than the image of the great progressive historian portrayed in the "paper of record."

Posted 7:19 AM by Peter Fallow
'THE LONG NIGHT': Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard continues his reporting from Kuwait City. Today, he has an engrossing interview with a public affairs officer -- one of the military types who briefs the media on war operations. Check it out.

Posted 7:11 AM by Peter Fallow
BLOGGERS AND THE WAR: Howard Kurtz reports on the blogs covering the war in Iraq. Give it a look.

Posted 8:52 AM by Peter Fallow
NEW JOURNO-BLOGGER: If you're interested in all things journalistic, check out Tim Porter's First Draft. I especially liked his motto: "Ink-Stained Kvetches About Newspapering, Readership & Relevance." Give it a look.

Posted 8:04 AM by Peter Fallow
THE WAR & THE MEDIA: All in all, I've been quite impressed by the coverage. The "embedding" strategy has worked brilliantly, giving the public immediate access to images they used to have to wait days to see.

There's not much I can really add to the discussion. Go to Romenesko for all your media-related news. I would like to point out this column by Mackubin Thomas Owens in the National Review, because it's rare for Romenesko to link to articles from a leading conservative publication. Owens makes the excellent point that the media's attention to negative anecdotes (a function of the structural bias toward the bad or sensational) can lead many people to ignore the overall picture of the war.

Posted 6:49 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON ALTERMAN: I almost overlooked this bit from David Shaw's interview with Eric Alterman. (See below for more.) Here's a quote from Alterman:

But the success of conservatives in the media relies heavily on the argument that, as Alterman characterizes it, there is a "liberal cabal/progressive thought police who spin, supplant and sometimes suppress the news we all consume."

Alterman obviously regards the "progressive thought police" as a myth conservatives invented to beat up on the media. Well, I wonder how he would he explain this article by Boris Johnson recounting one writer's encounter with the forces of political correctness at The New York Times and the changes they demanded in his work:

Some of the changes were unobjectionable. ... But I started to get a floaty, out-of-body sensation when he said that he had made a change to a sentence about donations of US overseas aid to key members of the UN Security Council. I had said something to the effect that you don’t make international law by giving new squash courts to the President of Guinea. This now read ‘the President of Chile’. Come again? I said. Qué?

‘Uh, Boris,’ said Tobin, ‘it’s just easier in principle if we don’t say anything deprecatory about a black African country, and since Guinea and Chile are both members of the UN Security Council, and since it doesn’t affect your point, we would like to say Chile.’ In the end, I gave way on this, since it was getting cold and I was worried about the battery of my mobile. But my views of the NY Times were starting to evolve.

How craven and mealy-mouthed can you get? Why is a mild insult more bearable because it is directed at a crisis-ridden Latin American country, rather than a crisis-ridden African country? Is it, heaven forfend, because one country is Hispanic and the other is black?

Hilarious and disturbing, all at once. Read Johnson's whole piece.

Posted 6:39 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA BIAS UPDATE: David Shaw, the media critic for the Los Angeles Times, interviews Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media, in this enlightening piece. Alterman admits that most big-time journalists hold middle America in absolute contempt:

He acknowledged that "most big-city journalists are liberal. I personally don't know ... well, I don't have to my house for dinner anyone who's not pro-choice, pro-gun control ... pro-campaign finance reform."

Alterman also said that conservatives who think "the mainstream media hold them and their way of life in contempt" are largely correct.

"Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw want nothing to do with the people who listen to talk radio and drive pickup trucks," he said. "In the high levels of the New York media, these people are regarded as yahoos."

But Alterman believes the all-powerful journalistic codes of ethics prevent this bias from having any real-world effect. Shaw has a nice response that doesn't quite go all the way:

But I think it's the demonstrable presence of so many liberals in the big-city news media -- and their coverage of antiwar activities and the civil rights, feminist, gay rights, consumer and environmental movements -- that has enabled the conservatives to make their case for liberal bias.

To many conservatives, the very fact that the media covered these movements means the media were sympathetic to them and the coverage was, ipso facto, tainted by a liberal bias.

Moreover, journalists are skeptical, confrontational and iconoclastic, which means they challenge the establishment, while conservatives want to conserve it.

You're heading in the right direction, David. But you missed it. Conservatives don't believe covering these issues at all is wrong. Conservatives object to the manner in which these important social issues are covered. Time and again, opposing viewpoints get minimalized or ignored. (I blogged about a prime example last year regarding USA Today's reporting on the slavery reparations movement. Check it out here.) Shaw has a point about the adversarial position journalists take in regards to "the establishment," but he fails to note that a great many liberal ideas and movements (i.e. feminism, affirmative action) have become part of "the establishment" as well, yet often fail to come under the same scrutiny as, say, evangelical Christians.

I give Shaw credit for pointing out that Alterman's book relies on "conspiracy theories." Too bad Shaw has kept his own ideological blinders on, despite the fact that he's gone on vacation with one of his "anti-gun control friends."

Posted 8:34 AM by Peter Fallow
THE WAR ON THE WEB: Slate has got all the bases covered.

