Month: February 2006

Leaders Lead

by digby

So it looks like the Judiciary Committee is going to do the big el-foldo on the NSA spying scandal and some Democrats in the congress are going to simply vote with the Republicans make the president’s illegal program legal and call it a day. Once again their losing strategists have misunderstood why Americans believe that they are weak on national security. Indeed, if they capitulate on this they will have reinforced that image much more than if they oppose it outright.

This article by Walter Shapiro on Salon discusses what is driving some Dems to play down the NSA spying issue:

Typical was my lunch discussion earlier this week with a ranking Democratic Party official. Midway through the meal, I innocently asked how the “Big Brother is listening” issue would play in November. Judging from his pained reaction, I might as well have announced that Barack Obama was resigning from the Senate to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door. With exasperation dripping from his voice, my companion said, “The whole thing plays to the Republican caricature of Democrats — that we’re weak on defense and weak on security.” To underscore his concerns about shrill attacks on Bush, the Democratic operative forwarded to me later that afternoon an e-mail petition from MoveOn.org, which had been inspired by Al Gore’s fire-breathing Martin Luther King Day speech excoriating the president’s contempt for legal procedures.

A series of conversations with Democratic pollsters and image makers found them obsessed with similar fears that left-wing overreaction to the wiretapping issue would allow George W. Bush and the congressional Republicans to wiggle off the hook on other vulnerabilities. The collective refrain from these party insiders sounded something like this: Why are we so obsessed with the privacy of people who are phoning al-Qaida when Democrats should be screaming about corruption, Iraq, gas prices and the prescription-drug mess?

Again, aside from the ridiculous fantasy that they will be able to “neutralize” the terrorism issue and move on to prescription drugs (again!), they have made a huge error in their analysis of why the Republicans have the edge on national security and every time they genuflect to the administration’s wacky plans they drive the image home. The problem for Democrats isn’t that they are seen as soft on national security. It’s that they are seen as not believing in anything and therefore are not strong on national security.

Every time the Democrats first speak out strongly and then fall in behind Republicans on national security like this, selling out their principles and the deep concerns of their constituents, they reinforce the image that there is nothing the Democrats are willing to fight for and the national security vote goes to the Republicans who have shown they are willing to fight for everything.

Via Rick Perlstein’s book “The Stock Ticker and The Super Jumbo” here are some typical focus group answers about what people think of Democrats:

“I think they lost their focus”
“I think they are a little disorganized right now”
“They need leadership”
“On the sidelines”
“fumbling”
“confused”
“losing”
“scared”

Republicans openly defied the polls when they impeached a president who had a 60 percent approval rating. (They had the help of the press, of course, but it never made any difference in public opinion.) They used the language of principle and “the rule of law” and paid no price for what they did beyond the loss of a few seats in 98. People do not hold it against politicians for standing up for principle even if they know there is political intent. They do hold it against politicans if they are seen as having no principles at all.

Capitulating on issues of such huge importance is even more damaging when it’s clear that it’s the Eunuch Caucus who are truly soft on this issue, not the Democrats. The Republicans hold both houses and have the power to defy this presumptuous administration on a matter of fundamental principle to the conservative cause: unfettered government power. The few who managed to squeak out a tiny protest just caved in response to arm twisting from president Dick Cheney. Apparently when he wasn’t drunkenly shooting old men in the face, he found time to put the metaphorical shotgun to the heads of his own party who promptly fell to their knees and kissed his ring. They are invertebrate, cowardly eunuchs who cannot even muster enough courage to defy this lame duck jerk when he openly regards the US Senate as his personal pack of spayed retreivers.

The polls today show that more than half of the country believes the president broke the law with this program and that it was wrong for him to have done it. And the press is in the most danger they’ve been in since since the Pentagon Papers, which was the last time whistleblowers came forward with such important revelations about government secrecy and lawlessness. So Democrats do not have to fear the press on this — particularly if they remind them who their friends are on this issue. The Republicans are split on it, with the libertarian wing and the doctrinaire conservatives finding themselves having to swallow their disgust or break with the party. Democrats are in a much better position than they think to turn this into a positive and drive a wedge through the Republican coalition while they do it.

