I'll have some of whatever Moyers' is smoking.
Bill Moyers Retiring From TV Journalism"I'm going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story of our time: how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee," says Moyers. "We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people."
The Right has one cable network outlet and a handful of talk radio shows, a few crazy aunts in the basement tapping out cranky screeds for print and a portion of the blogosphere and suddenly (heh) the media is skewed right and the journalistic sky is falling.
I posit that it is Moyers and his ilk who have done the most damage to their own cause, not right-wingers. Many Americans who are not especially religious, idealogically driven and socially-moderate/liberal are simply tired of the MSM's rentless pursuit of secularism and knee-jerk hatred for the Judeo-Christian values that are the bedrock of the country.
To put it in Moyer's native idiom: That dog won't hunt.
The MSM just doesn't get it. This guy thinks he scored a big win...no...he's handed our troops a morale defeat and our enemies within another propaganda advantage.
Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts is embedded with the 278th Regimental Combat Team, now in Kuwait preparing to enter Iraq, and is filing articles for his newspaper. Pitts claims in a purported email that he coached soldiers to ask Defense Secretary Rumsfeld questions!From: EDWARD LEE PITTS, MILITARY AFFAIRS
Sent: Wednesday, December 8, 2004 4:44 PM
To: StaffersSubject: RE: Way to go
I just had one of my best days as a journalist today. As luck would have it, our journey North was delayed just long enough see I could attend a visit today here by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. I was told yesterday that only soldiers could ask questions so I brought two of them along with me as my escorts. Before hand we worked on questions to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor their vehicles going into combat have. While waiting for the VIP, I went and found the Sgt. in charge of the microphone for the question and answer session and made sure he knew to get my guys out of the crowd.
So during the Q&A session, one of my guys was the second person called on. When he asked Rumsfeld why after two years here soldiers are still having to dig through trash bins to find rusted scrap metal and cracked ballistic windows for their Humvees, the place erupted in cheers so loud that Rumsfeld had to ask the guy to repeat his question. Then Rumsfeld answered something about it being "not a lack of desire or money but a logistics/physics problem." He said he recently saw about 8 of the special up-armored Humvees guarding Washington, DC, and he promised that they would no longer be used for that and that he would send them over here. Then he asked a three star general standing behind him, the commander of all ground forces here, to also answer the question. The general said it was a problem he is working on.
The great part was that after the event was over the throng of national media following Rumsfeld- The New York Times, AP, all the major networks -- swarmed to the two soldiers I brought from the unit I am embedded with. Out of the 1,000 or so troops at the event there were only a handful of guys from my unit b/c the rest were too busy prepping for our trip north. The national media asked if they were the guys with the armor problem and then stuck cameras in their faces. The NY Times reporter asked me to email him the stories I had already done on it, but I said he could search for them himself on the Internet and he better not steal any of my lines. I have been trying to get this story out for weeks- as soon as I foud out I would be on an unarmored truck- and my paper published two stories on it. But it felt good to hand it off to the national press. I believe lives are at stake with so many soldiers going across the border riding with scrap metal as protection. It may be to late for the unit I am with, but hopefully not for those who come after.
The press officer in charge of my regiment, the 278th, came up to me afterwords and asked if my story would be positive. I replied that I would write the truth. Then I pointed at the horde of national media pointing cameras and mics at the 278th guys and said he had bigger problems on his hands than the Chattanooga Times Free Press. This is what this job is all about - people need to know. The solider who asked the question said he felt good b/c he took his complaints to the top. When he got back to his unit most of the guys patted him on the back but a few of the officers were upset b/c they thought it would make them look bad. From what I understand this is all over the news back home.
Thanks,
Lee
Yeah Lee, it's all over the news that you're a self-serving scumbag driving an anti-military agenda under the guise of being their friend.
(Hat tip to Drudge)
Every Leftie talkinghead/Journo seems to be tossing the word arrogance around to describe the Repubs, Bush and anyone who disagrees with their world view. (BTW-I don't recall the term being applied to the Dems during the forty-three years they controlled Congress and the agenda.)
However, should one look up the word in a dictionary you will find a picture of Brian Williams.
Brian Williams, who will succeed Tom Brokaw as the anchor of NBC Nightly News on Wednesday, has not made a good first impression among political bloggers. According to CBS Marketwatch, at a post-election wrap-up session, when a fellow panelist "mentioned that bloggers had had a big impact on the reporting on Election Day, Williams waved that point away by quipping that the self-styled journalists are 'on an equal footing with someone in a bathroom with a modem.'"
