RelentlesslyOptimistic

NewsTrust: Independent News Ratings

The old days when you could trust the media to be somewhat objective are about as mythical as many other visions of those better days in the past. Still, the extreme and hidden biases of many media outlets today does seem worse than even a decade ago.

NewsTrust is an ambitious effort to create a volunteer-based rating service that will use defined metrics to score stories on fairness, accuracy and credibility.

The service hasn't launched yet, but so far it appears they're doing everything right. They have an impressive staff and group of advisers, and in three months have done surveys that cross the political spectrum, tested the concept and usability of their service and developed and tested their news review tool.

"In today's rapidly changing media landscape, it is becoming harder to tell truth from fiction. Increasingly, sloppy journalism is treated as legitimate news, opinions are presented as facts, and misinformation spreads throughout our news media, threatening the foundation of democracy.

A non-profit venture...is now working on a practical solution to those issues...NewsTrust...aims to bring together experienced journalists and volunteer reviewers to rate news stories and their sources according to rigorous editorial standards"

Via Good Morning Silicon Valley

Scientific American: Now Fair and Balanced, and less filling!

I got busy and missed this until Torrez pointed it out. In their April 1 issue the editors of Scientific American come clean and admit how biased they've been towards facts and peer-reviewed theories, and even science. That's going to change, though.  In Okay, We Give Up -- We feel so ashamed the editors admit to their errors, and promise to change:

"True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.[...]
Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.[...]
Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But [Intelligent Design] theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.[...]
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. [...]
Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Image from here

The Agonist to the National Press Club: Hello?

The supposed "liberal" media has covered several events centered around blogging. All have had little or no representation from liberal or progressive blogs, and overwhelming representation from conservative ones.

Sean-Paul Kelley of The Agonist. is asking the National Press Club to include a serious liberal blogger in an upcoming forum. The "discredited conservative media operative Jeff Gannon, neé Guckert," who wasn't a blogger until after he was unmasked, was invited to be a panelist. "Guckert's token liberal counterpart will be a gossip blogger and sex comedy blogger."

As Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise said:

You can't make this stuff up: The National Press Club's panel on blogs and journalism includes Gannon/Guckert and Wonkette, but no liberal bloggers.

The Gannon/Guckert story was investigated and written first and most in blogs, primarily by John Aravosis of Americablog.org, yet the National Press Club, that bastion of the "liberal" media, did not think to invite him to be on the panel. Sean-Paul's full letter asking them to include Aravosis is here, along with contact info to weigh in with the Press Club.

Sleepwalking to disaster in Iran

Scott Ritter former UN Chief Weapons inspector in Iraq, wrote this essay about the clear US intention to attack Iran later this year. Many of the quotes of neoconservatives could have been about Iraq before the war: unsubstantiated allegations of intelligence and denying the knowledge of inspectors as justification for doing what they want to do anyway.
Sleepwalking to disaster in Iran.

"Late last year, in the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, I was contacted by someone close to the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq."[...]
"The American media today is sleepwalking towards an American war with Iran with all of the incompetence and lack of integrity that it displayed during a similar path trodden during the buildup to our current war with Iraq."[...]
"Enter John Bolton, who, as the former US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security for the Bush administration, is responsible for drafting the current US
policy towards Iran.
In February 2004, Bolton threw down the gauntlet by stating that Iran had a 'secret nuclear weapons programme' that was
unknown to the IAEA. 'There is no doubt that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons production programme', Bolton said, without providing any source to back up his assertions."

Sounds too familiar, doesn't it?

Onward Christian Soldier

Another day, another astounding post from Billmon that has to be repeated in its entirety. Welcome back, Bill!

Whiskey Bar: Christian Soldier

The legal battle over the life of Terri Schiavo may have ended, but a thick, fervent crowd remains in the makeshift encampment outside the Woodside Hospice House here . . .

No, we're not going to go home," said Bill Tierney, a young daughter at his side. "Terri is not dead until she's dead" . . .

Mr. Tierney, a former military intelligence officer in Iraq who works as a translator and investigator for private companies, cried as he talked about watching the Schiavo spectacle on television and feeling the utter need to be at the hospice.

