Astounding

Yowzers! The mainstream media's meltdown over the Sarah Palin candidacy for the Vice Presidency is truly astounding to behold. Have these people no sense of how transparently biased, dishonest and petty they sound?
Jim Lindgren quotes an exhaustive rebuttal of the charge that there was insufficient vetting (from National Review), and says:

To say that the press is doing the Democrats’ work for them would be an understatement.
[...]
I don't get it. Are the New York Times reporters just printing what the Obama people are telling them (as Byron York is explicitly doing for the other side)? Or is one side or the other simply lying? Or both?
I guess we should be happy that there are now alternative sources of information, or too often most of us would hear only one side of the story.

Mitchell Blatt writes:

Hillary Clinton's campaign complained about sexism in the media during his primary battle vs. Barack Obama, and we are seeing now just how right she was about sexism in the media.
Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol has been revealed as being pregnant, and that story has dominated election coverage recently. (Note to networks: Bristol isn’t running for VP; Sarah is.)
Not only are the networks trying to drag this story out, they are also saying Palin is neglecting her children by running for vice president. (Stay at home, women, preferably in the kitchen!)

Do read the whole thing.
And have you heard people saying that she's a rabid evangelical who will impose creationism in the classroom? Little Green Footballs clears a few things up:

One of the smears being circulated against Sarah Palin is that she is in favor of teaching creationism in public school science classes, but as I pointed out last week this simply isn't true. Apparently, she has a rather confused attitude toward evolution (an attitude she shares with about 50% of the US population), but when asked explicitly whether she would support teaching the pseudo-science of "intelligent design," her answer was "No." And today even the Associated Press has to admit that Palin has not pushed creationism as governor.
And by the way, John McCain is also on the right side of this issue.

More at the link.
Confederate Yankee has some more on vetting:

We now know far more about Sarah Palin in just four days than we've learned about Barack Obama in 17 months. That is just sad. It's a pathetic reflection of the mainstream media's unwillingness to do their jobs for fear of finding stories that would hurt the candidate so many of them openly desire to win.
But periodically appearing to read teleprompters isn't vetting, not matter how many months a candidate has done it, and Obama's ability to perform in set-piece debates is both dubious—Hillary once famously took him apart—and irrelevant. Barack Obama really has never been fully vetted. He hasn't even come close.
You want examples?
[...]
To their great dishonor, the media has focused more energy on Sarah Palin's religious background in just the few days since her announcement as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate than they have on Obama's in the entire campaign.

And a few sound words on experience from Newt Gingrich:

And some home truths from Rudy Giuliani:

Nonetheless, if one looks carefully, there are some members of the MSM, such as the managing editor of the FT's US edition, who haven't completely lost their marbles:

During the Democratic primaries, Gloria Steinem, pioneering feminist and Hillary Clinton supporter, argued that the contest had revealed that gender was "probably the most restricting force in American life". She illustrated her point by imagining a female version of Barack Obama and contending that no woman with such a slender biography would be considered seriously for the presidency.
It is now clear that Ms Steinem was right – although proof comes not from the treatment of the Democratic lioness Mrs Clinton but from the responses, particularly on the left, to the Republican newcomer Sarah Palin. Less than 24 hours after the triumphant close of a convention that nominated a 47-year-old first-term senator as its party’s candidate to be president of the United States, Democratic heavyweights were sputtering with horror at the idea of a 44-year-old, first-term governor as Republican vice-presidential nominee.
As the Democrats absorb Senator McCain's truly maverick decision, I suspect we will hear less of this "experience" argument. Governor Palin, who took on her own party's good ole boys and won, has as much of a record of political achievement as does Senator Obama: running a state, no matter how sparsely populated, is a bigger executive job than being a senator. More­over, you do not have to be Karl Rove to point out that the inexperienced candidate on the Republican ticket is running to be vice-president, not commander-in-chief.
What Democrats, and progressives generally, will have a harder time accepting is that Gov Palin's nomination could be a milestone for American women: in many ways she is an even better feminist icon than America’s reigning top gal Hillary Clinton. In contrast with Mrs Clinton, whose most important political decision was whom she married, Mrs Palin is a genuinely self-made woman, who broke into politics without the head start of a powerful husband or father. Moreover, like Sen Clinton, Gov Palin is a working mother role model, giving birth to her fifth child less than five months ago, going back to work three days later.

It will be interesting to see how the truly despicable reaction on most of the mainstream media's part will play out in the next few days, particularly in light of Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention tonight. I believe that if they don't pull their act together soon, there will be a serious backlash from large swathes of the voting public, who already hold the coastal-elite dominated media in low regard for its naked bias.

