A More Conservative Union

CNN Headline: "Once an underdog in Massachusetts, Brown could shake national agenda"

2010-01-20T00:03:00.002-04:00

Republican Scott Brown has been capitalizing on voter anger.

(CNN) -- For weeks, he was the underdog candidate, running behind in the race for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. But today, Republican Scott Brown could deal President Obama his first defeat in the 2010 congressional elections.
Trailing by double digits a little more than a week ago, Brown has edged ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley in the race to fill the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat.
Brown, a state senator, has campaigned as the pickup truck-driving candidate, capitalizing on voter frustrations and vowing to send Obama's health care bill "back to its drawing board."
Coakley, the state's attorney general, had been considered a shoo-in, but now her party is desperately trying to keep a pivotal Senate seat from slipping away.

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"This was supposed to be a walk. It's fairly incredible that here we are ... and Ted Kennedy's seat is actually up for grabs," said Scott Helman, political editor for The Boston Globe.
Helman attributed the closeness of the race to two things: "I think Coakley's campaign operated for a long time as if this was going to be a fairly easy race; and two, Scott Brown's campaign has done a very good job, capitalizing on anger at Washington, anger over health care, anger about the deficit, the sort of throw-them-out mentality," he said.
A GOP win in Tuesday's special election would mean that Democrats would lose their 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, jeopardizing much of Obama's agenda, including health care reform.
Coakley's been criticized for running a lackluster campaign and not fighting hard enough for the seat. Massachusetts is considered a Democratic stronghold, but, by most accounts, Coakley has been unable to fire up her party.
Hoping to revive her sputtering campaign, Obama and former President Bill Clinton joined Coakley on the campaign trail.
"If you were fired up in the last election, I need you more fired up in this election," Obama urged a crowd at a Coakley campaign rally Sunday.
Supporters say Coakley is the best candidate to carry on Kennedy's lifelong fight for health care. Kennedy, known as the liberal lion of the Senate, died in August of brain cancer.
For the past three years, Coakley has been Massachusetts' attorney general. She previously spent eight years as the district attorney for Middlesex.
On her campaign Web page, the Democratic candidate points to her 20-year career in public service and her commitment to advocating the best interests of Massachusetts.
Heading into the race, few political analysts believed Brown had a serious shot at beating Coakley. Brown was underfunded and unknown statewide. No Republican has won a U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts since 1972. Democrats control the state's congressional delegation. They also hold the state's governorship, along with overwhelming majorities in the state legislature.
But Brown, who is in his third term in the state Senate, has charged forward on a pledge to end wasteful government spending and hand politics back to the people.
Before he was in the state Senate, Brown served three terms as a state representative. He's also a member of the Massachusetts National Guard.
"He's branded himself brilliantly. He has run as the people's senator," said Jennifer Donahue, a political analyst and contributor to The Huffington Post.
Asked in a debate last week if he was willing to sit in Kennedy's seat and block health care reform, Brown replied, "With all due respect, it's not the Kennedys' seat, and it's not the Democrats' seat, it's the people's seat."
Donahue said that was the game changer for Brown because Coakley "didn't have an effective answer against that."
More so than a statement on the candidates' strength and weaknesses, it's discontent among voters in Massachusetts that is driving this election, said David Gergen, a political analyst and CNN contributor.
"Scott Brown has turned this into a referendum on what's going on in Washington, especially with health care. His campaign began to gain traction when he said that, 'I am going to be the 41st senator, the one who can stop a lot of this,' " Gergen said.
Gergen also pointed to a major sports gaffe that might have hurt Coakley's image in Red Sox nation. In a recent radio interview, she suggested that former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling is a Yankees fan.
"When she was clueless the other day about who Curt Schilling was ... you can imagine what that did," Gergen said.
John Avlon, author of "Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics," says in the end, the results of Tuesday's election rest in the hands of independent voters. Democrats far outnumber Republicans in Massachusetts, but there are more independents than Republicans and Democrats combined.
"Independents are going to decide who wins this election, bottom line," he said. "Independents asserting their real power even in Massachusetts should be a huge wake-up call to Democrats and Republicans."
But no matter what the outcome, Avlon said this shouldn't be viewed as voters turning on Obama.
"I don't think it's a referendum on Obama necessarily personally, because he is still personally popular with many independents. It's the Democratic Congress that's being reacted against.

"Independents like the checks and balances of divided government. They dislike the ideological arrogance and legislative overreach that comes when one party controls both the White House and Congress. That's what you're seeing," he said.

What Washington Post Story Did Not Say about Its Own Poll: Most Americans Say They Want a Smaller Government

2010-01-19T00:41:00.002-04:00

Monday, January 18, 2010
By Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief
[Correction: Although the Washington Post’s Sunday story that focused primarily on a new Washington Post-ABC News poll—“Poll Shows Growing Disappointment, Polarization Over Obama’s Performance” by Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta—made no mention of the fact that the poll found that 58 percent of Americans say they favor a smaller government that provides fewer services, another story in Sunday’s Post—“One Year Later Assessing Obama; Testing the Promise of Pragmatism” by Dan Balz--did mention that finding.

The tenth paragraph of Balz’s story said: “The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country's problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points.”]

(CNSNews.com) - A large majority of Americans say they want a smaller government that provides them with fewer services, according to a new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News. But the Washington Post story about the poll makes no mention of this fact.

The poll asked: “Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?”

Fifty-eight percent said they favor a smaller government with fewer services, and only 38 percent said they favor a larger government with more services.

The Post did not mention the results from this poll question in its news story about the poll.

The poll surveyed a random sample of 1,083 American adults from Jan. 12-15, 2010.

Don't Shoot the Pollster

2010-01-15T00:40:00.000-04:00

Attacks on Scott Rasmussen and Fox News show a disturbing attitude toward dissent.

By PATRICK CADDELL AND DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN

Polling is both an art and a science, but recently it's also become a subject of political intimidation.
One shot was fired by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Dec. 8, when he dismissed Gallup's daily tracking of President Obama's job approval. It had hit a record low of 47%, and Mr. Gibbs called the results meaningless:
"If I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG I'd visit my doctor. If you look back I think five days ago. . . there was an 11 point spread, now there's a one point spread. . . I'm sure a six-year-old with a crayon could do something not unlike that. I don't put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is the daily Gallup trend. I don't pay a lot of attention to meaninglessness."
Polling is a science because it requires a range of sampling techniques to be used to select a sample. It is an art because constructing a sample and asking questions is something that requires skill, experience and intellectual integrity. The possibility of manipulation—or, indeed, intimidation—is great.
A recent case in point is what has happened to Scott Rasmussen, an independent pollster we both work with, who has an unchallenged record for both integrity and accuracy. Mr. Rasmussen correctly predicted the 2004 and 2008 presidential races within a percent, and accurately called the vast majority of contested Senate races in 2004 and 2006. His work has sometimes been of concern for Republicans, particularly when they were losing congressional seats in 2004 and 2006.
Most recently, Mr. Rasmussen has been the leader in chronicling the decline in the public's support for President Obama. And so he has been the target of increasingly virulent attacks from left-wing bloggers seeking to undermine his credibility, and thus muffle his findings. A Politico piece, "Low Favorables: Democrats Rip Rasmussen," reported on the attacks from blogs like the Daily Kos, Swing State Project, and Media Matters.
"Rasmussen Caught With Their Thumb on the Scale," cried the Daily Kos last summer. "Rasmussen Reports, You Decide," the blog Swing State Project headlined not long ago in a play on the Fox News motto.
"I don't think there are Republican polling firms that get as good a result as Rasmussen does," Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow with the progressive research outfit Media Matters, said in a Jan. 2 Politico article. "His data looks like it all comes out of the RNC."
Liberals have also noted that Rasmussen's daily presidential tracking polls have consistently placed Mr. Obama's approval numbers around five percentage points lower than other polling outfits throughout the year. This is because Rasmussen surveys likely voters, who are now more Republican in orientation than the overall electorate. (Gallup and other pollsters survey the entire adult population.) On other key issues like health care, Rasmussen's numbers have been echoed by everyone else.
Mr. Rasmussen, who is avowedly not part of the Beltway crowd in Washington, has been willing to take on issues like ethics and corruption in ways no other pollsters have been able to do. He was also one of the first pollsters to stress people's real fear of the growing size of government, the size of the deficit, and the concern about spending at a time when these issues were not really on Washington's radar screen.
The reaction against him has been strident and harsh. He's been called an adjunct of the Republican Party when in fact he has never worked for any political party. Nor has he consulted with any candidates seeking elective office.
The attacks on Rasmussen and Gallup follow an effort by the White House to wage war on Fox News and to brand it, as former White House Director of Communications Anita Dunn did, as "not a real news organization." The move backfired; in time, other news organizations rallied around Fox News. But the message was clear: criticize the White House at your peril.
As pollsters for two Democratic presidents who served before Barack Obama, we view this unprecedented attempt to silence the media and to attack the credibility of unpopular polling as chilling to the free exercise of democracy.
This is more than just inside baseball. As practicing political consultants, both of us have seen that the established parties try to stifle dissent among their political advisers and consultants. The parties go out of their way to try to determine in advance what questions will be asked and what answers will be obtained to reinforce existing party messages. The thing most feared is independence, which is what Mr. Rasmussen brings.
Mr. Gibbs's comments and the recent attempts by the Democratic left to muzzle Scott Rasmussen reflect a disturbing trend in our politics: a tendency to try to stifle legitimate feedback about political concerns—particularly if the feedback is negative to the incumbent administration.
Mr. Caddell served as a pollster for President Jimmy Carter. Mr. Schoen, who served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is the author of "The Political Fix" just out from Henry Holt.

