No, It's Not Just About Golf. It's Much Worse Than That

I firmly believe that one of the big -- if not the biggest -- reasons that our political environment is so completely effed up is because our media is so completely effed up. If the press covered things that actually mattered and bothered to inform people, it would be very hard for charlatans to gain political purchase. But they don't. What we get instead is not substantially different from celebrity "news" shows; the coverage is about personalities, not issues. We get plenty of stories about who's fighting who, but very little information on what they're fighting about.

For example...

Politico:

White House Correspondents Association president Ed Henry is standing by his complaints about the lack of press access to President Obama, pushing back against critics who say he and his fellow White House correspondents are just "whining" and don't respect the president's privacy.

"This is a fight for more access, period," Henry told POLITICO late Monday night. "I've heard all kinds of critics saying the White House press corps is whining about a golf game and violating the president's privacy. Nothing could be further from the truth."

"We're not interested in violating the president's privacy. He's entitled to vacations like everyone else. All we're asking for is a brief exception, quick access, a quick photo-op on the 18th green," Henry continued. "It's not about golf -- it's about transparency and access in a broader sense."

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The Savvy Idiots of Political Journalism

My view is that there’s nothing that’s secret in campaigns anymore — but that doesn’t mean everything is understandable in a campaign. The ability of campaigns to run circles around journalists in some places is strong, and it’s not healthy.
-Terry Nelson, John McCain's 2008 campaign manager.

It isn't getting much coverage -- and it's easy to understand why. In a New York Times op-ed over the weekend, journalist and author Sasha Issenberg informs us that nearly everything journalists think they know about political campaigns is wrong and those misconceptions are reflected in reporting.

I covered the 2008 election for The Boston Globe, filing articles that I hoped would rise above the superficial and ephemeral poll-driven reporting that I had been trained to disdain. But after spending the last two years reporting on the scientific revolution that is quietly reshaping politics, I realized how much of the story my colleagues and I had missed.

Over the last decade, almost entirely out of view, campaigns have modernized their techniques in such a way that nearly every member of the political press now lacks the specialized expertise to interpret what’s going on. Campaign professionals have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding what moves votes. It’s as if restaurant critics remained oblivious to a generation’s worth of new chefs’ tools and techniques and persisted in describing every dish that came out of the kitchen as either “grilled” or “broiled.”

“When I went to work for my first campaign, in 1994, I was actually surprised at how journalists tended to think one step ahead where campaigns are four steps ahead,” says Joel Benenson, a former newspaper reporter who now serves as President Obama’s chief pollster. “Think of it as a level-five player in chess and a level-eight player in chess. You had people covering campaigns who are at the mercy of the grandmasters of politics.”

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No Light, White Heat -- The Media Shirks its Duty to Illuminate

There's a reason why incandescent bulbs are less efficient than compact fluorescents. We all know that energy can't be created or destroyed. So, when a bulb emits light, it's really just a sort of energy converter -- electrical energy is turned into light energy. But an incandescent bulb wastes more of that energy as heat. If you've ever tried to change a bulb that just blew, you know this. It's hot. If you could find some way to inhibit that bulb from converting energy into heat, that bulb would burn brighter.

I bring this up not as an environmental message, but as an expression of pure physics. When a device uses energy to produce another form of energy, some of the power is going to be lost. So the energy put into producing another type of energy is not equal to the energy that is the product. In the lightbulb, this means that the production of heat reduces the energy available for illumination.

This is a metaphor for our media environment. Energy is wasted in copious amounts. Even in our 24/7 news climate, no single news outlet is capable of supplying limitless amounts of information. The output is constrained and the energy it takes to create that output is, by necessity, limited. It's the job of the media to illuminate, but -- like the bulb -- a lot of that energy is wasted. The news media exists to cast light, but a lot of the energy that goes into it is wasted by generating heat.

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Irrational Non-Solutions to the WikiLeaks "Problem"

There's nothing like good, old fashioned irrationality. So many other conditions sprout from it -- willful ignorance, stupidity, hatred, paranoia, and fanaticism, to name a few. While we're at it, let's add futility to the list.

New York Times:

The Air Force is barring its personnel from using work computers to view the Web sites of The New York Times and more than 25 other news organizations and blogs that have posted secret cables obtained by WikiLeaks, Air Force officials said Tuesday.