Georgian aggression is a figment of Putin's imagination

The general consensus on the Georgian crisis seems to be that although Russia is behaving like a thug and is unjustified, the crisis could have been averted if only the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had not attacked the separatist forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. However, Bernard-Henri Lévy writes in today's Wall Street Journal that this is not so:

We know now that the Russian army had been hard at work on its war preparations since before Aug. 8. We know that it massed at the "border" between Georgia and Ossetia a considerable military and paramilitary logistical presence. We know the Russians had methodically repaired the railroad tracks that the troop-transport trains were to take, and we know that at least 150 tanks went through the Roky tunnel separating the two Ossetias the morning of Aug. 8. In other words, no one can ignore the fact that President Saakhashvili only decided to act when he no longer had a choice, and war had already come. In spite of this accumulation of facts that should have been blindingly obvious to all scrupulous, good-faith observers, many in the media rushed as one man toward the thesis of the Georgians as instigators, as irresponsible provocateurs of the war.

I was surprised that this sequence of events has not been made clearer in the Western media. Meanwhile, independent blogger and journalist Michael Totten, has been doing the honourable legwork.
Russia's Orwellian rhetoric must not be allowed to stand and the West needs to hit back hard in the face of Russia's violent, nationalistic and anti-democratic expansionism. At this point the push-back need not involve military retaliation, although I think the West should help Georgia rebuild its shattered armed forces and the US should go ahead with the developement of its missile shield (and, of course, military retaliation would be de rigueur if Russia escalates its aggression either in Georgia or starts another one in the Ukraine). What Europe needs to do (in addition to the more general goals of increasing our defence spending and investing heavily in nuclear energy) is to immediately kick Russia out of the G8 (as John McCain has suggested), officially state that Russia can forget about its application to join the WTO (for the time being), fast-track both Georgia's and the Ukraine's application to enter NATO and most importantly Germany needs to put the kibosh on the Nord-Stream pipeline while at the same time Europe must encourage the Nabucco pipeline and other projects like it. There is only one language regimes like Russia understand, and as Vegetius says: Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Cooler heads?

It would seem that cooler heads may be prevailing in the global warming debate. Even in the UK where the global warming orthodoxy is actively supported by many media outlets - for example, I bet you weren't aware that US carbon emissions fell in 2006 - according to a recent survey by Pocket Issue more than two-thirds of the respondents believe that climate change is a natural phenomenon which has little to do with human actions:

Almost three quarters of people believe global warming is a 'natural occurrence' and not a result of carbon emissions, a survey claimed today. This goes against the views of the vast majority of scientists who believe the rise in the earth's temperatures is due to pollution. The online study which polled nearly 4000 votes found that a staggering 71 percent of people think that the rise in air temperature happens naturally. And 65 percent think that scientists' catastrophic predictions if pollution isn't curbed are 'far fetched'.

Admittedly this is an online survey, whose accuracy is unclear to me, but the results still seem encouraging.
Meanwhile, isn't it ironic that Al Gore constantly invokes science and reason, while peddling the most exaggerated (and unscientific) claims to encourage people to join his global warming cult? If you think I'm just being snarky about him because I disagree with his politics and policies, I think a recent essay in the Chicago Sun Times would be well worth reading. In it James Taylor points out how many of the Goracle's most famous claims have little relation to scientific research published in mainstream scientific journals. Here are the juicy bits:

For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."
Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."
Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.
Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.
Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."
Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.
Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.

Do read the whole thing.

Post Scriptum:
As I expected, the online poll I mention above, seems to be far from accurate, but underlines a real trend: a majority of people in the UK, according to a more traditional poll, seem to be skeptical of the global warming orthodoxy. BBC News reports:

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested. The Ipsos Mori poll of 2,032 adults - interviewed between 14 and 20 June - found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change. There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.
The Royal Society said most climate scientists believed humans were having an "unprecedented" effect on climate. The survey suggested that terrorism, graffiti, crime and dog mess were all of more concern than climate change.

I must say I'm very pleased about this.
Meanwhile Tim Blair has a hilarious takedown of the Live Earth concerts:

Consider the vast carbon footprint of Live Earth, during which the world's most indulgent people - rock stars - will demand that their followers pledge to "take personal action to help solve the climate crises by reducing my own C02 pollution as much as I can."
Has Live Earth performer Keith Urban sold his Bentleys yet? (Actually, merely selling those 12-cylinder babies won’t reduce C02 emissions; he must destroy them.) I’ve been trying to come up with a violently destructive Gaia-raping stunt for us to participate in on Live Earth day, but it is literally impossible for even several thousand non-millionaires to match Live Earth's own level of eco-vandalism while remaining within their means and the law.
We've been out-carboned by Big Environmentalism. There’s simply no way we can come close to matching the colossal carbon output of Gore and his musical mates.

Do read the whole thing.