If the Democrats in congress simply stood together on principle instead of listening to overfed, out of touch strategists who have misdiagnosed the problem for years, they would begin to crawl out of this hole on national security. In order for the nation to trust them to defend the country the first thing they must do is stop believing that going along with the Republican Eunuch Caucus will ever improve their lot. People trust leaders who lead not followers who fall in line.

Glenn has more on this, here.

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Sending A Message

by digby

Bush is at the Wendy’s Headquarters giving a speech about how many great jobs he’s created since he took office. I’m not kidding.

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Abu Ghraib: More Pictures

by tristero

60 more photos, including six corpses, and what appear to be wounds from shotgun pellets (and no, I don’t find any humor or irony in comparison. Torture takes away my ability to laugh or smirk.) The Bush administration has been trying to prevent Americans from seeing these new pics but 15 of the 60 are published in a slide show with the article. They are sickening.

The rest are to be shown on an Australian tv show. Note the very different way the incident is described by a press that is not American, which seems to my mind not only to imply culpability but also a cover-up of the involvement of superiors:

Seven US guards were jailed following publication of the first batch of Abu Ghraib photographs in April 2004.

Hit, tip, Kevin.

No doubt there are many more pictures, and videos, that have fallen beyond the legal control of the US.

[Update: One sentence removed, one revised, one added after original post. ]

Journalistic Venereal Disease

by digby

Glenn has another great post up today in which he throws down the gauntlet to the right wing bloggers like the Old Perfesser who are all quick to require that Democrat purge the party of radicals while they cheer and applaud the eliminationist fascists in their own midst.

Republicans have been playing this game for years. They wildly inflate the importance of fringe, extremist figures and then — every time one of those individuals makes an intemperate remark or comment that can be wrenched out-of-context and depicted as some sort of demented evil — they demand that Democrats ritualistically parade before the cameras and either condemn those individuals or be branded as someone who is insufficiently willing to stand up to the extremists “in their party.”

I’ve written dozens of posts on this topic myself and it never fails to amaze me how deeply the right believes in its own righteousness. We on the left are not perfect, but by God, when leftist radicals start talking wistfully about killing Republicans we don’t make them into best selling authors and cheer them like rock stars.

But I think there is another dimension to Glenn’s observation and one that lets the right wing bloggers off the hook just a little. You can’t really hold them responsible for Ann Coulter when the woman is profiled on the cover of TIME magazine and characterized as some sort of kicky, ascerbic comic. The writer of that article said:

“the officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire.”

Here are a few more choice quotes from that article, (gathered by the incomparable Howler🙂

CLOUD: Coulter’s speech was part right-wing stand-up routine—she called Senator Edward Kennedy “the human dirigible”—and part bloodcurdling agitprop. “Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism,” she concluded. “I say, let’s give them some. They’ve had intellectual terror on the campus for years … It’s time for a new McCarthyism.” Curtain.

CLOUD: [S]he told me several times that, as she put it in an e-mail, “most of what I say, I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that.”

CLOUD: So which is it? Is she a brave warrior or a shallow hack? Or is Ann Coulter that most unlikely of conservative subspecies: a hard-right ironist?

CLOUD: [A]s Coulter herself points out in Is It True What They Say About Ann?, “I think the way to convert people is to make them laugh or to make them enraged … Even if I could be convinced that if I had gone through 17 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands, I might convince one more liberal out there, I think I’d still write the way I write, because it gives me laughs.” Coulter told me that when her editor suggests cutting a line from a column to save space, “I’ll ask him, ‘But is it funny?’ And if he says it’s funny, I’ll cut an actual fact [instead].”

CLOUD: People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh.

CLOUD: One theory about Coulter is that she is less Joe McCarthy and more a right-wing Ali G, acting out a character who utters what the rest of us won’t.

