Thank goodness for professional journalists
I’ve noted before the habit the media has of using “supposedly” to cast doubt on terror charges in situations where the neutral “allegedly” is called for. Another obvious gambit is to use the word “claimed,” rather than “said” or “stated,” to cast doubt on a speaker’s assertion.
In this case, it’s a military report that violence has fallen dramatically off in Iraq since the surge began:
Violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq has fallen to its lowest level for 18 months, the deputy American commander claimed today.
The authors can’t really find a substantive objection to the numbers, so they just kind of randomly throw this out:
But US Democrats point out that much of this analysis is contradicted by independent studies, while the anti-war group Moveon.org branded Gen Petraeus as “General Betray Us” in a full page newspaper advertisement which accused him of “cooking the books” for the White House.
… again confirming the sneaking suspicion that Democrats see themselves as the enemy in this war, and randomly repeating the baseless slander on General Patreaus from MoveOn.org.
Thank goodness for professional journalists. Who else would take a press release from the military and frame it in hostile, mindless drivel for our reading pleasure?
Rather vs. CBS
A $70 Million lawsuit. Right. This is going to be fun:
Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit Wednesday against CBS, alleging that the network made him a “scapegoat” for a discredited story about President Bush’s National Guard service.
The 75-year-old Rather, whose final months were clouded by controversy over the report, says the complaint stems from “CBS’ intentional mishandling” of the aftermath of the story.
Surprisingly, the AP report is quite open about stating that the story was inaccurate and unfair.
WaPo casts Soviets as liberators
… in a very convoluted paragraph, WaPo contests Fred Thompson’s claim that Americans have shed more blood to liberate other peoples than any other country. Astoundingly, their proof point is the Soviet Union, which under Stalin shed more of it’s own blood in peacetime to suppress it’s own people [probably about 20 million] than any other country except Communist China, greedily partitioned Poland with the Nazis, and then for forty years brutally caged all the people it “liberated.”
Here’s the odd paragraph where WaPo explains its reasoning:
In World War II alone, the Soviet Union suffered at least 8 million casualties, or more than 10 times the number of U.S. casualties for all wars combined. According to Winston Churchill, the Red Army “tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine.” It can be argued that Soviet troops were primarily fighting to free their homeland from Nazi occupation. After fighting its way to Berlin, the Soviet Union imposed its own dictatorship over Eastern Europe. Even so, Soviet sacrifices contributed greatly to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi domination. Soviet forces died for their own country and their own tyrannical government, but they also spilled blood on behalf of their Western allies.
Ouch. I feel like I got a hernia just trying to follow those contortions.
Orwell would be proud.
Supposedly II
I’ve noted before that reporters are paid to know the nuances of language, and I noted in particular an AP report in which convicted terrorist Jose Padilla was referred to as “supposed” rather than “alleged.” The same AP reporter appears to be on the beat again, this time regarding the anti-terror work by Michael Mukasey while a federal judge. This piece refers to Mukasey’s involvement in the Padilla case:
Mukasey also had a hand in one of the most hard-fought post-Sept. 11 terror cases: that of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in 2002 on a supposed mission to detonate a “dirty bomb.”
As I noted before, the proper neutral term in this case is “alleged,” or “allegedly.” A firm tilt toward favoring the accusation is “apparently,” and a firm tilt toward skepticism is “supposedly.”
You cannot use “supposedly” without casting editorial doubt on the veracity of the charge. I do not believe it is an accident that the AP keeps doing this. If it is an accident, they need to hire reporters better attuned to the nuances of language.
Irony-proof reporter misses punchline
In an attack on one of Bush’s most recent Supreme Court nominees, Dahlia Lithwick takes on the Landmark Legal Foundation’s tongue-in-cheek nomination of Rush Limbaugh for the Nobel Peace Prize. Only, she doesn’t realize they’re joking:
What other important jurisprudential efforts have been spearheaded lately by the Landmark Legal Foundation? Probably none as important as its recent effort to nominate Rush Limbaugh for a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Describing Limbaugh as “the foremost advocate for freedom and democracy in the world today,” the foundation’s nominating letter goes on to enthuse that “everyday [sic] he gives voice to the values of democratic governance, individual opportunity and the just, equal application of the rule of law—and it is fitting that the Nobel Committee recognize the power of these ideals to build a truly peaceful world for future generations.”