Despite everything, we will miss you Tony

When Tony Blair announced his intention to step down, I had mixed feelings, much along the lines of Glenn Reynolds' succint remarks:

I was never a fan of Blair in general, and before 9/11 would have been delighted to see him go. I've never liked the soft totalitarianism that Labour has championed, and to a large degree implemented, in Britain: Cameras everywhere, political correctness, gun confiscation -- and yet a diminished ability to actually maintain public order.
On the other hand -- and it's a big other hand -- I did, along with many others, value Blair's clarity on the subject of Islamic terror, and his pro-American sentiments, which were the exception rather than the rule in Old Europe. Blair was a beacon in that regard, and we needed him. I'll miss that, but honestly we're short of clarity on this side of the Atlantic, too. And I suspect we'll wind up missing that even more than Tony Blair's.

In this regard, the MSM and popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic have utterly failed to illustrate and promote the moral clarity and intellectual honesty that are going to be necessary for the survival of the West. This is underlined by a recent comment the PM himself wrote recently for the Daily Telegraph (Australia):

I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry.
I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a UN-supervised democratic process.
And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.
Why aren't they angry about the people doing the killing? The odd thing about the conversation is I could tell it was the first time he'd heard this argument.

Stunning.

Priorities

The other day there was a minor story in the Italian press involving Veronica Lario, Silvio Berlusconi's wife. What the episode highlighted for me is how appalling the Italian media is. The Washington Post notes:

Italy's biggest mainstream newspaper, Milan's Corriere della Sera, dedicated five large-format pages to the story on Thursday -- including 21 articles, 21 photographs, one cartoon and one graphic.

My younger sister told me yesterday that La Repubblica (another mainstream daily, which has a smaller format) dedicated six pages to the incident. I guess this should be no surprise when the death of the Pope (admittedly a far more newsworthy subject) warranted 25 pages of coverage in Corriere della Sera the day before it happened.
There are many things that can be said about Italian newspapers (which are, incredibly, the most high-brow expression of the media in Italy), and none of them are compliments. In addition to hair-raising inaccuracy, an astonishing lack of impartiality and the total absence of investigative reporting, there seems to be a problem with the priorities given to certain subjects. What a shame.

Mary's womb

There is a widespread - and totally false - idea (see below), particularly in Europe, that one of the main reasons why George Bush won the 2004 presidential election was because of "value voters" whose main issue was opposition to gay marriage. TigerHawk (via Instapundit) has a discussion about the recent uproar caused by the announcement of Mary Cheney's pregnancy. He approvingly quotes Kathryn Jean Lopez from The Corner, who says:

Unless Mary Cheney asks to be part of a political debate about this, there is no need to have a public discussion about her life. The New York Times raises the question of how/who, etc. That just seems outrageous to me. She is not the vice president. She is not the president. That's just uncalled for from anyone in the media/commentariat. I could be wrong but the media/commentators seem to be making it — Mary Cheney's pregnancy — a political issue, not the Cheneys.

And then he goes on to demolish the Times' unsurprisingly dishonest "reporting:"

Then the Times says this:

In 2004, Ms. Cheney worked on the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, which won in part because of the so-called values voters who were drawn to the polls by ballot measures seeking to ban same-sex marriage.

Er, no. A very academic no (that is otherwise quite interesting on the impact of same-sex marriage initiatives). Sadly, no. No. A big old Pew Research no. All of these studies and many more can be found by Googling the words *Bush election 2004 gay marriage ballot*. It is hard to find stories with any actual data that make the opposite argument. The New York Times is not only dead wrong in its allegation, it is so wrong about a widely-studied and publicized "urban legend" that we are forced to choose between two explanations: (i) the reporter (Jim Rutenberg) just didn't do the most basic reporting, and his editor didn't ask him the most obvious questions, or (ii) the Times (either the reporter or the editor) deliberately inserted the legend about same-sex marriage initiatives to fabricate evidence in favor of one of the left's favorite arguments, that "so-called" values voters are easily duped.

Do read the whole thing.

Hank vs. Pinch?

The New York Post reported the other day that Hank Greenberg has been buying up shares in the New York Times Company:

Billionaire insurance titan Maurice "Hank" Greenberg has begun buying huge blocks of New York Times stock to break the Sulzberger family's stranglehold on the media empire, The Post has learned.
Sources confirmed that the famously combative Greenberg has been buying hundreds of thousands of Times shares, but did not disclose the exact number or the size of the stake he wants to own. Greenberg has both the assets - Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.2 billion - and the temperament to jump into a fight over the future of the stumbling newspaper giant.
A major stock position would put Greenberg in league with already angry Times' shareholders, such as Morgan Stanley Investment Management, to battle the board over whether the founding Ochs-Sulzberger family should hold a powerful class of stock that accounts for a majority of the voting power at the company.

