The Washington Post writers who wrote this story are morons and here’s why.

They don’t actually understand what a flip flop really is. Here’s their definition:

While flip-flopping — or, more delicately put, a change in position — has always been a part of political campaigns, President Bush turned it into a deadly political weapon in 2004.

No dummies. It’s not a change in position. A change in position when new information is presented is called prudent, intelligent, and smart. A flip flop has another component.

I feel like a broken record sometimes, so I’ll just quote myself here:

Flip flopping is the act of changing your opinion and never acknowledging the fact that you had the other opinion in the first place. It’s not about changing your mind in the midst of new evidence or information, it’s about changing your mind and making a point of telling the world that you strongly hold the belief and it’s the way you’ve always felt.

That’s what a flip flop is, so unless these people in the debate never acknowledged their former positions, they didn’t flip-flop on anything. I wouldn’t expect the WaPo to understand that, though. They admit that it worked well for Bush in 2004, so they’re now trying to submarine the current crop of Republican hucksters with the same technique.

Just so you all understand, here’s the most recent textbook example of a flip flop:

I know the WaPo would love to use the technique they hated so much in 2004 as long as it hurt a Republican, but they should at least learn what the term means first.

I’m starting to see a pattern here. Politicians seem to realize that in order to score some cheap brownie points with the public at large, all they have to do is take a crap on radio hosts…

In the wake of the slayings of 32 people by student Seung-Hui Cho, who also took his own life, Boortz began asking why Tech students didn’t fight back. He called it part of the “wussification of America” and a symptom of a passive culture fostered by the political left…..

On Monday, the three legislators called on the eight Virginia stations that carry Boortz to drop him. “This community up here’s still suffering greatly,” Shuler said Tuesday…. Still, Stevens said, before the delegates’ letter, he had received just one call about the comments, and it was so nonspecific that he had not realized what it was about.

Similarly, managers at WFIR in Roanoke — which pulled Boortz’s show for a day in response to the comments — WLNI in Lynchburg and WMVA in Martinsville said they had heard few complaints about Boortz. Leonard Wheeler, president and general manager of WFIR, called Boortz’s words “totally unfair, horribly ill-timed, completely insensitive” but said he heard much more outcry when he didn’t air the show for a day than about the remarks themselves….

Vultures, the lot of them.

I’m not saying Boortz was right. In fact, I find him morally reprehensible and an overall shithead who I’ve publicly (meaning literally to his face) told to go fuck himself. That being said, can we stop trying to bolster our political careers by shitting on jocks who say dumb stuff? It really is starting to get old now.

Neal Boortz is a piece of crap. He said something dumb.

Can all the vultures in Richmond stop acting like they just hit the political lottery?

Technorati Tags: neal boortz, virginia, va tech

Okay, this one is a damn classic. Paul Kapustka from GigaOM seems to have caught the WSJ red-handed in a bit of shadiness. On Friday, Vonage ran an ad slamming Verizon in its patent case. The ad, according to Kapustka, had what looked like a sharpie line through it. Closer examination of the ad in question revealed that the ad did have a marker line through it, but it was in the ad, not done by his delivery person. Here’s a shot he had of the ad in question (click to embiggen ever so slightly).

Kapustka contacted Vonage for a copy of the ad, and they sent him the unredacted ad that ran in the New York Times, also on Friday. The edited line reads ““Now, Verizon has chosen to attack Vonage in the courts. Why? Could it be all about the money?” Vonage was told by the Wall Street Journal that the ad would not be accepted at all in its original format (ie: with that line in tact).

So now you have to wonder… What in that ad was so egregious that it required it to be censored or scrapped? Or was it just the fact that Vonage called Verizon on the carpet for its predatory use of a patent it probably shouldn’t have had in the first place?

Technorati Tags: verizon, vonage, wall street journal, wsj, censorship

From the NY Times:

CBS Radio suspended two hosts from an FM station in New York City today after an Asian-American advocacy organization complained about the broadcast of a six-minute prank phone call to a Chinese restaurant that was peppered with ethnic and sexual slurs.

The call was first played on “The Dog House With JV and Elvis,” a midmorning show on WFNY, on April 5, the day after Don Imus made his comment about the Rutgers women’s basketball team on WFAN, another CBS-owned station. The call was then replayed on “The Dog House” on Thursday, a week after Mr. Imus was fired by CBS Radio.

In the skit, a series of apparently unsuspecting employees of a Chinese restaurant are berated by a caller who tells one woman he would like to “come to your restaurant” to see her naked, especially a part of her body he refers to as “hot, Asian, spicy.” The caller also attempts to order “flied lice,” brags of his prowess in kung fu and repeatedly curses at several employees.

In a statement on Sunday, the four New York-area chapters of the Organization of Chinese Americans, an advocacy group, demanded an apology from the show’s two hosts and from CBS Radio, and called for the firing of the hosts and their producer.