Vatican says 'Avatar' is no masterpiece

2010-01-13T00:54:00.000-04:00

Vatican says 'Avatar' is no masterpiece

By ALESSANDRA RIZZO, Associated Press Writer Alessandra Rizzo, Associated Press Writer – Tue Jan 12, 3:49 pm ET

VATICAN CITY – "Avatar" is wooing audiences worldwide with visually dazzling landscapes and nature-loving blue creatures. But the Vatican is no easy crowd to please.
The Vatican newspaper and radio station are criticizing James Cameron's 3-D blockbuster for flirting with the idea that worship of nature can replace religion — a notion the pope has warned against. They call the movie a simplistic and sappy tale, despite its awe-inspiring special effects.
"Not much behind the images" was how the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, summed it up in a headline.
As the second highest-grossing movie ever, "Avatar" is challenging the record set by Cameron's previous movie "Titanic."
Generally it has been critically acclaimed and is touted as a leading Oscar contender.
Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, has praised "Avatar" for what he calls its message of saving the environment from exploitation. But the movie also has drawn a number of critical voices. Some American conservative bloggers have decried its anti-militaristic message; a small group of people have said the movie contains racist themes.
To Vatican critics, the alien extravaganza is just "bland."
Cameron "tells the story without going deep into it, and ends up falling into sappiness," said L'Osservatore Romano. Vatican Radio called it "rather harmless" but said it was no heir to sci-fi masterpieces of the past.
Most significantly, much of the Vatican criticism was directed at the movie's central theme of man vs. nature.
L'Osservatore said the film "gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature." Similarly, Vatican Radio said it "cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium."
"Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship," the radio said.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said that while the movie reviews are just that — film criticism, not theological pronouncements — they do reflect Pope Benedict XVI's views on the dangers of turning nature into a "new divinity."
Benedict has often spoken about the need to protect the environment, earning the nickname of "green pope." But he also has balanced that call with a warning against turning environmentalism into neo-paganism.
In a recent World Day of Peace message, the pontiff warned against any notions that equate human beings with other living things in the name of a "supposedly egalitarian vision." He said such notions "open the way to a new pantheism tinged with neo-paganism, which would see the source of man's salvation in nature alone, understood in purely naturalistic terms."
The pope explained in the message that while many experience tranquillity and peace when coming into contact with nature, a correct relationship between man and the environment should not lead to "absolutizing nature" or "considering it more important than the human person."
The Vatican newspaper occasionally likes to comment in its cultural pages on movies or pop culture icons, as it did recently about "The Simpsons" or U2. In one famous instance, several Vatican officials spoke out against "The Da Vinci Code."
In this case, the reviews came out after a red-carpet "Avatar" preview held in Rome just a stone's throw from St. Peter's Square. The movie — which has made more than $1.3 billion at box offices worldwide, partly boosted by higher 3-D ticket prices — will be released Friday in Italy.
"So much stupefying, enchanting technology, but few genuine emotions," said L'Osservatore in one of three articles devoted to "Avatar" in its Sunday editions. The plotline of aliens who live on a distant unspoiled planet and the humans who want to pillage their resources is a universal theme that can be reminiscent of past colonizations and wars, the paper said. As such, it is easy to relate to it, but also unoriginal.
"Everything is reduced to an overly simple anti-imperialistic and anti-militaristic parable," it said.
In America, the big numbers and media hype have been accompanied by some controversy.
Blog posts, newspaper articles, tweets and YouTube videos have criticized the film, with some calling it "a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people" and that it reinforces "the white Messiah fable." Cameron says the real theme is about respecting others' differences.
An LA Times blog noted that the movie "has inflamed the passions of right-wing bloggers and pundits."
"Cameron incensed many voices on the right by acknowledging of-the-moment messages about imperialism, greed, ecological disregard and corporate irresponsibility," it said. Anti-smoking lobbies have denounced the cigarette-puffing character played by Sigourney Weaver.
Back at the Vatican, the reviews did praise the groundbreaking visuals of the movie.
Vatican Radio said that "really never before have such surprising images been seen," while L'Osservatore said the movie's worth lies in its "extraordinary visual impact."

O'Brien May Jump to New Network

2010-01-09T00:48:00.002-04:00

By SAM SCHECHNER And SHIRA OVIDE

Associated Press

Conan O'Brien during his debut as the host of NBC's 'The Tonight Show' on this June 1, 2009.

Comedian Conan O'Brien and his advisers were mulling career options Friday, including jumping to a rival television network, people familiar with the matter said, leaving the fate of NBC's late-night shake-up in limbo.
A person familiar with Mr. O'Brien's camp said there had been "approaches" by other networks since it emerged Thursday that NBC hopes to return former "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno to his longtime 11:35 p.m. eastern perch at the General Electric Co. network, displacing Mr. O'Brien.
One suitor is News Corp.'s Fox network, which has had early discussions with Mr. O'Brien's circle about hosting another late-night show, according to other people. News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. O'Brien, who currently hosts "The Tonight Show," is the big question mark in NBC's plan, which is an about-face after the network installed Mr. Leno in a nightly prime-time show in September. The move was greeted by a hailstorm of criticism, and the show has had lackluster viewership.
NBC's plan would push Mr. O'Brien's "Tonight" back by half an hour to 12:05 Eastern time to make room for a shortened version of Mr. Leno's current show, according to people familiar with the matter.
If Mr. O'Brien doesn't agree, Mr. Leno would return to hosting "Tonight" for its normal hour, one of these people said. Although the moves aren't finalized, Mr. Leno has agreed in principle to both options, the person said, adding: "One way or another, Jay will be on at 11:35."

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Conan O'Brien during an interview with then 'Tonight Show' host Jay Leno on March 27, 2008.

At least some in Mr. O'Brien's camp believe NBC's proposed switch is unfair because Mr. O'Brien gave up the opportunity more than five years ago to move to another network when NBC promised him the "Tonight Show" slot, according to a person familiar with their thinking. NBC is likely to want a decision before it meets with local TV affiliates on Jan. 21. But Mr. O'Brien is in no rush to make a decision, the person said.

An NBC spokeswoman didn't have any comment. The network said yesterday that remains "committed to keeping Conan O'Brien on NBC."
Mr. O'Brien faces potential pitfalls regardless of what he chooses to do. Staying at NBC would entail following Mr. Leno and losing his coveted time slot less than a year after his June debut. Moving away could put him in competition with Mr. Leno just as some television executives have expressed concern about the size of Mr. O'Brien's audience.
From Sept. 21 to Jan. 3, Mr. O'Brien's "Tonight" averaged about half as many viewers as Mr. Leno garnered a year earlier, according to Nielsen Co. Mr. O'Brien has seen far less steep declines among younger viewers, and he has remained even with his CBS competitor David Letterman among viewers in the the key 18-to-49-year-old category in the fourth quarter.
People close to Mr. O'Brien say his ratings declines result from Mr. Leno's poor performance earlier in the evening, according to a person familiar with their thinking.
Fox executives are potentially interested in Mr. O'Brien and are crunching the numbers to see whether adding Mr. O'Brien would make sense, according to people familiar with the matter. The conversations haven't yet turned serious, one of the people said, in part because Mr. O'Brien is still under contract to NBC.
"While Conan is a great talent, he's still under contract with NBC, so we'll have to see how it all plays out," a Fox spokesperson said.
Among Fox's concerns are the shrinking profits of late night as competition grows, and Mr. O'Brien's soft ratings, the people said. The network could also have trouble persuading local Fox TV stations to give up shows they have already purchased to fill their late-night hours.
Another possible home for Mr. O'Brien could be Walt Disney Co.'s ABC, which was interested in the possibility of picking up Mr. Leno in late 2008.
But ABC has had relative ratings success in the past year with its late-night newsmagazine "Nightline," apparently damping its interest. "With all due respect to Conan, we like the late-night hand that we are current playing," an ABC spokesman said.
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Shira Ovide at shira.ovide@wsj.com

Rove: EVEN LA Actors Could Have Gotten Good Intel Interrogating Bombing Suspect

2010-01-08T00:19:00.002-04:00

Democrats woo MSNBC host Ed Schultz for Senate Democrats woo MSNBC host Ed Schultz for Senate

2010-01-07T00:52:00.002-04:00

North Dakota Democrats are actively pursuing liberal MSNBC talk show host Ed Schultz as a candidate to replace Sen. Byron Dorgan, who announced Tuesday he would not seek reelection.