When Air Force personnel on the service's computer network try to view the Web sites of The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Spanish newspaper El País and the French newspaper Le Monde, as well as other sites that posted full confidential cables, the screen says "Access Denied: Internet usage is logged and monitored," according to an Air Force official whose access was blocked and who shared the screen warning with The Times. Violators are warned that they face punishment if they try to view classified material from unauthorized Web sites.

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Wikileaks and Kiddie Porn Barbie -- If Something is Possible, You Should Be Afraid of It

Beware this Christmas! Your children could be at risk! If kindly old Grampa Jimmy gives little Suzie a certain Barbie doll, then kindly old Grampa Jimmy could possibly be a child molester! So sayeth the imaginative, paranoid minds at the FBI.

Associated Press:

The FBI has issued a "cybercrime alert" on a new Barbie doll that comes with a hidden video camera.

[...]

The FBI's Sacramento office issued a report last month with the warning on Mattel's Barbie Video Girl. The doll has a video camera lens built into its necklace that can record up to 30 minutes of footage to be downloaded on a computer.

FBI spokesman Steve Dupre says the alert was inadvertently sent to the media but only was meant to be given to law enforcement agencies advising them not to overlook the doll during any searches.

"Officials warn that it could possibly be used to produce child pornography," the report tells us, "but say they don't have any reported crimes." It could be used to create child pornography, but it hasn't been. That's probably a better record of kiddie porn non-production than any other camera in the world.

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Zero Sum BS

If you follow politics, you've probably seen the argument. You're reading a blog post or a comment thread or a discussion on an online forum and you see words that go something like "capitalism isn't a zero sum game." What this means is that, when we're talking about wealth, there isn't a limited amount and it isn't possible for one person or one group of people to collect it all. Wealth is created all the time -- if it weren't, a growing population would've ruined capitalism with Malthusian cannibalism long before the system of capitalism even had a name. The "zero sum game" argument is generally used defensively when someone's complaining that such-and-such a gazillionaire is making way too much money. Since wealth creation isn't a "zero sum game," we're told, it's ridiculous to say that this gazillionaire is living high on the hog at the expense of all of the non-gazillionaires among us.

But this "zero sum game" argument is only partially true. At this moment in time, there's only X dollars worth of wealth in the world. It's not an unlimited amount. It is, therefore, most definitely a zero sum game. It won't be eventually, but we live in the now. If you buy something, you're generally not going to get that money back -- eat lunch at a restaurant and someone is cash richer because you've become slightly cash poorer. At any given moment, the contents of your wallet is a fixed sum. It's possible for someone else to take it all.

This reality works both ways and a post by Dean Baker at his American Prospect blog demonstrates that. Baker is a media critic who follows economic reporting (we need a lot more of this, by the way) and his response to a Washington Post article about the market and the economy is much more interesting than the article itself.





The WaPo article freaked out about the loss of $6.9 trillion in value in U.S. stock market last year. But, as we need to be reminded more often, Wall St. isn't the economy -- as much as financial reporting makes it seem that way. "While those who own large amounts of stock have reason to shed tears, this may end being good news for the rest of us," Baker tells us.

The loss of stock wealth means that stockholders have less claim to value of the country's output. The U.S. economy can produce just as much in 2009 as it did in 2008 (in fact somewhat more, because of labor force and productivity growth). If stockholders can demand less because of the reduced value of their stock, then this leaves more for the rest of us.

The most visible evidence of how the loss of stockholder wealth can benefit the rest of us was the sharp decline in consumer prices over the last three months. As a result, real wages rose at almost a 15 percent annual rate in the three months from September through November.

Grab an ad insert from your local paper to see this demonstrated. Demand has dropped prices to the consumer's favor. What you have buys more. When Baker says, "The loss of stock wealth means that stockholders have less claim to value of the country's output," he means that the immediate sum total of wealth has shifted in your favor.

But, of course, people are losing jobs. As a result, we aren't taking advantage of this de facto raise in wages. The working are afraid of joining the unemployed, so they're pinching pennies until Lincoln squeals. And it's the working -- i.e., labor -- that creates wealth, not Wall St. All the financial sector does, at its most basic, is trade money. Products and services are supplied by labor and demanded by consumers -- that's the real market and that's the real basis of the economy. It's all about consumption.