The ownership structure of the Times Co. is such that the Ochs-Sulzberger family owns the majority of the voting rights but only about 20% of the share capital (giving them the right to elect nine of the company's 13 directors). Therefore it seem to be impossible for Greenberg to obtain control of the company without the consent of the Sulzbergers. But he undoubtedly knows what he's doing, and I don't think he'd be pouring millions into a venture that did not have some return, either financial or in influence.
There has long been speculation that the Sulzbergers would like to take the company private, and although this has increased with Greenberg's reported shenanigans, it seems to be an unlikely prospect. The Boston Herald reported in July (free version here):

The famous Sulzberger dynasty is quietly tightening its financial grip on the New York Times and the Boston Globe, a new analysis shows. And it's using shareholders' cash, instead of its own, to do it.
A Herald examination of Times financial filings shows that since Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. took over as chairman in 1997, The New York Times Co. has bought up almost one-third of the stock held by outsiders. Meanwhile the Sulzbergers themselves have "basically held their shares," says company spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. And so, without spending a dime, the storied newspaper dynasty has raised its stake to about 20 percent.
[...]
In other words, pretty much every penny of profit generated by the New York Times, the Boston Globe and other company operations under Pinch has been spent... gradually returning the company to Sulzberger hands.
[...]
Meanwhile the program has been a disaster for the outside investors who still own 80 percent of the company. Pinch and his team blew much of the cash buying stock at the peak of the market. Based on current prices, they overpaid by $1.2 billion.
[...]
But don't expect a leveraged buyout too soon. Brian Shipman, analyst at UBS, said a deal "is certainly a possibility" at some point. But, he thinks, not at current levels. He thinks New York Times stock would have to fall to about $17 before it started to look attractive to the kind of private equity backers that Pinch would need. Other analysts suggested $15.

Meanwhile, this week's BusinessWeek explains:

Still, the Times faces increasingly withering scrutiny. Investors holding more than a quarter of its common shares withheld votes for directors at the annual meeting in April. At the same time, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which owns 7.6% of the company's common shares, filed documents with the Securities & Exchange Commission requesting that the dual share structure, never popular with governance hawks, be put to a shareholder vote. The firm also wants the position of chairman and publisher, held by Sulzberger, to be separated. The Times Co. is especially vulnerable because its big-city newspapers are facing major threats from the Web. Since January, the publisher's shares are down 14%, to about 24.50.

I have little sympathy for Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and I think his tenure has seen the Times sink to new lows in various respects. Not only have there been several journalistic scandals, the newspaper has increasingly blurred the line between the editorial page and what should in theory be impartial news coverage. I think only the most entrenched East Coast liberal-lefty would fail to recognize that the Times' standards have been in woeful decline. It has come to the point that when I see a story in the paper, I take it with the same sizable pinch of salt that I do if I had seen it in one of the more low-brow British tabloids (as opposed to the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, which are as liberal as any in their reporting, but which I think can be trusted more): there have simply been too many instances in which the Times has demonstrated its inability to be impartial.
It'll be fun to see if Hank Greenberg knows something we don't, and if he plans to do anything exciting – it could make for interesting reading in the coming months!

Post Scriptum:
Some more kvetching about the New York Times: here, here and here. Also see an excellent evisceration by Bruce Bartlett from Commentary magazine (July/August 2005): Class Struggle in America? (requires subs.; free version here).

Half the news is about America, and half of that is wrong

Megan McArdle of Asymmetrical Information takes a well-deserved swipe at Sky News, and the general level of laughably superficial and biased analysis common in much of the European media:

Watching Sky News is weird, because half the news is about America, and half of that is wrong. I mean, not factually wrong, but with a take on things that seems very strange to an American. For example, there was a very long piece on the "rising backlash" against George Bush on global warming. I care about global warming about as much as any quasi-libertarian, ever, I try to live a green(ish) lifestyle, and I follow the issue pretty closely. I had not noticed any rising backlash against anything except the rising gas prices preventing some Americans from taking long trips in their SUVs. Source of this "backlash"? Cities (and California) passing their own global warming ordinances.
This makes perfect sense from a British perspective, where about the only thing local councils are allowed to control is grotty public housing. But overlaying that worldview onto America has very strange results. Local governments can pass ordinances against global warming whenever they want; they can outlaw coveting your neighbour's wife, too, for all the good it will do. But in doing so, they don't strike a blow against the federal government; they are just making themselves part of the grand (classical) liberal experiment that is supposed to flower under federalism.
There was also a lot of talk about how all the extra American troops killed in Iraq will probably make Americans determined to bring the troops home. This is, indeed, what happens in Britain every time one of their soldiers is killed, but personally I hear a lot more complaints about the expense of the war, or the dead Iraqi civilians, than I do about dead American troops. Americans expected to lose soldiers in the war. What they didn't expect was to spend hundreds of billions of dollars igniting a low level (or, if you believe the Lancet, fast-and-furious) civil war.

Wait a minute, I thought Europeans were terribly smart and sophisticated and it was the Americans who were simplistic boors...

Facts or ideology?