Oh yay. The Asian groups see Imus get fired and want to get some of their own firing on. Must be great to be jealous of Sharpton and Jackson. Of course, they haven’t let the Imus incident’s end result escape them:

In an interview today before the suspensions were announced, Vicki Shu Smolin, president of the organization’s New York City chapter, said she was mystified that CBS would allow the call to be broadcast in the first place and then would permit it to be replayed in the aftermath of the Imus incident. (“The Dog House” has been waging a broad campaign in support of Mr. Imus both on the show and on its Web site.)

“I just see plain ignorance in the CBS management — of the community, of who we are, of what we’re all about,” Ms. Shu Smolin said. “If they don’t fire the D.J.’s, it will be a double standard.”

She promised to rip a page from the playbook of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who led the charge for Mr. Imus’s dismissal, by staging protests of CBS Radio and boycotting advertisers on WFNY.

So now any DJ who says anything that might be considered offensive must be fired or the station faces the daunting prospect of being called a hypocrite!

Like that situation CBS? You’d better get used to it, because it’s one you created! My good friend Gregg Henson, former radio jock in Philly and Detroit, isn’t impressed with the snivelling cowards CBS has become:

CBS is ruined as a radio company. They have lost their soul, when Mel Karmazin was in charge he defended Talent and the right to attempt humor. Since his departure to Sirius, CBS is an empty shell of its former self. Remember, this was the company that was once know for developing talent, sadly they are simply beholden to the stockholders and special interest groups. Watch this story closely, soon you will not be able to say anything that could be construed as offensive. Big media and big business don’t think we are adult enough to handle edgy humor.

It started with the firing of Opie and Anthony for the Sex for Sam stunt in 2004. CBS backed down and chickened out.

It’s been downhill ever since and apparently, CBS hasn’t realized that they opened the floodgates on their own back then, propped them open with Imus, and now they have to face the fact that they have to fire JV and Elvis or else they will have to wear the hypocrite badge.

Should be interesting to see what plays out, but I’m with Gregg here. JV and Elvis are done.

Technorati Tags: jv, elvis, cbs, opie, anthony, don imus, opie and anthony

It’s nice to see the NY Post isn’t letting things like news get in the way of trashy tabloidism…

Not satisfied with being effectively removed from the public eye after the firing of Don Imus, Al Sharpton announced that some people were sending in death threats to his office. Apparently the average Joe doesn’t like race-baiting pieces of garbage…

NEW YORK WCBSTV.com learned early Saturday that the National Action Network has increased the Rev. Al Sharpton’s security due to a number of death threats in the wake of the firing of radio host Don Imus by MSNBC and CBS Radio.

There will also be added security at the National Action Network’s headquarters in Harlem.

“We have no way of knowing the seriousness of these threats, but they have intensified greatly in the last two days as Rev. Sharpton was figured prominently in the firing of Don Imus,” Attorney Charlie King said in a statement early Saturday morning.

“Since Rev. Sharpton survived a personal assassination attempt where he was stabbed, we take any and all threats, especially at this volume, very serious. Therefore, all may be comfortable that we will not take the safety of our staff or that of our President lightly.”

That’s a pretty slick way to get more attention out of this story. Good one, Al, you piece of racist garbage.

Technorati Tags: al sharpton, don imus

Ed Felten posted an interesting bit from Viacom’s complaint against YouTube.

In addition, YouTube is deliberately interfering with copyright owners’ ability to find infringing videos even after they are added to YouTube’s library. YouTube offers a feature that allows users to designate “friends” who are the only persons allowed to see videos they upload, preventing copyright owners from finding infringing videos with this limitation…. Thus, Plaintiffs cannot necessarily find all infringing videos to protect their rights through searching, even though that is the only avenue YouTube makes available to copyright owners. Moreover, YouTube still makes the hidden infringing videos available for viewing through YouTube features like the embed, share, and friends functions. For example, many users are sharing full-length copies of copyrighted works and stating plainly in the description “Add me as a friend to watch.”

So in other words, private videos on YouTube are a big problem because they “could” contain copyrighted material and stupid Viacom wants that stopped because of the possibility, not even the reality.

How far are they going to take this?

via Boing Boing

Technorati Tags: copyright, dmca

Paul Gillin summarizes Dan Rather at SXSW thusly:

Rather said that journalism needs a “spine transplant,” a return to its role as an independent advocacy for truth and disclosure. The role of the journalist is as a watchdog, he said. A watchdog barks when it suspects danger but doesn’t lie down or attack. It’s a warning system that keeps those in power on their toes.

“Do we still believe that the documents of government belong to the people and not the people in power?” he asked. “The president is not a descendant of the Sun God. This person is elected by the people and part of what [journalists are] expected to do is check on them.”

