The Facade Is Continuing to Crumble

Greg Packer gets around more than Bill Clinton or Jesse Jackson, even.

In a revealing column by Ann Coulter today at Town Hall, we are clued in to two remarkable facts. (1) The first person in line to buy Hillary Clinton's book "at Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center" is a former Clinton campaigner who has been a guest of the Clintons at their homes — but did not identify himself as such. And (2) somebody named "Greg Packer" was interviewed by NYT for a "man in the street" appraisal of this (mightily ginned up) Hillary phenomenon — and has been quoted "in news stories more than 100 times as a random member of the public".

Mainstream media's ability to bamboozle us is diminishing almost every day. Hallelujah!

(Thanks, Dom.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 08:03:07 PM
Categorized as Media.

An Incident That Won't Get Mentioned in Any Memoir by Hillary or Bill

Nor in The New York Times.

From an open letter to Hillary Clinton by Dick Morris at NRO today:

.... You even misquote me as telling you: "I don't like the way I was treated, Hillary. People were so mean to me."

As you know, I never said anything of the sort. I had, in fact, no experience in dealing with either your staff or the President's at that point, and had not yet met Leon Panetta or George Stephanopoulos. My prior dealing with Harold Ickes had been twenty five years earlier.

The real reason I was reluctant was that Bill Clinton had tried to beat me up in May of 1990 as he, you, Gloria Cabe, and I were together in the Arkansas governor's mansion. At the time, Bill was worried that he was falling behind his democratic primary opponent and verbally assaulted me for not giving his campaign the time he felt it deserved. Offended by his harsh tone, I turned and stalked out of the room.

Bill ran after me, tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me. You grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me. Then you walked me around the grounds of the mansion in the minutes after, with your arm around me, saying, "He only does that to people he loves." ....

And we elected that man President of the United States of America. Twice. God have mercy on us.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 06:52:57 PM
Categorized as Political.

James Taranto Agrees With Me

Re: Stopping the Palestinian Terrorism

In Best of the Web Today today:

.... It's time for a ban on the phrase cycle of violence. Not only is it a journalistic cliché -- a substitute for thought -- but it paints a fundamentally false picture of what's going on in the Middle East. (Though not everyone who uses the phrase is a liberal ideologue; watching the fair-and-balanced Fox News Channel this morning, we also heard a correspondent speak of the "cycle of violence.")

"Cycle of violence" suggests that Israel and its enemies -- in the most recent case, Hamas -- are somehow equivalent. Israel attacks Hamas leaders in response to a Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, which itself was a response to an Israeli attack on a Hamas leader, and so on. Who knows, who cares, where it all began? It's a destructive cycle, and it must stop.

But this is nonsense....

The only way to stop the "cycle of violence" is to kill or incapacitate the instigators. If Abbas cannot or will not do so, how can anyone fault Israel for acting in its own defense?

See "People Burned Like Torches".

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 06:43:11 PM
Categorized as International.

More Talk About Spam

This time from Arnold Kling at TCS today.

See also Two Billion Three Hundred Million: That's how many spam e-mails AOL rejects. Every day!

(Thanks, Jonah.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 03:47:26 PM
Categorized as Other.

American Mainstream Media Grilled and Charred

Several articles from the July/August issue of The American Enterprise are now available on-line. This issue takes a look at "How the Media Press Our Hotbuttons".

First, Karl Zinsmeister excoriates American reporters and editors:

.... Many members of the media establishment who read this critique (this is a subject they hate) will be tempted to roll their eyes and pronounce me a member of "the right wing conspiracy" for even giving credence to the idea that we have a problem with media bias in this country. That's how they've treated all who have drawn attention to this subject in the past. Top reporters and editors are an extremely clubby group, and they punish anyone who doesn't close ranks with the club whenever its competence comes into question.

When you are as powerful and unchecked as our major news sources are (72 percent of Americans now say "the news media have too much power and influence in Washington"), and as ideologically unified (a remarkable number come from the same schools, and the same parts of the country; 11 out of 12 national reporters currently vote the same way), then ignoring your critics, or marginalizing them if they somehow manage to get attention anyway, is often a clever defense strategy. But in this case, there is a problem with that course: The American people are on the side of the critics. On the day we sent this issue off to the printer, the editor and managing editor of the New York Times resigned -- wounded by the tumbling credibility of that newspaper in the wake of recent reporting scandals. The time for denial of this problem is over....