State House Minority Leader Merle Boucher told POLITICO he made an official overture to Schultz late Tuesday night about launching a campaign and said he believes the TV commentator is "intrigued by the idea."
"We have to find someone that has a high profile and a national fundraising base, and I can't think of anyone better than Ed Schultz in that regard," said Boucher. "He certainly didn't say no to me by any means," he added.

Dorgan's retirement announcement took state Democrats by surprise and immediately sent party leaders scrambling for a viable opponent to take on likely Republican candidate Gov. John Hoeven. Hoeven, who led Dorgan by double digits in public polls this fall, is expected to announce his candidacy within weeks.

"Very few people have the resources and the backing to take on John Hoeven, and Ed has taken on John Hoeven before on his radio show. I don't think anyone knows John Hoeven and his record better than Ed Schultz," said Boucher.

Minutes after Dorgan's announcement, Schultz began receiving e-mails from across the country, urging him to run.

"We've gotten a ton of e-mails," said Vern Thompson, programming manager for Schultz's nationally syndicated radio show. "I think it's something he would be interested in, but it is a little early. To be honest, I don't know what he will do," added Thompson, who served as executive director of the North Dakota Democratic Party from 2001 to 2004.

In that role, Thompson tried to recruit Schultz to run against Hoeven for governor in 2004. He said Schultz seriously considered it but passed on a race to pursue his broadcasting career.

"It was the right decision because now we have this huge voice at 30 Rock," Thompson said. MSNBC host Schultz said Wednesday during his show that he might run for the seat and noted that state Democrats requested that he consider it.

Schultz said on his show Tuesday evening that he believes North Dakota law holds that a candidate would have to be a resident for the past five years to run, and he hasn't been living in the state.
“I'm flattered to have gotten a lot of calls in the past 24 hours,” Schultz told POLITICO through a spokesperson, adding that “it is an honor to be asked to consider it.”
He said no one from the national party had contacted him.
When asked whether MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews’s flirtation with a Senate run in Pennsylvania has influenced his decision whether to run, he said it had not.
“Chris's decision had not impacted my response to this,” Schultz said.

State Senate Minority Leader David O'Connell said Schultz would be a strong candidate not only because of his ability to rake in cash from around the country but because of his detailed knowledge of Hoeven's record.

Throughout Hoeven's first term, Schultz repeatedly lambasted Hoeven as "an empty suit" during his morning Fargo radio show — a characterization he repeated Tuesday on his show.

"But, you know, if I was still there," Schultz said, "I'd love to run against the empty suit, because that's what I used to call John Hoeven, the sitting governor."

"A lot of people think he's blowing hot air, but the thing is, he never put anything on the air until he confirmed it. He'd always call about stuff and wanted to check his sources," said O’Connell.

Boucher said he didn't expect Schultz to make a snap decision, and Democrats acknowledge that it might be hard for the talk show host to give up a lucrative and glittery broadcasting career for the tiring and tedious campaign trail.

"He said he would visit and get back to me, and I'm going to give him all the time he needs to make that decision," said Boucher.
Andy Barr and Michael Calderone contributed to this report.

One 'Allegedly' Too Many

2010-01-06T00:24:00.002-04:00

In her raw and disastrous way, Janet Napolitano is revealing.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Shocking though it was, the Christmas Day terror attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian has only hardened Americans' awareness that they confront an implacable enemy in a war whose end is nowhere in sight. It is a hard-won new sense of reality and an invaluable one, achieved event by embittering event. The holy warrior assigned to blow up that passenger plane and who almost succeeded has, we learn, been granted the chance to strike a deal. His attack effort had come on the heels of the all-too-successful terror assault by that other Soldier of Islam, Maj. Nidal Hasan who murdered 13 fellow members of the American military. This, even as it was becoming clear that the number of our homegrown jihadis involved in terror plots, or who had enlisted in training toward that goal, had increased markedly.
It wasn't always easy to preserve a healthy sense of reality about terrorism in the years since 9/11, as the comments of ethical counselors, privacy advocates and civil liberties sentinels aghast at the possibility of government snooping have reminded us in the last week. They were around in force for media interviews, equipped as ever with a variety of arguments for the sanctity of privacy rights, warnings against surveillance that threatened the rights of citizens in a democracy. Day after day came the same breezy assurances—we had only to balance our security needs with privacy rights. As though, in this deadly war or any other, sane people could consider the values equivalent. The latest threat to privacy rights, advocates charged, was the use of full body scanners: the technology that would have immeasurably decreased the chances someone like Umar Abdulmutallab would have been able to get past security wearing his terror panties—intimate underwear, that is, in which 80 grams of PETN had been concealed.
It was that prospect of images revealing intimate areas of the body that apparently disturbed Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and sponsor of a House measure banning the use of full body scanners other than as a "secondary device"—i.e. to be used on select subjects. He didn't think, he told a New York Times reporter, "anybody needs to see my 8 year old naked in order to secure that airplane." A useful bit of reassurance, that, for the plotters of terror assaults who have in the past shown no compunction about the use of children as suicide bombers.
Another argument we heard frequently held that no matter what technology was put in place, our dauntless enemies would find ways to get around it. The picture was clear. With an unbeatable, ever resourceful enemy working night and day devising ingenious strategies, what point could there be in developing better detection capacities? Historians of the future may one day well ponder the powerful streak of defeatism in the U.S. in the era of its terrorist wars—and the superhuman characteristics Americans ascribed to their enemies in that 21st century battle against terrorism: a view in no small way nurtured in their media and political culture.

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David Klein

No guardians of privacy rights had weighed in earlier against the body imaging scanners than the American Civil Liberties Union. In October, 2007, the ACLU issued a statement decrying the use of this technology as "an assault on the essential dignity of passengers." "We are," the agency declared, "not convinced it is the right thing for America." This reasoning is clear. The right thing is for America to reject the scanners. Its citizens may then face increased risk of being blown up in mid-air but their privacy would remain inviolate to the end. Who could ask for anything more?

It took the president a second speech to weigh in on the issue of the security, or lack thereof, that had nearly led to tragedy. The first speech, two and a half days after the event, was in its own way noteworthy. In it the president observed that a passenger on the plane had "allegedly tried to ignite explosives. . . ." Mr. Obama's use of a familiar legalistic evasion would, it was soon clear, raise hackles—though the term is one routinely used in crime reporting. No matter. It was one "allegedly" too many in the world, jarring coming from the president in this circumstance.
Consider the justly famed speech an enraged American president delivered the day after Pearl Harbor. Then try imagining that address by Franklin Roosevelt—a leader to whom Mr. Obama has been compared—as it would sound in Obama language.
"Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces allegedly from the Empire of Japan . . . Yesterday the Japanese government allegedly launched an attack on Malaya. Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked Guam . . ."
Still it wasn't the president's comments but those of Janet Napolitano that reverberated. It wasn't the first time the Homeland Security chief's struggles to utter the kind of views she understood to be fitting for an Obama administration official ended in trouble—this time with interviews in which she made her now famous assertion that the airport security system had worked. She followed up, the next day, with retractions and clarifications that ended, as such things do, sounding worse than the original.
Asked in an interview with the German magazine "Der Spiegel" last March why she had avoided using the word "terrorism" in her testimony to Congress, she explained that she had instead preferred to use another term: "man-caused disasters." That choice of words demonstrated, she said, that "we want to move away from the politics of fear." The idea now, she added mysteriously, was to be prepared for all risks that could occur. There was nothing mysterious about the intended point. In the new forward looking administration she served—its leader had after all travelled far tendering apologies for his country's past sins and arrogance toward other nations—emphasis on terrorism was to be dispatched, along with the words war on terror and terrorists. The use of such references was to be equated with the low, the deceitful, the politics of fear, with indeed, a false claim of danger.
Ms. Napolitano would go on in other ways to prove the potency of man-made disasters—of which she was clearly proving one. In April, she issued a report seeming to target military veterans as potentially dangerous right-wing extremists. She soon apologized. In the same month she managed to suggest that the 9/11 terrorists had entered the U.S. through Canada, which appalled Canadian leaders. Apologies and clarifications followed.
Mr. Obama can't be happy with his Homeland Security chief. It's fair to say no president deserves an appointee so extravagantly unequipped for her job. Still there is much in Ms. Napolitano's attitudes and pronouncements, including talk of "the politics of fear," that reflect with glaring accuracy the Obama team's values, ideology and prime political targets. In her disastrous and raw way she is its voice revealed.
Terrorism will continue to provide its hardening education, though not entirely from terrorists themselves. We have before us now the spectacle of Jihadi Abdulmutallab, lawyered up, with full rights as though a U.S. criminal defendant. The impossibly expensive, dangerous, and unavoidably chaotic trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and associates still lies ahead, slated for a Manhattan courtroom. Even now a majority of Americans can't fathom the reason for their government's insistence that the agents chiefly responsible for the 9/11 attack be tried under the U.S. criminal justice system with all due rights and constitutional privileges, instead of in a military court. That insistence itself is answer enough—an unforgettable testament to the ideological drives and related evasions of reality that shape this administration's view of the world.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

