Day: 10/1/2008

Frantic Conservatives Trying To Ditch The Sarah Palin Debate

Posted by on October 1, 2008 at 3:29 pm. NO Comments :

Let’s face it. They have a right to be scared. Conservative activists have seen Sarah Palin humiliate herself and her Party repeatedly. She can’t name a single newspaper or magazine that she reads, or cite a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade, or give an example of McCain’s maverickiness. She doesn’t know who Hamas is. She adopts Obama’s policy toward cross-border attacks in Pakistan (then denies that she did so). And she asserts that her fresh face and new ideas (see Barack Obama) make her a better candidate than Joe Biden because he is just an old guy who has been in the Senate for a long time (see John McCain).

She has still only been permitted to be interviewed twice in the thirty-three days since McCain tapped her for his VP. She is being purposefully sequestered from the media and any serious inquiry into her positions or her past. There have been conservative commentators calling for her to be dropped from the ticket for the good of her Party and the country. And last week McCain suggested that the VP debate be postponed until some undetermined date and replaced by the first presidential debate.

Obviously, they don’t want the debate to proceed. And the latest evidence of that is a new effort to remove the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS. The argument is that Ifill has authored a book that prevents her from being objective. “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” is scheduled to be released January 20, 2009. The book is a study of how…

“…the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s.”

For the book Ifill interviews Obama, as well as Republicans like Colin Powell. By all accounts, the book is not political advocacy, but an exploration of race in contemporary politics. But the controversy being manufactured by the likes of Fox News, National Review, and Human Events is a thinly disguised attempt to kill the debate. Even if their allegations were valid, it would be very difficult to find a replacement for Ifill literally on the eve of the debate. They would have to find someone who was able to immediately clear their calendar and then would still come to the event unprepared – no research, no questions, no context for engaging the participants. The only viable option would be to delay the debate to some undetermined date, just as they tried to do last week.

This is yet another transparent attempt to sabotage the debate by having it canceled or by preemptively discrediting the results. How convenient to have a reason to disregard the whole affair should Palin, true to form, embarrass herself. This dust up could also have the effect of influencing Ifill’s performance as moderator. She may decide to bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of bias and, consequently, display bias in favor of Palin.

We can only hope that the cynical manipulations of the rightists orchestrating this controversy are not successful, and that Ifill relies on her own sense of professional ethics and not the rantings of frightened partisans.

Another Media Mea Culpa For The War In Iraq

Posted by on October 1, 2008 at 11:03 am. NO Comments :

In a book review for Bob Woodward’s latest installment of his Bush chronicles, the New York Times’ Jill Abramson decides it’s time to salve her guilty conscience. Woodward’s “The War Within” serves as the impetus for her confessional.

Abramson reveals her misgivings regarding the Times’ coverage of the build up to war with Iraq after citing a passage from Woodward’s book wherein he admits that he had not done enough at the Washington Post to expose the weakness of the administration’s arguments for the existence of WMDs and for going to war. Abramson followed up that citation by saying…

“I was Washington bureau chief for The Times while this was happening, and I failed to push hard enough for an almost identical, skeptical article, written by James Risen. This was a period when there were too many credulous accounts of the administration’s claims about Iraq’s W.M.D.”

Thanks a lot. Another too late revelation of dereliction of duty that resulted in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqi civilians. How exactly does this expression of regret compensate the victims of a disastrous and deadly war? How does it repair the damage done to both Iraq and America, who is now on the brink of bankruptcy partially due to having wasted a trillion dollars fighting an imaginary enemy.

This is not the first time that prominent figures in the press have sought absolution for their failures:

Woodward previously expressed these thoughts in an online chat:
“I think the press and I in particular should have been more aggressive in looking at the run-up to the Iraq war, and specifically the alleged intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction stockpiles.”

The New York Times issued this mea culpa:
“Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper […] while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.”

New York Times editor, Bill Keller personally apologized:
“I’ve had a few occasions to write mea culpas for my paper after we let down our readers in more important ways, including for some reporting before the war in Iraq that should have dug deeper and been more sceptical about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction.”

CNN reporter Jessica Yellin weighed in with this bit of uncharacteristic honesty:
“The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings. And my own experience at the White House was that the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives.”

Even Bill O’Reilly announced that he was wrong (but it’s OK because, he says, everyone was wrong):
“Now I supported the action against Saddam because the Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, William Cohen, the CIA, British intelligence, and a variety of other intelligence agencies all told me Saddam was making dangerous weapons in violation of the first Gulf War cease-fire […] I was wrong in my assessment, as was everybody else.”

I am willing to concede that a lot of people, reporters and politicians alike, were wrong, but not everyone. There were many who opposed the war, who saw through the administration’s lies, who spoke out about the fraud that was being forced upon the nation. The sane objections were mostly confined to alternative sources that were ignored or ridiculed. But even the mainstreamers quoted above seemed to have known at the time that they were being less than responsible with regard to their reportorial obligations.

Now Abramson joins those who have seen the error of their ways. Or have they? Abramson is the Times’s managing editor for news, but this revelation appears in a book review rather than in the news pages. And there has been little evidence that the press has altered its behavior. Keller, the Times’ editor noted last year that…

“The administration has subsidised propaganda at home and abroad, refined the art of spin, discouraged dissent, and sought to limit traditional congressional oversight and court review.”

But even with knowledge of that, the administration’s press releases are often reprinted or broadcast virtually verbatim as news. Some of that can be seen in the current Wall Street affair that is characterized as a crisis that demands the immediate implementation of the White House’s untested and hysterical solutions.

It isn’t enough for these people to confess their sins and be on their way. I don’t want to sift through another collection of apologies for the next disaster that they feel so sorry for having misreported or ignored. They need to initiate real reform that addresses the root causes of these journalistic failures. And they need to fire those who have let down their papers, their readers, and their country. When steps like these are taken, I will start to take seriously their assertions of regret. Until then, they are still just covering up for themselves and the Washington insiders on whom they are pretending to report.