Here we go again. In a Guardian column by Jonathan Freedland:

Suddenly the applause died as the prime minister announced that terrorism is unconnected to foreign policy, and only enemy propaganda would say otherwise. Blair is one of the very few people left on the planet who still believes this: even the CIA now concedes that the invasion of Iraq has fuelled terrorism rather than curbed it. So when Blair said that a withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan would be "a craven act of surrender", he said it to silence.

I have noted before what I think of that, but at least it's a matter of opinion. It seems however, that Freedland also has problems with his facts:

In a Comment piece headed A storming send-off - but the silences show why he had to go, page 29, September 27, we said that Tony Blair's statement that a withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan would be "a craven act of surrender" was received by conference delegates in silence. That was not the case. As our "clapometer" recorded on page 6 of the same issue, the statement drew 11.44 seconds of applause.

At least (unlike other times) they ran a correction. But how such an egregious mistake could have occurred in the first place is still staggering. The whole column revolves around an event (the silence) which did not in fact take place - not even remotely. I cannot conceive that such a significant misstating of the facts could be anything other than intentional or grossly negligent. Marcus notes:

Even if Freedland's hearing aid had malfunctioned for a full twelve seconds one might expect the reporter to have witnessed the massed palms of the delegates' left and right hands being brought together in the universal physical gesture of agreement and approval for the same amount of time.
Doing so, however, would have meant admitting that the view common among metropolitan journalists that Labour foreign policy is hugely unpopular with Party members isn't supported by the facts though.

Of what value is a paper (and writer) if its relationship with the facts has become so tenuous that they are adapted a priori to an ideological position?

Cruel, to boot

Whenever I think we've hit rock bottom, the Guardian always proves it can go lower still. In a column about Anna Nicole Smith, Alexander Chancellor writes:

Anna Nicole was described as being "absolutely devastated" by the loss of her son, "her pride and joy and an amazing human being". Daniel can hardly have been as amazing as his mother. Such a woman is hard to imagine existing anywhere but America. Where else could a woman achieve such fame and fortune on the strength of apparently nothing but surgically enhanced breasts?
[...]
I am finding it uphill work to share her grief.

William Sjostrom of AtlanticBlog comments:

Chancellor uses the death of someone he does not know, and has never, so far as he knows or is willing to admit, done him or anyone else any harm, as an occasion to vent bigotry and snobbery (he reminds me of Jane Austen's Lady Catherine) toward an essentially harmless woman he does not know, and of course Americans. Chancellor comes across as the sort of creep who would walk into a funeral and remark that the death was really no loss, because, after all, the man read tabloids. (And by the way, snot nose, Baywatch is the most watched TV series in the world, after being dropped in the US for low ratings.)

Apart from the revolting callousness of the feeling expressed, how ridiculous it sounds given my experience of British popular culture:

Where else could a woman achieve such fame and fortune on the strength of apparently nothing but surgically enhanced breasts?

What?! Well, how about in the UK, for one, where a dizzying array of ever-changing soap opera starlets and Big Brother winners (and runners up!) populate the newspapers, television and radio waves. Chantelle, anyone? Not that Italy is any better, mind.
And the point is not that we should welcome this phenomenon, but making it into a critique of the US in particular is breathtakingly idiotic.

Media balance and integrity

Why do many Americans think the MSM is biased towards despots and terrorists?
Because it is! Meryl Yourish notes one striking example:

Can you find a news source for the rally against Ahmadinejad at the UN yesterday? Correction: Can you find a non-Jewish media source, or a non-blogger source, for the rally?
I can't. Except for the New York Sun.
I checked AP. Nothing. Reuters. Nada. I checked Google News. Nothing. 1010WINS. Nothing. I checked WABC, NY1, all the New York media sites. Gridlock alerts are the only thing you can find about the march. After all, it's not newsworthy. The fact that 2,000 people marched a day earlier to protest the Iraq war? Oh, yeah, that made the news.
35,000 people protesting against a man who wants to "wipe Israel from the map"? Not newsworthy at all. John Bolton speaking? Who? Elie Wiesel? George Pataki? Who?
[...]
If you want to read about the rally, it appears that you have to go to the bloggers who were there, or whose readers sent in pictures. Or the Israeli press. Or the Jewish media. But nowhere else can you find any evidence that 35,000 people protested the Iranian president’s message of hate.
[...]
The news media doesn't think that 35,000 people protesting the president of Iran outside the UN is worth a story. But 2,000 people protesting the Iraq war? Now that's news.