Rather’s message was a welcome call for a return to the values of Edward R. Murrow, whose name he invoked twice. But I think the audience was interested in hearing more about social media. Rather’s own knowledge deficit in that area - he didn’t mention YouTube or podcasts once and appeared awkward using “Google” as a verb - was painfully evident. As someone whose CBS career was arguably brought down by bloggers in the Rathergate incident, you’d think he would have more to say. But the question about Rathergate, like so many others, never came up.

Of course the disgraced ex-CBS anchor had nothing to say about his (and Mary Mapes’ for that matter) plot to hand to the election to John Kerry. What’s he gonna say? “Yeah, I had a forged document on my newscast. Yes I defended it when it was proven by multiple sources to be false. Yes I weaseled out in the end by saying it may be fake but I believed it.”

His lack of knowledge on social media makes me wonder… What idiot signed him up to speak at a conference where social media is the hot topic of the day?

Technorati Tags: dan rather, who cares

Allahpundit makes a great point and proves what an idiot Terry Moran actually is. The first line is from Terry Moran’s idiotic “rant” about what it means to be white, he being an authority on whiteness of course, and then Allahpundit takes out the trash in the next sentence.

So the Giuliani candidacy might tell us something about today’s Republican Party. And about America.

In other words, if conservatives don’t vote for the pro-choice, pro-gay, twice-divorced, open-borders candidate, it’s quite possibly because they fear the Eye-talian.

Liberals love boiling everything down to race. Allahpundit nails it when he points out that if Giuliani doesn’t win, it’s going to be his own record and politics that does him in, and not the fact that his last name ends in a vowel. I agree, and as an Italian, I probably wouldn’t vote for him. It’s not that I don’t like him or anything, but I’m not sure a guy who wants to fling the borders open and not enforce the law is the kind of man I want running the country.

In New York City, he was all about looking the other way to illegal immigration (and frankly, so have all mayors because they’ll do anything not to piss off the base and get re-elected). That’s not what we need right now. We’ve had it for years and frankly, I want it over with.

Technorati Tags: rudy giuliani, giuliani

Byron Calame savages the New York Times again, this time for including data about unmarried mothers that can’t be married.

I kid you not. The whole article is a worthy read and you really need to check it out. This was my particular favorite part:

When I began to look into reader concerns about the article shortly after it appeared, it became clear that there was confusion over the issue of 15-year-olds. Mr. Roberts initially told me, and wrote in an e-mail, that 15-year-olds had been excluded from the “raw numbers” cited in the article, mainly because he had discovered some states’ restrictions on marriage at that age. So the statements in the article and graphic that 15-year-olds were not counted seemed at first to be consistent with what Mr. Roberts had told me and the office of the standards editor last month.

My subsequent questions, however, led to Mr. Roberts’s eventual acknowledgment that 15-year-olds had been fully included in all the data. Seeking to explain that shift, he wrote in a Jan. 30 e-mail to me: “When I realized that nothing would change by eliminating 15-year-olds, I left the numbers as is, again for consistency.”

Actually, leaving out 15-year-olds would have cast statistical doubt on the new majority. A calculation done for me by Times consultants at the Queens College department of sociology in New York shows that the number of females 16 years old and older not living with a spouse in 2005 exceeded the total living with one, but by a small number that was well within the margin of error.

Mr. Roberts is now defending the inclusion of 15-year-olds on the basis of historical comparability and consistency. He points out that the Census Bureau has collected and reported marital data on them for decades — going back to a time when marriage at that age was more common than today. (Even the Census Bureau can recognize that times do change, however: it once included 14-year-olds in its marital status data, but no longer does so.)

So Sam Roberts first said the data wasn’t included at all.

Then he said they were, but they didn’t statistically change the tenor of the article.

Then he said they had to be included because inclusion was necessary to make data across multiple years consistent.

In other words, he got caught lying.

Badly.

No wonder Calame won’t be around in a few weeks.

NY Times via Hot Air

Technorati Tags: calame, ny times, woops

So Tony from LAist left a nice little missive in my comments section overnight. Apparently he objected to the utter complete and total destruction of the digital reach-around piece LAist wrote for Netfux…

as long as reviews like that keep getting us on the front page of Digg, ive got no problems with such reviews:

http://digg.com/movies/Why_Blockbuster_STILL_Sucks_Compared_to_Netflix

plus a ton of people over there agreed with Henry.

Let’s dismiss the horrible grammar, lack of punctuation, and zero capitalization. It’s a plague that affects most of the “ist” writers when they aren’t being copy-edited. There’s something very telling in there, though. LAist doesn’t care about the content of the review being inaccurate as long as it gets them to the front page of Digg.

Hit whoring. Plain and simple.

