I cannot add anything to this.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
*It’s a Blazing Saddles reference.
Category: Journalism
If I Ever Direct a Pr0n Movie, I now Have a Title
Mike Wallace Dead
Just Saw Olbermann on Letterman
They talked about his firing, and Olbermann was pretty magnanimous about his exit. He basically said that it wasn’t a good match, and that Current TV just couldn’t handle the demands of the show.
I’m not sure how this will all end up, but it was a remarkably fun and light hearted bit.
I Am So Jealous
It’s a long story, but I was discussing journalism with someone today, and uttered a Yiddishism, and he replied, “Sy Hersh is the only guy who speaks Yiddish to me.”
I’m jealous. It would make my day if the dean of investigative journalism, Seymour Hersh, called me an “Ill conceived son of a wombat.”
The Hair of Doom is Arrested
The Hair of Doom!
Specifically, Rupert Murdoch protege Rebekah Brooks, along with her husband and other Murdoch Staffers:
Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, the British newspaper division of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, was arrested early Tuesday on suspicion of obstruction of justice, according to a person with knowledge of the arrest. Her husband, Charlie, a friend of Prime Minister David Cameron from their days at Eton three decades ago, was also arrested, the person said.
The police said in a statement that six people in and outside of London had been arrested on Tuesday as part of Operation Weeting, the criminal investigation into phone hacking and other illegal activities at The News of the World and other newspapers. None have yet been formally charged with crimes; in the British system, charges can be filed months after an arrest, and sometimes not at all.
Following standard procedure, the police statement did not identify those arrested. But a person with knowledge of the arrests said that besides Ms. Brooks and her husband, they included Mark Hanna, the head of security for News International.
The police statement said the six had been arrested between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. and were being interrogated at different police stations on suspicion of “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice,” the British equivalent of obstruction of justice. This could relate to activities like destroying e-mails, computers and other evidence, people with knowledge of the investigation said.
Two former editorial staff members at News International said they had heard from inside the company that the questioning was related to e-mails that were deleted before the police widened their phone hacking investigation last year.
It’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up.
Obama Conspiring to Lock Up Foreign Journalist
Seriously.
Yemeni journalist proves that military operations in his country are actually US drone strikes, and gets sentenced on trumped up charges to 5 years in prison.
A few months after the kangaroo court, President Saleh had a pardon for him prepared, but Obama pressured him to keep him in prison:
On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.
Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”
………
While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”
So, a journalist revealed a US lie, and the worst constitutional law professor ever decides that this guy needs to remain behind bars forever, because he embarrassed our military/intelligence services.
Truly repulsive.
Stage Two of the Phone Hacking Scandal
It looks like the government and the police are using Britain’s odious Official Secrets Act in an attempt to ferret our the leakers:
The Metropolitan police are seeking a court order under the Official Secrets Act to make Guardian reporters disclose their confidential sources about the phone-hacking scandal.In an unprecedented legal attack on journalists’ sources, Scotland Yard officers claim the act, which has special powers usually aimed at espionage, could have been breached in July when reporters Amelia Hill and Nick Davies revealed the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone. They are demanding source information be handed over.The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, said on Friday: “We shall resist this extraordinary demand to the utmost”.Tom Watson, the former Labour minister who has been prominent in exposing hacking by the News of the World, said: “It is an outrageous abuse and completely unacceptable that, having failed to investigate serious wrongdoing at the News of the World for more than a decade, the police should now be trying to move against the Guardian. It was the Guardian who first exposed this scandal.“
The first rule of law enforcement is that the Cops will go after you if you embarrass them, and so now they are going after the paper that broke the story.
They haven’t invoked the Act againt the Murdoch papers, where police took bribes for information, but they are going after the Guardian, where police misconduct was revealed.
The fact that they are bringing out the big guns indicates that this is going to be getting a lot worse very soon.
Did a Not-Krugman Times OP/Ed Writer Just Call Republicans Domestic Terrorists?
Why yes, I think that Nicholas Kristof just wrote that:
IF China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.
Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.
We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength — and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.
House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.
…………
So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda. Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots.
BTW, I think that he’s wrong: This is intentional.
They want to win in 2012, and they are attempting to destroy the nation to do so.
I Know That I Should Not Feel Good About This, But I Do
Corporate crook and right wing newspaper magnate Conrad Black has been sent back to prison:
After nearly a year of fighting to remain free, Conrad M. Black is going back to prison.
Mr. Black, the onetime newspaper baron, received a new jail sentence on Friday from a federal judge in Chicago for his remaining convictions on charges that he defrauded his investors. Judge Amy St. Eve imposed a three-and-a-half-year sentence on Mr. Black, although prosecutors say he will get credit for the more than two years that he has already served in federal prison.