Posted 8:14 AM by Peter Fallow
IN KUWAIT: The Weekly Standard also has this entertaining read from Matt Labash. It's about the adventures of a journalist trying to find a drink in Kuwait, plus a few other things about some war or something. Check it out. And take a peek at Stephen Hayes' Kuwait diary.

Posted 8:07 AM by Peter Fallow
THEY FINALLY 'GET IT': The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last points out that some in the media are finally beginning to understand that our mission in Iraq is liberation, not colonization. Meanwhile, many American citizens don't seem to be paying attention:

CNN's Martin Savidge, who is embedded in a unit making its way toward Baghdad, reported that as his column sped north this morning, large numbers of Iraqi civilians came outside to wave to the troops.

COMPARE THAT with the reaction of many on the American left. Protests broke out across the country late yesterday. Two thousand people marched in Chicago and clashed with police. In San Francisco a much, much larger group brought the city to a halt. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that some 1,400 protestors--just the tip of the iceberg--were arrested. ...

In Washington, a few hundred protestors marched through downtown around rush hour last night. The group was surprisingly young, so maybe they should be forgiven. One of them was carrying a placard saying "President Bush, choke on this pretzel!" as the crowd chanted, "What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!" Wishing death to your commander in chief while he's sending troops to protect your freedom is one thing, but deciding that your personal desire for "peace" outweighs 24 million Iraqis' desire for freedom from torture and oppression seems cruel and ungenerous in the extreme.

As I wrote the other day, it seems to me that those on the left who complain about having their voices silenced by the media are actually complaining that their hysterical messages have virtually no traction with the American public.

Posted 7:56 AM by Peter Fallow
POWERS SURGE: William Powers' opinion of the media's coverage of the buildup to war runs counter to much of what you'll read in Editor & Publisher or Columbia Journalism Review. In other words, Powers acknowledges that the debate has been diverse, and that the media have reflected that diversity. (Hell, how could something as massive and diffuse as "the media" not reflect the myriad of opinions out there?):

You think I'm dreaming? Think back on the pre-war debate, and name a single point of view that didn't get its due. The war is all about overcoming an evil tyrant. It's all about oil and American imperialism. It's all about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. It's all about Israel. It's all about George Bush's strange messianic certainty, and Tony Blair's. And so on. These arguments and many others are out there in profusion, and have been for months.

Here's who had their say on the war question: everybody. From the most-powerful columnists and anchor-people to obscure citizens who marched in protest and found themselves quoted in major media outlets. Our most serious intellectuals had their say, pro and con, and so did our less-serious celebrities. Turn on CNN one recent Sunday, and you could catch Bianca Jagger earnestly debating actor Ron Silver on the merits of war.

Just go read the whole thing.

Posted 7:48 AM by Peter Fallow
BLOGGING FROM THE FRONT LINES: Kevin Sites, a correspondent for CNN, runs a blog that he has been updating since U.S. forces began their assault on Iraq. Give it a look, and read about Kevin here.

Posted 5:49 AM by Peter Fallow
IT'S GO TIME: I saw something in the paper today about Iraq. Looks like it's on.

About damn time.

Last night at work was quite hectic. People haven't moved that fast around the newsroom since the last time someone brought in Krispy Kreme. And it'll be hectic at work today, too. So go elsewhere for your media news.

A quick thought. I hope this war can be ended quickly with as little loss of innocent life as possible. (Conversely, I hope there's plenty of loss of guilty life.) I hope our troops can stay safe. I hope the Iraqi people can be set free. And I hope that God continues to bless the United States of America.

Posted 7:37 AM by Peter Fallow
DEFENDING TERRORISTS: The National Review examines the silence emanating from the big-media defenders of University of South Florida computer-science professor (and alleged terrorist) Sami al-Arian. Take a gander.

Posted 6:38 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA BIAS UPDATE PART 19,455: The New York Times has a solid, balanced look at media-bias accusations from the left and the right. Best lines:

About critics, Mr. Westin said: "Everybody is entitled to their opinion. We should always consider who is doing the criticizing."

Bill Wheatley, a vice president of NBC News, said that most of the criticism seemed to be from "people on the edges of this sort of debate."

I certainly hope Mr. Wheatley is referring to both the left and right fringes of the debate.

Posted 6:29 AM by Peter Fallow
THE 'SILENCED' SPEAK: Those brave alternative-media patriots, whose dissenting opinions have been so ruthlessly suppressed during the run-up to a possible Gulf War II, are gearing up for the conflict, according to this story in the Boston Globe. Here's the flavor of one outlet's coverage:

The Free Speech TV satellite network has pre-empted its regular programming to focus on what a spokeswoman, Linda Mamoun, calls ''the crimes against humanity the United States will perpetuate, and the opposition to it.''

It seems to me that those on the left who complain about having their voices silenced are actually complaining that their hysterical messages have virtually no traction with the American public.

There is a big difference, you know.

Posted 7:55 AM by Peter Fallow
CZECH IT OUT: Here's a blog by a journalist in the Czech Republic. Stop by and say "Dobrý den, Ahoj."

