Thursday, February 17, 2005
Whack a Mole
Years later, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are still making the claim that "Al Gore brought up Willie Horton." It isn't true. At this point they have to know it isn't true. They Don't Care.
Lies and the Lying Liars
Josh Marshall should get a comments section. Well, not really, but if he did he'd have more exposure to the ability of those on the right to continue to claim something even after it has been proven to be demonstrably false.
They're just liars. And, no one bothers to hold them accountable, and no one holds them to any standard.
...to be fair, the person in question, Roger Simon, has corrected his post and can thus be taken off the liars list. But, here's a sampling of people who have pushed this idea about Reid supporting social security privatization (not all the links are for such people, but a lot are).
Maybe they're all just honest idiots. Or, maybe they're just taking their orders from Dear Leader Glenn.
They're just liars. And, no one bothers to hold them accountable, and no one holds them to any standard.
...to be fair, the person in question, Roger Simon, has corrected his post and can thus be taken off the liars list. But, here's a sampling of people who have pushed this idea about Reid supporting social security privatization (not all the links are for such people, but a lot are).
Maybe they're all just honest idiots. Or, maybe they're just taking their orders from Dear Leader Glenn.
All the Gannon News That's Fit to Print
The full Daily Show Clip.
Frank Rich:
Sid Blumenthal:
Boehlert:
Frank Rich:
"Jeff Gannon" had decided to give an exclusive TV interview to a sober practitioner of by-the-book real news, Wolf Blitzer. Given this journalistic opportunity, the anchor asked questions almost as soft as those "Jeff" himself had asked in the White House. Mr. Blitzer didn't question Mr. Guckert's outrageous assertion that he adopted a fake name because "Jeff Gannon is easier to pronounce and easier to remember." (Is "Jeff" easier to pronounce than his real first name, Jim?). Mr. Blitzer never questioned Gannon/Guckert's assertion that Talon News "is a separate, independent news division" of GOPUSA. Only in a brief follow-up interview a day later did he ask Gannon/Guckert to explain why he was questioned by the F.B.I. in the case that may send legitimate reporters to jail: Mr. Guckert has at times implied that he either saw or possessed a classified memo identifying Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative. Might that memo have come from the same officials who looked after "Jeff Gannon's" press credentials? Did Mr. Guckert have any connection with CNN's own Robert Novak, whose publication of Ms. Plame's name started this investigation in the first place? The anchor didn't go there.
The "real" news from CNN was no news at all, but it's not as if any of its competitors did much better. The "Jeff Gannon" story got less attention than another media frenzy - that set off by the veteran news executive Eason Jordan, who resigned from CNN after speaking recklessly at a panel discussion at Davos, where he apparently implied, at least in passing, that American troops deliberately targeted reporters. Is the banishment of a real newsman for behaving foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a more pressing story than that of a fake newsman gaining years of access to the White House (and network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances? With real news this timid, the appointment of Jon Stewart to take over Dan Rather's chair at CBS News could be just the jolt television journalism needs. As Mr. Olbermann demonstrated when he borrowed a sharp "Daily Show" tool to puncture the "Jeff Gannon" case, the only road back to reality may be to fight fake with fake.
Sid Blumenthal:
Thus a phony journalist planted by a Republican operation, used by the White House press secretary to interrupt questions from the press corps, called on by the president for a safe question, protected from FBI vetting by the press office, disseminating innuendo and smears about critics and opponents of the administration, some of them gay-baiting, was unmasked not only as a hireling and fraud but as a gay prostitute, with enormous potential for blackmail....
Lifting the heavy Puritan curtain draping Bush's Washington reveals enlightening scenes of its decadent anthropology. Even as Guckert's true colors were revealed, the administration issued orders that the words "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual" and "transgender" be removed from the program of a federally funded conference on suicide prevention. But the transparent hypocrisy of conservative "values" hardly deters a ruthless government.
Boehlert:
Thanks to the continued digging by online sleuths, there's now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias "Jeff Gannon," once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, "published regularly," in itself an extraordinarily low threshold. Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team which includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate nor independent, two criteria often used in Washington, D.C., to receive press credentials.