I responded:

Sure Tony… And half the people who commented on your site think he’s a moron. But hey, it’s really all about hit-whoring, and as long as you make the front page of digg, who cares if Henry says completely inaccurate shit based on nothing (they ship from stores? Stop it dope, they do not; they ship from one of 35 distro centers around the country, none of which are stores).

Way to go making the front page, though.

I also saw a story about redesigning Myspace, so you guys are certainly in elite company.

Yep… But hey, at least they got eyeballs.

Might I suggest to the “ist” hitwhores that if they want to be respected in the world, they may want to take their content more seriously than their stats. I would hope that whoever runs “ist” would put them in their place. I can say what I want about Gothamist, but the truth of the matter is that they’re big on content, and while I may disagree with them, you won’t catch a blatant mistruth or half-assed story in there. Jake and Jen, for all the grief I may give them in their comments do a great job, and frankly the LAist folks are not up to that level (And yes, I read a bunch of the other articles before drawing that conclusion).

Oh, and just for shits and giggles I checked out the IMDB page for the movie they couldn’t find on Blockbuster, Amores Perros. Here it is.

Riveting.

Technorati Tags: laist, tony, hypocrites

Byron Calame fact checks then weakly deflects with regards to the propaganda piece in the Sunday NY Times Magazine (see my earlier thoughts on the issue here) and suddenly Byron Calame’s position may be eliminated.

Yep. That’s how accountability at the New York Times works.

The two-year term of the current public editor, Byron (Barney) Calame, will conclude in May. There may, or may not, be another.

“Over the next couple of months, as Barney’s term enters the home stretch, I’ll be taking soundings from the staff, talking it over with the masthead, and consulting with Arthur,” meaning publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., wrote Bill Keller, The Times’ executive editor, in an e-mail to The Observer.

Mr. Calame is the paper’s second public editor since Mr. Keller announced the job on his first day as executive editor in July 2003.

Mr. Keller wrote in his e-mail that “some of my colleagues believe the greater accessibility afforded by features like ‘Talk to the Newsroom’ has diminished the need for an autonomous ombudsman, or at least has opened the way for a somewhat different definition of the job.”

Mr. Keller added that “the creation of a public editor has helped the paper immensely in a period when the credibility of the media generally has been under assault.” The position at The Times was created in the wake of the Jayson Blair debacle that emerged in 2003.

When reached by phone on Dec. 29, Mr. Calame said he had heard the news. His assistant, Joseph Plambeck, had attended an in-house Q&A on Dec. 15, at which Mr. Keller expressed the idea.

“I have been critical of the newsroom,” Mr. Calame said. “I’ve also praised the newsroom, and I think that Bill Keller has been—quite obviously—unhappy with some of the things I’ve written.”

Heh… I’ll bet… When you don’t toe the line on the liberal talking points, you suddenly become expendable.

More accountability at work.

Technorati Tags: ny times, media

There are certain issues that the New York Times can never be depended upon to write about with any degree of reliability, honesty, or integrity.

The first is gay marriage. The Times, despite many calling it some kind of flagship paper or whatever, cannot get past its own biases with regard to gay marriage.

The second is affirmative action. Again, the Times has historically portrayed Affirmative Action as the kind of issue that only racists would disagree with.

The third is illegal immigration. The Times typically refers to illegal aliens as “undocumented,” always stopping short of calling them illegal.

The fourth is abortion where the Times continuously frames the murder of unborn babies as an issue of “choice,” a popular euphemism for those who can’t stomach the fact that they’re actually murdering babies.

To the fourth, we find the Times is yet again caught in manipulating an issue. In a piece designed to promote their pro-abortion agenda (reg req’d), the Times went down to El Salvador and interviewed Julia Cardenal about Carmen Climaco whose story they incorrectly noted was that she had an abortion (illegal in El Salvador) and was jailed for 30 years.

In fact, Climaco was not jailed for abortion; she was jailed for infanticide.

LifeSite.net rips the Times for their manipulation:

Hitt described his visit to Carmen Climaco in prison. “I was there to see Carmen Climaco. She is now 26 years old, four years into her 30-year sentence,” wrote Hitt. The New York Times article concludes, “She’d had a clandestine abortion at 18 weeks, not all that different from D.C.’s, something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It’s just that she’d had an abortion in El Salvador.”

However, court records from the case, which have been obtained by LifeSiteNews.com, indicate that the case was actually one of infanticide rather than illegal abortion. While it was investigated on the suspicion of an illegal abortion, authorities found the dead baby hidden in a box wrapped in bags under the bed of Mrs. Climaco.

Moreover, forensic examination showed that it was a full term (38-42 weeks gestation) normal delivery, and that the child was breathing at the time of birth. The legal opinion of the cause of death was asphyxia by strangulation.

Cardenal also points out that the main source of information for Hitt came from a pro-abortion group called IPAS.