Posted 7:46 AM by Peter Fallow
HARSHING THEIR MELLOW: TAPPED, echoing Eric Alterman, claims this review of Alterman's "What Liberal Media," written by Jeff Dufour of The Hill, is "silly" and "axe-grinding." Alterman refers to it as a "right-wing hatchet job."

Well, what's the problem with the review? Aside from a mistake Alterman points out, the review correctly identifies Alterman as the ideologue he is while taking a few sly digs at him. (Compare that to the stream of vitriol that is Alterman's Nation column.) It also makes some solid points. Trust it "at your peril" indeed.

The reaction from TAPPED and Alterman would seem to indicate that Dufour struck a little too close to the awful truth about "What Liberal Media."

Meanwhile, Matthew Hoy keeps reading "What Liberal Media" so you don't have to. Here's Part II of his book report, and here's Part I.

Wow. All that dissecting, and it's just the first chapter!

Posted 6:30 AM by Peter Fallow
WHICH IS THE OLDEST: The Columbia Journalism Review examines three newspapers' claims to being the nation's oldest newspaper. The verdict? Two out of three ain't bad.Give it a look.

Posted 9:08 AM by Peter Fallow
WARBLOGGING AT WORK: Well, it's nice to see that someone can do it. The Seattle Times has launched a "war blog" entited Battle Lines. Check it out.

Posted 7:08 AM by Peter Fallow
WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA: Howard Kurtz interviews Thomas Friedman on the differences between print and electronic journalism. (It seems the presence of a camera tends to make people less honest.) But there's also this item way down in the column:

When a group called the Young Conservatives of Texas was preparing to protest a Bill Clinton appearance in the state, Steve McLinden, a Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter, used the paper's e-mail to send the group this message:

"Ah, the heartless, greedy, anti-intellectual little fascists are mobilizing again. (Let me guess. All you frat boys saved up your allowances and monies from your McDonald's jobs for those Beemers you'll be driving to the protest, and those new jackboots you'll be sportin' en route)."

Editor Jim Witt let McLinden go that day and apologized to the group. "Obviously, reporters have opinions," Witt says. "But we expect our reporters not to express those opinions unless they're columnists."

I just wish you could read some of the entries on our company-wide Intranet site. Not quite that vitriolic, but definitely in the same neighborhood.

Instapundit noticed the same thing, and his comments are worth repeating:

What's most notable, of course, is the juvenile, sneering, substance-free tone. When you send an email like this -- especially if you're a journalist -- what, exactly, do you expect to accomplish here?

And can we trust this guy to honestly cover people he openly regards as greedy little fascists?

Amen to that.

Posted 6:48 AM by Peter Fallow
RATING THE PUNDITS: Slate has a breezy, entertaining look at the Iraq pundits, rating them "from blood-red hawks to snow-white doves." Check it out.

Posted 8:26 AM by Peter Fallow
READ THIS: The Washington Post has a generally unfavorable review of a book on the media. Check it out. (Hint: It ain't Alterman's book, but it's one I'm sure he would endorse.)

Posted 7:22 AM by Peter Fallow
THE TIMES & ISRAEL: Here's a longish analysis of how terror attacks in Israel are covered in the New York Times. (Guess which side gets more sympathetic coverage?)

Posted 7:14 AM by Peter Fallow
SO LONG, SALIM: Marxist Salim Muwakkil, a writer for In These Times (my favorite rag back in my lefty college days), has been dropped as a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Here's why:

Bruce Dold, the editorial-page editor, says he deleted the following passage: "Adolf Hitler justified the Nazi invasion and occupation of parts of Europe as a benign move to protect them from Britain's imperial tyranny. The Nazis called it Lebensraum. We call it `pre-emptive self-defense.'"

Says Dold in an E-mail, "The column misapplied the term [lebensraum, which means "living space"], and in attempting to link U.S. policy to Hitler's invasion, had an exceedingly narrow explanation of Hitler's justification for the invasion."

Predictable quarters of the left will scream and shout about this, but I applaud the move. Holding strong opinions is one thing. Expressing them in a nasty and intellectually dishonest manner is another.

Posted 7:08 AM by Peter Fallow
OUTRAGEOUS: I wanted to blog about this yesterday, but the furshlugginer Blogger thingee wasn't working and I had to go to work. So here goes.

What the hell is going on at the White House press room? The administration is forcing reporters to let their quotes be reviewed before they're released for publication? This is outrageous, and it's really unneccesary.

For more on that now-infamous presidential press conference, check out Brent Bozell's take.

Posted 10:35 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON ALTERMAN: Fellow journo-blogger Matthew Hoy is reading Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media so you don't have to! (Sorry, babe.) He promises a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the book, and Part I is up now. Just go, already.

Posted 7:51 AM by Peter Fallow
ALTERMAN UPDATE: David Horowitz, who can be a tad too screedy for my tastes, has penned a solid rebuttal to some of the charges Eric Alterman makes in his book What Liberal Media. He deflates the myth of the all-powerful influence of right-wing think tanks and foundations, reminding us that there are vastly more heavily funded and influential left-wing think tanks that are unacknowledged as such. They're called elite public and private universities.