CNN: A Tragedy in Cable News

2010-01-04T01:20:00.001-04:00

AP wins world brown-nosing championships for 'How Obama saved the world' article

2009-12-30T01:19:00.000-04:00

Obama raced clock, chaos, comedy for climate deal
By CHARLES BABINGTON and JENNIFER LOVEN (AP) – 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON — It was almost unthinkable. The president of the United States walked into a meeting of fellow world leaders and there wasn’t a chair for him, a sure sign he was not expected, maybe not even wanted.
Barack Obama didn’t pause, however. “I’m going to sit by my friend Lula,” he said, moving toward Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
A Brazilian aide gave the U.S. president his chair, and Obama spent the next 80 minutes helping craft new requirements for disclosing efforts to fight global warming. Along with India, South Africa and Brazil, the key member in the room was China, which recently surpassed the U.S. as the world’s top emitter of heat-trapping gasses.
At the table this time for China was Premier Wen Jiabao, not an underling as before. Obama was bent on striking a deal before flying home to snowbound Washington.
He would later hail the achievement as a breakthrough. But even Obama said there was much more to do, and climate authorities called Copenhagen’s results a modest step in the global bid to curb greenhouse gasses that threaten to melt glaciers and flood coastlines.
Obama’s 15-hour, seat-of-the-pants dash through Copenhagen was marked by doggedness, confusion and semi-comedy. Constrained by partisan politics at home, and quarrels between rich and poor nations abroad, he was determined to come home with a victory, no matter how imperfect.
Experts and activists may debate its significance for years. Some, like Jeremy Symons, who watched the talks for the National Wildlife Federation, said it was “high drama and true grit on the part of the president that delivered the deal.”
Others were far less kind. The Copenhagen agreements are “merely the repackaging of old and toothless promises,” said Asher Miller, executive director of the Post Carbon Institute.
Even though a weary, bleary-eyed Obama had added six hours to his planned nine-hour visit, he was back in Washington by the time delegates at the 193-nation summit approved the U.S.-brokered compromises on Saturday. The agreements will give billions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations, but they do not require the world’s major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
This account of Obama’s hectic day is based on dozens of interviews and statements by key players from numerous countries.
___
Obama was thrown off schedule almost from the moment he landed Friday morning in Copenhagen, where the summit’s final-day talks seemed to be collapsing.
Instead of attending a planned meeting with Denmark’s prime minister, he plunged into an emergency session of about 20 nations, big and small, wealthy and poor. Right away there was a troubling sign.
China was the only nation to send a second-tier official: vice foreign minister He Yafei instead of Premier Wen, who was in the building. The snub baffled and annoyed delegates.
For months, Obama had been pressing China to put into writing its promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Obama later seemed unusually animated when he alluded indirectly to China in a short, late-morning speech to the full conference.
“I don’t know how you have an international agreement where we all are not sharing information and ensuring that we are meeting our commitments,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Things then appeared to turn for the better, as Obama and Wen met privately, as scheduled, for 55 minutes. A U.S. official said they took a step forward as they discussed emissions targets, financing and transparency.
The two leaders directed aides to work on mutual language, and Obama’s team proposed specific wording meant to solidify China’s promise to be more forthcoming about its anti-pollution efforts.
A short time later, however, the U.S. team was more baffled and irked than before. At a follow-up session of the morning’s big meeting, the Chinese sent an even lower-ranking envoy in Wen’s place.
An irritated Obama told his staff, “I don’t want to mess around with this anymore, I want to just talk with Premier Wen,” according to a senior administration official who spoke on background to discuss sensitive diplomatic issues.
___
By now night had fallen, and it was clear Obama would be late getting home. He kept an appointment to discuss arms control with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Meanwhile he asked aides to try to set up a final one-on-one meeting with Wen, and a separate meeting with leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. He hoped these fast-growing nations, which had been loosely aligned with China on many of the key issues, might influence the Chinese.
Confusion reigned. Chinese officials said Wen was at his hotel and his staff was at the airport. The same was said of top Indian officials, but nothing was clear.
South African President Jacob Zuma agreed to meet with Obama, then canceled when he heard the Indian leader was away, and Brazil would attend only if India did.
The Chinese said Wen could meet with Obama at 6:15 p.m., then changed it to 7 p.m. Obama used the time to talk strategy with the leaders of France, Germany and Great Britain.
Meanwhile, a four-nation negotiating team known as BASIC gathered. The modified acronym reflected its members: Brazil, South Africa, India and China.
Obama was unaware, however, thinking he was going to meet alone with Wen. After some confusion about who had access to the room, White House aides told the president that Wen was inside with the leaders of the three other countries, apparently working on strategy.
“Good,” Obama said as he walked through the door. “Mr. Premier, are you ready to see me?” he called out. “Are you ready?”
Inside he found startled leaders and no chair to sit in.
U.S. officials denied that Obama crashed the party, saying he simply showed up for his 7 p.m. meeting with Wen and found the others there.
Whatever the meeting’s original purpose, Obama used it to help strike an agreement on ways to verify developing nations’ reductions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, a good U.S. ending to their talks with the Chinese.

Obama Slams Security Breach

2009-12-30T01:12:00.002-04:00

Reports, Intercepts Suggested Attack Preparations; Multiple Agencies Had Warning

By EVAN PEREZ, JAY SOLOMON and SIOBHAN GORMAN

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. had multiple pieces of information about alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, according to senior U.S. officials, including intelligence reports and communications intercepts suggesting a Nigerian was being prepped for a terror strike by al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

U.S. investigators are pursuing possible links between the Christmas Day airline bomb plot and former Guantanamo Bay prisoners. WSJ's Evan Perez discusses developments in the investigation and possible policy outcomes, in the News Hub.

The intercepts were collected piecemeal by the National Security Agency, which has been monitoring al Qaeda militants in that country, including former Guantanamo detainees believed to be leaders there.
In addition, the father of Mr. Abdulmutallab met with the Central Intelligence Agency at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, Nov. 19, and told of his son's likely radicalization, U.S. officials say. That led to a broader gathering of agencies the next day, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Department, in which the information was shared, a U.S. official said.
But U.S. officials said it isn't clear whether intelligence officials in Washington charged with coordinating such intelligence activities effectively distributed the information gathered in Nigeria.

Thisday

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at age 19.

President Obama on Tuesday described these lapses in general terms during a sweeping broadside aimed at his government's intelligence services. Citing a "potential catastrophic breach," he said the warning signs, if heeded, would have prevented the Christmas Day attempted bombing on a Detroit-bound airplane.
"A systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable," the president said, referencing "a mix of human and systemic failure." In his comments, the president cited information "that could have and should have been pieced together."
Officials familiar with a review ordered by Mr. Obama say the connections aren't obvious, except in hindsight, and that there doesn't appear to be a single clear warning that should have set off alarms. But if the information had been brought together before Christmas, Mr. Abdulmutallab likely would have been put on a no-fly list and kept off the plane he tried to destroy, the president said.
U.S. and Yemeni authorities said they are investigating whether the bomb plot was hatched by the former Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Yemen, the claimed source of the attack. That development is likely to hinder the Obama administration's effort to release detainees as it attempts to close the prison.

The Flight 253 Bomb Attempt

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Vote: Should all airline passengers undergo body scans?

The lapses, and Mr. Obama's critical comments, will focus fresh attention on the operation of the U.S.'s intelligence agencies, particularly the National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC, a Washington-based body set up after 9/11 to act as a clearinghouse for terrorism data. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars building systems to detect impending attacks, which appear to have failed in this instance.
It has already set off a round of finger pointing among multiple U.S. agencies still stinging from 9/11 and Iraq-related intelligence failures. According to officials, the NCTC has complained that the CIA didn't provide all the information they had, such as where Mr. Abdulmutallab attended college, while the agencies have said that the counterterrorism center had what it needed to properly assess the threat.
Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NCTC, said in a written statement that despite improvements to information sharing, "it is clear that gaps remain, and they must be fixed." The NSA didn't respond immediately to requests for comment.
Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said the agency first learned of Mr. Abdulmutallab in November, when his father came to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. He said the agency helped place the Nigerian in the government's terrorist database, including his extremist connections in Yemen, and also forwarded biographical information to the NCTC.

