This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Media

  • Obama Administration doesn’t like fact-checking

    According to the Fox News Channel, the White House is purposely avoiding the network’s Sunday news show because it’s “opinion journalism masquerading as news”. Not at all like the networks that get tingles in their collective leg when the President’s name is mentioned. Apparently, they don’t like to be fact-checked;

    The White House stopped providing guests to ‘Fox News Sunday’ after Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in August. Dunn said fact-checking an administration official was “something I’ve never seen a Sunday show do.”

    Maybe that’s why Fox has a growing audience these days – because the other news shows don’t bother to investigate beyond the talking points issued by the White House.

    Can you imagine the furor if the Bush White House had treated the President’s critics this way? This is more of the tactics they’ve borrowed from Hugo Chavez – it’s certainly not American. If I worked at one of those other networks, I’d be questioning the ethics of my own employers at this point – but then, I don’t, and they won’t.

  • Post for Deeds

    In a stunning move that breaks with all of the conventions, the Washington Post has chosen to endorse Creigh Deeds, the Democrat candidate for governor of Virginia in the November 3 election. Yeah, I know, I’m so surprised, I can hardly type. And why would the Bethesda/Chevy Chase white liberals decide to back Deeds – recalling the successful 1988 campaign of Michael Dukakis, the Post has decided that he’s politically courageous for suggesting he’ll raise taxes;

    Mr. Deeds has run an enormous and possibly fatal political risk by saying bluntly that he would support legislation to raise new taxes dedicated to transportation. It is a risk that neither Mr. Kaine nor Mr. Warner felt they could take. But given that the state has raised no significant new cash for roads, rails and bridges in 23 years, Mr. Deeds’s position is nothing more than common sense. It is fantasy to think that the transportation funding problem, a generation in the making, will be addressed without a tax increase.

    Yes, that strategy worked so well for the Dukakis campaign, how can the Democrats avoid making the same pronouncement. True to form, the Washington Post endorses higher taxes on Virginians from their Betheda, Maryland salons – on taxes, we can always count on liberals to take the intellectual shortcut.

    The truth is that Virginians are already punished for owning automobiles with higher fees than almost any other state for the supposed purpose of maintaining roads. Every candidate for governor in the last twelve years has promised to cut the Virginia car tax with no success – so Deeds’ call for higher taxes says more about his ineptness than his fitness for the office.

    But, then, no one really expected the Washington Post to endorse Republican candidate Robert McDonnell, did they? Partisan hacks that they are.

  • Command restricts photos of dead US troops

    TSO sent us this link last night from Congressional Quarterly;

    The U.S. military command in Bagram, Afghanistan, confirmed Wednesday that it has barred reporters who embed with its forces from videotaping or photographing U.S. military personnel killed in action.

    Several senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee — including the chairman, Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, and the ranking Republican, John McCain of Arizona — said Wednesday they were not aware of the change in policy and wanted to find out more about it.

    As much as I disagree with restrictions on the press by government agencies, journalists brought it on themselves with their abhorrent behavior in the case of Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard whose final moments of life were sent out over the news wires.

    His family asked the Associated Press to not publish the photos, yet they did it anyway. And then, the entire media engaged in an electronic circle jerk to assuage their widdle feewings. For example, although his newspaper didn’t publish the photos, Stars and Stripes ombudsman, Mark Prendergast felt the need to give AP a handjob;

    It was a tough call, but the right one.

    As hard as it may be to view that picture, especially for the Marine’s family, it belongs in the public domain as a legitimate piece of visual history in a conflict that as of this writing has taken 562 American lives in combat, with no end in sight.

    It honors his death, and those of all others, by showing what it means to give one’s life for one’s country. It is also a testament to courage and comradeship. Two fellow Marines can be seen risking their own lives to tend to their fallen buddy under fire.

    Suppressing or withholding the photo would have ill served the open society that the dead Marine, Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard of New Portland, Me., gave his life to serve so well so far from home.

    So, in the age of instant imaging and broadcasting, Prendergast sees no problem engaging in this type of snuff journalism. Especially, working for a newspaper that’s claim to fame is “The Independent News Source
    for the U.S. Military Community”.

    What choice did the military have to protect the good order and discipline of the military by restricting the bad order and indiscipline of the press.