The New York Times on Sunday ran the following “clarfication” of the original story. Apart from pointing out that “sensitive” topics need to be handled with an extra degree of diligence (note, of course, that even a cursory degree of diligence would’ve blown this story out of the water):

Apart from the flawed example of Ms. Climaco, Mr. Hitt’s 7,800-word cover article provided a broad and intriguing look at a nation where the penal code allows prison sentences for a woman who has an abortion, the provider of the procedure or anyone who assisted. His interviews with doctors, nurses, police officers, prosecutors, judges and both opponents and advocates of abortion offered revealing personal perspectives on the effects of the criminalization of the procedure.

Heh… Inaccurate but accurate. I guess Calame knows Dan Rather… Anyway, here comes another moneyshot:

Exceptional care must be taken in the reporting process on sensitive articles such as this one to avoid the slightest perception of bias. Paul Tough, the editor on the article, acknowledged in an e-mail to me that in reporting this story, Mr. Hitt used an unpaid translator who has done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group, for his interviews with Ms. Climaco and D.C. This wasn’t ideal, he said, but the risk posed for sources in this situation required the use of intermediaries “to some degree.”

Ipas used The Times’s account of Ms. Climaco’s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for “identifying lawyers who could appeal her case” and to help the organization “continue critical advocacy work” across Central America. “A gift from you toward our goal of $30,000 will help Carmen and other Central American women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws,” states the Web appeal, which Ipas said it took down after I first contacted the organization on Dec. 14. An Ipas spokeswoman called the appeal “moderately successful.”

But who is Ipas and what do they do? If you’ll notice, the Times never actually explains it. Lifesite, of course, does. A quick peek at their website reveals that Ipas makes…

Wait for it…

Abortion equipment! Of course, as is usually the case with abortion, they never actually call it that. They call it, ironically enough, equipment for reproductive-health services.

As part of its mission to enhance women’s reproductive choices and to eliminate unsafe abortions, Ipas works to expand the availability and accessibility of medical equipment and supplies that health professionals need to deliver high-quality reproductive-health services.

Manufactured to high-quality and safety standards, Ipas MVA instruments have been used in health-care programs for thousands of women and are distributed through a worldwide network. The Ipas MVA system, consisting of an aspirator coupled with cannulae, is the perfect portable uterine evacuation system for the primary point of care, and is ideal for provider offices, clinics, ambulatory and outpatient facilities, and emergency rooms. Ipas’s product line includes:

Wow! That would certainly be a reliable source for a translator! You would think with all the “diversity” of the Times, they could’ve sent someone down that actually spoke Spanish, but of course that would be asking entirely too much.

Oddly enough, Ipas even goes as far as mentioning their consulted NY Times article on the front page of their site!

So now that we know the complete story and the interesting angles that are in play here, what does the Times intend to do about it?

Well, what do they always do?

That’s right! Nothing! I know the pasted quote below is longish, but it’s very important.

The magazine’s failure to check the court ruling was then compounded for me by the handling of reader complaints about the issue. The initial complaints triggered a public defense of the article by two assistant managing editors before the court ruling had even been translated into English or Mr. Hitt had finished checking various sources in El Salvador. After being queried by the office of the publisher about a possible error, Craig Whitney, who is also the paper’s standards editor, drafted a response that was approved by Gerald Marzorati, who is also the editor of the magazine. It was forwarded on Dec. 1 to the office of the publisher, which began sending it to complaining readers.

The response said that while the “fair and dispassionate” story noted Ms. Climaco’s conviction of aggravated homicide, the article “concluded that it was more likely that she had had an illegal abortion.” The response ended by stating, “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.”

After the English translation of the court ruling became available on Dec. 8, I asked Mr. Marzorati if he continued to have “no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts” in the article. His e-mail response seemed to ignore the ready availability of the court document containing the findings from the trial before the three-judge panel and its sentencing decision. He referred to it as the “third ruling,” since the trial is the third step in the judicial process.

The article was “as accurate as it could have been at the time it was written,” Mr. Marzorati wrote to me. “I also think that if the author and we editors knew of the contents of that third ruling, we would have qualified what we said about Ms. Climaco. Which is NOT to say that I simply accept the third ruling as ‘true’; El Salvador’s judicial system is terribly politicized.”

I asked Mr. Whitney if he intended to suggest that the office of the publisher bring the court’s findings to the attention of those readers who received the “no reason to doubt” response, or that a correction be published. The latest word from the standards editor: “No, I’m not ready to do that, nor to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point.”

One thing is clear to me, at this point, about the key example of Carmen Climaco. Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect.

Actually, what we got was exactly what we’ve come to expect from the Times. There’s an issue that they have a preconceived notion on, they find as many facts as they can to back up that point of view, and then they report that one side as if it’s news. It happens on a regular basis at the ole Gray Lady, and this is nothing new, nor is their reaction to it and lack of corrective action.