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Felix Onigbinde

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab

"This agency, like others in our government, is reviewing all data to which it had access -- not just what we ourselves may have collected -- to determine if more could have been done to stop Abdulmutallab," he said.

The errors could prove a political problem for Mr. Obama, who spoke for the second day running about the attack, after three days of silence. Over the weekend, other administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, argued that air-security systems had worked in the attack's aftermath. Campaign consultants for potential Republican presidential challengers in 2012 have been waiting for an opportunity to paint the president as a soft on terrorism.
A senior administration official said Mr. Obama's Tuesday statement was prompted by a conference call with Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and other top security officials. The administration's review had uncovered existing "bits and pieces" of information, some of it "incomplete or partial in nature," that taken together constituted an intelligence failure. That included information about the suspect's thinking and his plans, about al Qaeda and its plans, and about potential attacks over the holidays.
The officials said the president stands behind Ms. Napolitano and that her job is secure. A preliminary review ordered by Mr. Obama is due Thursday.

Suspect's Journey

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It is rare for a president to publicly reprimand intelligence agencies, particularly when he is relying on them to prosecute two wars. Tuesday's scolding will likely compound an already tense relationship.
The failure to detect the plot out of Yemen is focusing attention on the links between al Qaeda's operations there and the apparently pivotal role in the group played by former Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Several detainees who joined "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" -- the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen that Monday claimed responsibility for the bombing attempt -- were released under the Bush administration and repatriated to Saudi Arabia. Within a year, many had slipped into Yemen and joined al Qaeda. Some terrorism experts said the Yemen branch was of little consequence until the arrival of the Saudi Guantanamo Bay veterans.
Former Bush administration officials acknowledged Tuesday the concern that detainees released under their watch could have been involved in the plot. But they said the decision was the best of imperfect options.
"It's a serious issue because we were trying to find ways to return detainees to home countries and ultimately close Guantanamo while effectively addressing the long-term security threats from such detainees," said Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism official in Mr. Bush's White House.

Two leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are Said Ali al-Shihri and Muhammad al-Awfi, Saudi nationals released from Guantanamo in 2007, according to the Pentagon.
At least 11 Saudis released from Guantanamo have joined militant groups in Yemen in recent years, according to al Qaeda statements and Defense Department documents. The extent of their involvement in the plot is now a focus of the FBI's probe.
In a letter to Mr. Obama, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, three prominent supporters of closing Guantanamo, said transferring any more detainees to Yemen is too risky given the Christmas plot.
About 45 of the more than 90 Yemeni prisoners that remain at Guantanamo are cleared for release and likely would be sent home if it weren't for their nationalities, two senior U.S. officials involved in detainee issues said. If the Yemeni security situation doesn't improve, they may end up moved to a Thomson, Ill., prison the U.S. plans to use to hold detainees if Mr. Obama succeeds in closing the prison.
—Elizabeth Williamson contributed to this article. Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com, Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com and Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com

A Low, Dishonest Decade

2009-12-23T01:08:00.002-04:00

The press and politicians were asleep at the switch.

Stock-market indices are not much good as yardsticks of social progress, but as another low, dishonest decade expires let us note that, on 2000s first day of trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 11357 while the Nasdaq Composite Index stood at 4131, both substantially higher than where they are today. The Nasdaq went on to hit 5000 before collapsing with the dot-com bubble, the first great Wall Street disaster of this unhappy decade. The Dow got north of 14000 before the real-estate bubble imploded.
And it was supposed to have been such an awesome time, too! Back in the late '90s, in the crescendo of the Internet boom, pundit and publicist alike assured us that the future was to be a democratized, prosperous place. Hierarchies would collapse, they told us; the individual was to be empowered; freed-up markets were to be the common man's best buddy.
Such clever hopes they were. As a reasonable anticipation of what was to come they meant nothing. But they served to unify the decade's disasters, many of which came to us festooned with the flags of this bogus idealism.

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Associated Press

Jack Abramoff

Before "Enron" became synonymous with shattered 401(k)s and man-made electrical shortages, the public knew it as a champion of electricity deregulation—a freedom fighter! It was supposed to be that most exalted of corporate creatures, a "market maker"; its "capacity for revolution" was hymned by management theorists; and its TV commercials depicted its operations as an extension of humanity's quest for emancipation.

Similarly, both Bank of America and Citibank, before being recognized as "too big to fail," had populist histories of which their admirers made much. Citibank's long struggle against the Glass-Steagall Act was even supposed to be evidence of its hostility to banking's aristocratic culture, an amusing image to recollect when reading about the $100 million pay reportedly pocketed by one Citi trader in 2008.
The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal showed us the same dynamics at work in Washington. Here was an apparent believer in markets, working to keep garment factories in Saipan humming without federal interference and saluted for it in an op-ed in the Saipan Tribune as "Our freedom fighter in D.C."
But the preposterous populism is only one part of the equation; just as important was our failure to see through the ruse, to understand how our country was being disfigured.
Ensuring that the public failed to get it was the common theme of at least three of the decade's signature foul-ups: the hyping of various Internet stock issues by Wall Street analysts, the accounting scandals of 2002, and the triple-A ratings given to mortgage-backed securities.
The grand, overarching theme of the Bush administration—the big idea that informed so many of its sordid episodes—was the same anti-supervisory impulse applied to the public sector: regulators sabotaged and their agencies turned over to the regulated.
The public was left to read the headlines and ponder the unthinkable: Could our leaders really have pushed us into an unnecessary war? Is the republic really dividing itself into an immensely wealthy class of Wall Street bonus-winners and everybody else? And surely nobody outside of the movies really has the political clout to write themselves a $700 billion bailout.
What made the oughts so awful, above all, was the failure of our critical faculties. The problem was not so much that newspapers were dying, to mention one of the lesser catastrophes of these awful times, but that newspapers failed to do their job in the first place, to scrutinize the myths of the day in a way that might have prevented catastrophes like the financial crisis or the Iraq war.
The folly went beyond the media, though. Recently I came across a 2005 pamphlet written by historian Rick Perlstein berating the big thinkers of the Democratic Party for their poll-driven failure to stick to their party's historic theme of economic populism. I was struck by the evidence Mr. Perlstein adduced in the course of his argument. As he tells the story, leading Democratic pollsters found plenty of evidence that the American public distrusts corporate power; and yet they regularly advised Democrats to steer in the opposite direction, to distance themselves from what one pollster called "outdated appeals to class grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy."
This was not a party that was well-prepared for the job of iconoclasm that has befallen it. And as the new bunch muddle onward—bailing out the large banks but (still) not subjecting them to new regulatory oversight, passing a health-care reform that seems (among other, better things) to guarantee private insurers eternal profits—one fears they are merely presenting their own ample backsides to an embittered electorate for kicking.
Write to thomas@wsj.com

To Salahi or Not to Salahi . . .

2009-12-18T00:59:00.002-04:00

The White House gate-crashers have unwittingly bestowed a gift to the language in the form of a richly functional verb.

By MARK HELPRIN

If, as I do, you live within John Nance Garner "spitting" distance of Washington and you read its fast-disappearing newspapers, then for the last week or two you have been drowned in a Salahi marinade. For those who may have been on vacation on another planet, or are reading this after it has been extracted from a time capsule—what with the American attention span being what it is, time capsules are now retrieved 45 minutes after they are buried—the Salahis are two strange pinheads, one of whom looks like Barbie and the other Fat Ken, who harbor the noble ambition of appearing on a "reality show."
For those who do not know what a reality show is, it is a chance to achieve utterly transient fame by acting like an idiot and embarrassing oneself in front of a charge-coupled device that communicates your indiscretions to the less intelligent population of an entire nation. The Salahis are themselves a charged couple, and perhaps a device, in more ways than one: She looks like she's part neon, and they have begun their encounters with the system of what used to be called justice. To get on the reality show, which, appropriately, does not even exist, they faked their way into the White House, Tareq Salahi, it is presumed, wearing his fake Patek Philippe.
The president and Mrs. Obama are reportedly outraged. Strangely enough, Theodore Roosevelt, who was shot while making a speech, and finished it, was not reported to have been outraged. When Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists attacked Blair House, with three wounded, two dead, and at one point only a machine-gun on the stairs between Harry Truman and assassination, the president was not reported to have been outraged. And when Ronald Reagan, bullet near his heart, was wheeled into the emergency room at George Washington University, he was most likely not outraged—because had he been he likely would not have had the wit to say to his surgeons before he was put under, "I hope you're all Republicans." Apparently, outrage, like attention span and a good deal else, has devolved with American history.