And writer Sean Higgins caught Alterman speaking in Washington, D.C., recently. Check out his commentary here.

Posted 7:43 AM by Peter Fallow
FUNNY PAPERS: Dean Esmay has an interview with Chris Muir, a cartoonist who draws the entertaining Day By Day strip. Check it out.

Posted 7:21 AM by Peter Fallow
J'ACCUSE 2003: Borrowing from Emile Zola's famous "J'Accuse" polemic from the 1898 Dreyfus affair, David Frum lays the smack down on Pat Buchanan and his paleocon allies for opposing the war in Iraq. Check it out.

And, for those interested in such things, here's a translation of Zola's "J'Accuse." It's important to note that it appeared in a newspaper.

Posted 7:13 AM by Peter Fallow
BUSH AND THE MEDIA: Here's a column full of outrage over President Bush's news conference last week that was claims it was "one of the all-time stage-managed White House electronic events." Yet you read on, and near the bottom you discover that, hey, other administrations have done similar things!

Posted 8:21 AM by Peter Fallow
ALTERMAN-MCGOWAN FEUD CONTINUES: The other day, William McGowan, author of Coloring the News, a book which challenges the drive for "diversity" in American newspapers, posted a letter at Media Bistro challenging Eric Alterman to quit making false claims about Coloring.

Alterman has responded. Let's unpack this wholly inadequate rejoinder, shall we?

The crux of this little dust-up is a negative review of McGowan's book in the liberal Washington Monthly by writer Seth Mnookin. As McGowan writes:

In the Washington Monthly piece, which ran under the headline "Yellow Journalism," Mnookin wrote that "McGowan acknowledges that the Free Press was willing to publish his book; it was the author who balked," before going to a new publisher, Encounter Books. This is completely untrue, flipping on their heads both what I told Mnookin and the truth of the matter. I never acknowledged that the Free Press was willing to publish my book because they were in fact not willing to do so, for reasons which were entirely political and in no way connected to the manuscript's quality. He quotes an offhand comment I made to him, about the Free Press not supporting the book had I stayed, which was raised in an entirely hypothetical manner and wrenched completely out of context.

Alterman's response? He basically says, "I believe Mnookin, because that's the only source I checked":

My guess is that most responsible writers, given a choice, would credit Mnookin's version of reality, backed up with his taped interview, the reputation he's established, and the Monthly's well-deserved fame for scrupulous fact checking, over one presented by an aggrieved author with an ideological axe to grind.

Yes, Mnookin has certainly established a decent reputation. (He's currently at Newsweek.) But Mnookin is fairly young. He graduated from Harvard in 1994, and only joined Newsweek in June of 2002. (Here's an interview with Mnookin.) Why does his view of McGowan's book carry more weight than, say, John Leo, Jim Sleeper, Nat Hentoff or Trevor Butterworth, who have written favorably about the book? Calling this kind of oversight mere lazy reporting would be generous.

Alterman then raises a nasty and entirely unverifiable slander against McGowan:

Moreover, Mnookin informs me that McGowan's vendetta has proven so obsessive over the years that he has taken to calling editors of various publications and informing them of Mnookin's history of drug abuse, a topic both Mnookin and his mother have addressed in the public record with painful honesty. [Ed. note: McGowan denies he called editors to inform them of Mnookin's history with drug addiction.] That is really so low I do not know what to say.

This from a man who had no problem working in a heroin reference to late New York Post columnist Eric Breindel, a former addict himself, in The Nation. (Read about that here.) Third-hand hearsay? That McGowan denies? What the hell. Put it out there and see if it sticks. So typical.

Alterman also discusses a "hysterical" letter McGowan wrote to the editors of Washington Monthly regarding Mnookin's review. Well, here's that letter. Read it and decide for yourself. I think McGowan makes a pretty convincing case that, at the very least, Mnookin may have been guilty of lackadaisical reporting.

I don't think Alterman convincingly answered any of the charges McGowan made, and when he lamely tried to do so, he did so in an intellectually dishonest manner.

Par for the course, apparently.

Posted 8:09 AM by Peter Fallow
POINT-COUNTERPOINT: Tom Shales of the Washington Post says the first 60 Minutes showdown between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton was pretty lame.

If it sounds kind of dull, well, it was, except for the novelty of having a former president as one of the participants. Neither Clinton nor Dole was particularly clever or persuasive, however, and the segment was unimaginatively produced. Dole's prowess as a wit was not much in evidence, but maybe he felt using wit against Clinton would be like using a gun against an unarmed man.

Check it out here.

Posted 8:03 AM by Peter Fallow
FAT-CAT JOURNALISTS: The always-funny Larry Miller says journalists are a chunky lot:

At the press conference the other night, I couldn't help noticing that most of our top reporters are, er, not slender. Well-dressed and polite, sure (or, at least, not too snide), and scrubbed behind the ears for the occasion. But there's a difference between twenty pounds overweight--like most of us--and eighty pounds overweight--like, well, most of them. I don't know what they do in between filing stories, but isn't there a gym in the basement of the White House? Or is it just donut shops down there?