And not good ones, I'd say... And let's remember that this is the US media we are talking about, which are much reviled for being "Bush poodles" in Europe. Don't even get me started on the viciousness of much of the European media.
Meanwhile Instapundit has comments about how the media makes itself useful to terrorists:

Cole undermines his case a bit by admitting that there are cases where media people have "behaved inappropriately" -- that is, faked news on terrorists' behalf, but the bigger point, stressed in my post and in the Austin Bay article that I linked, is that media attention isn't just neutral coverage -- the way it generally is with, say, urban crime -- but rather the actual goal of terrorists. In fact, it's their lifeblood. Terrorism is an information war disguised as a military conflict, and media coverage is an essential part of the terrorist plan.
Media people know this, and even admit it, but don't let it affect their coverage -- though as Pam Hess of UPI admitted, they're far more careful about being spun by the U.S. military -- and one reason why they don't let it affect their coverage is that terrorism gives them ratings. That's what I meant by their mutually-supporting relationship. Terrorists provide ratings (and, as we've seen, often via staged news events) and news media provide the coverage that terrorists need. As I've noted in the past, news media are entirely capable of moderating their own coverage when they think the stakes are high -- say, protection of confidential sources, or promotion of racial tolerance -- but here they clearly don't feel that way. If they applied as much skepticism and adversarialism to terrorist behavior as they do to the U.S. military, few of us would be complaining.

Do read the whole thing.

The Guardian does it again

Apparently, the Guardian is not only blatantly dishonest in its reporting, but it also misrepresents books in its reviews. Alan Dershowitz protests in Slate:

I thrive on controversy and have developed a rather thick skin, having had my fair share of both negative and positive reviews.
But in the quarter of a century that I have been writing books, I've never had the experience of a reviewer claiming that I take a position in one of my books that is the exact opposite of what I have actually asserted
[...]
A section in my book concerns Israel. It is supportive of some, and critical of others, of Israel's pre-emptive military actions. Christian focused on this section for the majority of her article. She characterized Preemption as an attempt to "justify the Iraq war and even the actions of the state of Israel (which the author, a Harvard law professor, obsessively admires)." First, notice the "even" before Israel, showing that the author assumes the actions of Israel to be particularly indefensible. Second, she misreads the fundamental point of this chapter. I do not try to justify Israel's actions. I analyze its actions, and I conclude that some of them were justified and beneficial, while others were wrongheaded and unnecessary. Finally, had Christian read the book, she would know that I opposed the war in Iraq. She apparently assumed that because I support Israel's right to exist, I also supported America's war in Iraq. It's a telling assumption.
[...]
Most egregiously, Ms. Christian claims that "[i]n its concluding chapter the book goes so far as to suggest that theories of 'chromosomal abnormality' should be pursued as predictive of violent crime to justify long-term detention." In fact, I say precisely the opposite. Christian is referring to an appendix in which I reproduce an article I published in 1975. The whole thrust of the article is categorically against the use of the XYY chromosome to predict violence, since I demonstrate conclusively that the XYY karyotype is not predictive and therefore creates an unacceptable risk of "false positives," which are precisely what we most fear when we engage in preventive or pre-emptive action. Here is what I write: "Nor is it likely that the XYY karyotype, even in combination of other factors, could be used to predict violence. There is simply no hard evidence establishing that any combination of factors can accurately spot a large percentage of future violent criminals without also including an unsatisfactory number and percentage of false positives." Christian confuses my strong opposition to using chromosomes as criminal predictors with support for their use, thereby reversing my position. It is hard to believe that this is a simple mistake.

And this passes for serious journalism...

The Guardian's dishonesty

It is truly a pity to see how appallingly dishonest and shoddy the Guardian, considered by some Britain's foremost daily, has become in its reporting. William Sjostrom at AtlanticBlog illustrates a recent despicable example. The article begins:

George Bush last night admitted that Saddam Hussein had no hand in the 9/11 terror attacks, but he asked Americans to support a war in Iraq that he said was the defining struggle of our age.
[...]
The president conceded some crucial ideological ground, formally disavowing the neo-conservative accusation that Saddam had played a role in the attacks on September 11 2001. But he was unapologetic about the decision to invade Iraq.

AtlanticBlog notes:

Is the Guardian really this incompetent, that neither its reporter nor its editors pay attention to their own stories, or is something else going on? In 2003, the Guardian says Bush "admits", then three years later does the same thing, in neither case saying when Bush made the claim. Any suspicions that the Guardian is a newspaper rather than a tiresome propoganda rag are once again eliminated.

Do read the whole thing. Harry's Place also mentions this and notes:

The Guardian story in a nutshell: Bush has once again 'admitted' that something he and his administration never said, wasn't the case.

Also see Melanie Phillips' comments, where she expands on the Al Qaeda-Iraq question. Elsewhere, in regards to the Lebanese Red Cross ambulance story, Tim Blair makes a good point:

Mayes, reasonably enough, allows for "inconsistencies and anomalies" in reporting from war zones. Perhaps, then, the Guardian's initial report should have indicated some fog-of-war doubt over the claims made to their correspondent instead of stating as fact: "Israel's rocket strike on two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances on Sunday night set a deadly new milestone [...] Two ambulances were entirely destroyed, their roofs pierced by missiles."
[...]
Great work, Clouseau.

Do read the whole thing. And then journalists wonder why the MSM is not trusted...