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Associated Press

Michaele and Tareq Salahi at the White House.

There may, however, be a Salahi lining in all this pitiable behavior; i.e. a gift to the language in the form of a richly functional verb—to Salahi. We have the Ponzi Scheme, named after the first known originator; Hobson's Choice, named after a livery stable owner who is reported to have said "You can take any horse you want as long as it's the one by the door;" and Melba Toast and Peach Melba, in honor of late 19th- and early 20th-century diet-averse opera star Nellie Melba, who all by herself could have equaled at least three or four of our early 21st-century fashion models (if she could have been convinced to adopt the facial expression of a heroin-addicted captive in a Russian Mafia bordello). Why not to Salahi?
I would like to offer the following to the Oxford English Dictionary, free of charge:
To Salahi: v. U.S. [after 21st century reality-show aspirants Michaele and Tareq Salahi] 1. intrans. to gain entrance to an event or gathering to which one is not invited. "They Salahied into the Bar-Mitzvah even though they didn't know the Goldblatt boy, and ate most of the chopped-liver sculpture of Elvis." Shakespeare, Sonnet MMIX. 2. in a general sense to appear where one is not welcome. "Michael Moore Salahied into George and Laura Bush's second honeymoon to lecture the former president about justice for the undocumented immigrants held at Guantanamo." Chomsky, Profiles in Courage. 3. to forge, fake or pretend, especially in hope of achieving a contemptible or pathetic objective that is simultaneously a comment upon the corruption and distastefulness of a particular individual and society itself. trans. "To elevate his chances of becoming a Chippendales dancer, Arnold Toynbee Salahied a letter of recommendation from Rosa Luxemburg. Al Franken, An Intellectual History of the United States.
If, for example, you sneak into the circus, you cannot be said to have Salahied, because the action is too honorable and direct. It must be accompanied by convoluted and narcissistic scheming that is bound to unravel because of its elemental stupidity. Another use of the expression would be simply to turn it into a noun: "She looks like a Salahi," "They're just Salahis," "It was one of the greatest Salahis ever," or "It takes a Salahi to know a Salahi." And, although not finally, as the speakers of English are a creative lot and may find many fascinating variations, the very notion of Salahi-ing could be lifted to an eye-crossing level were one to speak of "ersatz Salahis," a true puzzle for philosophers, or at least a double negative.
Meanwhile, the Salahis themselves are to be thanked for enriching the language, even if unwittingly (and that's an understatement).
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt), "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt) and, most recently, "Digital Barbarism" (HarperCollins).

Bozell: 'Mark Lloyd: FCC Chief Diversity Officer -- And a Liar, Too'

2009-12-17T00:36:00.000-04:00

December 15, 2009 08:05 ET

Alexandria, VA – Yesterday in a speech for the Media Access Project (http://ow.ly/Mldt), Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd claimed to refute numerous what he called “exaggerations and distortions” of a wide range of his thoughts, positions and policy prescriptions from what he called a “right-wing smear campaign.” What Lloyd did was offer numerous falsehoods and denials about things that are undeniably true.

Just some of his many misrepresentations:

LLOYD LIE: That the “right-wing smear campaign” was “distorting my views about the First Amendment.”

TRUTH: From Lloyd’s 2006 book, Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America:

"It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration … "[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance."

Excerpt: http://ow.ly/M5TI

LLOYD LIE: That the “right-wing smear campaign” incorrectly asserted that Lloyd is “a supporter of Hugo Chavez.”

TRUTH: Lloyd as the head of the Leadership Council for Civil Rights participating in a panel discussion:

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution - a democratic revolution. To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela. The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled - worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government - worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

Video: http://ow.ly/M5UE

LLOYD LIE: “I am not at the FCC to remove anybody, whatever their color, from power.”

TRUTH: Lloyd at the May of 2005 Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice:

“Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions. And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem. We're in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.”

Audio: http://ow.ly/M5VX

Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center:

“Why are Obama’s leadership picks so incapable of telling the truth? It is not necessary for conservatives to ‘distort’ or ‘smear’ Mark Lloyd. All we have to do is quote him. When we do, he has public meltdowns with hysterical and dishonest accusations.

“Mr. Lloyd, we’re not going to stop talking about you or your record, using that media – the alternative media – you and your radical friends despise so much because you can’t control it.”

Newsrooms: Time for Integrity

2009-12-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

What's important is the willingness to hold power accountable.

This is a terrible time for newspapers, but the solutions suggested over the last year by the deep thinkers of the floundering industry give one little hope.
Back in September, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, Andrew Alexander, lamented his paper's failure to keep up with conservative outlets after they described footage showing Acorn employees apparently advising people how to evade the law. The Post's slowness on the story, Mr. Alexander wrote, raised the possibility that the paper didn't "pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints."
Continuing the next day on the newspaper's Web site, he decided that the blame for this unhappy situation lay with the newspaper industry's workforce, which is apparently made up of the wrong kind of people. According to "surveys," Mr. Alexander wrote, "newsrooms . . . are more liberal than the population." Newspapers might mean well, but they are handicapped by their monocultural politics. The obvious answer is to hire for political diversity.
Mr. Alexander's predecessor as ombudsman made the same point in 2008, and it's easy to understand why: It seems to dismiss an embarrassing failure with an uncontroversial idea. Everyone likes diversity, right? And this way no one is really to blame for botched coverage of any sort, least of all newspaper brass. Their intentions are pure, just poorly executed by their annoyingly conformist info-proles.
Ordinarily, such a bad idea would not draw much concern. But it has now been repeated several times in the great organ of journalistic consensus. Clearly they mean it seriously.
Years ago, Mr. Alexander wrote, newspapers achieved racial and gender diversity, and "It's the same with ideology."
Actually, it isn't. Unlike race or gender, people choose their ideologies. What's more, they often change them as they go through life, and they sometimes find that it is to their pecuniary advantage to ditch the embarrassing political enthusiasms of their youth.
Which brings up the problem of Republicans in Name Only. Anyone setting out to appease bias-spotters on the right should know that the conservative movement feels that it is plagued by impostors and fakers, and it won't be satisfied until these RINOs, too, are chased from the newsrooms of the nation.
Then, once all that is taken into account, there's the damnable problem of the bias-spotting left, like the Media Matters for America organization, which has documented the conservative tilt of the press in voluminous detail. How to deal with this? By ignoring it? Isn't that an act of bias on its own?
Besides, there's the mechanics of the job. How is the Post supposed to check up on its reporters' politics? I'm hoping for loyalty oaths and televised hearings, with stiff penalties for employees who refuse to talk or to name names: It would be the perfect spectacle for the end of the newspaper era.
Craziest of all, though, is the prospect of the Post ditching its decades-long pursuit of the grail of objectivity . . . because it got scooped on the Acorn story. If that is all it takes to reduce the Washington Post's vaunted editorial philosophy to ashes, what is the newspaper industry planning to do to atone for its far more consequential failures?
Remember, this disastrous decade saw two of them: First, the news media's failure to look critically at the Bush administration's rationale for the Iraq War; and then, the business press's failure to understand the depth of the subprime mortgage problem and to anticipate its massive consequences.
Would the solution currently on the table—hiring more Republicans and fewer Democrats—have helped the press behave differently in either situation? It's possible, of course, given the right Republicans.
But it is far more likely that it wouldn't have helped at all. To begin with, it would have been unrealistic to expect the press to scrutinize the Bush administration's claims about Iraq more vigorously had it agreed with the administration more. Even bias theorists understand that's not the way it's supposed to work.
And in the case of the subprime lending industry and its relationship to Wall Street, the public would probably have been better served by a perspective that regarded, say, predatory lending with suspicion instead of one that insisted on putting the phrase in quotation marks.
Which is another way of saying that the problem, in each of these massive failures, wasn't really ideological at all. The people who got it right, in both cases, were the ones willing to hold power accountable, to directly challenge the conventional wisdom.
What the Post seems to be after is the opposite: A form of journalism that offends nobody, that comes crawling to the powerful, that mirrors the partisan breakdown of the population as a whole. If that's the future of journalism, we can be certain that ever more catastrophic failures await.
Write to thomas@wsj.com

The WSJ-NYT Smackdown

2009-12-15T00:56:00.002-04:00

This morning the New York Times' David Carr accused the Wall Street Journal of moving its news division to the right under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch.
The WSJ's Managing Editor Robert Thomson responded:

From: Thomson, Robert
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 11:06 AM
Subject: Statement by Robert Thomson on The New York Times
The news column by a Mr David Carr today is yet more evidence that The New York Times is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival while its own circulation and credibility are in retreat. The usual practice of quoting ex-employees was supplemented by a succession of anonymous quotes and unsubstantiated assertions. The attack follows the extraordinary actions of Mr Bill Keller, the Executive Editor, who, among other things, last year wrote personally and at length to a prize committee casting aspersions on Journal journalists and journalism. Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at The New York Times.
Robert Thomson, Editor-in-Chief, Dow Jones.