But the focus on Wall St. has served us poorly for years. As the market did better and better (even though it was a house of cards), real wages fell. The gap between rich and poor became greater and greater. If the economy wasn't a zero sum game, it was sure looking like one, with people gaining at the expense of others.

"To focus on the performance of the market... is to zero in on an economic indicator that can do well even as the country does poorly," wrote Ezra Klein in September. "In 2006, for instance, the Dow Jones industrial average hit highs. According to the just released census data, however, median earnings fell 1 percent, and millions more Americans entered the ranks of the uninsured. Indeed, from 2000 to 2007, the S&P 500 gained more than 500 points; meanwhile, the median household's income, at least as of 2006, fell by more than $900." While the media and the Bush administration were focused on the stock market, the actual economy was showing cracks. As is now being said so often as to become cliched, the focus was on Wall St., not Main St. And, as isn't being said often enough, the real economy is on Main St.

Therefore, the job isn't to fix Wall St. While important, it's not the be-all and end-all of the economy. And, if we pretend it is, we aren't going to get anywhere but in the same fix we were in -- right before it all went to hell. We need to increase demand and we need to do it where demand is strongest -- through workers.

"[I]f the loss of demand [for labor] from stockholders is effectively replaced by demand from the government or foreign sector, then the vast majority of the country will be made better off by this plunge in stock prices," Baker writes. In other words, if the demand for workers shifts and is made up, then we're going to have money that's worth more -- as we do now -- but that we also feel can be spent safely.

It's often said that the best social program in the world is a job, but it's also true that it's the best economic program. If government can create jobs through investments in our infrastructure, then there really isn't a better and more logical time to do it than now. If we can put the brakes on the constantly increasing unemployment, then people will feel easier about spending money that, as it is, has more value right now.

It's a no-brainer.

-Wisco

To Fix the Media, Kill Phony Objectivity

I've been ripping on the media lately and not without good cause. We've seen what may have been the worst and most uninformative presidential debate of our lifetime. Well, worst and most uninformative to date, anyway. There may not be any lower limit to just how bad television news can make things. We've seen the media give John McCain the kid gloves treatment, meeting terrible campaign decisions and appearances with near-applause. We've seen the media acting as stenographers to power, repeating everything they're told without examining whether or not any of it is true.

Still, the fourth estate is not dead, merely sick. Perhaps dying. But it's not done yet. Print journalism, at least, is still kicking. And sometimes producing great work. We see the difference in coverage of Iraq. Where TV media tends to show us Iraq as a big map, print journalists show us that people live and work within the borders. When watching cable news or the networks, it's often as if you're watching from the moon. Everything you see is shown as a matter of nations, not people. And, since nations are at their most basic entirely conceptual, coverage of Iraq becomes an academic exercise. It's not a war, it's a game, and Iraq is that weird shaped piece in the middle east. Take Iraq and the grand plan to capture Yakutsk and Kamchatka moves apace.

McClatchy Baghdad Correspondent Leila Fadel reprints part of a letter from a mother that reminds us why a more focused and earthly approach to the news is still important. In response to an article and accompanying video about US troops in Sadr City, she wrote:

Lt Adam Bowen is my son. You were with him and his platoon a few days ago in Sadr City. When I read your article, which so accurately depicted him, I could hear him talking and hear his tone of voice in each quote. But then I saw the video. I watched it, with lots of trepidation, hoping for a just quick glimpse of him. When the camera panned around the room, and I found myself face to face with him, it was such an incredible moment. I’ve watched it over and over and have paused it repeatedly just to be able to look at him, to see if he’s okay. (He looks well—I hope you found him so.) I play it again and again, hearing him in the background on the radio.

"Something Lt. Bowen said to me has stuck with me," Fadel writes. "'Nobody cares about what we're doing here, nobody but our families.' I hope that's not true."

At the risk of conjuring memories of Soylent Green, I'd remind TV media outlets that the news is people. Maps are just some crap we made up and arbitrarily imposed on the world.

Another print journalist who demonstrates this is columnist Dana Milbank in a piece for the Washington Post. Titled "What the Family Would Let You See, the Pentagon Obstructs," it's about the micromanagement of media coverage of the funeral of Lt. Col. Billy Hall.