Why Coulter is just a female Ali G! Hilarious!

When Eric Alterman had the temerity to call Cloud on this utter swill, the author fell back on journalism’s tedious false equivalency crutch:

Eric Alterman calls my piece on Ann Coulter a “moral, professional, and intellectual abomination” as well as, redundantly, a “moral and intellectual scandal.” He says Time has “a journalistic venereal disease.” This is the left-wing equivalent of an Ann Coulter attack: callous and intended to create as much friction as possible (words I use to describe Coulter in my alleged puff piece). But that’s really what my story was about–the kind of take-no-prisoners dialogue that Coulter has helped create and popularize. Now Alterman, it would seem, is trying to out-Coulter Coulter.

[…]

What Alterman wants is for people to ignore Coulter, to pretend as though she doesn’t exist and isn’t one of the most loved–and hated–figures on the public scene. I would rather engage her, examine her ideas and her popularity, and challenge her. My story does all of those things. It’s true that I don’t list every single mistake Ann Coulter has ever made, although I do print some new ones. My job was not to fact-check all of Coulter’s 1,000 columns, the 1,300-odd pages of her books and the hundreds of TV appearances; it was to profile her. Nonetheless, I do list several Coulter errors and also correct the record on some mistakes by others who have written about her–including Alterman. In his book on the media, Alterman asserts that Coulter said to a Vietnam vet, “People like you caused us to lose that war.” She did not. In fact, the vet had just gotten his facts wrong, and Coulter responded sarcastically, “No wonder you guys lost.” Harsh words, yes–sort of like saying Time has a venereal disease–but Alterman got the quote wrong.

Yes the phrase “TIME has journalistic venereal disease” (meaning that this rhetoric is passed along through intimate contact) is equivalent to “my only regret is that he [McVeigh]didn’t blow up the NY Times building. Right. Exactly the same.

I wrote about this nonsense last spring when the Coulter profile was published:

Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn’t. For instance, he doesn’t say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn’t say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn’t say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn’t put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn’t, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it’s a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.

I have long felt that it was important not to minimize the impact of this sick shit. For years my friends and others in the online communities would say that it was a waste of time to worry about Rush because there are real issues to worry about. Likewise Coulter. Everytime I write something about her there is always someone chastizing me for wasting their time. Yet, here she is, being given the impramatur of a mainstream publication of record in a whitwash of epic proportions. Slowly, slowly the water is heating up.

It’s kind of funny that I and others spent last week arguing whether Democrats ought to be encouraging Hollywood to stop selling sex, (which even David Brooks agrees doesn’t seem to correlate to any real negative change in the way kids behave.) But, here we have a real problem, a real coarsening of the discourse which has resulted in our politics becoming so polarized and rhetorically violent that it’s as if we live on two different planets.

While Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time for writing that liberals have a “preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason,” her followers actually side with Iraqi insurgents against an American charity worker. At freeperland and elsewhere they laughed and clapped and enjoyed the fruits of the enemy’s labor. This is because if you listen to Ann and Rush and Sean and Savage and all the rest of these people you know that there is no greater enemy on the planet than the American liberal. That’s what Ann Coulter and her ilk are selling and that is what Time magazine celebrated with their cover girl this week.

Ann Coulter and her violent, racist eliminationist rhetoric is considered funny and mainstream by the Washington post and TIME magazine. Considering that, why should the right wing bloggers believe they have any responsibility to hold themseloves to the standard to which they hold liberals with an outlying provocateur like Ward Churchill? In thier view, and most of the poltiical establishment, Ann Coulter is perfectly respectable.

I ended this post on the same subject with this comment from the racist website RedState:

Ann Coulter doesn’t go on television ranting and raving like the liberals do. Remember Lawrence O’Donnell? Paul Begala? James Carville? Try Maureen Dowd. Ann is nothing like these losers but she does have a sharp wit and biting tongue and knows how to dish it out. These conspiracy theory wingnuts deserve nothing less.