Tiger Woods and the Animation of News

2009-12-14T01:22:00.000-04:00

Video avatars are like newspaper illustrations of old.

Long after Tiger Woods has been forgiven his transgressions, one lasting legacy of his extramarital activities will be a new journalistic art form: the animated news report. Millions of people have now viewed the online animations produced by Hong Kong-based Next Media depicting the wronged wife coming after Tiger Woods with a golf club and smashing the back window of his vehicle, causing the now-famous accident.
This may or may not be what actually happened, but one lesson of technology applied to information is that every medium finds its ultimate conclusion, from talk radio to reality television. In the case of online video, animated "news" will fill the gap where there is no actual video. (If you've somehow missed this animation, view it at http://tinyurl.com/YL9H6X6).
Journalistic traditionalists tut-tut; animations are not re-enactments so much as a potential version of the news. Even leading new-media journalists are ambivalent. Kara Swisher, who blogs at the Journal's All Things Digital Web site, quipped, "It's not pretty, but it is hard to avert my eyes from the bizarre video report," comparing it to a video game "gone awry." She said she couldn't tell "whether such faux representations of how news might or might not have happened is a good or bad thing."

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Associated Press

Tiger Woods

These animations are the latest brainstorm of Jimmy Lai, the founder of Next Media, which launched what are now the most popular Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Reflecting on how newspaper stories have more background about events than television news reports have, as he told me last week, "I thought, hey, why not make those missing images of the background into animated images?" He hired 160 software developers and engineers in Taiwan, who spent more than two years perfecting the technique. Reporters describe their interpretation of what happened to engineers and actors who serve as the models for the animation. Mr. Lai says that his team can create an animated video in 90 minutes, producing about 20 a day.

Mr. Lai says there's no confusing the animation with real video. "The avatars are still quite wooden looking," he said, though he plans to make them more realistic as the technology improves. Still, viewers need to be discriminating, keeping in mind the difference between enactments and real footage.
Which reminds us that quite a few news stories would benefit from animation of reality: How about congressmen pretending to read the entire health-care bill, or Iranian arms-control negotiators secretly sniggering at U.N. diplomats?
Next Media launched its animations last month, and regulators in Taiwan have already fined the company for its sometimes-graphic depictions of murder and other crimes. Mr. Lai is philosophical. It takes time to get used to new forms of media, he says, "especially when you have competitors who fan the public's sentiment out of fear of an innovation's disruptive competition."
Next Media is based in Hong Kong, which has long enjoyed bragging rights for having more news outlets than any other city. Even under Beijing's rule, the former British colony has remained vibrant and transparent due in good part to its colorful spectrum of news media, including Mr. Lai's free-market and democracy-championing Next Magazine and sister paper Apple Daily.
There is a technology precedent for Mr. Lai's news innovation. Before the era of photography in newspapers and magazines, enterprising editors used similar creative license to help readers imagine how news might have happened. The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, used woodcut-like drawings to depict dramatic scenes, everything from sightings of royals to natural calamities to lynchings of robbers during California's Gold Rush.
The pictorial newspaper sensationalized crime with a purpose. The editors hoped to "infuse a healthier tone of morality into the popular mind upon the subject of such dismal atrocities." When the newspaper printed a drawing of a new archbishop, every clergyman in Britain got a free copy.
As similar newspapers launched in the 19th century, the Illustrated London News hired an army of artists to interpret the news quickly, telling readers, "We shall be able to keep our wood engraving department further in advance by the retention of permanent artists ready at a moment's notice for the contingencies of every public event."
Mr. Lai plans to share his technology with news companies around the world. He reports that "we're in talks with news agencies and some major TV channels" in the U.S. to cooperate in producing animated news.
Another technology genie out of the bottle, destined to change our view of news.

Palin on the Rise; Obama is Old News

2009-12-14T01:18:00.002-04:00

By Jack Kelly
I'm sure a 6-year-old with a crayon could do something not unlike that," snarked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs Tuesday.
The object of Mr. Gibbs' scorn was Gallup's tracking poll for the day before, which showed only 47 percent of respondents approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing, with 46 percent disapproving.

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Perhaps Mr. Gibbs' skin was thin because this was the lowest ranking for a president at this point in his presidency since Gallup began conducting presidential approval polls in 1938.
Meanwhile, a CNN/Opinion Research Poll also released Monday indicated 46 percent of respondents have a favorable impression of Sarah Palin, while 46 percent have an unfavorable one.
The polls were not quite the same. Gallup asked people what they thought of the job Mr. Obama was doing, not whether or not they liked him.
Even with that caveat, though, the convergence between Mr. Obama and Ms. Palin is remarkable. There is no statistical difference between the one and the other.
This represents a substantial gain in public esteem for Ms. Palin since she resigned as governor of Alaska in July, and a substantial decline for Mr. Obama over the same period.
Sarah Palin's been on a roll since the publication of her autobiography last month. "Going Rogue" is already the second-biggest seller among nonfiction books in history (only Bill Clinton's 2004 autobiography, "My Life," sold more copies in the first month), and could be No. 1 before the end of her book tour, since her sales seem to be holding up better than his did.
The book tour itself is a cultural phenomenon. At each stop hundreds, often thousands, of people have waited hours, sometimes days, to meet her.
Could Barack Obama -- who now seems so last year -- inspire that kind of devotion today?
The turnabout in fortunes is all the more remarkable because no political figure in recent history has been subject to such vilification from our news media as Sarah Palin. No malicious rumor was too preposterous to report. No accomplishment was important enough to mention.
Meanwhile, no presidential candidate or president has received more favorable press coverage than Barack Obama.
"President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House," concluded a Pew Research study last May. Forty-two percent of stories in major newspapers and television news programs about Mr. Obama were favorable, compared to 22 percent for Mr. Bush and 27 percent for Mr. Clinton.
"The press just acted like this guy walked on water," Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz said during the campaign.
That's changing, in both directions.
Sarah Palin interrupted her book tour to speak at the Gridiron Club, the biggest social event of the year for Washington journalists.
"The very fact she was willing to take the chance of appearing in a room full of her most disdainful critics is testimony to her courage," wrote Dan Thomasson of Scripps Howard. "She came away with at least a consensus of grudging admiration."
"Her appearance produced the extraordinary scene of inside-the-Beltway cynics and their significant others asking for autographs," Mr. Thomasson noted.
"Palin won the evening," conceded columnist Clarence Page.
"As much as her politics are not mine, after chatting with her and her husband, good-natured 'First Dude' Todd Palin, I came away with a new fondness and respect for both of them," Mr. Page wrote.
"Going Rogue" received savage reviews from most liberals, like that from Ana Marie Cox in The Washington Post, who acknowledged she hadn't actually read the book.
Those who did have a different opinion. Stanley Fish, writing for The New York Times, described it as "compelling and very well done."
The reaction of liberals to Sarah Palin -- which is like that of vampires to garlic -- indicate she is the Republican they fear most. With good reason, Mr. Fish thinks.
"Perseverance, the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin's character," he wrote. "Her political opponents, especially those who dismissed Ronald Reagan before he was elected, should take note."