    If the Associated Press and the news outlets who chose to run the photos of LCPL Bernard had showed a bit of decorum, maybe they wouldn’t have had these restrictions placed on them. The government doesn’t usually regulate things that people and organizations regulate properly for themselves.

    Of course, we can probably count on snuff pornographers in the media to cry and whine, but it’s their own damn fault.

  • White House more worried about Fox than Taliban

    Last week, we were treated to a Jimmy Carter Redux when the White House announced that the Taliban was someone they could deal with in the war against terror. This week, they signal that Fox News is their biggest enemy. From Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz on his interview with Anita Dunn, the White House communications director;

    I had thought Dunn might try to smooth things over with the country’s highest-rated cable news network, as guests often do in front of a television camera, but instead she was determined to ratchet things up: “The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. . . . Take their talking points and put them on the air. Take their opposition research and put them on the air, and that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

    I don’t think she was freelancing; there are meetings in every White House about what message to put out on the Sunday shows.

    Dunn acknowledged that the president had intentionally stiffed Fox for this reason when he did that Sunday morning blitz a few weeks back, but added: “Obviously he’ll go on Fox because he engages with ideological opponents. . . . When he goes on Fox, he understands that he is not going on — it really is not a news network at this point. He’s going to debate the opposition.”

    Engage people who throw acid in the faces of preteen girls, ignore the half of the country that oppose him ideologically. Makes sense. From Fox News;

    But last week, Fox News was informed by the White House that Obama would grant no interviews to the channel until at least 2010. The edict was relayed to Fox News by a White House official after Dunn discussed the channel at a meeting with presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs and other Obama advisers.

    So the millions of people who get their news from Fox won’t have to listen to the incessant whining of the Administration – that’s a plus. The REALLY funny part is that Fox wasn’t all that biased during the election;

    …a study by the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Fox News stories on Obama in the last six weeks of the campaign were negative. Similarly, 40 percent of Fox News’ stories on Obama’s Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, were negative.

    On CNN, by contrast, there was a 22-point disparity in the percentage of negative stories on Obama (39 percent) and McCain (61 percent). The disparity was even greater at MSNBC, according to Pew, where just 14 percent of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73 percent of McCain stories — a spread of 59 points.

    Since the election, Fox has peeled off from the pack that reads the news from White House press releases and covered things like the ACORN hooker scandal, the tea parties, the czars – ya know stuff that’s happening which the rest of the media won’t cover.

    If I sat here all day and did the same thing 90% of bloggers are doing, how long would you read this blog? So Fox gets punished by the Administration for pursuing the news no one else will – if no one was interested, they wouldn’t watch and Fox would tank. But who is really getting punished here? Obama has voluntarily left millions out of his loop – he won’t reach millions with his message because his ignorant staff wants to throw temper tantrums instead.

    Of course, this is the same path Hugo Chavez took, too.

  • Media notices ‘gator’s long tail

    When the President announced he was sending 22,000 troops to Afghanistan last Spring, I guess the media didn’t realize that it would entail sending support troops behind the trigger-pullers judging by the headlines this morning. The Washington Post‘s Ann Scott Tyson incredulously writes “Support Troops Swelling U.S. Force in Afghanistan; Additional Deployments Not Announced and Rarely Noted”

    President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized — and the Pentagon is deploying — at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials.

    The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan.

    Who would have thought an increased number of combat forces would need more support? Certainly not the Washington Post, or even Fox News, for that matter;

    “Obama authorized the whole thing. The only thing you saw announced in a press release was the 21,000,” an unnamed defense official familiar with the process told the paper.

    The report comes as Obama weighs a request from the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for more combat, training and support troops, with several options including one for 40,000 more forces.

    The number we used to talk about was 7 support troops for every infantryman. It’s probably more than that now given the amount of technology the troops carry around with them these days. Somehow the media, which claims to be the expert on everything on this planet, is just noticing that the pointy end of the alligator has a long tail to propel those teeth.

    Defense officials, however, acknowledge that the request for 21,000 troops has led to the authorization of more forces.

    “The 21,000 are only combat forces, and when the combat forces go in, there are a certain amount of additional forces that are required,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who signs the deployment orders, had military officials identify last spring the entire scope of the increase and agreed that he would consult with Obama again if the Pentagon sought to go above that, Whitman said.