That is the problem with Republicans. They don’t know how to go for the throat while the Democrats are pros at aiming for the head.

I hope Ann keeps it up and never gives an inch. She is a strength for us conservatives, not something to be ashamed of.

Here’s a cute little quote from that fun little minx’s biting tongue:

“Liberals hate America, they hate flagwavers, they hate abortion opponents. They hate all religions except Islam post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do; they don’t have the energy; if they had that much energy they’d have indoor plumbing by now.”

Adorable.

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He Stands Ready To Assist

by digby

Yesterday McClellan kept saying that the vice president and his staff couldn’t get all the facts together because they were concentrating so hard on making sure Whittington was ok. The implication was that Cheney must have been intimately involved, pressing down on an artery or administering CPR for hours since he didn’t bother to even call Bush until much later.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that the first priority was making sure that Harry Whittington, Mr. Whittington was getting the medical care that he needed, and I think that’s where everybody’s attention should have been focused and was focused when the hunting accident took place. And in terms of here in Washington, there was information that we were continuing to learn about throughout the course of that evening and into early Sunday morning. The initial report that we received was that there had been a hunting accident. We didn’t know who all was involved, but a member of his party was involved in that hunting accident. And then additional details continued to come in overnight.

And it’s important always to work to make sure you get information out like this as quickly as possible, but it’s also important to make sure that the first priority is focused where it should be, and that is making sure that Mr. Whittington has the care that he needs. And the Vice President went to the hospital yesterday to visit him. The Vice President was pleased to see that he was doing well and in good spirits. And the President is, as well.

Today,post heart attack, they are again saying the the Veep is standing by (waiting to be called into the operating room to monitor his vital signs orsomething.)

A statement from Cheney’s office said, “The vice president said that he stood ready to assist. Mr. Whittington’s spirits were good, but obviously his situation deserves the careful monitoring that his doctors are providing.”

The funny thing about all this is that during the long night that Cheney was supposed to have been rolling bandages and mopping Whittington’s fevered brow, he was actually “focused” on having his dinner:

She said Cheney stayed “close but cool” while the agents and medical personnel treated Whittington, then took him by ambulance to the hospital. Later, the hunting group sat down for dinner while Whittington was being treated, receiving updates from a family member at the hospital. Armstrong described Cheney’s demeanor during dinner as “very worried” about Whittington.

“Man I hope that old bastard doesn’t kick. Can you pass the butter?”

I have to say that judging from the cable gasbags today, this is the first scandal I’ve seen handled by the press like the Lewinsky scandal — with everyone sitting around breathlessly speculating about what really happened and “what it all means.” I suspect it’s because it fits a larger narrative, as this diary on Kos, only partly tongue in cheek, shows. In fact, I just heard Bob Shrum say on Hardball that this story is a metaphor for the entire Bush administration: the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

But, seriously. What in the hell are they hiding? What?

Update: Ok. I think something very serious is happening behind the scenes. There is simply no way that a normally functioning white house would let their most powerful propaganda voice say this:

“Would you rather go hunting with Dick Cheney or riding in a car over a bridge with Ted Kennedy?” Limbaugh asked. “At least Cheney takes you to the hospital.”

Is that really where they want to go with this? Yow.

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Laziness Doesn’t Begin To Explain It.

by tristero

Dear Kevin, You’re wrong. I was there. I remember.

Laziness doesn’t explain why George Stephanopoulos failed to mention on the proceeding Sunday show in February that millions of people in the United States marched the day before to oppose Bush’s insane plans for war. Oh he mentioned Europe but not a word about the US marches. That’s right, Kevin: Stephanopoulus failed to mention what was almost certainly the largest US demonstration in history the day after it happened. That wasn’t laziness. And it’s not laziness that the February and March ’03 marches been all but eliminated from the official memories of 2002/2003. (Except to bring up ANSWER’s involvement in organizing them and dismiss all those millions of mothers, fathers, and kids as green-haired goofballs.)