Bathroom with a modem? Just how outdated is Williams' computer equipment and I for one have never taken a computer into the frickin' bathroom.
Gees...not yet out of the gate and he's dissing bloggers. I give him 6 months.
(hat tip to Taegan Goddard's Political Wire)
'Evening News' anchor says he'll 'remain a "hard news" investigative reporter' for CBS.
Hard, but accurate.
BUWHAHAHAHAHA!
Mike at Rathergate.com isn't pleased, not at all:
Upon further thought, I don’t believe this is a victory for us at all.* Rather gets to stay at CBS
* CBS has not released report on Rathergate
* Rather is going to be doing full-time investigative reporting. (?!)Jim at the KerrySpot is right - we’ve been insulted. Again.
Actually I was hoping for comeuppance more than a victory, as there are no winners in this, only losers on all sides. What next? An announcement late Wednesday that Mapes has "left" the network to pursue other opportunities or spend more time with her family?
While the MSM is busy kissing Bill Clinton's nether parts, a story that is illustrative of the type of enemy we are facing has dropped off the US MSM radar.
DNA tests to reveal if Iraq body is HassanDNA tests are being carried out on the mutilated body of western woman found in Fallujah to discover if it is that of the British aid worker Margaret Hassan.
The torso, which was disembowelled and had its arms and legs cut off, was found in the Iraqi city by American soldiers last Sunday.The body was reported to have been flown out of Iraq for the DNA tests and British officials in Baghdad said they were urgently trying to discover its identity.
The husband and family of Mrs Hassan, 59, said this week that they believe that she is dead after a video emerged of a western woman hostage being shot in the head.
Mrs Hassan, who was the Iraqi director of the charity Care International and had lived in the country for 30 years, was kidnapped at gunpoint in Baghdad on Oct 19.
Big Trunk posts on Iraqi sentiment regarding Hassan's death and terrorism:
Our reader Haider Ajina phoned his father in Baghdad for an update on Iraqi sentiment concerning the Marine killing. Haider sends us the following message:I just got of the phone with my father in Baghdad. I asked him what is the reaction of the Marine killing the injured Iraqi in the Mosque in Felujah. His first words were "Good riddance."
People are not giving it a second thought. Any terrorist who attacks soldiers from Mosques has no sanctuary. Any terrorists who fake death to kill in a mosque deserve no mercy. He says Iraqis (including Sunnis) are fed up with the terrorists and want them eliminated.
There was much uproar about the brutal kidnapping killing of Mrs. Margaret Hassan. Iraqis are upset outraged and disgusted with her brutal abduction & killing. She helped us, helped the poor & needy and this what the terrorist do to her and her family.
He says we must stay strong, united and relentless in the pursuit of the terrorist. Baghdad had relative calm over the last few days. People are even going out in the street till 9:30pm now.
Please spread the message, let America Know that the Iraqis are with us, grateful and want us to stay strong and get stronger so that we can all defeat terrorism.
Trunk has more on the Marine and the rest of the shooting story in the same post.
Looks like this has turned into a beat up the media day...but they they are such a target rich environment.
This story illustrates why embeds are a bad idea in a free-fire zone.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The U.S. military said Tuesday it is investigating the videotaped fatal shooting of a wounded man by a U.S. Marine in a mosque in Fallujah. Iraqis condemned the act as "cowardice" and "something forbidden in Islam."
Oh really, how about kidnapping, torture, imprisonment and sawing off the heads of innocent civilians? Forbidden? What about the kidnapping and murder of Margaret Hassan, a woman who lived and worked for the good of her adopted country for more than thirty years? How about the missing Polish woman, who may be the mutilated corpse found in the streets of Fallujah? Of course they are simply women thusly expendable. Or the use of a mosque to shelter terrorists, store weapons and as a firing platform? Forbidden? Cowardly?
Where was al-Jazeera and the Arab world's outrage as Saddam Hussein filled mass graves? I for one am really tired of the Arabic pity song and I do not want to hear it in our media. It's outrageous.
All I need to know about this story is summed up in one short sentence:
Sites reported that a Marine in the same unit had been killed a day earlier when he tended to the booby-trapped dead body of an insurgent.
It's a pity that our networks and MSM cannot see beyond getting a scoop...that what they film and write can be used to kill more of our military....the same young men who will willingly stand between the embeds and death.