They fell down on the job, wrote a quick mea culpa that pretty much placed them above the issue they created, then proceeded to explain why the “rest” of the article was important anyway even though the main part of the story was decidedly false.

This is the mainstream media, folks.

Issues-biased.

Arrogant.

Unaccountable.

via HotAir

Technorati Tags: ny times, lie, abortion, pro-abortion, el salvador, mainstream media

Utterly clueless, this guy…

The prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse rape case has heard the criticism from experts and armchair lawyers, and said yesterday he is comfortable with nearly all the decisions he has made and confident about taking the case to trial.

“I think that I have a responsibility to prosecute this case,” district attorney Mike Nifong said. “I think that really nothing about my view of the case and my view of how the case ultimately needs to be handled has been affected by any of the things that have occurred.”

Funny how when this was a case of a bunch of privileged white guys raping a black exotic dancer, this case was all over the place in a profound way. Now that more and more evidence is stacking up that this woman was lying and nothing actually happened and that the prosecutor is grossly incompetent and complicit in what appears to be wrongful prosecution of those same privileged white kids, the media isn’t interested, except for passing mentions on the news and two decent stories on Good Morning America and 60 Minutes.

Why is no one putting pressure on this prosecutor?

Technorati Tags: duke lacrosse, rape, duke, lacrosse

Michael J. Fox shows up on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, twitching, shaking and rocking due to Parkinson’s disease. In the midst of the interview, his microphone falls off. Of course, for dramatic effect, Katie Couric reaches over to help him clip it back on and instead of editing that mishap out, they leave it in. After all, how can we faithfully promote Fox’s agenda without showing every detail of how devastating (and make sure you say it in Katie’s concerned voice for full effect) it is.

Well thanks Katie, but we all know it is. We don’t need your fake concern to prove the point.

Michael J. Fox has been quite the forefront celebrity. He appeared in an ad against Michael Steele, saying he’s against stem cell research. Of course, as is usually the case, the critics are wrong and Michael Steele is nowhere near “against” stem cell research. As is the case with most Republicans, he’s against embryonic stem cell research. Fox obviously didn’t read up on Steele’s position because in an ad for Ben Cardin, he said, “George Bush and Michael Steele will put limits on the most promising stem cell research. Fortunately Marylanders have a chance to vote for Ben Cardin.”

In a way, this is no different than Democrats saying on numerous occasions that Republicans are against immigration. Just like in stem cell research where they leave out embryonic, in immigration they leave out the word illegal.

And Michael J. Fox is a big emotional prop and nothing more and is not to be criticized, again much like prior ad props like the 9/11 widows and Cindy Sheehan.

But what’s worse about Fox is that he has a debilitating condition that’s physically obvious and people are swooping in on him to show just how bad it is. I don’t have so much of a problem with that. If Fox is okay with being exploited like some kind of shaking mannequin, then go to it. If he wants to put himself out there, go right ahead.

But what drives me crazy is that George Stephanopoulos had a scoop dropped right in his lap and he ignored it. He either did it out of stupidity (not likely; Stephanopoulos is a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them) or he was driven by the same bias that drove CBS to leave the mic foible on the tape that was shown to the public. What was the scoop he missed?

Well, though Fox is campaigning for Claire McCaskill, he never read the bill he was preaching to the camera for.

Stephanopoulos: In the ad now running in Missouri, Jim Caviezel speaks in Aramaic. It means, “You betray me with a kiss.” And his position, his point, is that actually even though down in Missouri they say the initiative is against cloning, it’s actually going to allow human cloning.

Fox: Well, I don’t think that’s true. You know, I campaigned for Claire McCaskill. And so I have to qualify it by saying I’m not qualified to speak on the page-to-page content of the initiative. Although, I am quite sure that I’ll agree with it in spirit, I don’t know, I— On full disclosure, I haven’t read it, and that’s why I didn’t put myself up for it distinctly.

But I’ve made this point before, and I really am sincere in it, that anybody who’s prayed on this, and thought about it, and really considered it and can’t get their mind around or their heart around the idea of embryonic stem cell research, I’d go to war for your right to believe that. And you’re right to feel that. I respect it. I truly do.

My point is, and our point as a community, is we have a very good and supportable conclusion that a vast majority of people in this country are in favor of science playing a leading role in making changes in the future and believe in embryonic stem cell research.

So we’re just saying, know that we have prayed on it, too, and we have thought about it, and we are good people, and we are family people, and we are people that take this very seriously, and we’re as concerned as you are.

And we’ve decided that we would like to take this step and to do it with caution and to do it with oversight and to do it with the strictest adherence to ethics and all of the principles this country stands for.