Lighting candles of truth

There seems to be a tendency among people who are, for whatever reason, opposed to George W. Bush, to minimize any scourge he turns his attention to, be it the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Iranian nuclear armament, terrorism or fundamentalist Islam. Martin Amis has a long essay in the Observer (the Sunday edition of the Guardian; via Instapundit) in which he explores what should be self-evident:

I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million.

Do read the whole thing. Glenn also cites Amit Varma, who says:

I don't fully agree with either Amis's pessimistic appraisal of Islam in general today, or his optimistic prognosis of the future. Unlike him -- and perhaps because I am in India -- I see plenty of "moderate Islam," as he terms it, around me, though more and more Muslims are certainly getting radicalised, for a variety of complex reasons. Equally, I am not convinced that Islamism is "the death agony of imperial Islam ... the last wave - the last convulsion." I think Amis writes those lines more in hope than in rational conviction, giving in to the twin human instincts of believing that all problems have solutions, and that progress is inevitable.

In many respects the West really does not seem to have internalized this message. One of the many small signs of this is the MSM's insistence in calling Mohammad Khatami a moderate. Pajamas Media has an interesting video with Richard Miniter about him, entitled Murder at the Cathedral. Clearly fundamentalist Islam (which I generally call Islamism) must be combatted urgently (particularly in Europe). There has been a general debate about how to go about this, most starkly regarding the decision whether Islamist terrorism should be seen as an act of war or as a law enforcement matter. It does not exactly fall into either category and I think the best attitude is illustrated by Richard Posner's position, whose Glenn & Helen Show podcast I listened to recently, and whose new book has been garnering positive reviews (via Instapundit): in the Washington Post and in the Weekly Standard. As (the non-neocon) Dahlia Lithwick says:

The real power of Posner's effort is that he stands back and measures whether Guantanamo Bay and wiretapping are really worth it. It's proof that the best cure for partisan shrieking is a good old-fashioned game of cost-benefit analysis.

Do read both reviews.
While we fine tune in what way to best fight Islamist fundamentalism, there is another extremism which all rational and moderate people should be worried about: Western extremism. Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at New York University the other day and made a few points I emphatically agree with (though I don't always agree with him). PJM correspondent and Atlas Shrugs blogger, Pamela, has videos and commentary:



Netanyahu exhorts us to:

"...repel the lies. I will not go back to those gas chambers. Not those physical ones, not those of the poisoned wells and slanders.The only way that a free society can defend itself aside from taking up arms is also to light those candles for truth.
What I ask of you tonight is for each of you to light the candle of truth. You know how you do it ...flip on the internet and light many many candles of truth."

Do watch the whole thing.
If there was any doubt that this ("lighting candles of truth") was badly needed (after the countless scandals and biases, which seem to always go one way), this story (via Instapundit) should clinch the deal:

Saddam Hussein had a very trusted source inside AP, according to the translation of another of the thousands of documents captured by U.S. forces that are only slowing being made public. In this particular document, the source inside AP tells Hussein about the formation of UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection team.

As Ed Driscoll says:

After Eason Jordan's "The News We Kept To Ourselves" admission, and Reuters' cozy relationship with assorted freedom fighters terrorists, I'm not at all surprised.
Amongst numerous media other scandals, add to the list CBS's Ra^therGate, ABC's eagerness to be censored, Newsweek's Koran in the Can fabrication, and of course, all of the New York Times' woes, and you've got an Elite Media whose credibility across the board is crumbling.

And this is the "respectable" US media we are talking about... (which Europeans always say are pawns of Bushitler). I cringe to think about the rest. That's why there is a need to fight and "light candles of truth."

Threatening license revocation?

I have not seen the much talked about ABC 9/11 miniseries, however, whatever its flaws, I am appalled by some of the overwrought reactions I have seen from some of its critics.
As Professor Bainbridge notes:

Of course, in a way, I can understand the Democrats' outrage. They are so used to Hollywood being a reliable part of the Democratic propaganda machine that the very idea of a network movie making any criticism of a Democratic administration must come as a serious shock to the system.
The letters from Democratic lawmakers to ABC implictly threatening ABC affiliates broadcastig license, however, are an unacceptable infringement of First Amendment values.

This seems to me a terrible move on two levels. Firstly, it seems like the Dems want to stifle free speech:

I think this may be the biggest miscalculation I have seen this election season. I mean this one is positively biblical. The Senate Democrats just threatened to go after ABC's broadcasting license if it airs The Path to 9/11. Not fix it, not alter it. Kill it or they will come for you.
[...]
Do they have any idea what they look like to the average American? They look not like defenders of the truth, they look exactly, precisely, like they are trying to hide something. This is an absolutely stunningly stupid move. This may play well to the true, hard-left believers, but to average Americans you just hurt yourselves very, very badly.

