Category: Media

I’m really getting a major case of The Ass at the Washington Post’s editors this week. I just ran across this story in the WaPo that’s headlined “Saudi prince Offers Lukewarm Support on Iraq” which refers to this quote by the prince;

Prince Saud al-Faisal said he supported “the objectives” of Bush’s plan, which calls for an increase of 20,000 troops to secure Baghdad, but declined to discuss the specifics.

“The details of how to implement those objectives, I don’t think we can cover in one night of discussions,” Saud said, speaking after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had evening and morning meetings with King Abdullah and other Saudi officials. “So I really cannot comment on the means that will be applied.”

So what kind of comment would not be “lukewarm” for the Post? Further on we read;

Saud’s response to Rice’s visit was distinctly cooler than that of the Egyptian foreign minister, who after a meeting with Rice on Monday said Egypt was “supportive of that plan.”

Oh, yeah, it sounds like Egypt is just jumping up and down with glee! Did my readers notice the string of superlatives in that statement? While the Saudis “support the objectives”, the Egyptians are “supportive of that plan”. See the difference between lukewarm and distinctly warmer?

The Washington Post is just full of nuance, aren’t they?

UPDATE: WaPo rewrote the story after 4pm this evening.

Just a glance at the front page of the Washington Post’s main page this morning will tell you on which side of the political spectrum and civil society they land. It runs the gamut from sympathy for Saddam Hussein’s decapited half-brother to sympathy for Guantanamo denizens for whom the wheels of justice turn slowly (ignoring the fact that these people were all rounded up engaged in evil acts against the civilized world). Sympathy for all of the devils, as it were. 

And a vitually useless article that reports that the UN claims there nearly 35,000 Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq last year.

Gianni Magazzeni, the chief of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said 34,452 civilians were killed and 36,685 were wounded last year.

So we learn from the Washington Post that there are actually people killing other people in Iraq. Why didn’t the President tell us about that? Is this some kind of cover up?

I want to know how the UN can count the Iraqi dead from their luxury suites in New York City Hotels.

And don’t forget the story that President Bush will shift the ideological burden of the federal deficit to the Democrats next week;

When he takes the House rostrum next week for the State of the Union address, President Bush will list among his goals a balanced federal budget, a shift for a president who has presided over record deficits while aggressively cutting taxes.

Politically, analysts say, the president is calling the bluff of Democrats, who won control of Congress in part by accusing Bush of reckless fiscal policies. While Bush now shares the Democrats’ goal to erase the deficit by 2012, the politically perilous work of making that happen — cutting spending or raising taxes — falls to the Democratic-run Congress

I guess the Washington Post would prefer that the President not mention that Democrats have that responsibility now.

I had to snicker at this attempt at AP making news of a protest of Smithfield Foods, Inc. decision to not recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with a paid day off;

A few hundred employees at a massive Smithfield Foods Inc. hog slaughterhouse missed work Monday after a union called for a walkout to protest the company’s decision to not make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a paid holiday.

But it was difficult to tell if the workers didn’t come to work because of the union or because of other reasons, Smithfield spokesman Dennis Pittman said.

On a typical day, about 100 to 150 people miss a shift, and on Monday there were as many as 150 additional employees absent, Pittman said. He said he couldn’t tell why the workers didn’t come but that the plant — which has two daily shifts of 2,500 people — continued operations.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union estimated that 400 people among the 2,500 scheduled to work Monday morning walked out or did not come to work. The union has been running an organizing campaign at the plant and already lost one election.

“Compared to the last Martin Luther King Day, it’s about the same,” Pittman said. “There was no walkout. We’re going to have a real good day.”

So it was pretty much a typical Monday. And if they’d gotten MLK Day off with pay, what would they have done to honor the man? Besides sit home and watch Combat and Rawhide DVDs like I did.

Anyone else tired of the Mainstream Media comparing Republican combat action to Vietnam like this sorry hackjob by Robert Kaiser?

Trapped by Hubris, Again

By Robert G. Kaiser

Sunday, January 14, 2007; Page B01

After nearly four years of ineffectual war-fighting, after the collapse of domestic support for President Bush and his policies, after the expenditure of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, it no longer seems possible to avoid the grim conclusion: For the United States, Iraq has become another Vietnam.

You’d think that a journalist who has been in the business as long as Kaiser would weary of the comparison eventually. All wars are the same, you hacks. Especially wars that have to be fought against a “peace-at-any-cost” press as well as an armed and wiley enemy.

No matter how bad they try, the Left can’t concoct a comparison that equals their sorry-ass actions in Vietnam. It was the Left that got us involved in Vietnam and it was the Left that made our withdrawal a disgrace.

