Category: Media

John Fund has a nice little column on my buddy Stefan Sharkansky’s work to keep the Washington governor’s election honest:

The new media–talk radio, bloggers and independent watchdog groups–have followed up their success in exposing Dan Rather’s use of phony memos by showcasing another scandal: Washington state’s bizarre race for governor, which features a vote count so close and compromised it allows Florida to retire the crown for electoral incompetence. If Democrat Christine Gregoire, who leads by 129 votes and is scheduled to take the office Wednesday, eventually has to face a new election, it will have been in large part because of the new media’s ability to give the story altitude before it reached the courts.

The issue is far from settled, and Stefan’s work has given it a prominence that the Seatlle media wanted to avoid at all costs.

It’s interesting that the blogosphere is all abuzz with news of the CBS Rathergate report, which resulted in the firing of four CBS News employees (see Instapundit, Buzzmachine, RatherBiased, Rathergate, Real Clear Politics, Red State), but the Big Six leftwing sites (Eschaton, Dreary Kos, Kevin Drum, Tapped, Marc Cooper and Josh Marshall) are all completely silent about it. Do they hope it will all go away if they can just shut their eyes long enough?

Apparently.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis is hopping mad about how the report marginalizes the bloggers who broke the story and how it excuses Dan Rather’s “perspective.” We concur.

UPDATE: Even Instapundit notices the blackout; check him out, he needs the traffic.

UPDATE: Incidentally, this report is a whitewash. It finds most of the facts, but doesn’t make the obvious conclusions about bias that the facts indicate. I’m very disappointed in CBS News, but I didn’t really expect all that much either. Blaming Mary Mapes for Rather’s behavior is rather boorish, however.

UPDATE: New watchdog at CBS News. Never again.

NEWS FLASH: Atrios breaks radio silence with a bit of denial. I’m so impressed I could sneeze.

UPDATE: Welcome to Glenn’s readers. I’ll post something on breast-feeding shortly just to make everybody happy. Meanwhile, here’s the main page.

UPDATE: Now Sundries Shack, My View of the World, Slant Point, and Alarming News hear the crickets chirping.

UPDATE: After everybody has gone to bed, Kevin Drum sneaks a post onto Political Animal endorsing the “sloppy journalism but no evidence of bias” line. Give me a break. A commenter observes that racing to be the first to air a story they knew was false doesn’t really rate as competitive journalism. It was politically-motivated bias, nothing more and nothing less.

UPDATE: Marc Cooper finally weighs in with some constructive suggestions for CBS News from Jay Rosen mixed-in with the party line (“bias? what bias? we ain’t got no bias”.)

Jeff Jarvis thinks CBS News is beyond redemption and should be sold.

RatherBiased.com has some good news:

CBS News just announced that Dan Rather will be stepping down from “CBS Evening News” anchordesk on March 9, 2005.

Not a moment too soon.

UPDATE: Who’s your pick to replace Dan? I think CBS should go with either John Stewart (to maintain Dan’s bias) or Howard Stern. Howie would bring the dwarves, hookers, and porn stars to the show and appeal to the crucial teenaged boys with ADD demographic, no small feat these days; come to think of it, so would Stewart.

Bloggers are trumpeting their role in bringing Dan down, but I think it’s just a case of his finally being old enough, 73, for a job on 60 Minutes.

So CBS had planned to run the story about 380 tons of explosives missing in Iraq (out of 600,000 total) this weekend in order to sink the Bush re-elect effort, but the NY Times beat them to the punch. Unfortunately, NBC News has busted them:

An NBC News crew that accompanied U.S. soldiers who seized the Al-Qaqaa base three weeks into the war in Iraq reported that troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.

Reporter Lai Ling Jew, who was embedded with the Army?s 101st Airborne, Second Brigade, said Tuesday on MSNBC TV that the news team stayed at the Al-Qaqaa base for about 24 hours.

?No move to secure the weapons?
?There wasn?t a search,? she said. ?The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers headed off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around.

The fact that this story comes from a UN official desperate to shut down the Oil-for-Palaces scam is very disturbing, but not so disturbing that the Soros Brigade of Marshall, Brock, and Black didn’t run with it.

This is hilarious. Go see Lawrence (“Mr. Sterling”) O’Donnell when he’s off his meds.

President Bush is ahead of Kerry in the national polls right now by an average of 3.1 percent (see Real Clear Politics.) Over the past several months, his trend line is up while Kerry’s is flat (see Stephen den Beste.)

Michael Barone explains why this is happening:

Bush’s most effective opposition this year has come not from Kerry and the Democrats but from Old Media, the New York Times and the news pages of the Washington Post, along with the broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC. Old Media gave very heavy coverage to stories that tended to hurt Bush?violence in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the false charges of Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson, etc. And during the first eight months of the year Bush did a poor job of making his case.

Then, suddenly, that case was made with maximum effectiveness at the Republican National Convention in New York?by John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, by Zell Miller and Arnold Schwarzenegger, by Laura Bush and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush himself. Bush was able to get his message out unmediated by Old Media. (Fox News Channel had more viewers during the Republican National Convention than any of the old-line broadcast networks.) The message was simple: We need this president to protect the nation. Bush muffed the chance to deliver that message effectively in the first debate. But he made up for it in the second and third debates.

Kerry helped confirm the Bush message in the debates?by saying American action had to pass a global test, by saying that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq both was and was not a threat, by arguing that Saddam would “not necessarily” have remained in power if Kerry’s course had been taken. He remains the man who volunteered the words “I did actually vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” So in all the polls Bush continues to score better than Kerry on handling the war on terrorism and on handling Iraq.

Sounds about right, but there’s one other thing: Kerry’s messages are very appealing to the audidences for which they’re tailored, but it takes the voters a while to figure out that he’s pandering; they’ve more or less done that by now.

Go see the story of continuing slime from CBS News at Rather Biased.