One must ask where this kind of negativity toward soldiers operating in difficult circumstances comes from. The answer is: from the inchoate anti-military suspicion that is permanently in the air in most editorial suites. Most of the pressies I ran into in Iraq were just typical reporters -- meaning they were disproportionately left-wing, cynical, wiseguy Ivy League types, with a high prima donna quotient.

Some media outlets made wise and careful choices as to whom they sent to Iraq. Fox, for instance, embedded Greg Kelly, a correspondent who is himself a Marine reservist, with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. He hit the ground running in terms of shop knowledge, and enjoyed instant credibility with both his military informants and viewers. But there are numerous studies today showing that members of the major media are now nearly as out of the mainstream politically and culturally as university professors. I ran into plenty of those folks in Iraq and Kuwait....

The pack mentality of the press can be observed in many settings -- at major news events, in political campaign buses, any place where the press descends en masse. Rather than walking a mile in the shoes of the people they're reporting on, many journalists rely on the gossip and shop talk of their fellow scribes to find their storylines. During my Iraq sojourn I observed media folk passing far too much time hobnobbing with fellow reporters, mocking military mores in snide jokes, chafing at the little disciplines required by the military's life-and-death work, banding off as a group to watch DVDs on their computers in the evening, eating separately with each other in the mess hall during meals, and otherwise failing to take advantage of an unparalleled opportunity to enter deeply and perhaps sympathetically into the lives and minds of Americans in military service.

If you want to file accurate and illuminating stories, a lot more homework and humility toward your subject are called for. Especially on this subject -- because few reporters know much about the fighting life. Worse, many show scant respect for the fighter's virtues. Many of the journalists embedded among U.S. forces with whom I crossed paths were fish out of water, and showed their discomfort clearly as they hid together in the press tents, fantasizing about expensive restaurants at home and plush hotels in Kuwait City, fondling keyboards and satellite phones with pale fingers, clinging to their world of offices and tattle and chatter where they could feel less ineffective, less testosterone deficient, more influential....

Shortly after I returned stateside, Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel, two wise observers of American culture (and lifelong Democrats) who closely followed the media war coverage on the home front while I was in Iraq, wrote a review pronouncing "the prestige media" to be "big-time losers" in the second Gulf war. As Kotkin (who writes for us on a different subject on page 32) has warned elsewhere, today's media is a caste -- a highly inbred, insular, self-referential group, largely Ivy League, urban, and politically homogeneous, that lacks connection with many traditional American institutions and values. The cultural gap separating the media from our military in turn reflects a more general divide yawning between our military and the nation's liberal elites as a whole....

Second, Karina Rollins looks more specifically and extensively at coverage of the War Against Saddam Hussein:

.... On April 9, the day that statues of Saddam Hussein fell across Iraq, Peter Jennings gave his most bizarre commentary yet. Either out of utter detachment from reality, vapidness of mind, or a willful attempt to put a damper on the party, he said this during live coverage:

Saddam Hussein may have been, or may be, a vain man, but he has allowed himself to be sculpted heavy and thin, overweight and in shape, in every imaginable costume -- both national, in historic terms, in Iraqi historic terms -- in contemporary, in every imaginable uniform, on every noble horse. The sculpting of Saddam Hussein, which has been a growth industry for 20 years, may well be a dying art. A man named Natik al-Alusi [phonetic spelling] was one of the principal sculptors, and he was doing a new sculpture for the Ministry of Electricity even as this war was beginning.

The thoughtful Mr. Jennings was also, according to the MRC, the newsperson "most indulgent of the [anti-war] movement, offering uncritical coverage." On March 21, Jennings spent most of an hour-long show promoting activists, including a Jordanian man who wishes to attack America, and long interviews with organizers of far-left protest groups which Jennings failed to label politically. Instead, he tossed protestors softballs like: 'Why do you feel so strongly about this war?'" Throughout, anti-war activists were characterized (inaccurately) as politically and demographically typical Americans. Meanwhile, ABC's "World News Tonight" completely ignored a support-the-troops rally held in New York City on April 10 that attracted 15,000 participants....