Well, I'm not a part of the White House press corps, but I am 25 pounds slimmer than I was at this time last year. I'm 5-8-1/2, and I weighed 210 pounds then, and I'm now at 185 pounds. I'd like to reach 170, but I'm not too worried about it. I'm just glad I can easily fit into my 34-waist jeans again.

I'd reached my sorry state last year despite exercising regularly and eating well three or four days out of the week. (Of course, I went completely nuts on the weekends. Huge dinners on Thursday, plus huge breakfasts and dinners on Friday and Saturday, not to mention a bunch of beer, can easily wipe out the benefits of skinless chicken breasts and spinach salads Sunday through Wednesday.)

The real impetus for change came during a summer visit to my doctor. A blood-lipid test revealed I was flirting with dangerous territory. My total cholesterol was nearly 280. Fortunately, my "good" cholesterol was a decent 59, but the doctor was concerned. He ordered me to eat better and exercise, and he'd check it again in two months. Well, I immediately began to change my diet, strenuously avoiding sources of saturated fat, and two months later I'd lost 15 pounds and lowered my cholesterol to 240. (I didn't really boost my exercise routine that much. It basically consists of 25 minutes on a stairmaster or stationary bike, 10 minutes of running on a treadmill and a few simple weight-lifting exercises. I do that four to five times a week.) Unfortunately, my "good" cholesterol fell, too, dropping to 48. (That's not bad, but I wanted it higher.) The doctor said he'd check me again in three months.

That test, in the fall, revealed that my total cholesterol was down to 219 but my "good" cholesterol was up to 69, possibly due to the daily use of niacin. I'd also lost 10 more pounds. I don't need to be checked again for a year.

OK, I've wandered off the subject of fat reporters and onto my cholesterol soapbox, so let me just end with this bit of advice. If you're over 35, please get your cholesterol checked. And if it's high, do something about it. It's easier than you think, or it was for me.

Posted 7:20 AM by Peter Fallow
HIGH NOON: John Rosenberg at Discriminations makes the analogy between the classic Western High Noon and the current showdown over Iraq. Check it out.

Posted 7:18 AM by Peter Fallow
FULL DISCLOSURE: Fellow journo-blogger Dave Copeland sent me this column by Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. It's a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that journalists disclose their "known prejudices" at the end of every story. It's a funny piece. This part rang true to me:

Not every one of the several hundred writers and editors I’ve met in 30 years of small, medium and big-time newspaper journalism was a government-hugging, tax-loving, gun-hating liberal. A few were recovering socialists. Several were openly practicing Republicans.

That's been my experience, too. I've only worked with maybe two journalists who could safely be called politically radical, and I've worked with a couple who were openly conservative. But the vast majority have been your standard, middle-class Democrats. Good folks all, and more fair-minded than a lot of conservative media critics will allow, but they still harbor blind spots on certain issues such as race.

Posted 11:43 AM by Peter Fallow
DEAR MR. ALTERMAN: William McGowan, author of the excellent book "Coloring the News," posts an open letter to Eric Alterman at MediaBistro regarding certain false information about McGowan's work that Alterman put into "What Liberal Media":

I say this having read your account of the fraught history of my book, Coloring the News, with its original publisher, the Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster. Your account is quite at odds with the facts of the matter and is edged with considerable jaundice. I suggest that the next time you want to do a hatchet job on someone or his book, you should do more than a clip job—or at least consult more than one clip. I'd also suggest that you even try a little actual reporting.

Alterman dishonest? Well, he's been called that before.

Posted 7:02 AM by Peter Fallow
THE WAR & THE MEDIA: The always-excellent William Powers assumes the persona of fabled war correspondent Ernie Pyle to deliver a little lesson to the reporters who will be embedded with U.S. troops. I really loved this bit:

It's all flattering, and it's nice to know my work has held up. But to be honest, I'm not sure I'd recommend being me, not now, not in this war. The first problem you face is competition. My work took off in such a big way -- it appeared in hundreds of newspapers, landed me on the cover of Time, turned me into a real folk hero -- because it was different. There weren't 499 other Ernie Pyles running around doing the same thing I was doing. I've been watching the would-be Ernie Pyle stories start to emerge these last few weeks, and I've got to tell you, they're all starting to run together. How many clever, self-deprecating memoirs of life at journalist boot camp can the market bear? And the shooting hasn't even started.

God, I'm sick of those boot-camp stories, too.

Posted 6:45 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE NEWS FROM BRITAIN: The Economist is reporting that Britain's lively and heavily read newspapers are mired in a financial slump. Read all about it here.

Posted 6:42 AM by Peter Fallow
BBC WATCH: The BBC has issued guidelines to ensure that anti-war protesters get equal time in the event of an attack on Iraq. But Andrew Sullivan has been paying attention, and he's labeled Britain's state-run TV network the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation. Check it out here and here.

Posted 7:17 AM by Peter Fallow
JERK ATHLETES & THE MEDIA: Just read this. Wow. Carl Everett of the Texas Rangers comes off as a real jerk. Granted, the reporter wasn't asking the best questions, but Everett showed absolutely no class in handling the situation.

