What JeffJim GannonGuckert would have asked the President, if he could have gotten a day pass to the last White House press briefing: Today’s Briefing Question While I am on hiatus from the White House briefing room, I’m going to post the question I would have asked had I been there. It will be interesting to see if anyone else … Read More
“We Report, You Decide”, My Ass
Not that this is "news", but . . . On Fox News, No Shortage of Opinion, Study Finds By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff WriterMonday, March 14, 2005; Page C01 In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says. By … Read More
No Empirical Reality
Paid-off pundits to fake newsmen — where does it end? Frank Rich says it goes deeper: When the Bush administration isn’t using taxpayers’ money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul … Read More
All Together Now . . . “WHAT Liberal Media?!?”
Joe Conason raises a good, and retrospectively obvious, point in this column: If the mainstream media is "liberal" and loves stories about sex, then why isn’t it jumping all over the Gannon-as-male-prostitute story? Imagine the media explosion if a male escort had been discovered operating as a correspondent in the Clinton White House. Imagine that he was paid by an … Read More
The MSM That the Right Wing is Hyperventilating Over
Courtesy of The Left Coaster comes these words from Chicago Trib’s Jim Warren: The three journalists discussed troubling pressures that affect the ability of news organizations to report the truth. A major one is that with consolidation of news organizations into conglomerates like Time Warner, news outlets have numerous conflicts between their business interests and their reporting. While NBC reports … Read More
Jeff Gannon: Available for $1,200/weekend and $200/hour?
"Well, several years ago, before I came to Washington, I had registered various domain names for a private client. I was doing Web site development. Those sites were never hosted. There’s — nothing ever went up on them. And the client went on to do something else." – Jeff Gannon to Wolf Blitzer, CNN, 2/10/05 AmericaBlog calls bullshit. The details … Read More
Questions About Gannon Put To White House
UPDATE: We are informed here that nobody gets a White House pass, press or otherwise, by using an alias. "Therefore, if Gannon was using an alias, White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover." For those who don’t "get" the issue about Gannon (posted here), I think this letter from the Ranking Member of the House Committee … Read More
The Saga of Jeff Gannon (Abridged)
UPDATE (Chapter Seven): He can’t stand the heat, so he wisely gets out of the kitchen. White House will have to find a new lackey. Chapter One: Who is Jeff Gannon? With all this talk about media bias, nobody can beat Jeff Gannon. He is a member of the White House press pool. This is the kind of question he … Read More
More on Payolagate
Frank Rich is right: But perhaps the most fascinating [Armstrong] Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all "journalists," was rewarded with an extended sit-down … Read More
Stupid Media Question of the Day
CNN Daryn Kagan interviewing Democrat Congressional candidate Steve Brozak: "I have to say, when I was reading about you my first thought, and maybe this is a stereotype, but why isn’t a former, and just recently retired Marine, why are you not a Republican?" MAYBE this is a stereotype? Hat tip to Eric Alterman.
Are You Rrrrready to Rrrrrrrumble?
Apparently, Moveon.org has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that Fox News Channel’s slogan "fair and balanced" violates the FTC’s prohibition against deceptive advertising. (Source, although there are probably others). I’m not sure what Moveon.org hopes to achieve — they are unlikely to win, in my view. However, they will clearly cause a lot of damage and … Read More
I Love Stats Like These
They’re rich and chock full of meaning. This I lifted from Eric Alterman’s site. This is, in fact, part of the new afterward to the paperback edition of his book "What Liberal Media?", and it is sssoo-wwweeet: An in-depth study undertaken for the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes and published around the time of the second anniversary … Read More
More America Haters
”Do not fall into the easy trap of mourning the loss of U.S. lives,” it reads. Oh, geez. Not Moore’s website again. Doesn’t that guy EVER get tired of making light of dead American soldiers??? Actually, it’s not Moore. It’s Fox. It’s a memo from Fox Senior Vice-President for News instructing Fox News not to report TOO much on dead … Read More
Moore Spanks Isikoff
Yeah, even I am getting tired of Moore 24/7, but I was amused at how Moore has been taking Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff to the shed for some sloppy reporting in his critiques of F9/11. Like . . . the head of the Carlyle Group (mentioned prominently in the movie). In his article, Isikoff gets the wrong guy. It’s not like … Read More
Two-Faced Jim Hoagland
In October 2002, the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland wrote an editorial criticizing the CIA because it had (up until then) been unwilling to recognize the danger of Saddam Hussein. He said, in part: it is no surprise that Bush has until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq. There is simply no way to reconcile … Read More