Memo to The Daily Show: What do you do when a joke writes its own punch line?
Memo to Ms. Lithwick: you smile with bemusement at those who didn’t get it.
With a little reflection — heaven forbid — it might have dawned on Dahlia that a conservative group wouldn’t with a straight face nominate Rush Limbaugh for a prize already given by the Swedish socialists on the committee to such luminaries as Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat.
The joke was on the Nobel crowd. And, apparently, you.
Can the NY Times be any more transparent?
NYT created a stink when it came out that the infamous MoveOn.org ad was bought at a steep discount. It could well be the case that this is in fact routine, especially with ad revenues in decline. Jeff Jarvis has some on point observations on this:
Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor who blogs on media at buzzmachine.com, said the key question for the Times was could any other political or advocacy group get the same rate under the same circumstances.
“The quandary the Times gets stuck in is they don’t want to admit you can buy an ad for that rate, no matter who you are,” Jarvis said, noting that with print advertising revenues in decline newspapers generally did offer big discounts.
On a more general note, Jarvis said U.S. papers should emulate their counterparts in Britain where, for example, The Guardian makes no effort to hide its liberal stance.
“In the U.S., I would argue newspapers should be more transparent and open about the views taken … and the (New York) Times is liberal,” he said.
I guess that would be refreshing in a sense, but it hardly seems necessary. Anyone who doesn’t see NYT already in that stance is either dumb or willfully blind.
Hyperbolic demagogues, left and right
The difference between our hyperbolic freaks (Ann Coulter) and the Left’s is that their’s sit front and center at CNN (Keith Olbermann), and no one every breathes a word regarding their gross and routine excesses. Read and ponder the following deep thought from Olbermann:
Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda — worse for our society. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.
I think that many African-Americans might take umbrage at this casual effort to re-legitimate the KKK. As might many of the 9/11 families object to his demoting in the pantheon of evil the man who murdered 3,000 Americans.
But Olbermann does us a favor, of sorts, to tip his hand so heavily. He obviously thinks that expressing views contrary to his is a more serious threat to the country than the machinations of murderers who would behead any one of us if given the chance.
How does one begin to respond to such sophomoric excess?
The WaPo headline reads,
Rove Replacement Seen as Highly Partisan Go-Getter
I guess the conciliatory slug turned down the job?
The Kyoto lie continues
Powerline flags this on another AP report asserting the lie that the Bush administration killed Kyoto. Anyone who followed it at the time knew, of course, that the Senate voted 95-0, led by key Democrats, to reject that substance of that treaty before it was negotiated. Given this, the Clinton administration never even bothered to try to have it ratified. Bush didn’t kill Kyoto: he merely gave it a decent burial.
But the facts don’t fit the official narrative. So they must be bent accordingly. Here is the AP blundering onward in its casual and irresponsible lies:
Under the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, the United States joined a U.N. meeting in Kyoto and agreed to the protocol. But the United States rejected it under the administration of President George W. Bush, Clinton’s successor.
NY Times needs to learn pyramid style
The first rule of journalistic writing is the pyramid. The most important stuff gets in the first paragraph, and each succeeding paragraph descends in importance. When you put a vitally important fact at the bottom of an article, you are inviting it to be trimmed or not read. When you do it for ideological reasons, it’s called bias.
Today, the NY Times wants us to think that the marines charged in Haditha were bloodthirsty criminals, not good men reacting properly in a very difficult situation. So they quote at face value the testimony of one marine against another, along with an inflammatory headline suggesting that this is the real stuff.