The family of 38-year-old Hall, who leaves behind two young daughters and two stepsons, gave their permission for the media to cover his Arlington burial -- a decision many grieving families make so that the nation will learn about their loved ones' sacrifice. But the military had other ideas, and they arranged the Marine's burial yesterday so that no sound, and few images, would make it into the public domain.

Milbank tells us that the roadblocks put up to the media, who were invited by the family to cover the service, "fits neatly with an effort by the administration to sanitize the war in Iraq."

He reports what he can and tells us that there's a bigger story here, one the military goes to extremes to keep out of the news. These fallen have families and Hall was no exception; he leaves behind two daughters, 6-year-old Gladys and 3-year-old Tatianna. "In the front row of mourners, one young girl trudged along, clinging to a grown-up's hand; another child found a ride on an adult's shoulders," Milbank writes. "It was a moving scene -- and one the Pentagon shouldn't try to hide from the American public."

But not even TV news is hopeless. There are times when everything is so big and so overwhelming that reality seeps into the detachment. Where TV journalists tend to be robotic, the emotional context of the story can't be denied and it's at this point -- sadly, when all their TV news training fails -- that we see excellence.

Both of my examples of this come from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was so huge and so overwhelming and so tragic that it was difficult for journalists to maintain their objectivity and became, if only for a moment, human.

This is video of an interview of Katrina survivor Hardy Jackson by Jennifer Mayerle, a reporter for WKRG, Mobile, Alabama. It was shot in Biloxi, Mississippi:



This was the best video I could find and it's a little quiet (at least, on my machine), so I went looking for a transcript. I totally lucked out and found one, as well as great commentary on it by G.E. "Skip" Lawrence of the Phoenixville News, a small paper in the Philadelphia area.

[Mayerle] tries out a conclusion, that "Hurricane Katrina is proving to be a powerful, destructive, and maybe deadly storm here along the Gulf coast. We know that people will remember this storm for years to come."

As she does, a man who had started to pass her doubles back, two small boys in tow. "I lost my wife", says Hardy Jackson, 434 Heidenheim Avenue. She doesn't hear him.

Mayerle: How are you doing, sir?

Jackson: I'm not doing good.

Mayerle: What happened?

Jackson: The house just split in half.

Mayerle: Your house split in half?

Jackson: [inaudible] We got up in the roof, all the way to the roof. And water came in high, just opened it up, divided it.

Mayerle: Who was at your house with you?

Jackson: My wife.

Mayerle: And where is she now?

Jackson: [inaudible] She's gone.

Mayerle: You can't find your wife?

Jackson: No, she told me, I tried, I hold her hand as tight as I could. And she told me, 'You can't hold on.' She said, 'Take care of the kids, and the grandkids.'

Mayerle: What's your wife's name, in case we can get this out there?

Jackson: Tonette Jackson.

Mayerle: Okay. And what is your name?

Jackson: Hardy Jackson.

Mayerle: Where are you guys going?

Jackson: We got nowhere to, I don't know where I'm going. I'm, I'm lost. That's all I had. That's all I had. Don't know what we'll do.

Mayerle: [to the camera] Katrina is proving to be a dead...

Jackson: There's six, a few more bodies over there where I stayed at. Laying, laying right there in the mud.

Mayerle: You guys, you take care of your boys, okay? [to the camera] Katrina is proving to be a deadly storm. Now reporting in Biloxi, Jennifer Mayerle, News 5.

"In print, this scans as if Mayerle is doing nothing more than being a good reporter, structuring the occasion with reporter's questions, asked with reporters' objectivity," Lawrence wrote. "But at 'I'm lost' - which was, of course, not an answer to her question of geography - she starts to cry. Her questions now come with a tremble. Her practiced line 'Katrina is proving to be..'" becomes her salvation. She drops the 'maybe' from 'maybe a deadly storm', and hangs on to the rest as tightly as she would have done to a piece of flotsam on what used to be Heidenheim Avenue."

It turns out that the pretty blonde news-robot isn't a robot at all. At the moment her objectivity fails her, we fall from our detached orbit and find ourselves on that ruined street, worried about this man and his boys who have suddenly become inarguably real to us. Hardy Jackson became a minor celebrity because of this, the footage was widely circulated, and people around the world wanted to help him specifically and other survivors generally. One year later, Jackson was living in a donated home. TV journalism made a difference, but only because objectivity was lost and humanity shown.

