The silence is deafening……as they say. From Alex Koppelman at Slate:

ABC News reported a few days ago that a group of so-called Principals — including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — met dozens of times in the White House to “discuss and approve” specific interrogation techniques to be used against suspected terrorists.

Initial reports indicated that Bush was “insulated” from the “series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.” Bush eventually dispelled the notion that he was out of the loop, though, and said — arguably, bragged — that he endorsed the Principals’ work from the outset. The president told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz, “I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

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Via Howard Kurtz, actually, here’s one of the best pieces I’ve read recently on McCain. It’s from Kevin Drum on 3/24, and I’ll quote it in its entirety:
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Cenk Uygur on why the New York Times sat on the Mcain/Iseman story:

The John McCain-Vicki Iseman story is not the first article the New York Times has held back for political reasons. They have now done this on at least three occasions:

1. The original FISA story on how the Bush administration was not getting warrants for wiretaps inside the United States.
2. The original story in 2004 that showed Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
3. The McCain-Iseman story.

We had James Risen, the writer of the first two stories on our show back in 2005 and he admitted that they held the Bin Laden story until after the 2004 election because the New York Times didn’t want to “get caught up in the politics of it.”

Another way of stating that is that they were afraid of being called the liberal media by Republicans. After decades of being chastised for being liberal, they have become gun’shy. In this McCain story, they also held off until they were about to outed by other news agencies as sitting on the story.

Full story at the Huffington Post

With the recent arrival of MLK Day, it’s time once again for doctrinaire conservatives to pretend that liberals are racists and if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he’d be a conservative. Think I’m kidding? Check out this year’s assessment of such rhetoric by Mister Leonard Pierce of Sadly, No! Meanwhile, Rick Perlstein provides some welcome historical perspective on past opposition and this attempted appropriation. (Roy has a slightly different take.)

Of course, if conservative pundits had any integrity, they’d also have called out Jonah Goldberg for his noxious piece of disingenuous, revisionist crap, Liberal Fascism, weeks ago, and Goldberg himself would have actually responded to the “serious” criticism he claims he welcomes. Not content to level the ludicrous accusation that progressives are the real descendents of fascists, Goldberg recently accused them of being the real racists, as well. It’s all the more striking given that Goldberg works for the National Review, which had a long history of supporting segregation (and check out the vintage Goldberg Roy linked in the post linked above).
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Poor Edwards. I blame the media, and their lopsided coverage of the contenders.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton beat Sen. Barack Obama in the Nevada Democratic caucuses today, while former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney prevailed earlier in the Nevada Republican caucuses.

With 88 percent of the vote counted, Clinton led with 51 percent to 45 percent for Obama (Ill.). Former senator John Edwards trailed far behind with four percent.

The Edwards campaign has put out a hilarious, on-target spot with great editing/timing about the lastest round of the media blackout he’s consistently faced (via Greg Sargent, who has some good thoughts, as usual).

What blackout is that? Greg Sargent passes on this helpful graphic:
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Horse Shit Cigarettes are made from the finest grade of domestic and imported horse shit obtainable. Only fresh midd horse shit is used. NOT MULE SHIT. And they are roasted to keep that mild, sweet taste.

(Okay, the second paragraph doesn’t appear on the package. But it should.)

The problem with a horse race is that it produces a lot of horse shit. Sure, it’s fun to mock the boastful swells in the press box for losing all their bets on New Hampshire, but they’ve been wrong plenty of times before in this election season alone, and it’s not as if they all learn their lesson. A day after Chris Matthews said he’d “never underestimate Hillary Clinton again,” he said that the reason she was elected senator was because “her husband messed around.” Of course, in addition to peddling his own special brand of horse shit, Matthews is virulently anti-Clinton, a sexist and often seems delusional. But he’s far from the only prominent pundit with a short memory or no shame. As one of Matthews’ colleagues observed:

“The pirouettes are amazing,” says Brokaw, who was analyzing the campaign on MSNBC. “The utter confidence with which everyone had been wrong 20 minutes earlier, they have the same utter confidence about what produced this surprise. It’s intellectually dishonest.”