Click here
But what's significant about the February 2003 date is that Talon did not even exist then. The organization was created in late March 2003, and began publishing online in early April 2003. Gannon, a jack of all trades who spent time in the military as well as working at an auto repair shop (not to mention escorting), has already stated publicly that Talon News was his first job in journalism. That means he wasn't working for any other news outlet in February 2003 when he was spotted by C-Span cameras inside the White House briefing room. And that means Guckert was ushered into the White House press room in February 2003 for a briefing despite the fact he was not a journalist.
How Are We Doing
Ken Auletta wrote this in December, 2001. I highlight it just to remind us of all the talk after September 11 by the media that they were going to get serious (Aulettta was appropriately pessimistic).
That didn't last long.
Like so much else, television news changed on the morning of September 11th. Six weeks later, as Aaron Brown, CNN's new anchorman, shifted from a Pentagon briefing to the ruins of the World Trade Center and then to a dissection of the latest anthrax scare, a familiar figure appeared in a box in the right half of the screen: O. J. Simpson on the witness stand. He was testifying in a Florida court, accused of road rage. Brown peered earnestly into the camera and said of the latest Simpson travail, "It is inconceivable to me that seven weeks ago, or six weeks ago, this would not have been carried live." It wasn't now, he said, because "it doesn't matter a whole lot. And here's why it doesn't." The screen filled with rescue workers pulling a body from the rubble of the World Trade towers.
Before September 11th, the evening news, to say nothing of the morning programs and the magazine shows, paid scant attention to foreign news. Instead, the networks filled the air with "weather events," Viagra breakthroughs, reports on various ailments, the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, the trials of O.J., the death of Princess Diana, the sagas of Monica and Chandra. The networks delivered the headlines of the day, and the dismissive characterization once applied to local television news--"If it bleeds, it leads"--increasingly applied to network news as well. Stories that once might have been noted in passing, if at all, on the half-hour nightly newscasts were now reported endlessly on the nine-o'clock and ten-o'clock magazine shows, which long ago displaced documentaries.
After September 11th, journalists who had grown accustomed to feeling slightly embarrassed by what they did for a living began to look at their jobs with a renewed sense of pride. Even their bosses, who had slashed budgets and trivialized the news in the name of higher ratings and sound business practice, seemed like earnest preachers spreading the gospel of serious journalism. "Over the past ten weeks, we've been reminded why we do what we do," Mel Karmazin, who is the president and C.O.O. of Viacom, the parent company of CBS, said a few weeks ago. Karmazin was speaking at a lunch given in his honor by the Center for Communication, at the Plaza Hotel. He has a fearsome reputation, based in no small part on the demands he makes of his employees. When an executive on the sales force is exhausted and claims that, in the midst of a recession, he cannot sell more ads, Karmazin has been known to reply, "I haven't heard of anyone having a heart attack yet!" But now, at the Plaza, Karmazin aligned himself with a different set of standards. He invoked Edward R. Murrow and quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., on character. Karmazin said, "We want it said of us that when it mattered most we measured up." His peers at NBC, ABC, Fox, and CNN in the audience rose and applauded--both for Karmazin and, it seemed, themselves.
That didn't last long.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
The Queen of All Iraq Speaks
Holy crap. I'm speechless.
Miller said she didn't feel she and Cooper were being targeted unfairly, but she found it curious why the prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, had chosen to go after only them and not other journalists who had received subpoenas.
"He was a very aggressive prosecutor against Al Qaeda, and I was an admirer of the zeal with which he went after Al Qaeda," said Miller. "I wish he would continue to do that instead of targeting journalists."
Gannon Subpoenaed?
Gannon claimed to Howie Editor and Publisher that he was never subpoenaed by Fitzgerald's grand jury, but he told his freeper pals that he had ben.
The White House/Gannon Connection
(info via Liberal Patriots)
...or maybe not.
Minarik
What a wanker:
What makes him even more of a wanker is his AOL profile:
ALBANY, N.Y. Feb 16, 2005 — Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called on the head of New York's Republican Party to apologize or resign Wednesday over remarks linking the Democrats to a civil rights lawyer convicted of aiding terrorists.
Dean called Stephen Minarik's comments offensive, and said, "The American people deserve better than this type of political character assassination."