Finally, in the 8th paragraph of a 14 paragraph article, we find this:
It is unclear how much weight the hearing’s presiding officer will give to the testimony of Sergeant Dela Cruz, whose credibility has been an issue in hearings for other marines charged in the Haditha killings. The presiding officer, Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware, will recommend to a Marine Corps general whether to try Sergeant Wuterich in a full court-martial.
Sergeant Dela Cruz has admitted to lying to an Army colonel who initially investigated the Haditha episode, in which Marine riflemen killed 24 Iraqis, including at least 10 women and children, after a roadside bomb killed one of their comrades.
I can think of any number of ways to work the fact that this is the contested testimony of an admitted liar into the first two graphs. If anyone is interested.
Brian de Palma is a tool
[Everyone say cheese! We just got done pretending to be murderous American soldiers on film. Now, it’s Miller time!]
If you walk past 160,000 men in a pressure cooker situation, and one of them flips out and commits a heinous crime, and you focus in on that one incident while ignoring all of the heroism and charity all around, and then explain your motives like this
“The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,” he told reporters after a press screening.
… you will be liable for your shameless slander in some court, if only in the next life.
de Palma has utterly no interest in reality. Reality is complex. Reality is Americans busting their butts to help people whose backs are against the wall. Reality is our enemies committing the kinds of crimes he finds in isolation here, but doing it daily and in the most premediated and calcuated manner. Brian de Palma isn’t offering reality: he’s smothering it.
“The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war,” he said.
Never mind what will happen if we leave. Never mind the thousands of rapes and tens of thousands of gruesome murders perpetrated by Saddam, his sons and his cronies before we intervened. Never mind those already being planned by the real hate mongers Brian de Palma refuses to condemn.
de Palma is a tool.
[Michelle Malkin points to a favorable review of the film, from John Murtha.]
Just think of it as a crossword puzzle
Powerline offers a point by point take down of the AFP story covering the Marine Haditha trial proceedings. Usually, you need additional information to flay the media for its truth distortion. But sometimes all you need is buried in the article itself. Such is the case here. The headline clearly implies that shocking testimony has been given against the defendant. In fact, the article gives no evidence against the defendant at all. And in fact, the charges will most likely be dismissed. All of this is in the article, but you have to dig for it.
Dhimmi is as dhimmi does
WaPo raised eyebrows today by spiking–and leading other papers to spike–a really silly Opus cartoon with a very vague bit of innuendo and a veiled [pun intended] slap at Islamic extremism. This, of course, contrasts with how they handled an “Amish nudist” sequence–a good target because they rarely riot–or a dig at the late Jerry Falwell:
Lago said she didn’t flag newspapers about that strip because she didn’t think readers would misunderstand the humor.
“They’re not going to take it seriously,” she said.
But she did alert newspapers about the Muslim-themed cartoon because there was a question about whether Muslim readers would be offended.
“I don’t necessarily think it’s poking fun [at Islam],” Lago said. “But the question with Muslims is, are they taking it seriously?”
Yes, that’s always the question, Lago. And the answer is invariably
YES, you frickin idiot, of course they are taking it seriously, because they’re lunatics, and they take everything seriously, and they expect you to cower before their lunacy, just as you did there!
Deep breath. I think I’m OK now.
Hey Musharraf, HufPo has a job for you
[Martin Lewis, you have fa-bu-lous hair. Have you ever considered … running for president?]
President, er, General Musharraf, when you are, uh, done in Pakistan, there’s somebody who has a job for you over here. HufPo published a post today in which the author, Martin Lewis, very emphatically does not call for a military coup. No, instead he calls for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to relieve Bush of his duties as Commander in Chief pending a court martial for “conduct unbecoming.”
I have no idea what this comedian means by this. I must be missing the punchline. It’s obvious he doesn’t know his derrière from a hole in the ground. That’s the thing about HufPo: it provides a platform for the mindless bloviations of countless Hollywood mediocrities. Here’s the opening paragraphs of Martin Lewis’ humble and obviously self-written bio:
Martin Lewis is a British-born, Hollywood-based humorist, commentator, producer and radio host.