But, allow us to do that without infusing the conversation with inflammatory rhetoric and name-calling and fear-mongering. It doesn’t help.

How’s that for some crap? The great hero that everyone is falling all over themselves to pat on the back is just a stuffed suit on television lending his shaking and tortured body to a political campaign with no real idea what he’s doing.

Understand, my problem is not really with Fox’s involvement in McCaskill’s campaign; it’s more about the way it’s being covered. He told Katie Couric he was over-medicated for his interview with her (which is ironic because Limbaugh claimed that Fox didn’t take his meds, then Fox came back and said he was over medicated and his condition would be more exaggerated because of it and Couric never even followed it up). He told George Stephanopolous that he hadn’t read the bill he praised McCaskill for being in favor of because he would “agree with it in spirit” not having read a word of it.

Couric and Stephanopoulos, however, did nothing with either of these huge scoops. Why? Because you can’t criticize Fox on anything related to stem cells or anything that might hurt his credibility.

I feel for Fox. I don’t wish Parkinson’s on anyone, but that’s not the issue here. The issue is the fact that having the disease does not make you an expert on it. Nor does it make you aware of the issues surrounding the disease beyond the issues you have to deal directly with yourself.

I know that’s directly contrary to the way things work now. You can never criticize Fox for his positions now because he has the disease and showed it on television in multiple interviews and commercials.

In the end, I have a piece of advice for Michael J. Fox.

If you’re going to show up in commercials for candidates the support of whom you base on a bill or an issue, you may want to actually read the bill or understand the position of the opposition on the issue that’s so central you’re lending your face to. He supported Claire McCaskill based on a bill, but he never read it. He came out against Michael Steele but apparently has no idea that Steele isn’t actually against stem cell research.

And God forbid you criticize him for it. Then you’re insensitive, unfair, harsh, a scumbag, or whatever else they can throw at you.

Technorati Tags: michael j. fox, fox

NY Times Ombudsman Byron Calame in today’s Times.

Banking Data: A Mea Culpa

Since the job of public editor requires me to probe and question the published work and wisdom of Times journalists, there’s a special responsibility for me to acknowledge my own flawed assessments.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

The source of the data, as my column noted, was the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. That Belgium-based consortium said it had honored administrative subpoenas from the American government because it has a subsidiary in this country.

I haven’t found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws. Although data-protection authorities in Europe have complained that the formerly secret program violated their rules on privacy, there have been no Times reports of legal action being taken. Data-protection rules are often stricter in Europe than in America, and have been a frequent source of friction.

Also, there still haven’t been any abuses of private data linked to the program, which apparently has continued to function. That, plus the legality issue, has left me wondering what harm actually was avoided when The Times and two other newspapers disclosed the program. The lack of appropriate oversight — to catch any abuses in the absence of media attention — was a key reason I originally supported publication. I think, however, that I gave it too much weight.

In addition, I became embarrassed by the how-secret-is-it issue, although that isn’t a cause of my altered conclusion. My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: the Times article and headline had both emphasized that a “secret” program was being exposed. (If one sentence down in the article had acknowledged that a number of people were probably aware of the program, both the newsroom and I would have been better able to address that wave of criticism.)

What kept me from seeing these matters more clearly earlier in what admittedly was a close call? I fear I allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger my instinctive affinity for the underdog and enduring faith in a free press — two traits that I warned readers about in my first column.

So to summarize…

1. Against his better judgment, Calame allowed the piece to go.
2. After further reflection, a valuable tool that he exposed was found, in his reflective judgment, to not be illegal in the first place.
3. No data was misused.
4. Despite trumpeting the great discovery of how illegal and wrong it was, it wasn’t.
5. The program is still continuing, although you can imagine smarter terrorists have gone further underground because of the leak of this program.
6. All of this was Bush’s fault, not the paper’s.

Oh, and remember how the original article appeared above the fold, right hand column the day it broke?

This one was relegated to the opinion section.

As See Dubya notes on JYB, I think someone put some sodium pentathol in the water at the Beeb and the Slimes. Must be more of that “unvarnished truth” we keep hearing so much about lately.

via JYB

Technorati Tags: unvarnished truth, ny times, retraction

F you, New York Post.

Here’s how the local papers commemorated 9/11 today… See if you can figure out why the post can kiss my alabaster white ass (click to embiggen)…

They couldn’t leave Uncle Pennybags off the cover for one day?

What trash. They should be ashamed of themselves. Something tells me a paper that makes its living off nip slips ain’t gonna be too hurt by my criticism though. Wait until one of the lowlives in that paper hauls out the “NY Times is working for the enemy” card next time. I’ll laugh right in their pompous self-important face.

(Collage of covers blatantly stolen from Gothamist)

Technorati Tags: 9/11, wtc, post, media morons, ny post, ny daily news, ny times

Well said:

I had to leave the World Trade Center this morning.