Perusing some other blogs last night, I ran across some nitwit (I’ll spare her from embarrassment by mentoning her name) who titled her blog entry “This country sucks” and justified that particular statement by telling us how the US bombed Somalia for no apparent reason. In other words, she only read the headline of some story somewhere and concluded that we just arbitrarily dropped bombs on some unsuspecting Somalians.

The same thing is happening over this much-ado-about-nothing New York Times story about the Defense Department expanding it’s financial records program. Reading the headline and the first few paragraphs, someone might get the impression that DoD is monitoring all Americans’ financial transaction. Buried in the fourth paragraph, we find that’s not true;

Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.

That’s not new. My son, who joined the Air Force in 2000, was confronted by his recruiter with his credit report and told he needed to pay off some credit cards before he joined, which my son did from his savings. Notice that was in 2000, before President Bush was president, before Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense.

Even the Washington Post jumped on the bandwagon with their own paraphrasing of the NYT story. Their admission that it only affected military personnel and civilian contractors came dead center of the first paragraph – but I still had to read the article twice before I found it;

The Defense Department has used a long-standing authority to acquire the personal financial records of American citizens in military-related criminal and other investigations as part of an expansion of the Pentagon’s gathering of counterterrorism intelligence at home, officials said yesterday.

The New York Times and WaPo are making a big deal over the fact that suspect military personnel and suspect contractors are being investigated for bribe payments. How big of a stink did they make over government agencies who didn’t catch spies like Robert Hanssen and John Walker who had unusually large bank accounts but went undetected for years because programs like this weren’t being used.

Lifted straight from James Taranto’s Best of the Web;

Are There Two Different Fort Bennings?

“Bush Cheered at Fort Benning: FORT BENNING, Ga.–President Bush, surrounded on Thursday by cheering soldiers in camouflage, defended his decision to send 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq and cautioned that the buildup will not produce quick results. ‘It’s going to take awhile,’ he said.”–headline and lead paragraph, Associated Press, Jan. 11

“Bush Speaks and Base Is Subdued: FORT BENNING, Ga., Jan. 11–President Bush came to this Georgia military base looking for a friendly audience to sell his new Iraq strategy. But his lunchtime talk received a restrained response from soldiers who clapped politely but showed little of the wild enthusiasm that they ordinarily shower on the commander in chief.”–New York Times, Jan. 12

Sounds like two different speeches doesn’t it? I always figured the media’s job was to merely report the facts, not add color and commentary like a sports broadcast.

I read with disgust a completely irrelevant story from the Washington Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan this morning about how a bunch of privates disagree with the President’s strategy in Iraq;

Moments before he stepped into his squad’s Stryker — a large, bathtub-shaped vehicle encased in a cage — [Specialist] Caldwell echoed a sentiment shared by many in his squad: “They’re kicking a dead horse here. The Iraqi army can’t stand up on their own.”

A specialist has about two years in the Army, and although I’m sure Specialist Caldwell is a fine combat soldier, I’m equally sure he’s not brilliant military strategist. having been in combat myself, I know that a soldier only sees a tiny part of the war, not having access to all of the intelligence and the benefit of seeing the big picture.

But let’s see some other quotes;

“The general feeling among us is we’re not really doing anything here,” Caldwell said. “We clear one neighborhood, then another one fires up. It’s an ongoing battle. It never ends.”

Caldwell doesn’t see that there are perfectly peaceful areas of Iraq where there is no sectarian violence. After my time in combat, I spent most of my time asking superiors what happened.

I know what me and my troops did, but since we were exchanging fire with the enemy one minute and then setting up a rest stop the next, I wasn’t even sure if the war was still going on or not. It took me months of research and asking simple questions to sort out the entire Gulf War and figure out my place in it. And I was a platoon sergeant.

This is a useless article that highlights the fact that troops bitch. Troops have bitched since the days of Alexander the Great and they’ll bitch long after this war ends. For the Washington Post to dedicate an entire article to what a couple of privates think about the Iraqi Army is nothing more than undermining morale in the US and fueling anti-war, anti-Bush sentiments.

Someone tell me when there are Americans working at the Post again. 

The New York Times is outraged that FloppingAces has questioned the ability of bloggers to accurately report the news. In light of the New York Times’ failure to accurately report the news with their vast resources, I think they’re displaying a bit of hypocrisy. We’ve got Reuter’s faked pictures, we’ve got ABC’s faked documents along with New York Times editorials masked as front page news stories. Everyday.

So what makes the bloggers of the world any less dependable than these supposed professional news organizations? Maybe the bloggers are more accurate because they don’t seem to be blinded by editorial boards, most of the bloggers I’ve read are more interested in national security than partisan wrangling. The new York Times should just sit back and watch how it’s done for a change.