Kevin, I read somewhere that at least one of the networks began planning a year before the invasion to cover it (I’ll try to look it up if you don’t believe me). Meanwhile the voices opposed to war – and there were millions – were systematically excluded. Think about it. “Fuck, Saddam. We’re taking him out,” Bush joked (haha) a year before. It was in no one’s interest in the media to include serious dissent to rush to war. Not only on Sunday bloviations, but throughout the week, the token representatives of opposition to Bush that were permitted on the major shows were ridiculed and smeared. Hey remember Scott Ritter, that shrill, hysterical, obnoxious guy who seemed slightly crazed? Laziness doesn’t explain why Ritter’s personal problems suddenly followed him whenever he confidently asserted that Saddam couldn’t possibly have wmd – problems that, while no doubt truly ugly, didn’t in any way disqualify his expertise. Remember when a liberal meant Michael Moore and only Michael Moore, a comic filmmaker who voted for Nader? The genuine major voices opposed to war weren’t permitted anywhere near an effective microphone, but they were known. When Jessica Mathews of Carnegie Endowment – as sober an American as one could ask for and certainly known within the media – started to make a convincing case on NPR that democracy by invasion was a crazy pipe dream, even that relatively unimportant network was too big. William Kristol personally called up and horned in on her time with ludicrous assertions designed to prevent the conversation from touching upon the substantive issues at stake.

Hey, do you remember the Turkey angle, Kevin? Boy, I do. By that time, I was trying full time to understand why my country had gone insane. In the months before invasion, the press in the US was reporting a “coalition” attack – i.e. US – from Turkey was a done deal. But I smelled a rat. I asked friends for translations of articles overseas, including from Turkey. My, my what a different picture one got of that done deal! We were lied to and laziness doesn’t explain that. It couldn’t possibly happen given some 95% of the country was opposed to the US invading from Turkey. We were lied to. The press lied to the American people.

That is the truth. Oh yes, the press was, and is lazy. In booking guests on Sunday or reporting the news from Turkey. But that was hardly what uniquely characterized 2002/2003. What happened was that the press became an active collaborator in the single worst decision ever made by a United States president. Ever. A decision my 9 year old daughter will have to endure the consequences of, in ways large and small, every day for the rest of her life.

Laziness excluded anti-war voices on Sunday shows? After what we’ve all seen of the Bush/Cheney obsession with information control? Laziness? Please, Kevin. You’re smarter than that. And you know you’re smarter than that, as your half-hearted attempt to make nice all-but-concedes.

Before Bush/Iraq, it may have seemed cleverly political – cute – to take your tack, to not blame the press but ever so gently suggest they are getting bored with the same tired faces. It lets them save face after all and accomplishes the same thing. But after Bush/Iraq, it’s gonna take a lot more than kind gentle suggestion to make sure that the US press never, ever deliberately abandons its gadfly role out of fear of retaliation from any presidency whose lust for power and control is well-nigh psychotic. As the current presidency is. And was particularly successful at enforcing in the prelude to disaster… sorry, I meant the war.

It’s going to take an angry, assertive polis fully prepared to take on the establishment press and hold both its lazy foot AND its sycophantic foot to the fire. And do whatever it takes – even if it leads to resignations and reorganizations – to ensure the American people get the information it must have to govern itself.

Laziness. Yeah, right.

Love,

tristero

{Update: Kevin examines whether ratings tipped the balance in the run up to war}. Why does the name Howard Beale come to mind when I hear this argument? And why do phrases like, “we’re talking about war, goddammit not a popularity contest” keep going throught my head? As for blaming Democrats for being boring, that is NOT what happened. That is NOT what makes the run up to war one of American journalism’s most shameful period. What happened, what is still happening, is that voices that were right about Iraq in 2002 are still systematically excluded. They were/are not excluded because they are boring, but because they are unwanted. There’s a difference.]