I was disgusted that the conspiracy-theory nutjobs were crawling everywhere like the rats they are. But I was even more disturbed at the media leaches crawling around them. I wanted to go up to some of my media colleagues with their pens cocked and ready and tell them to turn around: The story isn’t a few wackos who come because you and your cameras and notebooks are here, you fools! The story is over there, in the hole that still haunts us. The story is about the families and about the heroes and about the memories and about that hole. The story is even about WTC 7, now rising above the void, shining in a sky as bright as that five years ago today. The story is about the crowd of people — more than I’ve seen in recent years — who came to pay their respect. The story is not about these disrespectful loons, who got into shouting matches, drawing more cameras to them.

I was also bothered standing behind two women who were hugging and crying and in front of them were six photographers snapping eagerly, looking for a drop of human emotion to suck up. Oh, I have been there, too, calling the bereaved to find a photo of the dearly departed to share with the world. I’m not proud of that. Today, though, people can tell their own stories, thank goodness.

It really has become nothing more than a feeding frenzy year after year. Maybe it’s time to stop having the ceremony down there and let the vultures find something else to circle around.

Technorati Tags: wtc, 9/11, memorial, vultures, media, reporters

Well, apparently Nic Roberts took some cues from former CNN propagandist Eason Jordan. You may remember Eason Jordan as the news exec who admitted that CNN often acted as a propaganda outlet for Saddam Hussein’s government in the interests of maintaining an outlet in Baghdad.

Well, Nic Robertson seems to have taken a cue and done much the same thing according to Newsbusters:

Better late than never? On CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday, CNN’s senior international correspondent Nic Robertson added all of the caveats and disclaimers that he should have included in his story last week that amounted to his giving an uncritical forum for the terrorist group Hezbollah to spout unverifiable anti-Israeli propaganda.

Back on July 18, Hezbollah took Robertson and his crew on a tour of a heavily damaged south Beirut neighborhood. The Hezbollah “press officer” even instructed the CNN camera: “Just look. Shoot. Look at this building. Is it a military base? Is it a military base, or just civilians living in this building?”

In his original story, Robertson had no complaints about the journalistic limitations of a story put together under such tight controls, and Robertson himself at one point seemed to agree with the Hezbollah propaganda claim that Israeli jets had targeted a civilian area: “As we run past the rubble, we see much that points to civilian life, no evidence apparent of military equipment.”

Oh really?

That line of bullshit sure cracked quick when he was pressed on it:

Challenged by Reliable Sources host (and Washington Post media writer) Howard Kurtz on Sunday, Robertson suggested Hezbollah has “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations,” that the terrorist group “had control of the situation. They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath,” and he even contradicted Hezbollah’s self-serving spin: “There’s no doubt that the [Israeli] bombs there are hitting Hezbollah facilities.”

Wow. Flip. Flop.

I wonder if there’s gonna be any punishment for this.

Don’t worry. I was just kidding. I’m not stupid enough to believe that Robertson going to bat for Hezbollah is going to get him in any kind of hot water with CNN brass.

Technorati Tags: nic robertson, eason jordan

You’d be surprised to hear that I may agree with many of the critics who think that Flight 93, the movie about the ill-fated 9/11 flight that is believed to have been destined to smash the White House, is being released “too soon” after the 9/11 attacks and that people haven’t fully dealt with the scope of the tragedy yet.

To a degree, I agree with them. In fact, when I saw the headlines that a movie about 93 was in the pipeline, I almost wretched because my immediate reaction was, “Holy crap, do they need to cash in on this thing already?” Of course the media jumped right on that bandwagon because the movie doesn’t portray Bush as an evil incompetent schmuck and the terrorists as poor arab men victimized by a system that oppresses them. What’s the difference?

Well, I suddenly realized that Michael Moore came out with Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004, 2 years before this movie.

Ponder that for a minute.

One movie portrays what happened on the flight. The other twists, contorts, and warps the truth into an anti-Bush hit piece. In Moore’s movie, everyone who was victimized by 9/11 was a mere pawn in Bush’s game to take over the world. They all died because Bush didn’t act quick enough, and soldiers were sent to war because Bush had intentions of dominating everyone.

What kind of negative press did Moore receive? Awards. Lots of them. Both nominated for and received. Yet no questions by the media about the respectfulness of the nature of Moore’s capitalization on 9/11. In fact, many in the media were calling this movie critically important viewing, encouraging people to see it and see the “facts” that we’ve been hidden from, etc.

One movie is an account based on what we know (as best as we can know it) about what happened.

One movie is a mockumentary concocted in the warped mind of a partisan hack.

One was too soon. One was important viewing, though it came out two years earlier.

I wonder why that is?

Technorati Tags: michael moore, flight 93, fahrenheit 9/11