It may be that the most revealing video footage from Katrina (Windows and Quicktime, courtesy of Crooks and Liars) came from the most unlikely source -- FOX News. On the BS spin show, Hannity & Colmes, Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera pretty much lose it. Sent to the center of the devastation, the Superdome, these guys find themselves in a situation that's impossible to spin. At one point, Rivera tries to explain just how awful it all is, finally going with "What the hell?" He just doesn't have the words.

Sean Hannity is clearly unprepared for this sort of truth-telling. He was looking for FOX-style "the rest of the media says this is bad because they hate Bush" spin and he gets truth jammed down his throat. At one point, he tells Smith "I wanna get some perspective here..." (which is Hannity-speak for "let me spin this") and Smith bites his head off.

"This is perspective!" Smith says. "This is all the perspective you need!" Both reporters are visibly upset and genuinely angered and grief-stricken and appalled by what they're seeing all around them.

"The government said, 'You go here and you'll get help' or 'You go into that Superdome and you'll get help.' But they didn't get help. They got locked in there and they watched people being killed around them. And they watched people starving and they watched elderly people not get any medicine," Smith reported. "And now they know it's happening. Because we've been telling them, repeatedly. Over and over, every day..."

Shepard Smith changed from Leni Riefenstahl to a mix of Edward R. Murrow and Tom Jode that night. I wish I could say he never changed back. Given the enormity of what he was seeing, the tremendous mismanagement that was turning a disaster into a catastrophe, and seeing from the ground what needed to be done and what wasn't happening, he stopped being a robot too. And once again, we fell out of that detached TV news orbit and found ourselves face to face with unimaginable tragedy.

In terms of journalism, the sad thing is that these people needed to become emotionally defeated to get past all the maps and graphs and polls and pundits to actually report the damned news honestly. But it proves that TV news isn't hopeless, it can be done right. The problem is that there aren't many out there who are doing it.

The news is people -- even TV news.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; media; FOX News; Katrina; disaster; Believe it or not, TV journalism can be done right -- it's just that almost no one does it

The Media Hearts McCain

I brought it up yesterday, but there's a McClatchy headline that reads "McCain picks failing Ohio factory to laud free trade." I return to this story to demonstrate a problem -- you don't see these sort of headlines about McCain very often, but he does stuff like this all the time. McCain has a real bad habit of doing things that not only should he have no business doing, but things that no sane person would even consider doing. What should be massive media and PR gaffes are ignored, for the most part, by the media.

On April 22, John McCain was in Selma, Alabama. There, McCain praised the civil rights movement.

"Forty-three years ago, an army of more than 500 marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an army that brought with them no weapons, which intended no destruction, that sought to conquer no people or land," McCain said standing a few hundred yards away from bridge, bathed in the warm spring sunlight.

"They were people who believed in America, in the promise of America," he said. "And they believed in a better America. They were patriots, the best kind of patriots."

On March 7, 1965, the protesters, almost all of them black, had gathered to march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.

They never made it across the bridge. At its crest, police and state troopers attacked them, unleashing a vicious assault on the demonstrators that was captured on film. When it was shown on television, it shocked the nation. March 7 would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.

Check out the photo to see how well that turned out. Selma's about 70% black, yet you're now snow-blind. Don't worry, it's like looking at a lightbulb, it'll go away eventually.

Of course, the problem is that McCain voted against the MLK jr. holiday -- in fact, he campaigned against it. This was something he had earlier apologized for at the very hotel where King was assassinated. On the anniversary of King's death. To a crowd who were less than enthusiastic. In fact, so unenthusiastic that McCain was booed. Yet, what would've been a media disaster for any other candidate was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.

The media reaction was basically, "Well, how nice that he apologized." Never mind that the apology didn't seem to have been accepted.

And now, with all these bad campaign choices behind him -- and pretty thoroughly ignored -- McCain moves on to what in any sane world would be the next high profile media disaster; a visit to New Orleans today. The same New Orleans that big time endorser John Hagee said was wiped out by a hurricane because it didn't hate gays enough to please the Almighty. In fact, he's said it more than once. Most recently, tuesday. On talk radio nut Dennis Prager's program, Hagee had this to say:

PRAGER: Right, but in the case, did NPR get, is this quote correct though that in the case of New Orleans you do feel it was sin?

