A refresher course on doing their jobs

Here’s a set of lessons, or guidelines that reporters and their editors should be using in their reporting on Iraq and the run-up to war with Iran.

• Don’t assume anything administration officials tell you is true. In fact, you are probably better off assuming anything they tell you is a lie.
• Demand proof for their every assertion. Assume the proof is a lie. Demand that they prove that their proof is accurate.
• Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it should be make the headlines. The absence of supporting evidence for their assertion -- or a preponderance of evidence that contradicts the assertion -- may be more newsworthy than the assertion itself.
• Don’t print anonymous assertions. Demand that sources make themselves accountable for what they insist is true.

These lessons, or probably more simply, rules of journalism, don’t seem to simply be lessons in reporting that our media professionals should have learned from Vietnam and didn’t apply in the run-up to our invasion of Iraq, and they now aren’t using in the run-up to war with Iran. These seem to be the foundations of reporting that every reporter and editor should know and follow on every story they do. None of them should have jobs if they can’t follow these guidelines, but I guess their consumers aren’t demanding it. Anyway, with all of the alternative media these days, they are probably just supplying the nails to their own coffins.


Hat tip: Think Progress

Global warming

It’s nice to see stories like this from The Guardian finally coming out after 10 years of BS from the media on global warming.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The newest president for life?

I guess this is how you go from what his supporters would call a maverick reformer to a dictator. If Chavez has the support of congress, why not just let them rubber stamp his reforms? Just like Bush did for the six years prior to the last election; then you retain a nominal democracy.

In its latest draft, the law would allow Chavez to dictate measures for 18 months in 11 broad areas, from the "economic and social sphere" to the "transformation of state institutions."

Some may want to wait and see if he gives up his new power in 18 months, but this doesn’t look like a positive development.

To me, this move backs his critics in the US who will insist that the jury is in, and Chavez is just another dictator, now off his meds.

Can we really call ourselves a civilized society?

It’s stuff like this that makes me think that maybe there really isn’t any hope for this country. This isn’t just some whacked out Bush administration action that can be written off as one lunatic’s obsession; it’s a whole community--a government and its population apparently going along with it.

The city of Miami is planning an official celebration at the Orange Bowl whenever Cuban president Fidel Castro dies.

Discussions by a committee appointed earlier this month by the city commission to plan the event have even covered issues such as a theme to be printed on T-shirts, what musicians would perform, the cost and how long the celebration would last.

I along with probably every American was appalled by news reports of people “dancing in the streets” in places like Baghdad and Gaza after the 9/11 attacks, but as disturbing as these were, they were not government sponsored and in reality were later noted as more scattered incidents than mass demonstrations. So sure, if a few callous, obsessed individuals want to celebrate a national leader’s death, then who’s to stop them, but an organized, state-supported event?

Nixon was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Southeast Asia, and yet I don’t recall organized, state celebrations in Berlin, Paris, or Hanoi. And yet the media treats this as a natural and inevitable and even justified event. It’s truly shameful, for Miami, for the media, and for this country.

Terrorist haven?

So Pakistan says it isn’t harboring Taliban and Al Qaeda elements, but here’s a fact from USA Today that is a little hard to overlook:

But in a sign that insurgents are crossing from Pakistan to fight in Afghanistan, the bodies of 25 militants killed in a fierce battle with NATO were repatriated Friday to their tribal villages in Pakistan, where Taliban activists urged mass attendance at their funerals, residents said.

I’m not suggesting we should add Pakistan to the list of countries we are at war with, but the facts on the ground need to be recognized, and they need to be pressured diplomatically, and we shouldn’t just be blindly supporting Musharraf.

The truth is that we never had proof that bin Laden was in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. He may have been in Pakistan then and he may still be there now.

More on the escalation

Some interesting things have come up lately regarding the Iraq escalation and a likely alternate explanation for the escalation. Is the military simply forward positioning military resources for an attack against Iran? The NY Times has a piece with this quote:

“The administration does have Iran on the brain, and I think they are exaggerating the amount of Iranian activities in Iraq,” Kenneth M. Pollack, the director of research at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, said Sunday. “There’s a good chance that this is going to be counterproductive — that this is a way to get into a spiral with Iran that leads you into conflict. The likely response from the Iranians is that they are going to want to demonstrate to us that they are not going to be pushed around.”

. . .

Yet American officials have been careful not to rule out the possibility of American actions inside Iran. Pressed on the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday about excluding the option of going after Iranians inside Iran, Mr. Hadley said that for now, Iraq was “the best place” for the United States to take on the Iranians.

“So, you don’t believe you have the authority to go into Iran?” the host, George Stephanopoulos, asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Mr. Hadley responded. “This is another issue. Any time you have questions about crossing international borders, there are legal issues.”

And The Guardian had this from an interview with Robert Gates from a report on a NATO meeting:

The defence secretary, Robert Gates, told reporters that the decision to deploy a Patriot missile battalion and a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf in conjunction with a “surge” of troops in Iraq was designed to show Iran that the US was not “overcommitted” in Iraq.

So this could be interpreted as posturing or it could simply be preparation for an attack against Iran. And I might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, if I didn't know what this Administration was capable of.

Escalation

Obviously the Democrats should do everything they can to stop the escalation and redeploy our forces out of Iraq, and this is clearly what the vast majority of the American public wants. So why does the Washington Post insist on pushing the notion that this would be politically bad for the Democrats, when all of the evidence at hand points to the opposite: that the Democrats will pay the price if they don’t end the war?

The bold plans reflect the Democrats' belief that the public has abandoned Bush on the war and that the American people will have little patience for an escalation of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. But the moves carry clear risks for a party that suffered politically for pushing to end an unpopular war in Vietnam three decades ago, and Democratic leaders hope to avoid a similar fate over the conflict in Iraq.

What the fuck is the Post talking about? How exactly did the Democrats pay politically for opposing the Vietnam War? They didn’t. They won big in Congress in 1974, and they won the Presidency in 1976. But this is how the mainstream media operates.

And the headline for this article in the NY Times should be “Democrats and Republicans plan to fight expansion of troops,” since it quotes three Republican senators who appear to be aligning themselves with the Democratic position.

Minimum Wage

Thanks to Media Matters for debunking some popular minimum wage myths.

“Claims that an increase to the minimum wage will help few people and hurt the overall economy aren't supported by fact,” said Karl Frisch, spokesman for Media Matters for America. “Hopefully members of the media will think twice before reporting on or using these bogus arguments without noting just how questionable, misleading and false they truly are.”

Read the article. It's short, but has a lot of good numbers.

Um . . . how many wars are we going to start?

The Associated Press reports that the US has conducted air strikes against Somalia.

U.S. helicopter gunships launched new attacks Tuesday against suspected al-Qaida members, a Somali official said, a day after American forces launched airstrikes in the first offensive in the African country since 18 U.S. troops were killed there in 1993.

The latest attacks killed at least 27 civilians in the town of Afmadow in southern Somalia, lawmaker Abdiqadir Daqane told The Associated Press.

And we are moving forces away from Afghanistan, where we already don’t have enough to support the war we started there.

The U.S. Central Command reassigned the [aircraft carrier] Eisenhower to Somalia last week from its mission supporting NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, said U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown in Bahrain, where the Navy's Fifth Fleet is based.