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H/T to TOB for this one!

(Blue skies, smilin’ at me…)

When I hear someone say something like this, in this case from Howard Kurtz‘ 11/21/07 column “Belated Reaction?”:

It’s official: Things are getting better in Iraq.

The New York Times says so.

I feel something like this:
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Last week, Howard Kurtz downplayed his pal Michelle Malkin’s crazy and vicious smear campaign against twelve-year old Graeme Frost and his family, toddler Bethany Wilkerson and her family, and whoever else dared to challenge her blatant inaccuracies and complete lack of decency. This past Friday, in “CHIP On Their Shoulder,” Howard Kurtz demonstrated both what’s not so bad about him and what’s infuriating and contemptible.
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Joseph Menn
The Los Angeles Times
cross posted at Huffington Post

The mogul asks three reporters to stay. Some question how hands-on he’ll be with the paper.

Rupert Murdoch doesn’t yet own the Wall Street Journal, but he’s already flexing his muscles.

In the last two weeks, the chairman of News Corp. has called at least three reporters who were considering leaving the top financial publication and asked them to stay, people familiar with the calls said Thursday.

Some journalists in the newsroom took the gesture as a sign of Murdoch’s commitment to keep the staff’s quality high. Others said it showed that Murdoch would take a hands-on approach in newsroom affairs despite a special committee established to keep him from interfering in coverage.

News Corp. agreed this month to pay $5 billion for Dow Jones & Co., the owner of the Journal.

Murdoch, who has been vacationing in the Mediterranean in recent days, made the calls to the reporters from his yacht, the Rosehearty, named for the Murdoch family’s ancestral home in Scotland.

Murdoch called reporters Tara Parker-Pope, Kate Kelly and Henny Sender, according to five people at the Journal who asked not to be named for fear of upsetting the new owner. Parker-Pope and Kelly were weighing job offers from the New York Times, which Murdoch sees as the Journal’s biggest rival, while Sender was considering a post at the Financial Times, the leading business paper in Europe.

Murdoch told the reporters that they would be making a mistake to leave, that he valued all of the Journal’s coverage, and that positive changes were in store. Since announcing the acquisition of Dow Jones, Murdoch has publicly promised to invest in the Journal and expand its coverage.

The Pew Research Center

Summary of Findings

The American public continues to fault news organizations for a number of perceived failures, with solid majorities criticizing them for political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes. But some of the harshest indictments of the press now come from the growing segment that relies on the internet as its main source for national and international news.

The internet news audience - roughly a quarter of all Americans - tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. As many as 38% of those who rely mostly on the internet for news say they have an unfavorable opinion of cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, compared with 25% of the public overall, and just 17% of television news viewers.

The internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to “stand up for America,” and political bias. Roughly two-thirds (68%) of those who get most of their news from the internet say that news organizations do not care about the people they report on, and 53% believe that news organizations are too critical of America. By comparison, smaller percentages of the general public fault the press for not caring about people they report on (53%), and being too critical of America (43%).

read more HERE

cross posted at BuzzFlash.com

For reporting that is an embarrassment to the profession of journalism, and for being beholden to corporate paymasters rather than the citizens of America.

Oh boy, does Tim Russert fit the BuzzFlash Media Putz description to a “T”: “In recognition for reporting that is an embarrassment to the profession of journalism, and tailored to corporate paymasters rather than serving the citizens of America.”

When you work for NBC, owned by GE, you don’t make a lot of political waves with the status quo in D.C. that gives big fat contracts to your parent corporation. Tim Russert knows if he ever asked a meaningful follow-up question to Dick Cheney or any other “guest” from the dark side, a reprimanding phone call would come from down on high. Those kind of reprimands could dent a fat paycheck, so Tim knows to just offer up a baby-face smile and let the GOP Masters of the Universe lie away.