HAGEE: In the case of New Orleans, their plan to have that homosexual rally was sin. But it never happened. The rally never happened.

PRAGER: No, I understand.

HAGEE: It was scheduled that Monday.

PRAGER: No, I’m only trying to understand that in the case of New Orleans, you do feel that God’s hand was in it because of a sinful city?

HAGEE: That it was a city that was planning a sinful conduct, yes.

Anyone going to ask McCain about that today? Probably not. If they do, they won't press it. The networks are still playing clips of Jeremiah Wright -- long after polls showed that few people blame Obama for them -- but Hagee's bigotry goes unnoticed and uncommented on. In fact, the only ripples caused by the Hagee endorsement came from his anti-catholicism; his anti-gay bigotry is largely unknown. And the idea that a vengeful god would visit disaster -- not just on a city, but on an entire region -- over a rally in one place in one city is never questioned or even mentioned.

The thing is, that would really put McCain on the spot. One the one hand, he's been kissing up to the religious right for some time. On the other, Hagee's out of his mind -- just like all the other Jesus-happy homophobes -- and saying he was onboard with the death fantasies of John Hagee would hurt him with a large American demographic; i.e., sane people. He'd have to decide who he wanted to throw under the bus.

John McCain has the media in his back pocket. I'm not the first to say that. It goes back quite a long time. In 2000, PBS's NewsHour with Jim Leherer asked, "McCain: Media Darling?"

The answer they came up with was "yes." Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a Bush backer, said, "I said last week that the news ... the national news media were slobbering all over John McCain and that well known conservative correspondent Mary McGrory of the Washington Post said that absolutely it was true, that I was quite right, that the press has swooned for McCain. I've never seen anything like it..."

Even McCain campaign co-chair, former Senator Warren Rudman, agreed. "Of course it's true," he said. "They've not gone easy, but if you want to use the word slobber, I'll take slobber. But let me tell you why. You covered it in your opening. I've traveled on that bus. Several of the people here have traveled on that bus. It's remarkable -- unprecedented access -- not mealy-mouthed campaign bite answers. Ask a question, get an answer. But most of all, the press has watched him at 114 town meetings in New Hampshire answer every question and they've respected this guy and they like him."

Keep that phrase "unprecedented access" in mind -- the rest is BS. The good news for lefties is that George W. Bush found a way to beat McCain, despite the fact that the media were cutting him slack left and right. The bad news is that they had to pull some really lousy crap to do it.

In their book, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, Media Matters founders David Brock and Paul Waldman pretty much explain it all:

Quote courtesy of Pam Spaulding:

[T]he Straight Talk Express had a jovial, locker-room atmosphere, complete with free-flowing booze and plenty of swearing on the candidate's part. "After a day or two of this sort of thing," [Tucker] Carlson wrote, "the average journalist inevitably concluded that John McCain was about the coolest guy who ever ran for president...I saw reporters call McCain 'John,' sometimes even to his face and in public. I heard others, usually at night in the hotel bar, slip into the habit of referring to the McCain campaign as 'we' -- as in, "I hope we kill Bush." It was wrong but hard to resist."

That's what the "unprecedented access" got him -- an extremely friendly media. I've been on kind of a tear about the media lately and this is just one more example of how they've dropped the ball. You can't really blame McCain for doing this, especially when it works so well. He can almost literally get away with anything -- right there in front of the press corps and the cameras -- so why on Earth would he operate any other way?

No, once again, the problem is the media. In fact, the problem is in not recognizing that there is a problem. Like the "embedded journalist" during the invasion of Iraq, reporters following McCain are falling into a "band of brothers" mindset and aren't being rotated out before they lose perspective. But the access makes it hard for media outlets to resist.

So McCain in New Orleans, a city so hated by God that the entire gulf coast had to pay for it, will be another PR disaster avoided. No one will press McCain on Hagee. They'll just meet at McCain's campaign bus -- the "Straight Talk Express" -- afterwards for drinks and ribs.

When it comes to John McCain, we don't actually have any journalists. We have McCain boosters who'll ignore "foibles" because he's just such a darned fun fella to cover.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; 2008; Republican; homophobia; Katrina; New Orleans; The media and John McCain -- BFF

"Waterboarding Works"

There's a trick in journalism known as "burying the lead." In this, a journalist, editor, producer, or whatever doesn't like what the story's clearly about, but finds the story impossible to ignore -- they have to report it. Which doesn't mean you can't spin it or sensationalize it. You can produce an absolutely factual piece, but you can change what the story's about.