We need to let SecDef Rumsfeld know that's it's time to pull the embeds. They are more of a liability than an aid.
Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301-1000
http://www.defenselink.mil/faq/comment.html
Telephone 703-428-0711
UPDATE: Blackfive writes:
First, Kevin Sites, the embed reporter from NBC (who's video footage of the shooting has been broadcast around the world) is an blatant opportunist who had a responsibility to turn over the video footage to Marine Authorities, but, instead chose to broadcast it, give the entire tape to Al Jazeera, etc. It should not have been used for publicity, for television ratings, etc. Sites should have turned it over with the expectation that he would get it back. The video was broadcast (in full) on Al Jazeera - including the identities of the Marines.
Yeah, Matt, but that would require ethics.
The first step to overcome an addiction is to admit you have a problem. The MSM doesn't seem to understand that the information Genie is out of the bottle, that the old rules no longer apply. The big three Networks meet and wonder how they called election results wrong — again... of course! It's those pesky bloggers! Yeah, that's the ticket!
Major network news chiefs review election, look to futureSTANFORD, Calif. (AP) - The presidents of the three major television network news divisions were concerned about early election day exit polls that wrongly indicated Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was leading President Bush in several key battleground states.
But they also said the problem had been compounded when the exit polls, which were sponsored by a consortium of major news organizations including the Associated Press, were leaked onto the Internet. That, the presidents said Monday night, resulted in a widely publicized but ultimately incorrect expectation of how the election would ultimately turn out.
"We're not happy that the exit polls, even in the first wave, were wrong," said NBC News president Neal Shapiro at a joint appearance of network news presidents at Stanford University. "We're all reviewing it, it should have been better. I think there were mistakes, some of which we're trying to figure out, and some of which we can't."
Shapiro and the other news presidents - David Westin of ABC News and Andrew Heyward of CBS News - met in a public forum to discuss and take questions about network coverage of the election, as well as the challenges posed by the rise of Fox News Channel, the proliferation of news across multiple media "platforms," and a public increasingly unwilling to plan around a fixed-time network newscast.
"There is an explosion in the number of news and quasi-news outlets and it goes into the Internet, it goes into broadband, streaming video, it's now on cell phones ... and those of us in network news have to recognize that," Westin said. "Technology is making it possible that the audience wants us to come to them, instead of making them coming to us which is traditionally what network news has done."
What crap. They've been caught flat-out peddling bias, bogus memos, recycling old stories, and calling a lead while polls are still open in the much of the country and they can only come up with the internet dog ate their homework?
Sorry Gentlemen, it's time to say Goodnight...network news is so over.
Why is it that Liberals hold on to a failed orthodoxy in spite of evidence to the contrary? Nowhere is this more apparent than in education:
It also results in the school district foregoing as much as $10 million annually in state revenues that are based on attendance figures, as well as substantial sums that would be paid by the state to reimburse the district for enforcement expenses, the report said.
Matthews said the grand jury concluded that the San Francisco Unified School District didn't enforce truancy laws in all schools because "they didn't want to stigmatize certain socio-economic groups, but the result is poor academic achievement and perpetuating a permanent underclass."
He added, "I assume their intent was good, but they've missed the point" and the results are bad.
The report also finds that of the city's 18,000 high school students, 5,000 regularly miss at least one day of school every week and another 5,000 consistently show up late. Which is apalling, but this graf from the SF Chron clearly expresses the reporter's disinterest in the story:
Ho-hum, too bad...next. Where is the indignation?
An interesting footnote is that the first excerpt is from the NBC affiliate. I saw the story on the late news and made a mental note to refer to the Chron for a pull quote for posting. Much to my surprise the Chronicle omitted the crux of the problem "they didn't want to stigmatize certain socio-economic groups" so they did nothing.
Seems a tad disengenious not to include a key reason offered by the School Board as part of their failure to supervise the schools. Pro-NEA bias? Sloppy reporting/editing? You decide?
This story is exactly why the country is moving away from the left. We are tired of psycho-babble and excuses.
Can Mo Dowd get anymore tiresome? Dredging up hackneyed 60's references to taunt the Bushies is so over. Will Mo channel Valley girls next? How clever. not.
The orange warning may not mean much to the cosseted elites on the upper west side, but it resonates with the rest of us who work in high rises, public buildings, fly and cross bridges daily...plenty.