New York Times
Protesters With Hearts on Sleeves and Anger on Signs
March 28, 2005

 

Bill Tierney . . . had just returned from eight months working as an interrogator for US forces in Baghdad, and had come to talk, on the record, about torture.

''The Brits came up with an expression – wog,'' Tierney said. ''That stands for Wily Oriental Gentleman. There's a lot of wiliness in that part of the world.''. . .

After explaining his various psychological tactics to the audience, interrogator Bill Tierney (a private contractor working with the Army) said, ''I tried to be nuanced and culturally aware. But the suspects didn't break.''

Suddenly Tierney's temper rose. ''They did not break!'' he shouted. ''I'm here to win. I'm here so our civilization beats theirs! Now what are you willing to do to win?'' he asked, pointing to a woman in the front row. ''You are the interrogators, you are the ones who have to get the information from the Iraqis. What do you do? That word 'torture'. You immediately think, 'That's not me.' But are we litigating this war or fighting it?'' . . .

Asked about Abu Ghraib, Tierney said that for an interrogator, ''sadism is always right over the hill. You have to admit it. Don't fool yourself – there is a part of you that will say, 'This is fun.' ''

Boston Globe
Spy world
February 13, 2005

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics at CNN

Heaneyland pointed to this Media Matters for America story: CNN.com posted misleading graph showing poll results on Schiavo case. The results didn't change; the first graph merely uses a different scale to imply that Democrats supported removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube to a much greater extent that Republicans or Independents. In fact, the difference was less than the poll's margin of error. The adjusted graph replaced the first one after the Media Matters story ran.  Pathetic.

First:                                                                    Adjusted:

The Daily Show: Ted Hitler says "all they have is facts"

One Good Move offers QT and a transcript to The Daily Show on the Guckert/Gannon scandal, and Stephen Cobert a la "Ted Hitler" discusses what "real journalism" is about. I know I've said it before: Jon Stewart for President!

Gasp! Iraq Election Turnout Reports May Have Been Inflated!

Who would have expected that our government would lie about that?

Daily Kos :: Um, maybe turnout wasn't so high....
"For days, the press repeated, as gospel, assertions offered by an election official that 8 million Iraqis went to the polls on Sunday, an impressive 57% turnout rate.
...on Thursday night, John F. Burns and Dexter Filkins of The New York Times reported that Iraqi election officials have quietly "backtracked, saying that the 8 million estimate had been reached hastily on the basis of telephone reports from polling stations across the country and that the figure could change."
...In al-Anbar it was only 17,000 of 250,000 eligible voters, or 7% turnout. In Mosul, a city of 1.8 million people, only 54,000 votes were cast (3% of the population, so probably no more than 5% of the eligible voters)."

Terrible performance by the media, again.

Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Feeds From Government Trough

There's tons of information available about the right-wing foundations funding an entire industry to promote conservative viewpoints and manage messages. What we're seeing now is that the mouthpieces for the conservative perspective industry have abandoned their disdain for government funding in order to pay themselves. So far hypocrisy isn't paying very well; Armstrong Williams got a quarter million, but the other two columnists secretly on the government payroll only got $20,000 and $10,000. And Michael McManus is a proponent of ethics! Your tax dollars at work.

Salon.com News | Third columnist caught with hand in the Bush till
"One day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a third embarrassing hire has emerged."
"Michael McManus, a marriage advocate whose syndicated column, "Ethics & Religion," appears in 50 newspapers, was hired as a subcontractor" by HHS for $10,000.

The Answer Is Yes, Maggie: Writer Backing Bush Plan Had Gotten Federal Contract

Orincus points to the first of the conservative columnists to be outed since Armstrong Williams said in effect that "everybody does it."

"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?" Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.

"So we'll be happy to tell Gallagher: Your career as a journalist is over. Or ought to be. Simply because it didn't occur to you to disclose it.

Funny thing about that, though: Back in September, Gallagher seemed to know enough about journalistic ethics to pontificate at length on the subject in the case of Dan Rather:

"Journalists don't talk like that. How could Dan know this story was true? Was he there? Did he see it personally? Of course not. Why was he vouching for the story in the language of faith, not like a hard-headed journalist reporting the evidence?"

Yes, Maggie knows all about those hard-headed types reporting the facts. The ones she's paid to report."