Starting his career as a protégé of fabled Beatles publicist Derek Taylor – he has had a storied 36-year history as a journalist, columnist, writer, humorist, monologist, comedic performer, radio host, TV host, TV correspondent, Master of Ceremonies, producer (of movies, TV, radio, DVDs, stage shows and record albums), talent manager, record company owner, independent film distributor, film-festival curator, political commentator, pioneering organizer of benefit events, human rights activist - and as an award-winning publicity & marketing strategist. He is also a noted raconteur and Bon Vivant!
Oh my. That does put things in perspective.
Why anyone pays any attention to the kiddies playing in Arianna’s sandbox full of cat droppings is beyond me. I only know ’cause I got it via Instapundit, and he got it via Captain’s Quarters. Who knows where he got it from. Does anyone actually read the thing?
[Update: After looking of his bio more carefully, it appears that he does think of himself as something of a comedian. I suspect that this piece was meant to be dry humor. He might, however, consider the difference between dry and dessicated.]
Terror, schmerer
Did I miss the memo when Time dropped the facade of reporting the news and just started running straight partisan hits under a simple byline?
This hit piece on Giuliani is thick tripe. Here’s a sample, quoting Giuliani’s emergency management chief with whom he has since had a falling out. [That’s reporter talk for, he’s a fiercely partisan Dem.] Here’s what Hauer has to say about Giuliani’s interest in Islamic terror:
With his own preparedness staff, he did discuss terrorism, says Jerome Hauer, Giuliani’s emergency-management chief from 1996 to 2000. Giuliani was certainly more aware of the subject than most mayors, which made sense, given the city’s panoply of targets. But he was not a student of Islamic extremism, as he claims on the campaign trail, Hauer says.
And this:
“We never talked about Islamic terrorism,” Hauer says. “We talked about chemical terrorism, biological terrorism. We did talk about car bombs every now and then. [But] I don’t think there was much interest on his part. If he’s been studying it for 30 years, he certainly never verbalized it to me.”
Let’s see, you’ve got the mayor of NYC sitting down with you to discuss car bombs, chemical attacks, biological terror. But it appears that he never led group Koran readings. So we all assumed that this interest in terror was generic. You know, unibomber, skin heads, Timothy McVeigh’s, all the usual suspects. Never really occurred to us that the terror he was talking about might involve Muslims.
Bush’s speech twisted by media pundits
Should have seen this coming. All the advance assault by the media on Bush’s Vietnam metaphor took it largely out of context. Much of it focused on U.S. sacrifices and challenges in Japan and Korea, including the naysayers of the day.
It turned to Vietnam only toward the end, and even then only part of the focus was on the humanitarian disaster. It also focused–properly–on the signaling disaster to our would be friends and future enemies. You will not be taken seriously if the enemy knows a third front at home will always defeat your military in the field. A very reasonable point, whatever that self-important fop Robert Dallek thinks.
Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”
So much for the humanitarian disaster. But now, the more telling strategic argument:
In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.”
His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to “the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents.”
It’s actually a compelling argument, and a well-structured speech.
[More good excerpts and comment here.]
Ideologues lie about book consumption. Duh.
Liberals are lying. So are conservatives. Patsy Schoeder–the hardcore lightweight feminist ideologue from Colorado and now head of the Association of American Publishers, is gloating about survey results reporting that, among those who read at least one book in a year, liberals on average read more books than conservatives.
But take a look behind the numbers: liberals on average read 9, conservatives 8, and moderates 5. Note that the averages on the two wings are within the margin of error. Hardly cause for giddy triumphalism. Second, that huge moderate disparity is key. Are moderates less bright? Or does the self-description of ideology provoke wingers on both side to exaggerate?
My money’s on the latter. Those numbers seem way high. If they are accurate, then who is watching television? You’re talking about work a day people who come home tired at night from the insurance brokerage.