Skewed, inaccurate, and misleading reporting seeped into the entire spectrum of mainstream media reporting on the Iraq war, even among well-intentioned reporters and anchors who were not trying to promote an agenda. The consciousness at today's major media outlets is now deeply tinted with an eagerness to believe the worst about the United States government and its actions. The benefit of the doubt is easily given to critics of the U.S. The backgrounds or subsequent developments of accusatory stories are too often left unchecked. Tidbits of emotional claims and half-facts often pass for complete reporting. Liberal conventional wisdom is repeated, unquestioned, as fact....

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson puts a darker face on the hype and instant gratification that is TV news. "Rather than trying to digest and analyze the tempo of battle," he says, "our vulture pundits instead regurgitate rumor and buzz." "Casualties, POWs, and skyrocketing costs blanket the airwaves," complained Hanson on March 28. "Rarely mentioned is the simple military fact that in a single week, a resolute American pincer column has driven across Iraq and is now systematically surrounding Baghdad -- and with far fewer killed than were lost in a single day in Lebanon.... In just a week, the United States military has surrounded one of history's most sadistic and nasty regimes. It has overrun 80 percent of the countryside and has daily pulverized the Republican Guard, achieving more in five days than the Iranians did in eight years." Alas, these sorts of deeper lessons are rarely acknowledged in superficial daily news coverage.

And it wasn't just television that went overboard on some stories while missing others. Media outlets of all sorts lamented, day after day, that the Iraqi museum and library thefts essentially wiped out a whole era of civilization's history, never to be seen again. This was quickly shown to be a gross distortion and even falsehood, but few in the media have forthrightly acknowledged their error....

In addition to spreading misinformation, the media were guilty of gross impatience, accusing the government of misleading the public about the length of the war, after only a few days. And the issue that seemed to provoke the most media sneering was the suggestion that American soldiers would be welcomed by Iraqi civilians as liberators. "An arrogant blunder for the ages" is how Newsweek described that idea when it was voiced by Vice President Dick Cheney. "The danger for Mr. Bush is that he will win the war, eventually, and unpleasantly," droned Quentin Peel of the Financial Times, "but he will never be seen as a liberator." On ABC's "Good Morning America," the well-meaning Diane Sawyer asked "What happened to the flowers expected to be tossed the way of Americans? Was it a terrible miscalculation?" Within days we observed that it wasn't a miscalculation at all, but lacking all patience and willingness to let events unfold, the media failed to see what was coming....

Third, Jonah Goldberg hacks to pieces reviews the recent book by Eric Alterman:

.... Anyone who's met many of the conservative journalists, researchers, and authors whom Alterman names knows that most tend to be the sort of people least likely to take orders from any politburo -- conservative or otherwise. Sure, the Right has its hacks -- and Alterman does good job skewering some of them -- but that's true of every cause and enterprise. Attacking associations rather than actual public arguments is simply his attempt to discredit motives rather than argue facts. This is an old tradition of the Left, going back to the 1930s when American communists would attack the motives of their accusers rather than the veracity of the accusation. Today, whether railing against tax cuts that might go to "the rich," or blocking Miguel Estrada from becoming a judge because he's not an "authentic Hispanic," these associational ad hominem attacks remain the Left's favorite rhetorical strategy for undermining opponents....

None of this is news to you, Faithful Reader, but each of these articles is a tour de force well worth reading.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 01:14:50 PM
Categorized as Media.

"From Tragedy to Farce"

A hard-hitting column today at OpinionJournal, by Roger Kimball, on the "non-pillage" of the museum in Baghdad:

.... Fifteen minutes ago, when recriminations about an unprecedented historical loss were all the rage, it was all the fault of the Yanks and in particular the administration of George W. Bush. Quoth Prof. Zinab Bahrani from Columbia University: "Blame must be placed with the Bush administration for a catastrophic destruction of culture unparalleled in modern history."

Where do you suppose Prof. Bahrani is now? Busy writing an apology? Don't hold your breath. Columbia University is the institution that also gave us Nicholas de Genova, the prof who publicly said he hoped the Iraq war would result in "a million Mogadishus"--i.e., a million American soldiers dead and dragged naked through the streets.