Cheney’s Victim Has Heart Attack.

by tristero

Okay, the official reports – which only a fool would believe are telling us how badly Whittington was shot or what actually happened – are getting less and less funny. Let’s just hope he recovers and Cheney’s weapons are confiscated.

Oooooh Baby

by digby

The Poorman spends Valentine’s day with the ladies of Wingnuttia. He knows what they need and gives it to them.

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A Difficult Public Face

by digby

Via Kevin and Atrios I see that Media Matters has released more data today about the cable news networks’ partisan imbalance:

* The balance between Democrats/progressives and Republicans/conservatives was roughly equal during Clinton’s second term, with a slight edge toward Republicans/conservatives: 52 percent of the ideologically identifiable guests were from the right, and 48 percent were from the left. But in Bush’s first term, Republicans/ conservatives held a dramatic advantage, outnumbering Democrats/progressives by 58 percent to 42 percent. In 2005, the figures were an identical 58 percent to 42 percent.

* Counting only elected officials and administration representatives, Democrats had a small advantage during Clinton’s second term: 53 percent to 45 percent. In Bush’s first term, however, the Republican advantage was 61 percent to 39 percent — nearly three times as large.

* In both the Clinton and Bush administrations, conservative journalists were far more likely to appear on the Sunday shows than were progressive journalists. In Clinton’s second term, 61 percent of the ideologically identifiable journalists were conservative; in Bush’s first term, that figure rose to 69 percent.

* In 1997 and 1998, the shows conducted more solo interviews with Democrats/progressives than with Republicans/conservatives. But in every year since, there have been more solo interviews with Republicans/conservatives.

* The most frequent Sunday show guest during this nine-year period is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has appeared 124 times. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) has been the most frequent guest since 2003.

* In every year examined by the study — 1997 – 2005 — more panels tilted right (a greater number of Republicans/conservatives than Democrats/progressives) than tilted left. In some years, there were two, three, or even four times as many righttitled panels as left-tilted panels.

* Congressional opponents of the Iraq war were largely absent from the Sunday shows, particularly during the period just before the war began.

Again, none of this is surprising to those of us who have been watching this stuff from our side of the aisle for the last decade or so.

Kevin and Atrios both focus on the interesting fact that there was a total lack of anti-war voices in the run-up to the war. Kevin says:

Why did the anti-war side get shunned so badly by the talk shows?

I suspect the chart on the right contains the answer. Aside from documenting the insane love affair that Sunday hosts have with John McCain, it shows that eight of the ten most popular Sunday talkers were senators and every single one of them voted for the war resolution. The reason that anti-war senators didn’t get much air time was just simple laziness: the talk show bookers kept booking their favorites regardless of what was happening in the outside world and regardless of whether that meant they were shortchanging their viewers. They were on autopilot.

Actually, it was not just laziness at all. We have evidence that this was a conscious decision on the part of the news networks:

While “Donahue” does badly trail both O’Reilly and CNN’s Connie Chung in the ratings, those numbers have improved in recent weeks. So much so that the program is the top-rated show on MSNBC, beating even the highly promoted “Hardball With Chris Matthews.”

Although Donahue didn’t know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel.

That report–shared with me by an NBC news insider–gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. Some of recommendations, such as dropping the “America’s News Channel,” have already been implemented. But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as “a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace.”

The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

And wave it they did. Just as a refresher, let’s recall how the networks actually ended up covering the war:

Networks quickly scrambled to give names to their war coverage, with corresponding graphic logos that swooshed and gleamed in 3D colors accompanied by mood-inducing soundtracks. CBS chose “America at War.” CNN went with “Strike on Iraq.” CNBC was “The Price of War,” while NBC and MSNBC both went with “Target: Iraq”—a choice that changed quickly as MSNBC joined Fox in using the Pentagon’s own code name for the war—“Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The logos featured fluttering American flags or motifs involving red, white and blue. On Fox, martial drumbeats accompanied regularly scheduled updates. Promo ads for MSNBC featured a photo montage of soldiers accompanied by a piano rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” All of the networks peppered their broadcasts with statements such as, “CNN’s live coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom will continue, right after this short break.” Every time this phrase came out of a reporter’s mouth or appeared in the corner of the screen, the stations implicitly endorsed White House claims about the motives for war.