On Monday, Minarik said that Dean's election shows that "the Democrats simply have refused to learn the lessons of the past two election cycles, and now they can be accurately called the party of Barbara Boxer, Lynne Stewart and Howard Dean."
Stewart is a New York City lawyer convicted last week of helping terrorists by smuggling messages from one of her imprisoned clients, a radical Egyptian sheik, to his terrorist disciples on the outside. Boxer is a liberal senator from California.
Minarik has said he would not aplogize.
Republican Gov. George Pataki scolded Minarik on Tuesday, saying his remark was not "within the realm of appropriate political discourse."
What makes him even more of a wanker is his AOL profile:
Name: STEPHEN MINARIK
Location: Webster NY
Gender: Male
Marital Status: I'm there again
Hobbies & Interests: Golf, Hockey, Sex
Favorite Gadgets: IBM Compatible
Occupation: Electoral Guru
Personal Quote: There's winning, and then there's misery
More Gannon Mystery
A reader sends in this tip. According to E&P, Gannon claims to have attended his first WH press conference in April 2003, "just weeks after starting with Talon News."
But, the Intelligence Squad (don't know who they are) points us to a "Jeff Gannon" posting in the comments of Winds of Change on March 5, 2003, referring to a February 28, 2003 press conference:
So, if this was before he was working for "Talon News," under what organization was he credentialed?
...yep, there's our Jeff on Feb. 28, before Talon even existed.
But, the Intelligence Squad (don't know who they are) points us to a "Jeff Gannon" posting in the comments of Winds of Change on March 5, 2003, referring to a February 28, 2003 press conference:
This is a question I asked Ari Fleischer at a White House press briefing on Friday:
Q There have been reports out of Maine that the children of deployed
service personnel are being harassed as a result of their elementary school
teacher's expression of anti-war views in the classroom. Could you comment on
that?
MR. FLEISCHER: I'm not familiar with any specific report, but I can assure
you that the President, in all instances, believes that it's important for all
to honor and respect the first amendment.
Not the answer I was looking for, but at least I was able to get the issue in front of the mainstream press.
So, if this was before he was working for "Talon News," under what organization was he credentialed?
...yep, there's our Jeff on Feb. 28, before Talon even existed.
More Hilarity
Take a look at a sample of student complaints that Crazy Davey's "Students for Academic Freedom" is getting. Almost as funny as Freepi vs. Hannity, or would be if wingnuts in government weren't taking him seriously.
...or go read them all here. Warning, you may piss yourself laughing... or, maybe not -- looks like the server can't handle the traffic. oops.
...or go read them all here. Warning, you may piss yourself laughing... or, maybe not -- looks like the server can't handle the traffic. oops.
Scalps
If Dan Rather had grossly and deliberately misrepresented something that Ronald Reagan had said, here's what would have happened:
It would be all over AM radio.
Howard Kurtz would write several columns in the Post and discuss it frequently on CNN.
The New York Post would headline "Rather Kicks Reagan's Corpse!!"
The New York Times would run a prominent feature about it,
Editorial boards from around the country would weigh in on this travesty.
Every columnist - conservative and liberal - would be falling all over themselves to condemn Dan Rather.
It would for years to follow become the reference point for "bad journalism."
Now we have Brit Hume clearly deliberately distorting something FDR said, and several other Foxmonkeys following suit. Will any of the above happen? No. Brit Hume has no standards. Fox News has no standards. And, none of the usual suspects even tries to hold them to any standard.
So, when people ask why the "left" can't collect any scalps, that's why. You can't shame people who have no shame.
It would be all over AM radio.
Howard Kurtz would write several columns in the Post and discuss it frequently on CNN.
The New York Post would headline "Rather Kicks Reagan's Corpse!!"
The New York Times would run a prominent feature about it,
Editorial boards from around the country would weigh in on this travesty.
Every columnist - conservative and liberal - would be falling all over themselves to condemn Dan Rather.
It would for years to follow become the reference point for "bad journalism."
Now we have Brit Hume clearly deliberately distorting something FDR said, and several other Foxmonkeys following suit. Will any of the above happen? No. Brit Hume has no standards. Fox News has no standards. And, none of the usual suspects even tries to hold them to any standard.
So, when people ask why the "left" can't collect any scalps, that's why. You can't shame people who have no shame.
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