But don't single out Columbia. That's what establishment academic culture is like in America and Europe today. It's the received opinion--not the only opinion, but the dominant one, the agenda-setter. Go to virtually any college or university in America or Western Europe: Anti-Americanism is a growth industry, so thriving that it is simply taken for granted: It's the state of nature.

And these days the assumptions that inform university attitudes also shape media culture. When NPR or the BBC or the New York Times goes to war, it goes with the lectures of people like Prof. Bahrani ringing in its ears and sentiments like those espoused by Prof. de Genova stirring its heart. As one disabused reporter from the Guardian put it: "You cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed."

The story of nonlooting of the Iraqi museums gave us a glimpse into that heart of darkness. That tragedy has collapsed into farce. Now playing: the saga of weapons of mass destruction. Plenty of those, I predict, will be found, and then we'll be treated to long analyses of exactly why the media got that wrong, too. Stay tuned.

See also The Truth Will Out — Eventually.

P.S. Mark Sullivan blogs a letter from ArtsJournal: ".... It was all propaganda, to BLAME AMERICA FOR EVERYTHING!..." That sure does sum it up neatly.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 11:50:57 AM
Categorized as Political.

"Where Are They?"

Justin Katz has a fine column this week on the political wrangling surrounding the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:

.... The “rhetorical questioning” has devolved into little more than a legitimacy drop cloth thrown over underlying ulterior motives. One can make deductively reasonable guesses as to what those motives might be — political ambition, moral insecurity, ideological intransigence — but the questions themselves persist.

That they require repeated and prominent asking to maintain relevance is obvious from the minimal amount of new information required to spark repetition. Indeed, to keep the topic in the public conversation, various media outlets, from the Guardian to the New York Times to the Associated Press, have misrepresented statements of Bush administration officials, cited anonymous “analysts,” and selectively quoted from the broad pool of intelligence documents available before the war.

The reason that such tactics are necessary is that there is no real basis for the theme to be pounded for so long a duration. To be sure, the search for the WMDs ought not be allowed to peter off — if only because any weapons that still exist may have been, or soon could be, dispersed to dangerous parties. However, while the United States is shoulder deep in the mire of helping a nation to learn to be free, as a preface to reconstruction after a decades-long decomposition, it is premature and counterproductive to begin sowing seeds of doubt.

This is particularly true considering that WMDs were not the sole justification for war, and the argument about them focused on Saddam Hussein’s unwillingness to prove his relinquished ambitions. The broader context of the war included, of course, the War on Terrorism and the faltering credibility of the United Nations, as well as Iraq’s significance to the global economy and its strategic position, both geographically and for diplomatic purposes, to increase leverage and decrease the likelihood of more-dangerous wars. However, three distinct arguments were made for war based specifically on the country and its leading regime, with different people emphasizing different aspects to varying degrees....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 10:55:55 AM
Categorized as Political.

"People Burned Like Torches"

A gruesome account of the bus bombing in Jerusalem yesterday:

"I saw a woman going up in flames, as if she were a torch. Her clothes burned first and then her skin," said Eli Shmueli as he described the Jerusalem suicide bomb attack that killed 16 and wounded 100 others.

A parking inspector for the city, Shmueli, 36, was standing by the Clal Building on Jaffa Road late Wednesday afternoon when he heard the explosion. He turned to see a bus full of burning people.

Shmueli ran toward them. There was no glass left in the mangled bus. So he was able to reach inside to try and help douse the flames on people's skins, slightly hurting his own hands in the process.

"It was a barbecue, people burned like torches," he said....

I pray for the peace of Jerusalem, for peace in Israel, for peace in the Middle East. I hope you do, too. Let us continue to pray.

But the time has come — it may have come a long time ago — when we must admit that the real answer to this horrible situation requires that the leaders of terrorism be hunted down and killed.

Bush's & Blair's "roadmap" was blown apart with that bus, if not before. There may very well be many, many people among the Palestinians who really want peace. Good! Maybe even most of them do. Great! Find the ones who don't want peace — who think that killing innocent men, women, and children on a bus is a justifiable political tactic — find them and kill them.

(Thanks, Charles.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 08:43:50 AM
Categorized as International & Most Notable.