Our Media Lapdogs: At White House behest, NYTimes sat on scoop

by Michael Calderone (Politico, 2007-11-20)

When the New York Times published a front page story Sunday about the United States’ and Pakistan’s joint clandestine efforts to protect nuclear weapons, the newspaper offered a glimpse into a “highly classified program” the Bush administration long objected to seeing in print.

That is, apparently, until now.

In the article’s 11th paragraph, the Times disclosed that publication was delayed “for more than three years,” after the administration argued “that premature disclosure could hurt the effort to secure the weapons.”

So after several years, and previous objection, why did the piece now come off the shelf?

Times executive editor Bill Keller did not respond to several requests for comment about what influenced his decision to now publish the piece.

The rest of the story: Politico

FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be . . . FEMA

by Al Kamen (The Washington Post, 2007-10-26)

FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing.

Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices.

They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a "listen only" line, the notice said -- no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News (see the Fox News video of the news conference carried on the Think Progress website), MSNBC and other outlets.

Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the "commodities" being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.

He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters - in one case, he appears to say "Mike" and points to a reporter - and was asked an oddly in-house question about "what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration" signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly.

FEMA press secretary Aaron Walker interrupted at one point to caution he'd allow just "two more questions." Later, he called for a "last question."

"Are you happy with FEMA's response so far?" a reporter asked. Another asked about "lessons learned from Katrina."

"I'm very happy with FEMA's response so far," Johnson said, hailing "a very smoothly, very efficiently performing team."

"And so I think what you're really seeing here is the benefit of experience, the benefit of good leadership and the benefit of good partnership," Johnson said, "none of which were present in Katrina." (Wasn't Michael Chertoff DHS chief then?) Very smooth, very professional. But something didn't seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA's greatness.

Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters.

The rest of the story: The Washington Post

Essay: Journalism and its discontents

Ninety years after Walter Lippmann first railed against the complicity of the media in wartime propaganda, we're back at ground zero.

by Sidney Blumenthal (Salon, 2007-10-25)

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "Our Crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy," the Fourteen Points. In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost 50 years.

Lippmann wrote books on philosophy, politics, foreign policy and economics. In one of them, "The Cold War," he early defined the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union while offering penetrating criticism of U.S. policy as a "strategic monstrosity" that would lead to "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," inevitably forcing poor choices of having to either "disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face," or else back them "at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." Lippmann's prophetic warning was realized in the Vietnam War, which he opposed at considerable cost to his personal and political relationships. (Anyone interested in Lippmann, or American politics, should read Ronald Steel's magisterial biography, "Walter Lippmann and the American Century.")

Among his varied roles, Lippmann was the original and most prescient analyst of the modern media. His disillusioning experience in World War I prompted the first of three books on the subject, "Liberty and the News," followed in rapid succession by "Public Opinion" and "The Phantom Public." In them Lippmann deconstructed the distortions and lies of government propaganda eagerly transmitted by a jingoist press corps, the "manufacture of consent" and the creation of "stereotypes" projected as false reality.

-- from the afterword to a new edition of Walter Lippman's "Liberty and the News" to be reissued this month by Princeton University Press.

The rest of the story: Salon

USA Today's Iraq Progress (Fair.Org)

Military claims appear without scrutiny

Government efforts to portray progress in the Iraq War were boosted by USA Today's August 13 front page story, "Major attacks decline in Iraq."

The paper's report relied entirely on current and former military officials, with the key claim being that "large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago." The paper added that such attacks "have dropped to about 70 in July from a high during the past year of about 130 in March, according to the Multi-National Force-Iraq."

This claim deserved some serious scrutiny, but USA Today unfortunately provided none. ...

Counts of civilian deaths in Iraq vary: the Associated Press reported (Christian Science Monitor, 8/3/07) at least 2,024 violent deaths in July (an increase of 23 percent from June), while the Iraqi government reported a lower total (1,652) that was nonetheless a significant increase from the previous month (Agence France Presse, 8/1/07)

Given that such data is readily available, USA Today should have—at the very least—acknowledged that the military claims could be questioned. In contrast with USA Today's approach, McClatchy Newspapers (8/15/07) covered similar Pentagon claims regarding violence in Baghdad. But instead of merely repeating the official claims, McClatchy's Leila Fadel raised questions: "U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't support the claim."

The rest of the story: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

Backspin for War: The Convenience of Denial

The man who ran CNN's news operation during the invasion of Iraq is now doing damage control in response to a new documentary's evidence that he kowtowed to the Pentagon on behalf of the cable network. His current denial says a lot about how "liberal media" outlets remain deeply embedded in the mindsets of pro-military conformity. The rest of the story: Media Channel