In a tribute he wrote to his father, Russert writes about his love and admiration for a no-nonsense working class man who raised four children while working two jobs in South Buffalo, NY. But clearly, while “Big Russ” (as Tim titled the book and calls his dad) was an admirable working class hero, “Little Russ” is a toady who left the integrity in Buffalo as he pursued the big bucks.

Russert’s main skill has nothing to do with journalism. It’s his affability ratings when they conduct those strange focus groups where they hook people up to wires that somehow detect if they “like” a television “‘personality.” In short, Tim would never “offend” anyone by pointing out that they are lying. That maybe why Cheney loves to be interviewed by “Little Russ.”

Most recently, BuzzFlash reader Diane Rogers nominated Tim for a lovefest he held on the July 15 “Meet the Press” with Robert Novak and friends. It was just one friendly guffaw after another as the entrenched “pundits” provided a vehicle for promoting Novak’s new book.

Diane wrote in her nomination of Russert:

Tim Russert for hosting a Meet the Press “roundtable” Sunday (7/15) with Robert Novak, Al Hunt, and “political strategists” Mike Murphy (Republican) and Robert Shrum (Democrat), in what looked like a get-together for Novak to promote his book, The Prince of Darkness.

Novak got another chance to say, without rebuttal, that Valerie Plame couldn’t have been covert, and no crime was committed. The “liberal” Hunt, in fact, thinks Bob got a “bum rap” in the Plame case and pronounced the book “fabulous.”

read more HERE

By Kenneth Li and Robert MacMillan

I sincerely hope the Bancrofts DON’T cave in and let this deal go through with Murdoch. He’ll ruin the Wall Street Journal. I realize the editorial page isn’t what it used to be, but the overall news reporting is one of the best in the business. - JS

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. appeared to be inching closer to a deal to buy Dow Jones & Co. Inc. and gaining enough support from the divided Bancroft family, but both sides were still wrangling over the price.

In an attempt to win support among family members for the $5 billion deal, Dow Jones was negotiating for News Corp. to cover the advisory fees for the Bancrofts of at least $30 million, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site.

The Bancroft family controls Dow Jones through its 64 percent stake in voting stock of the company.

The deal would go through if two holdout shareholders agreed, the Journal reported. They are board member Christopher Bancroft and trusts managed by Denver law firm Hole Roberts & Owen. If they agree, it would give News Corp. enough Bancroft support to buy Dow Jones.

Michael Elefante, a Dow Jones board member and adviser to the Bancrofts, had set Monday as a deadline for the Bancrofts to indicate how they would vote. Elefante then is expected to present the results to Dow Jones’s and News Corp.’s boards for them to determine whether they can complete the deal.

Separately, Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan urged Dow Jones to meet with him and provide material to conduct due diligence as part of his own proposal for the company.

read more HERE

By RICHARD PeREZ

Despite an imminent deadline, the Bancroft family and even some of its advisers seem sharply split over whether to sell Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

The divisions make it almost impossible to handicap whether enough family members will vote in favor of a sale or even whether they can reach any conclusion by the deadline of 5 p.m. today.

The boards of both Dow Jones and the News Corporation are bracing for the possibility that they will not have a definitive answer tomorrow, people close to both boards say, and are trying to determine their next moves, which for Dow Jones could include a general shareholder vote.

“The potential for chaos is high,” said a person close to Dow Jones management who had been briefed on the family’s deliberations but who was not authorized to speak about them.

Even within the Bancroft camp, opposition to the deal is divided. Some family trustees, like Christopher Bancroft and Jane Cox MacElree, are opposed to a sale because they do not care for Mr. Murdoch’s brand of journalism and worry that he would interfere in the news pages of the Journal.

Others, like a group of family trusts controlled by lawyers in Denver, are willing to sell but want to hold out for a 10 to 20 percent premium over the $60-per’share offer News Corporation has made, at least for the supervoting shares of the company. Both Dow Jones and News Corporation have emphatically said they would only consider one price for all shares.

read more HERE