Posted 7:13 AM by Peter Fallow
JACK'S BACK: Slate's Jack Shafer has a nice piece on reporters "embedded" with U.S. troops in Iraq.

Such military conspiracy isn't necessary: You'd be hard-pressed to find any neutral, objective reporters in a foxhole—especially when a cloud of hot metal is streaming in. Historically, journalists have automatically empathized with whatever troops brung 'em to the front, making indoctrination redundant. Iraq will be no different.

It's heretical, of course, to suggest that war correspondents don't practice the objective brand of journalism brought to bear on politics, business, culture, religion, science, and other beats. After all, journalists don't follow the cult of objectivity grudgingly; they embrace it like a monk embraces silence: "Don't take sides"; "remain neutral"; "be open-minded"; "check your bias"; "you're not the story; you're just reporting it." Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., the high priest of journalistic objectivity, hasn't voted since becoming the paper's managing editor in 1984 because he doesn't want to make up his mind, "even in the voting booth, about candidates or issues."

But war reporting is clearly the great exception from the cult of objectivity—if only because a reporter who disengaged himself emotionally from a skirmish's outcome would be inviting death.

"It's hard for reporters to turn loose of a paradigm that is so thoroughly drummed into them," says the Miami Herald's Glenn Garvin, who covered the troubles in Central America for more than a dozen years, often hiking the high country with the Contras. "But it's inconceivable to me that anybody who goes out into a combat situation is not sympathetic with the guys they're traveling with."

"The closer you get to war, the less practical it is to write a balanced story. While traveling with a Marine patrol, you can't get comments from Iraqi troops," Garvin says. "It's not journalism at its finest."

Shafer punctures a few other myths about war correspondents in his column. It's a nice illustration of the problems of covering a war. If you travel with the troops, you develop a natural affinity for them, which skews your "objectivity." If you're only allowed to cover press conferences in Riyadh, you're getting a very one-sided account of what happened. Obviously, there are no easy answers.

Posted 8:44 PM by //page
WHAT MEDIA MINDED WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT HIMSELF: It's all here ... and it's all true ...

The Older Guy. Ah, you're hot and you have a touch
of class. You only get better with age, like
Chris Noth. Your talent and style and handsome
looks help you get what you want.


Which type of hot guy are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

And he thinks he's so anonymous.

(ED'S NOTE: This is called funny, jackasses. Get over it.)

Posted 8:09 PM by //page
NEW BLOG IN TOWN: For journalists and warmongers alike there's a new blog on homeland security and military journalism! The authors describe it as "A daily chronicle of news in homeland security and military operations affecting newsgathering, access to information and the public's right to know."

OK.

Click here and read.

Posted 9:03 AM by Peter Fallow
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANDY: Andrew ("call me Andy") Cline's Rhetorica blog is one year old today. Stop by and wish him well. And be sure to check out Andy's blog about the 2004 presidential campaign.

Posted 8:48 AM by Peter Fallow
THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO 'HMM': John Rosenberg of Discriminations has been reading his Washington Post closely lately, and he turns up 1) a disconnect between a headline and the body of a story, and 2) the misleading use of some numbers regarding minority enrollment at the University of Virginia. Check it out.

Posted 8:06 AM by Peter Fallow
LEWIS LAPHAM, LIMOUSINE RADICAL: The Guardian has a fawning profile of the blue-blood, hard-left publisher of Harper's. The Guardian describes him as a man who has the "epicurean instincts of Christopher Hitchens, the political perspective of Noam Chomsky and the social connections of Tina Brown." (Is that just a nice way of saying Lapham is a drunken, paranoid starfucker? It's not entirely clear. OK, that's a little harsh on Hitchens, but hey, lefties have been calling him a drunk ever since he began having second thoughts a few months ago.)

There are other inadvertently revealing passages:

Lapham is under no illusions about how seriously his views are taken within the establishment. "They just ignore it. It's of no interest or consequence to them," he says with a smile.

At least he knows his place in the intellectual firmament. But I especially loved this bit about the la-de-da luncheon this son of the plutocracy (one of Lapham's favorite words) had with an agent of the totalitarian regime that was hell-bent on destroying the United States:

He recalls a lunch with a Soviet journalist who was also a KGB agent in a fashionable restaurant in Washington DC more than 20 years ago, surrounded by the political capital's beau monde. "He knew who was sleeping with whom and who was taking money from whom. And none of them knew who he was. It was just typical of the American plutocracy; the combination of perfect virtue and infinite wealth which means you don't have to know anything."

Lapham certainly knows whereof he speaks.

Posted 7:49 AM by Peter Fallow
RESTRAINT IS DEAD: Conservative film critic James Bowman uses British newspaper obituaries as a jumping-off point for a short essay on the death of restraint. Check it out.

Posted 7:00 AM by Peter Fallow
DOING SOME DIGGING ON ATKINS: Blogger David Appell, who works as a free-lance science writer, has been following the Atkins Diet debate that's been going on over at Reason. Yesterday, Appell reported that the threat of a lawsuit forced Reason to run Gary Taubes' 9,000-word response to Michael Fumento's recent article that was critical of the low-carb diet.