    I suppose the media envisioned 21,000 trigger-pullers carrying everything they need for a year’s deployment on their backs.

  • CNN chasing ambulances

    Nucsnipe sent us an article from his hometown newspaper about an AWOL soldier turning himself over to authorities;

    A former Woodford County man who had been absent without leave from the U.S. Army for half a year turned himself in to Illinois State Police on Monday.

    Spc. Don Gartin, 25, was accompanied by a crew from CNN when he walked into the state police station near Metamora on Monday, exiting a short time later in handcuffs with officers. He was taken to the Woodford County jail in Eureka and was expected to be transferred to Army custody on Thursday or Friday.

    Gartin did 15 months in Iraq and according to his AKO account, he’s an infantryman in the 1st AD in an infantry battalion – so I’m not going to second-guess his claims that he suffers from PTSD. However, I think CNN acting as if they have the soldiers’ best interests in their collective shriveled little heart is pretty despicable.

    Gartin was interviewed via the Internet by CNN a week ago from an undisclosed location, and he later made arrangements for representatives of the television news network to accompany him when he surrendered.

    Now, if CNN had met with him and convinced him to turn himself in and got an interview afterward, that would be responsible journalism – but they interviewed him a week before he turned himself in and then accompanied him to the police station as if they were some sort of protection for him. That’s irresponsible.

    Journalists have become nothing but ambulance-chasing greaseballs interested in nothing but putting their spin on the news – and that’s the case here.

  • Giving Obama cover for political cowardice

    The Washington Post this morning gives Obama an exit strategy for making the politically tough decision to add to our forces in Afghanistan. The headline shouts Success Against Al Qaeda Cited;

    success-against-al-qaida

    The Post quotes unnamed “officials” who think we’re winning in Afghanistan without more troops;

    A U.S. counterterrorism official said that the combined advances have led to the deaths of more than a dozen senior figures in al-Qaeda and allied groups in Pakistan and elsewhere over the past year, most of them in 2009. Officials described Osama bin Laden and his main lieutenants as isolated and unable to coordinate high-profile attacks.

    The unnamed “officials” (who could be Kenny the Copy Guy for all we know) claim that these successes stem from our successful employment of ninjas and drone aircraft – you know the same things we were doing before the Inauguration before Obama sent 20,000 new troops to Afghanistan. You remember – before the Inauguration when we were losing Afghanistan.

    Of course, this article is nothing more than cover for Obama to disregard General McCrystal’s request for more resources – mainly because it goes against the brilliant military analysis of the smartest man in the world, Joe Biden;

    Those within the administration who have suggested limiting large-scale U.S. ground combat in Afghanistan, including Vice President Biden, have pointed to an improved counterterrorism effort as evidence that Obama’s principal objective — destroying al-Qaeda — can be achieved without an expanded troop presence.

    So now we know that the White House Wing of the Washington Post will be pummeling us with more of their propaganda to give cover to Obama when he punts on the issue of increasing ground forces in Afghanistan. I’m sure we’ll see an increase in ninjas and zombie robots, though.

  • Yes, there is a Canada Free Press

    I had the distinct pleasure to meet one of the few remaining conservatives in Canada while I was at Walter Reed last weekend. Her name is Marinka Peschmann and she writes for the Canada Free Press and and this is the article that resulted from her visit;

    On the eighth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attack on America, a band of patriots were on a special mission at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, DC, with America’s wounded warriors. Their mission, the brainchild of 69-year old, decorated Vietnam veteran, George Samek, was to help the wounded warriors’ recovery by providing them with donated laptops with webcams.

    For some of America’s wounded warriors who have risked all in the defence of freedom, the recovery may be swift. For others who have lost precious limbs or endured near death burns at the hands of terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, their challenging recovery may span months, to years, to a lifetime.
    The donated laptops serve not only as a window to the world but will also enable America’s wounded warriors to do something most take for granted—and that is to be able to say “goodnight” to their loved ones and keep in close touch with their families who often live in different states.

    It was a joy to discuss politics with Ms. Peschmann and the article she wrote reflected the respect she had for our wounded and for the folks who donated time and money to help them. Do her a favor and click over to the article and read the whole thing – and then thank George Samek for the work he does with Gathering of Eagles and our wounded troops.