The resentencing of Mr. Black stems from a federal appeals court decision in October that upheld two of Mr. Black’s 2007 convictions, for mail fraud and obstruction of justice, even though it reversed two other convictions for fraud. Mr. Black had been out on bail since last summer pending the appeal.
You have to understand, this guy was not just a right winger with a chain of newspapers, he also strip mined the papers, axing reporters and journalistic quality, when he ran them, so I imagine that the only people out there happier about this than I am are current and former employees of the publications he used to manage.
The New York Times is Called Out On What it Calls Torture
The Times should use the term “torture” more directly, using it on first reference when the discussion is about — and there’s no other word for it — torture. The debate was never whether Bin Laden was found because of brutal interrogations: it was whether he was found because of torture. More narrowly, the word is appropriate when describing techniques traditionally considered torture, waterboarding being the obvious example. Reasonable fairness can be achieved by adding caveats that acknowledge the Bush camp’s view of its narrow legal definition.
This approach avoids the appearance of mincing words and is well grounded in Americans’ understanding of torture in the historical and moral sense.
The fact that our media still consider people who think that it’s OK to crush a child’s testicles to pressure their parent (John Yoo) to be acceptable as regular editorial contributors (to be fair, in the Philly Inky, not the Gray Lady) indicates that the idea of telling the truth has left the lexicon of so-called journalism.
At Least This Wasn’t the Obama Administration’s Coverup
In this case, it’s big Ag (We’re Beatrice), who have been leaning on their running dog lackeys in state legislators to pass laws to make the taking of photographs, videos, and recordings of farms illegal:
So, proposed legislation in three states – Iowa, Minnesota and Florida – that would criminalize the filming, photography or audio recording of farms (the general assumption seems to be that the bills are meant to protect CAFOs – concentrated animal feeding operations, also referred to as factory farms – but could apply to any farm of any nature) raised a major red flag to me, and to others who follow and write about such issues. People you’d expect to raise a protest, like Humane Society’s Wayne Pacelle and Animal Welfare Approved director Andrew Guenther have done so, but mainstream media, especially the New York Times, has also done a great job, with this pointed op-ed and Mark Bittman’s excellent “Who Protects the Animals?” (in which he coins the phrase “ag-gag”).
I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised, considering the popularity of veggie libel laws, but the pure venality and hypocrisy here just boggles my mind.
I would hope that the courts declare this unconstitutional before the ink is dry, because it is banning the practice of journalism.
It Ain’t Just Krugman Who Gets It at the Times
Dave Leonhardt, one of their more prominent economics reporters, as well as being one of the more prominent contributors to their Economix blog, notices that most of the deficit gets fixed if you just do nothing and let the Bush tax cuts expire:
A trick question: If Congress takes no action in coming years, what will happen to the budget deficit?
It will shrink — and shrink a lot. This simple fact may offer the best hope for deficit reduction.
As federal law currently stands, some significant tax increases are set to take effect in coming years. The most important is the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012.
Of course, both parties favor the permanent extension of most of those tax cuts — the ones applying to income below $250,000. Both parties also oppose big cuts to the military, Social Security and Medicare, at least in the short term. Unfortunately, the deficit is likely to remain frighteningly large over the next decade without either cuts to those programs or tax increases.
Say what you will about Krugman, and he is a brilliant man who has won the Nobel Prize in Economics, but he does not reflect the conventional thinking at the “Paper of Record.” He is an outsider.
Mr. Leonhardt, on the other hand, does. He’s been working as a journalist at the Times for about a dozen years, and the fact that he is mentioning this means, at the very least, that the idea that doing nothing will fix the problem is something that is discussed amongst their staff.
So The New York Times Has Added a Paywall
I’m not sure exactly how it works, so I am unsure how the paywall, which limits you to 20 page views a month, would work off a link to this blog, but, at least for now, it works off of Twitter, so I have created a Twitter account, The Sh%$ I Read on the New York Times, and I will link to that tweet, which will allow one to see the article without having to deal with their paywall.
It appears to me that this is in accordance with both the spirit and the letter of their paywall, since I am manually tweeting the articles.
There are a number of alternatives, most notably the NYTClean applet, and while I might use that myself, I’m not going to put that on my link page, I figure that someone might go all TOS on my flabby white ass and finding a human at Google/Blogger in that case is well nigh impossible.
As to how the paywall will work, the Times had a paywall for a number of years for their opinion pieces, and the net result was that they got a lot less buzz, which is probably why Frank Rich and Bob Herbert both decided to leave the paper in the past few weeks.