Well, Appell made some phone calls, and Reason editor Nick Gillespie sent him an e-mail denying that the long rebuttal was published under threat of legal action. Check it out here.

Posted 8:00 AM by Peter Fallow
ROMENESKO'S LETTERS: You never know what you'll turn up when you go over to Romenesko's Letters page.

First of all, it appears Eric Alterman is in a snit because Slate's Timothy Noah wrote a review of his What Liberal Media? book for The Washington Monthly. Now, is Alterman upset because Noah slammed the book? He shouldn't be; the review is mostly favorable, though not particularly revealing. (Noah agrees with Alterman that conservatives are over-represented in the pundit class without entertaining the idea that perhaps it might be a minor concession from liberal editors to "keep the righties in their place." He also bemoans the heavy presence of conservative think tanks in news reports, while failing to mention that those organizations arose to provide an alternative to those vast, unacknowledged liberal think tanks called elite public and private universities.)

However, according to Noah's letter, the source of Alterman's complaint is this:

Department of more-than-you-probably-want-to-know: The source of Eric's one-way feud with me is my (indisputably gossipy) crack three years ago in a Chatterbox column that Eric spent the past decade telling anyone who'll listen that George Stephanopoulos is his best friend." You'll find that item here.

As you can see from Eric's fray comments, reprinted at the bottom of the item, this comment, meant as a gentle tease, infuriated him.

Alterman's response? He compares his treatment in a generally favorable review in a liberal magazine to a partisan slam from the Wall Street Journal:

It is the kind of treatment I would have expected from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, not from a publication whose editors -- and alumni -- I greatly admire.

Whatever, dude.

Moving on in Romenesko's letters, we discover an interesting little hair-pulling tiff between Michelangelo Signorile and Keith Olbermann. It all began when Signorile wrote a column for Newsday wondering why people got so upset when the New York Post ran an item (since retracted) saying that baseball legend Sandy Koufax is gay. The thrust of Signorile's piece is that the shock and surprise attached to the revelation that a sports icon allegedly hid his homosexuality for decades reveals that America is still as homophobic as ever. In the process, he singles out Olbermann for special attention:

The usually thoughtful radio sports commentator Keith Olbermann dramatically announced in a column in Salon.com that, in protest, he would give back the advance he'd received for a book he was to write for HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which also owns the Post...Was the Post item really worthy of Koufax's severing last week his 48-year-old ties with the Dodgers, an action that, in fact, resurrected the December item and made it a story? And did it warrant Olbermann pulling out of a book deal and announcing it to the world?...Certainly Rupert Murdoch has done far worse things - including pandering to the brutal Chinese government - than owning a newspaper that runs blind items suggesting that sports stars are gay. The pandering obviously didn't keep Olbermann from taking a multi-million-dollar job with News Corp.'s Fox Sports in 1999 (he's now at the ABC radio network), nor did it keep him from signing on the dotted line with HarperCollins. But a blind item suggesting one of his idols isn't straight has him ripping up his book contract?

Olbermann's response at Romenesko:

Signorile writes of me, "a blind item suggesting one of his idols isn't straight has him ripping up his book contract." He is guilty of two wildly inaccurate, almost prejudiced, assumptions: Sandy Koufax was not one of my idols, and I did not cancel my book deal because it was claimed he was gay.

As I quite clearly stated on the air and in print in many venues, my actions were taken in respect to the overwhelming journalistic conflicts of interest presented by the fact that Koufax's team, the publisher of his biography, and the newspaper in question are all owned by the same company. The specific invasion of his privacy could've been an accusation that he wasn't lefthanded, for all it matters to me.

Signorile's response contains an interesting revelation from someone who has often railed against so-called conservative ownership of the media:

My main point, which Olbermann overlooked in his letter, is that he did work for News Corp. in the past, and was paid a fairly hefty salary (a million dollars a year) long after Rupert Murdoch had been associated with many nasty actions. To offer more specifics, those actions include Murdoch's dumping of the BBC from his satellite network in China because the Chinese government complained about the BBC's human rights reporting, and his having a HarperCollins book killed because it was critical of China. I'm not saying Olbermann shouldn't have taken Murdoch money -- my last book was published by HarperCollins. If we all stayed clear of every giant media company with a tarnished record none of us would be working.
But Olbermann's giving back the money from the five-figure book deal now seemed, to me, to send a message that this is the worst thing Murdoch could possibly have done, again, as well-intentioned as Olbermann's actions were.

Michelangelo Signorile: tool of the right-wing media's puppet masters? What's next, a stipend from Richard Mellon Scaife? (On a serious note, Signorile has basically admitted that smart and successful publishing companies don't stay successful by filtering their book choices through strict ideological blinders. They stay successful by appealing to as wide a market as possible. That's a concept that seems to run counter to a good deal of Signorile's writing on the media.) Anyway, Olbermann responded again:

Mr. Signorile doesn't accept the possibility that Koufax is not my idol, even though Koufax retired long before I became a baseball fan, and while I have respect for him, I have never met him.