The networks also went to pains to identify with and praise the troops. Fox routinely referred to U.S. troops as “we” and “us” and “our folks.” MSNBC featured a recurring segment called “America’s Bravest,” featuring photographs of soldiers in the field. Regular features on Fox included “The Ultimate Sacrifice,” featuring mug shots of fallen U.S. soldiers, and “The Heart of War,” offering personal profiles of military personnel.

Much of the coverage looked like a primetime patriotism extravaganza, with inspiring theme music and emotional collages of war photos used liberally at transitions between live reporting and advertising breaks. Bombing raids appeared on the screen as big red fireballs, interspersed with “gun-cam” shots, animated maps, charts and graphics showcasing military maneuvers and weapons technology. Inside the studios, networks provided large, game-board floor maps where ex-generals walked around with pointers, moving around little blue and red jet fighters and tanks.

“Have we made war glamorous?” asked MSNBC anchor Lester Holt during a March 26 exchange with former Navy Seal and professional wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura, whom it had hired as an expert commentator.

“It reminds me a lot of the Super Bowl,” Ventura replied.

Never mind all the dead people and the hundreds of billions of dollars flushed down the toilet.

This article has more about NBC’s directives in the run up to the war. Disgusting.

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The Times Gets Off One Of Its Knees

by tristero

The NY Times coverage of “intelligent design” creationism is improving somewhat from the days when Jodi Wilgoren (who has since changed her name to Rudoren) cheerfully fellated Christian Reconstructionists – the folks behind “intelligent design” – as they, along with other wackos, pursued the Wedge Strategy to inflict their racist, theocratic trash on the rest of us.

Today, Neela Banerjee and Anne Berryman turn in a good article on church celebrations of Darwin’s 197th birthday:

The event, called Evolution Sunday, is an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, started by academics and ministers in Wisconsin in early 2005 as a response to efforts, most notably in Dover, Pa., to discredit the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools.

“There was a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy,” said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the major organizer of the letter project.

Mr. Zimmerman said more than 10,000 ministers had signed the letter, which states, in part, that the theory of evolution is “a foundational scientific truth.” To reject it, the letter continues, “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

“We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator,” the letter says.

There are nuances in the descriptions a scientist might quibble over, but the article’s approach is quite reasonable.

And this morning, Rudoren herself has a mediocre article on the rapid collapse of “intelligent design”, mere mediocrity being quite an improvement for her. Rudoren does a pretty good job summarizing how quickly “intelligent design” is collapsing:

A majority of members on the Board of Education of Ohio, the first state to single out evolution for “critical analysis” in science classes more than three years ago, are expected on Tuesday to challenge a model biology lesson plan they consider an excuse to teach the tenets of the disputed theory of intelligent design.

A reversal in Ohio would be the most significant in a series of developments signaling a sea change across the country against intelligent design — which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone — since a federal judge’s ruling in December that teaching the theory in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A small rural school district in California last month quickly scuttled plans for a philosophy elective on intelligent design after being challenged by lawyers involved in the Pennsylvania case. Also last month, an Indiana lawmaker who said in November that he would introduce legislation to mandate teaching of intelligent design instead offered a watered-down bill requiring only “accuracy in textbooks.” And just last week, two Democrats in Wisconsin proposed a ban on schools’ teaching intelligent design as science, the first such proposal in the country.

Unfortunately, Rudoren wastes space, and the reader’s time, passing on a stupid quote from the Christian Reconstructionist beard group, the Discovery Institute, without correction or comment. This is just one of several faux-balance quotes that maintain the fraud that there actually is a legitimate controversy over “intelligent design.”

Still, it’s something of an improvement from her Grand Canyon days.