Take the story of retired CIA officer John Kiriakou. Kiriakou spoke to ABC's Brian Ross about the capture and interrogation of terrorist suspect Abu Zabaydah. He told Ross that Zabaydah was waterboarded by the CIA. The suspect then caved. According to Kiriakou, Zabaydah "was able to withstand the waterboarding for quite some time -- and by that I mean probably 30, 35 seconds." Zabaydah later told interrogators that "Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate because his cooperation would make it easier on the other brothers who had been captured.

"And from that day on, he answered every question..." Kiriakou told Ross.

The story is that the CIA used waterboarding -- newsworthy because the CIA has destroyed tapes of interrogations. Many observers believe that destroying the tapes amounts to the destruction of evidence and the CIA was concerned that agents involved in waterboarding could be prosecuted. The 9/11 commission had requested such tapes and were told they didn't exist.

But back to burying the lead. Most of the headlines about this story are "Waterboarding Works." Take this, from the right wing CNS News Service, titled "Some Senators Wary of Waterboarding, Even to Save Lives."

With a vote pending to restrict the interrogation techniques of the Central Intelligence Agency, many senators were non-committal Tuesday on whether they would agree to outlaw waterboarding after a former CIA officer said the method of simulated drowning helped save American lives.

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou told ABC News and The Washington Post that the waterboarding of terrorist Abu Zubayda "probably saved lives," although Kiriakou did not participate in the waterboarding and does not support its use.

I should explain that it's called "the lead" because it's what you open the story with. Most news stories are written in what's called an "hourglass" structure that can be summed up like this:

1. Here's what the story's about.
2. Here are the details.
3. And that's what the story was about.

It works because it's actually a logical argument we're very familiar with. "This is my argument, this is the evidence supporting my argument, and that's why I came to the conclusions presented in my argument" -- or, more simply, "It's two, because it's one and one and that's two." The hourglass works because it's how we teach and learn.

So CNS took a story verifying waterboarding by the CIA and made into "Waterboarding works, but some Senators still oppose it -- here's a few. And that's why some Senators oppose waterboarding, even though it works." In that entire story, Kiriakou was quoted in a total of three words; "probably saved lives." Reading this, you have no idea what else he said, other than he's against it.

Yet, in the first story I quoted, Kiriakou went on in a lot more detail.

Asked if he believed waterboarding was torture, Kiriakou said that he didn't [think] so at the time, but his opinion on the subject had shifted. "I think I've changed my mind," he said. "And I think that waterboarding is probably something that we shouldn't be in the business of doing."

Added Kiriakou, "We're Americans and we're better than this. And we shouldn't be doing this kind of thing. But at the same time, what happens if we don't waterboard a person and we don't get that nugget of information. I would have trouble forgiving myself."

Given that Kiriakou probably came out because of the CIA tape scandal and given that the Geneva Conventions clearly bar torture, what he's saying is that the CIA participated in a war crime and covered it up. That's the lead.

Yet, what most of the media is doing with their "Waterboarding Works" stories is giving the right wing an entirely different story to tell. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is now asking, "When did the liberal media decide ... that waterboarding was torture?" and saying the CIA was right to destroy the tapes. The US military banned waterboarding.

The CIA said it had in back in September. Now I wonder.

Either way, we're now going to hear about how "waterboarding works" from right wingers for a long, long time. The media has made it easy for them.

Meanwhile, let's look at a damned good reason why we shouldn't torture. Think Progress has a post showing Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham asking Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann whether Iranian intelligence waterboarding a captured US airman would violate Geneva. Hartmann refused to answer.

GRAHAM: You mean you're not equipped to give a legal opinion as to whether or not Iranian military waterboarding, secret security agents waterboarding downed airmen is a violation of the Geneva Convention?

HARTMANN: I am not prepared to answer that question, Senator.

If we can do it, they can do it. And, as Hartmann demonstrates, we can't complain about it. By practicing torture, we put our own troops in greater danger of torture.

And that's what my post about waterboarding and burying the lead was all about.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; terrorism; crime; CIA; scandal; military; media; There's sometimes a fine line between journalism and propaganda