Thomas Sowell has an excellent column on the subject of media bias as it relates to the Iraq war:
If a battle ends with Americans killing a hundred guerrillas and terrorists, while sustaining 10 fatalities, that is an American victory. But not in the mainstream media. The headline is more likely to read: "Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq."
This kind of journalism can turn victory into defeat. Kept up long enough, it can even end up with real defeat, when support for the war collapses at home and abroad.
One of the biggest American victories during World War II was called "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" because American fighter pilots shot down more than 340 Japanese planes over the Mariana Islands while losing just 30 American planes. But what if our current reporting practices had been used back then? The story, as printed and broadcast, could have been: "Today, 18 American pilots were killed and five more severely wounded as the Japanese blasted more than two dozen American planes out of the sky." A steady diet of that kind of one-sided reporting and our whole war effort against Japan might have collapsed.
Whether the one-sided reporting of the war in Vietnam was a factor in the American defeat there used to be a matter of controversy. But in recent years, high officials of the Communist government of Vietnam have admitted that they lost the war on the battlefields but won it in the U.S. media and on the streets of America, where political pressures from the anti-war movement threw away the victory for which thousands of American lives had been sacrificed.
Too many in the media today regard the reporting of the Vietnam War as one of their greatest triumphs. It certainly showed the power of the media - but also its irresponsibility. Some in the media today seem determined to recapture those glory days by the way they report on events in the Iraq war.
MILWAUKEE, Jan. 24 -- The sons of a first-term congresswoman and of Milwaukee's former acting mayor were among five Democratic activists charged Monday with slashing the tires of vans rented by Republicans to drive voters and monitors to the polls on Election Day.
Sowande Omokunde, 25, son of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), and Michael Pratt, 32, son of former Milwaukee acting mayor Marvin Pratt, were among those charged with criminal damage to property, a felony that carries a maximum punishment of 3 1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The activists are accused of flattening the tires on 25 vehicles rented by the state Republican Party to get out the vote and deliver poll watchers Nov. 2.
Also charged were Lewis Caldwell, 28, and Lavelle Mohammad, 35, both from Milwaukee, and Justin J. Howell, 20, of Racine.
Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Seth Boffeli said the five were paid employees of the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) but were not acting on behalf of the campaign or party.
Um....if they weren't working on behalf of the Kerry For King campaign, just who were they slashing those tires for?
So many readers have made variations of this point, many, many from personal experience:
After I was captured, my hands were tied behind my back and I was struck repeatedly in the face with an open hand. After enduring the beating I was thrown on the water board, where under questioning the enemy would drown you till the verge of losing consciousness, only to revive you and start all over again. Then a black bag was secured around my head and throat which made it difficult to breathe. I was confined to a three by four foot tiger cage with a coffee can for a toilet. Loud music blared from speakers in the compound and I was repeatedly dragged from my cage for more beatings and interrogation. At night when it was freezing the guards would pour cold water on me. I was deprived of any food for five straight days.Yep. Pretty incredible, but yawningly familiar and terribly sad.Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Well that is only part of what EVERY U.S. Navy and Air Force pilot and flight crew goes through in survival school. The Army does it for their special forces guys as well. We do this to our own people for training but we can't do it to terrorists?
Incredible.
But I doubt whether Thornburgh and Boccardi will tell that story. To conduct this investigation, you needed an investigator. An old-fashioned investigator who would go to Texas, track down Bill Burkett, and persuade him to talk. Who would immerse himself in the corrupt politics of Travis County, Texas, and pursue leads on who created the forgeries. Who would demand to see Mary Mapes' telephone records for the last two years, and track down every number she called. Who would make witnesses like Max Cleland either answer questions, or go on record as refusing to talk. Who would, in short, investigate.