[The other key variable is what they read. If it’s pulp fiction and romance novels, it might as well be TV. But even at that, I seriously doubt an average of eight or nine per year.]
I think what we have here is that self-described ideologues recognize that the question is a marker for intelligence, and they inflate accordingly. Liberals upped the ante by one, proving they are more enthusiastic liars.
In short, whether babbling on the House floor or holding forth as head of the Association of American Publishers, Schoeder remains an airhead. [And don’t you ever change, Patsy!]
CNN headline writers: watch our hips
If you read headlines and only skim articles, you would think that retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Christman is saying that Vietnam should not be used as a rationale for sticking it out in Iraq. Here’s the headline:
“Retired general: Parallels between Iraq, Vietnam overplayed”
But what is the general really saying?
“A precipitous withdrawal almost certainly will lead to vastly increased bloodletting. The question, however, is the context in which that withdrawal occurs. If it takes place following a political accommodation amongst Iraqi factions and with strengthened Iraqi institutions — Defense and Interior ministries most importantly — the likelihood of increased carnage is greatly minimized. The “surge” is useful only if the Iraqis use the time we have given them to reach that accommodation.”
So the message so far is that the essential parallel Bush is trying to draw is fair: a bloodbath could easily follow an ill-considered withdrawal. So where is the parallel “overplayed”? Ah, here it is:
On Vietnam, the similarities are greatly overplayed. Iraq is, frankly, far more complex than Vietnam, given the internal religious and political dynamics, and externally, the region has far greater strategic significance for the U.S. than Vietnam and Southeast Asia ever did for the U.S. in the 1960s.
In short, the situation in Iraq is even more complex–and hence the bloodbath could be more severe–and, most importantly, failure in Iraq would be far more of a disaster for us.
Sure, the general said that the parallel was “overplayed,” but in context it is painfully clear that he meant to say “misplaced.” He did not contest Bush’s essential point, but did argue that if you don’t watch it, the parallel will lead you to underestimate the stakes in Iraq.
So the headline writers were formally accurate but substantively 180 degrees off. Oops. He he he.
Welcome to CNN.
Who CAIRs?
Scott Johnson of Powerline has a write up on CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, a shadowy group whose main purpose is to scream Islamaphobia whenever Muslims get in the news for the wrong reasons. The media slavishly cites CAIR as if they were the voice of American Muslims, which would really tick me off if I were a Muslim. They are, it appears likely, simply a front group with deep financial ties to those who fund radicalism everywhere, and their support from the American Muslim community is thin to nonexistent.
Why should you “cair” about this? Because you will see their name cited over and over as the defender of Muslim civil rights. CAIR is currently viewed as the legitimate voice of the American Muslim community. But their real function is to intimidate those who object to Sharia creep or to the terror probing. CAIR is the group suing the John Does who reported the terror probing of the flying Imams. Here’s a great video briefly outlining that case:
[Update: CAIR has just dropped the suit against the John Does, the passengers who reported the suspicious activity. But the suit against the airline proceeds, apparently. Both are clearly efforts to silence and intimidate those who would discern and protect.]
Someone’s missing something [but it ain’t me]
Perhaps the New York Times took the comment out of context. Perhaps the historian is this dumb. Either way, this is a funny commentary on somebody. The president commented the other day that the hasty retreat from South East Asia led to the death and persecution of
“ … millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’ ”
But Robert Dallek, a leftish presidential historian, is not impressed:
Those assertions are already being criticized by Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid [et tu Brute?], and at least one historian, Robert Dallek, a biographer of presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Both said Mr. Bush was ignoring fundamental differences between the conflicts. Citing Cambodia in particular, Mr. Dallek said in an interview that the mayhem under the Khmer Rouge “was a consequence of our having gone into Cambodia and destabilized that country.”
Now the vital distinction is clear … as mud. Let’s review: the Khmer Rouge genocide resulted from the U.S. destabilizing Cambodia and leaving it in a mess, and the slaughter in Iraq that will follow our hasty exit will be caused by ….?