Moreover, to me, in the Koufax incident, the Post crossed a threshold of unethical behavior in one particular area. It echoed last summer's blind item that provoked Mike Piazza's proclamation of heterosexuality. Frankly, Piazza and I can't stand each other, and I was completely on his side during that fiasco....

I felt that in repeating the style of gutter journalism directed against Piazza, News Corp had gone beyond even its own blanched pale, and it was time to break with that company as fully as I could. When I signed with them in 1998 I certainly did not feel they were PBS (and they did not let me down). But at no point were events in my field, directly touching on my employment, so egregious as to require my resignation.

Perhaps most importantly, in severing my ties to HarperCollins, I'm eliminating a personal conflict of interest -- you can't fairly criticize an ethics mess that starts with a HarperCollins book and is then multiplied by a New York Post gossip column, while actively writing a book for HarperCollins.

That last bit was a nice little jab at Signorile, who deserves as much pummeling as possible. I still can't believe the column he wrote last claiming that the Nazis had no problem with homosexuals, forgetting to inform his readers that hundreds of thousands of gays were murdered by Hitler. (Those little pink triangles gays wear as a symbol of pride was the insignia they were forced to wear in the death camps.) The reason for this disgusting assertion was to portray American conservatives as ignorant of European politics and thus out of their league when commenting on assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn.

That's a whole lot of credibility to waste on a weak political point.

Posted 10:06 PM by Peter Fallow
DEAR READERS: The Christian Science Monitor broke its own editorial policy against unsigned op-ed columns by running this guest piece from an anonymous Iraqi who now lives in America. The column, titled "If antiwar protesters succeed," is a passionate rebuttal of the anti-war position expressed through a series of questions. A sample:

It got me wondering: What if you antiwar protesters and politicians succeed in stopping a US-led war to change the regime in Baghdad? What then will you do?

Will you also demonstrate and demand "peaceful" actions to cure the abysmal human rights violations of the Iraqi people under the rule of Saddam Hussein?

Or, will you simply forget about us Iraqis once you discredit George W. Bush?

Will you demand that the United Nations send human rights inspectors to Iraq? Or are you only interested in weapons of "mass destruction" inspections, not of "mass torture" practices?

Kudos to the Monitor for realizing that editorial policies are guidelines, not laws written in stone. (Link via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Posted 9:06 AM by Peter Fallow
ABOUT CQ: In a column addressing how the Seattle Times tries to keep mistakes from getting into the paper, executive editor Mike Fancher lets readers in on the CQ mark. This is an old copy-editing shorthand indicating that the accuracy of certain material (phone numbers, odd names, etc.) has been verified. (Link via Romenesko.)

There's an old copy-editor joke about the CQ mark, and it goes like this. Depending on the editor who sent you the story, CQ either means the information is absolutely correct, or it means you'd better check it two or three times.

Of course, it's not really a funny joke, but still.

Posted 8:56 AM by Peter Fallow
AUGUSTA NATIONAL = KKK: Jim McCarthy, who is a publicity consultant for Augusta National, sent me this article from the New York Daily News about a planned march by the Ku Klux Klan in support of the golf club. Here's the choice quote from Martha Burk that McCarthy excerpted:

Burk told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she was sure Augusta National welcomed the KKK's support "because they seem bent on discriminating against women at any cost."

She pulled back from that viewpoint in an interview with The News yesterday - saying the comment was made "tongue-in-cheek" - but also charged that Augusta National did not go far enough in renouncing the KKK.

McCarthy has a nice comeback to this outrageous sentiment:

Never mind, of course, that the pack of journalists transcribing Burk's every utterance are precisely what is attracting other media vultures. Nor that Augusta National did explicitly and immediately repudiate the Klan. Why spoil the fun -- once you've got "KKK" and "Augusta" in the same sentence, it's rhetorical party time!

Hootie Johnson's long and vigorous civil rights record as detailed in the most recent New Yorker? Why let details like that spoil all the fun

Indeed.

Posted 6:28 AM by Peter Fallow
CLUELESS CELEBRITY WATCH: Mike Farrell's appearance on Meet the Press opposite Fred Thompson gets a negative review from The New Republic. It seems that if you're going to debate the pros and cons of arms inspectors in Iraq, you should know what you're talking about. Read it all here.

Posted 6:19 AM by Peter Fallow
THE SPORTSWRITER: Drawing on his own experiences, former journalist Mike Shropshire reveals that baseball's spring training is not exactly the idyll we see portrayed in the media:

In those days, the annual Florida sojourn wasn't a family vacation—it was a place ballplayer and journalist alike went to escape his wife. I never saw any kids, can vaguely recall seeing some old people, although they didn't look too happy, and I damn sure never saw any baseball games.

And this:

The schedule for the Major League Baseball beat writer went as follows: Get up, gargle with English Leather, and stroll the beach. Then I'd return to my room at the Surf Rider with its mildewed walls and do an hour's worth of research for the work day ahead. That amounted to studying the racing form to handicap the first five races at Gulfstream. After returning from the track, I'd report to Pompano Stadium, making sure to arrive late enough that the game would be over, and get a copy of the box score.

It's a fun read. Check it out.