CBS didn't employ an investigator. They employed a couple of distinguished 70-year-old gentlemen: exactly the wrong sort of people. Maybe Thornburgh and Boccardi had the sense to hire investigators, but I doubt it. My guess is that their "investigation" consisted essentially of interviewing CBS employees. At one point, I saw a news item where they proudly announced that they had talked to 36 CBS employees. Wow. What they needed to do was forget about CBS for a while, and go to Texas. If they only talked to CBS people, they would inevitably come away with the impression that 60 Minutes was well-intentioned but regrettably failed to be sufficiently critical of the documents' authenticity, and therefore fell for a possible hoax.
The fundamental question here is whether CBS was the victim of a hoax, or the perpetrator of a hoax. It has been our view for a long time that Rather and his colleagues were perpetrators, not victims, in part because the documents were such obvious fakes that it strains credulity to suppose that they were actually fooled. When you read the Thornburgy/Boccardi report, keep that question constantly in mind: victim, or perpetrator?There are lots of problems with CBS's effort to portray itself as the victim of a hoax, but perhaps the most intractable is Dan Rather's personal vouching for the documents. Trust me, he said to America. I know they're authentic. They came from an unimpeachable source. That takes CBS out of the category of victim, and into the category of perpetrator.
Well, duh.
When I read the assignment I remembered back to my high school in Kuwait. Many of my teachers were Palestinian; they hated America, they hated my worldview, and they did their best to brainwash me. I did not leave my country and my family to come to the United States to receive further brainwashing. I disagreed completely with Dye and Zeigler’s thesis. I wrote an essay defending America’s Founding Fathers and upholding the US constitution as a pioneering document, which has contributed to extraordinary freedoms in America and other corners of the world - including my corner, the Middle East.
Well, dear friends, we're now into the tenth day of the tsunami crisis and in this battered corner of Asia, the UN is nowhere to be seen -- unless you count at meetings, in five-star hotels, and holding press conferences.Aussies and Yanks continue to carry the overwhelming bulk of the burden,
The UN continues to send its best product, bureaucrats.
Most interesting to me was this memo written by Dutch diplomats and circulated at an EU meeting in Indonesia:
The US military has arrived and is clearly establishing its presence everywhere in Banda Aceh. They completely have taken over the military hospital, which was a mess until yesterday but is now completely up and running. They brought big stocks of medicines, materials for the operation room, teams of doctors, water and food. Most of the patients who were lying in the hospital untreated for a week have undergone medical treatment by the US teams by this afternoon. US military have unloaded lots of heavy vehicles and organize the logistics with Indonesian military near the airport. A big camp is being set up at a major square in the town. Huge generators are ready to provide electricity. US helicopters fly to places which haven't been reached for the whole week and drop food. The impression it makes on the people is also highly positive; finally something happens in the city of Banda Aceh and finally it seems some people are in control and are doing something. No talking but action. European countries are until now invisible on the ground.Like it or not, Bush fostered the impression that he was painfully slow to react to the post-Christmas disaster while at the ranch. Three full days with no appearance before the cameras? What else did he have to do that was more important?
Oh, I don't know. I supposed he could have ordered an aircraft carrier and a Marine strike group to the disaster scene. That would be more important than giving a useless press conference, which would have done nothing at all to help anyone. These press complaints are typical of the elevation of symbolism over substance that permeates newspaper coverage of many issues.
There is, of course, a subtext to press complaints that President Bush was slow to give a press conference. As Kurtz notes, the Los Angeles Times, one of the country's most left-wing newspapers, made the subtext explicit:
President Bush's initial, halting response to the Indian Ocean tsunami catastrophe, followed within days by strong expressions of concern and decisive action, spotlighted a governing style that sometimes finds its stride only after stumbling at the gate. This seems especially true when Bush is confronted with a cataclysmic event and must improvise quickly -- as with the Dec. 26 tsunami or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. . . .
Michael Moore remains a powerful influence on the Democratic Party.
So, keep reading Dirkworld and *occasionally*, you may actually get ahead of the cutting edge! Neat! :)
(Where's my cable TV news show shot?!? If that Wonkette chippie can get her airhead on air, I demand my 15 seconds!!!!)