Secondly, while the Clinton Administration (as well as the current Administration) can hardly be blamed for not realizing how dangerous Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were going to be, the record is not exactly prisitine: apart from the Sandy Berger shenanigans, see this post from Power Line, and this column from Investor's Business Daily. Ann Althouse points out that while the miniseries may be inaccurate, these ferocious attacks are bringing renewed focus on some uncomofortable hard facts, such as this NBC News clip, with Tom Brokaw, who is hardly a Republican stalwart:



Also see this Power Line post, which underlines why it is important that we not forget what went wrong before 9/11 under the Bush as well as the Clinton administrations: the Democrats seem to want to go back to the old system. Do read the whole thing.

Who's willing to stand up?

Yesterday Instapundit had a small but worrying roundup of recent developments in the increase in anti-Semitic attacks. In that context he repeats something he has pointed out before:

If they [the Jews] had the habit of blowing things up, they wouldn't face this problem.

The point is that Islamist terrorism wouldn't be so widespread if us Westerners didn't make it so effective by our limp and subdued response. Which is underscored by the Mark Steyn column he quotes today:

Consider, for example, the bizarre behavior of Reuters, the once globally respected news agency now reduced to putting out laughably inept terrorist propaganda. A few days ago, it made a big hoo-ha about the Israelis intentionally firing a missile at its press vehicle and wounding its cameraman Fadel Shana. Shana was posed in an artful sprawl in a blood-spattered shirt. But it had ridden up and underneath his undershirt was spotlessly white, like a summer-stock Julius Caesar revealing the boxers under his toga. What's stunning is not that almost all Western media organizations reporting from the Middle East are reliant on local staff overwhelmingly sympathetic to one side in the conflict -- that's been known for some time -- but the amateurish level of fakery that head office is willing to go along with.

See here and here for more details on the specific case. Mark Steyn concludes:

It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

As Niall Ferguson predicts (via Harry's Place), they will probably be proven wrong, but that happy outcome would certainly not be the merit of the Al-Reuters and multiculti crowd.

Is reality malleable?

Here's a rather amusing look at how the same events can be presented in a different light. The BBC News website informs us:

Japan gains key whaling victory

Pro-whaling nations have won their first vote towards the resumption of commercial whaling for 20 years. The meeting of the International Whaling Commission backed the declaration by a majority of just one.
Anti-whaling countries say they will challenge the outcome, which Japan has described as "historic". But pro-whaling nations need support from three-quarters of the commission to overturn the 1986 ban aimed at protecting the endangered species.
The resolution, tabled by St Kitts and Nevis where the meeting is being held, declared: "The moratorium, which was clearly intended as a temporary measure, is no longer necessary."

The (London) Telegraph on the other hand reports:

Anti-whaling nations win 'great victory' against Japan proposals

Japan suffered an unexpected and total defeat when it tried to start attacking a 20-year-old ban on commercial whaling at the International Whaling Commission's meeting in the Caribbean state of St Kitts and Nevis last night.
The member countries of the UN whaling treaty voted down two proposals by Japan - the most significant one for secret ballots so that small Pacific and Caribbean nations that receive Japanese aid could unpick the protection of whales without fear of retribution. The other proposal sought to prevent the commission from discussing the fate of dolphins and porpoises as well as whales.

Meanwhile this seems to be the most factual account:

How the voting went at the IWC meeting

Japan won its first pro-whaling majority in more than two decades today at the International Whaling Commission when the group approved a declaration criticizing a 1986 ban on commercial whaling.
But Japan lost four more substantive votes at the IWC's June 16-20 meeting in St. Kitts and Nevis.
The first vote, proposed by Japan, was to prevent the IWC from discussing the fate of dolphins, porpoises and small whales in addition to great whales. Japan lost 30-32, with one abstention.
The second vote, also proposed by Japan, was to introduce secret balloting. It lost that vote 30-33, with one abstention.
The third vote, which would have allowed Japanese coastal communities to hunt a limited number of whales -- effectively circumventing the moratorium -- was lost by 30 votes to 31, with four abstentions.
Japan lost its fourth vote when it proposed eliminating a Southern Ocean whale sanctuary, for which it needed and did not expect a three-quarters majority. Japan had hoped to at least win a simple majority but lost 28-33, with four abstentions.
The fifth vote on the declaration, which called the moratorium unnecessary and which accused whales of eating "huge quantities of fish," was won by 33 votes to 32, with one abstention. Environmental activists blamed a "yes" vote by Denmark for passage of the statement.

They also have the voting list.
It's funny how even something apparently simple can seem so different depending on which account one reads. No doubt this is even more true of the really important and controversial stuff.

Post Scriptum:
À propos whaling, Daniel Drezner (via Instapundit) explains why the International Whaling Commission is his favourite international body, and notes the Independent's "rather hyperbolic" coverage of the story. No surprises from what has deliciously been called the "Daily Mail for people who recycle."