The problem with the NYT is too fold, first, and uniquely to them, is the fact that they built, and paid cash for a ruinously expensive new office building in Manhattan, and second, and this is not unique to them, Craigslist is completely eating their lunches in the tremendously profitable classified ads section.
Not sure as to the solution, though any solution should involve cutting Tom Friedman’s travel budget.
David Broder Has Died
He was called the “Dean” of the Washington press corps, and I have only been aware of him since the late 1990s, so I cannot not comment on his career before then, but since then he was very much the voice of the sensibilities of “The Village” as Atrios calls it.
Needless to say, my sense of his oeuvre is not positive.
Kathleen Parker Quits Parker Spitzer on CNN
Well, now that she is leaving, perhaps I can check out the successor show without the right wing idoocy for “balance”:
Kathleen Parker has been dropped from “Parker Spitzer,” and the show is being replaced by a new show called “In The Arena,” the network announced Friday.
In a memo to staff, CNN President Ken Jautz said that “In The Arena” would be an “ensemble” show, with “several newsmakers, guests and contributors joining Eliot Spitzer each night.” Among the regulars will be former Fox News anchor E.D. Hill and National Review writer Will Cain.
(emphasis mine)
<Facepalm>
Then again, it maybe not.
The interesting thing here is that when Kathleen Parker took a temporary leave for medical reasons, the show’s ratings doubled.
Where Spitzer has credibility is his experience in dealing with Wall Street lawbreaking, and by larding the show up with “balance”, it makes it worse TV.
I’ll probably check it out at some point, if just because I can’t stand Lawrence O’Donnell, who is opposite to their time slot.
Is there a site online where I can see CNN streaming?
Normally, I Don’t Follow the Oscars
Good question
And the trailer
But Charles Ferguson, the director of the documentary The Inside Job, upon accepting his award for best documentary, raised an obvious point:
Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.
It’s a good question, and, considering the timing of the crisis, it really started in September 2008, and there was no way that anything but damage control could be done over the next few months, the answer has to be, “Because Barack Obama does not want a single financial executive to go to jail.”
There are some issues that were mismanaged by the Bush administration, they had no intention to reign in excessive bonuses, for example, but the only way that major figures, such as the recent decision to no-bill Angelo Mozillo, is if there was a conscious decision not to apply to the rule of law at the highest level.
This is very similar to, and as least as damaging in the long term as, his conscious to allow the worst excesses of torture, perjury, and civil rights violations for Bush and His Evil Minions.™
This is corrosive to society.
Shirley Sharrod Finally Sues Andrew Breitbart
Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip suggested she had used her position at the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against white farmers. The media devoured the Breitbart’s version of story so voraciously that the NAACP denounced Sherrod and the Obama administration fired her. The charge was, in fact, entirely untrue.
Sherrod argues in the lawsuit that the clip “damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work.” Breitbart, meanwhile, denounced the suit, saying he “categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech.”
Let’s be clear, as a public official at the time, Shirley Sharrod has a very high burden of proof, so I do not know her chances of prevailing, but even if she wins, it is highly unlikely that she will get anything unless she takes action in advance to ensure that the real assets of his operations are secure.
His real assets would walk out of his office tommorow, on a memory stick, we are talking about things like his subscriber database, so if I were her lawyer, I would suggest that she move to have the court appoint a special master to oversee this data, to ensure that it doesn’t walk out the door.
Then again, I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, Dammit.*
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
What the Hell?
Olbermann has been canceled by MSNBC?
Domestic Terrorism in Spokane
I’m not sure why the press isn’t covering this, but someone planted a relatively sophisticated road-side bomb along the route of the Spokane Martin Luther King Day parade:
A backpack found along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. march in Spokane contained a bomb “capable of inflicting multiple casualties,” the FBI said Tuesday, describing the case as “domestic terrorism.”
The FBI said the Swiss Army-brand backpack was found about 9:25 a.m. PST on Monday on a bench at the northeast corner of North Washington Street and West Main Avenue in downtown Spokane.
In an interview on msnbc cable’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Spokesman-Review reporter Thomas Clouse said confidential sources told him that the device was equipped with a remote control detonator and contained shrapnel.
There are two things that are very concerning here:
- The FBI is being very loquacious about this, and I don’t mean, “FBI is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people responsible for placing the device.” Considering how legendary the FBI is about keeping its cards close to its chest, this implies that they are very spooked by this.
- Spokane is smack dab in the middle of any number of any number of white supremacist encampments, and has already seen Aryan Nation inspired bombings and robberies.
I think that the FBI has some intel indicating that more than one person has some sort of ongoing plans for a series of actions.
What is odd here is that Maddow seems to be the only national media figure who is paying any attention.