Clips from the Post story:

Writer Backing Bush Plan Had Gotten Federal Contract (washingtonpost.com).
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer

"In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.
...
But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal.
...
Later in the day, Gallagher filed a column in which she said that "I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers.""

Oh, the "I forgot" defense, usually used by teenagers who haven't done their chores, to use a family analogy. She's a marriage expert - what would she say to a couple who's teenager used that excuse?

How much money do you have to make to "forget" a $21,500 contract?

No on Gonzales: The Top Legal Officer Shouldn't Believe The President Is Above The Constitution, M'Kay?

No on Gonzales by kos

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. In this case, we, the undersigned bloggers, have decided to speak as one and collectively author a document of opposition. We oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General of the United States, and we urge every United States Senator to vote against him.
...
In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales's endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint."

Read the rest, join the fun here: Daily Kos :: No on Gonzales

Photo via the wonderful Bob Harris

Volunteers Needed: Distributed Research

Daily Kos :: No Pundit Left Behind - The FOIA Project
At Daily Kos GregP has started the NPLB research project to tease out the information about what other "journalists" besides Armstrong Williams might have been (or still be) on the government payroll.  He's set up a Yahoo Group for people interested. Find it here.

First They Came For The Communists....*

From Juan Cole

That the Revisionist-Zionist extremist Daniel Pipes has fond visions of rounding up Muslim Americans and putting them in concentration camps isn't a big surprise. That a mainstream American newspaper would publish this David-Dukeian evil is. Of course, this is also a man that President Bush appointed to a temporary vacancy at the United States Institute of Peace, after the Senate understandably balked at a regular appointment for him.

Pipes's little project requires him to attempt to justify the interment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. I hope Asian-Americans realize that a key wing of the Republican Party, i.e. the Neoconservatives, wishes them ill.

In typical neocon fashion, he attacks his opponents with his own fallacies. Sounding remarkably like a holocaust denier (after reading the editorial, you can just imagine him saying that "Hitler was misunderstood," can't you?), he calls liberals revisionists before they can accuse him of the same:

"In the United States, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II."
.
.

*To continue with the WWII era references that Mr. Pipes started:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
--Martin Niemöller

CNN AP Knows What's Most Important: Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays

CNN.com - Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays - Dec 28, 2004

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- A German statesman, a Czech super model and a Swedish Olympic ski champion were among the vacationers whose search for peace and sun in tropical southern Asia was shattered by the tsunamis that spared neither rich nor poor.

Too pathetic for words. I didn't expect to need this category again so soon.

Update: It's an AP wire story, though so far only CNN has used that headline. As of 7:15 Central Time, Google finds 281 uses of the first paragraph. Most seem to use some variation of "Celebrities Among Victims of Tsunami."

Maybe there is a positive side to this. Maybe those who live vicariously through TV will better grasp the extent of the disaster, and be moved to help.

From Geek Life via Sparkwood & 21

MISINFORMER OF THE YEAR

MISINFORMER OF THE YEAR
 

Of all the news anchors, columnists, pundits, and reporters whose work we've critiqued and corrected, one stands above all the rest. We're pleased to announce that with at least 75 (we stopped counting) lies, distortions, and mischaracterizations, television host, columnist, radio host, former Inside Edition anchor, man of the people, and Harvard University graduate Bill O'Reilly can now claim the title: 2004 Misinformer of the Year.

1. O'Reilly falsely claimed Bush didn't oppose 9-11 Commission.
2. O'Reilly falsely claimed Iraq had ricin.
3. O'Reilly repeated discredited claims on Iraq-Al Qaeda link.
4. O'Reilly fabricated "Paris Business Review" as source for success of French boycott.
5. O'Reilly cited phony stats to argue that taxes on rich are excessive.
6. O'Reilly confused on elementary economics.
7. O'Reilly doctored quotation to suggest Soros wished his own father dead.
8. O'Reilly questioned if Kennedy would show up to Democratic convention ... as Kennedy spoke behind him.
9. O'Reilly disparaged Democrats with trifecta of voter falsehoods.
10. O'Reilly on the radio: Three lies, one broadcast. (7/7/04)

Via The Sideshow