After walkout, Congressional Black Caucus gets $6 billion in added spending

2009-12-11T00:19:00.002-04:00

December 10, 2009 | 12:23 pm

Call it the $6-billion boycott.
By boycotting a key House committee vote last week and threatening to abandon support for banking regulations, members of the Congressional Black Caucus got $4 billion added to a Wall Street regulation bill and $2 billion to a proposed House jobs bill in spending they sought for African American communities.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) this week inserted $3 billion to the legislation to provide low-interest loans to unemployed homeowners in danger of foreclosure. He added $1 billion for neighborhood revitalization programs.
The money would come out of the $700-billion financial bailout fund.
“For those of us who walked out, it was absolutely essential that we have parts of that legislation directed toward helping people who have been left out of all of these bailouts,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), one of 10 black caucus members on the Financial Services Committee.
The proposed jobs bill targets $1 billion from infrastructure spending for public housing repairs. It also provides $1 billion for an affordable housing trust fund.
With 40 members in the House, the Congressional Black Caucus can be a potent force.
“Since last September, we have continuously voted for bailout and reform for the very institutions that created this devastation without properly protecting the African American community or small business,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said on the day of the boycott. “That stops today.”
Among the caucus’ demands were greater assistance for minority-owned auto dealerships and banks that lend in African American communities and more government advertising in minority-owned media.
-- Associated Press

UPDATE 1-ABC to tap Stephanopoulos as co-anchor of 'GMA'

2009-12-10T00:36:00.002-04:00

NEW YORK, Dec 9 (Reuters) - ABC News plans to announce on Thursday that George Stephanopoulos will become an anchor of "Good Morning America" in a long-expected change that sees Diane Sawyer step up to head the U.S. network's nightly news.
Stephanopoulos, 48, is a former political adviser to the administration of President Bill Clinton. After leaving the White House, he took roles co-hosting ABC News coverage of political events and appeared regularly on ABC News shows.
He is expected to keep "This Week," his Sunday news program, "for the foreseeable future", one source said on Wednesday.
Stephanopoulos will begin his role on "Good Morning America" (GMA) on Dec. 14.
Robin Roberts will remain co-anchor at GMA, mow the second most-watched morning news program in the United States behind NBC's "Today."
Media reports have said Chris Cuomo, GMA's news reader, is leaving and will be replaced by JuJu Chang. The Washington Post reported Cuomo, son of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, will move to co-anchoring the ABC news magazine "20/20."
News programs are among the more lucrative shows put on air by the networks. ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co.
Sawyer will begin solo anchor duties at ABC's "World News" on Dec. 21, replacing Charles Gibson, who said he would step down in September.
Sawyer joins Katie Couric of the "CBS Evening News" as a female anchor of a major U.S. broadcaster's nightly news.
Couric, who left NBC's "Today" show to become the first solo female anchor of a U.S. nightly news program, has had a rocky tenure. Initially, her ratings jumped as viewers tuned in to see how she performed but viewership faded and, in recent years, has remained consistently below ABC and NBC.
Because of her viewership numbers, speculation has persisted that Couric plans to leave "CBS Evening News" before her contract expires in 2011.
Sawyer, who leaves GMA on Friday, may face similar scrutiny over "World News" viewership.
"That was a burden that Katie Couric had to bear," said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center and professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism.
"She was measured as a symbol of the new evening news ... someone who would have to make the transition from morning TV." (Reporting by Bernard Orr, Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and John O'Callaghan)

Accepting Peace Prize Will Be a Test for Obama

2009-12-09T14:22:00.002-04:00

By JEFF ZELENY

Published: December 9, 2009

WASHINGTON — He has read the Nobel speeches of Nelson Mandela, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Elie Wiesel. He has studied the award’s rich history and its extraordinary roster of winners.
Yet when President Obama travels to Norway to accept his prize on Thursday, he faces a far different challenge than those who have gone before him: He is a wartime leader, accepting a medal that is a commendation to peace, which even he insists he does not yet deserve.
There is, of course, no escaping the paradox of this moment for Mr. Obama as he delivers an acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize only nine days after announcing that he would escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending in 30,000 more American troops.
“There is one very pregnant question,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “How do you reconcile your role as a commander in chief with your aspirations to promote a more peaceful world at a time of war? That’s a question that he’s going to explore in some detail.”
If the trajectory of the president’s political career can be measured, at least in part, through his speeches, the remarks he will give on Thursday about the United States’ place in the world provide one of the most pronounced tests of his rhetoric. And surely the most unusual, given that the applause in Norway comes at a particularly trying period of his presidency.
It is, after all, merely a speech. (Actually in the parlance of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, it is called a Nobel Lecture, which is supposed to last 20 to 25 minutes.)
But suddenly, the burden seems even greater than it did two months ago when the Nobel committee startled the world — and Mr. Obama — with its decision to honor the president well before a full picture of his achievements is known.
At the time, the committee made no mention of Afghanistan, but wrote, “Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.”
So there was little question inside the White House that the central themes of the president’s speech had to include war and peace.
Two days after he delivered his Afghanistan address last week at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Mr. Obama sat down in the Oval Office with two speech writers, Ben Rhodes and Jon Favreau, and began to offer an outline for what he would like to say in Oslo.
Mr. Obama is the third sitting American president to be awarded the peace prize. A student of history, he read the lecture of Theodore Roosevelt, who won the award in 1906 for his role in bringing an end to the war between Russia and Japan. He also studied the words of Woodrow Wilson, who sent a telegram to the committee — he was ill and could not attend a ceremony — for his 1919 award in recognition of his 14-point peace program for ending World War I.
With so few former presidents to seek guidance from, aides said, Mr. Obama also spent time looking back at the speech of George C. Marshall, who was awarded the prize in 1953 for helping to rebuild the post-World War II world through the plan of economic aid that bears his name. Mr. Obama also was intrigued by the lectures of more recent honorees, aides said, including Mr. Mandela in 1993 and Dr. King in 1964.
The lessons of history, though, provided only a limited amount of instruction, considering that Mr. Obama’s circumstances are starkly different than those of previous winners. So in addition to explaining his strategy for Afghanistan — outlining why war is necessary to bring peace — the president’s advisers said they will reprise the words of humility that Mr. Obama delivered on Oct. 9, hours after learning he had won the award.
“It’s not necessarily an award he would have given himself,” Mr. Axelrod said. “In that sense, it poses a challenge, but thinking through these issues is not burdensome. He spends a lot of time thinking about how you promote a more peaceful and secure world, about the appropriate use of power and about the value and importance of diplomacy.”
To minimize his time away from Washington, where a vigorous debate over health care and Afghanistan is under way on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama is leaving the White House on Wednesday evening and flying overnight to Oslo. He will formally enter the history of the 108-year-old Nobel prize when he delivers his lecture in a ceremonial room of Oslo City Hall, which offers a view of the picturesque bay of Oslofjorden.
It was then, aides said, they realized that they would not be able to tailor the setting of the lecture in the way they usually do to project Mr. Obama exactly how they wish.
When presidents deliver their most important speeches, like Mr. Obama’s April address on nuclear threats from the central square of Prague or his June speech to the Muslim world from Cairo University, the White House choreographs the backgrounds, camera angles and crowds. But in this case the venue, like the award itself, is something that this president cannot control.

Gibbs: Poll like a 6-year-old

2009-12-08T15:38:00.002-04:00

Gibbs compared Gallup with an EKG machine in a Tuesday briefing. AP Close

The White House lashed out at the Gallup Poll on Tuesday after the survey's daily tracking numbers showed President Obama's approval rating dropping to a new low of 47 percent.

Asked for a response to Monday's tracking poll, which placed Obama's approval numbers among the lowest of any recent president in December of his first year in office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs mocked the reliability of the widely respected polling firm.

"I tell you, if I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG, I'd visit my doctor," Gibbs said. "If you look back, I think five days ago, there was an 11-point spread, now there's a 1-point spread. I mean, I'm sure a 6-year-old with a crayon could do something not unlike that. I don't put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is the daily Gallup trend."

He added: "I don't pay a lot of attention to the meaninglessness of it."

Gallup's tracking poll showed an uptick in Obama's numbers last week following his speech outlining a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. But in Monday's polling release, Gallup's Jeffrey M. Jones wrote: "Any slight bump in support Obama received coincident with his new Afghanistan policy proved to be very short-lived, as his approval rating returned to below the majority level by the weekend and slipped further to 47 percent in Dec. 4-6 polling."

#100: CNN Reaches Historic Low In Prime Time Demo

2009-12-07T15:22:00.000-04:00

CNN has reached a historic ratings low during prime time in the A25-54 demographic, finishing as the fourth place cable news network in that category now 100 times during 2009. This means CNN finished behind Fox News, MSNBC and sister network HLN.

While CNN’s daytime line-up has seen far more success – generally finishing in 2nd place behind just FNC – their prime time line-up has not yet turned around.
This is by far the most times this has ever happened for CNN. The network has now finished in 4th place in that category 41% of 2009 weeknights. It’s a dramatic fall from 2008, when Anderson Cooper’s 10pmET hour actually won the prime time demo, even topping his FNC competition. 2008 of course was a very big year for CNN, as the presidential election dominated coverage. But while CNN’s prime time ratings have not dropped off significantly from 2007 and before, the competition is growing enormously, and leaving CNN behind in the category.
The 100th occurrence was Thursday night. As the year ends, CNN is finishing fourth more and more often. The network was 4th in the prime time demo 13 nights during November – more times than any other month.
Prime time demo is just one of the many categories CNN and other networks use to sell against, and CNN continues to push the fact that it is performing strongly during the day. And it should be noted that while CNN drops in prime time, their sister network HLN is doing well – which benefits CNN’s parent company as a whole. Still, as CNN pushes the line, “More people turn to CNN because journalism matters,” (have you seen that anywhere today?) it appears more and more clear that people are turning to opinion during prime time.

The Usual Merger Suspects

2009-12-07T00:26:00.000-04:00

The Comcast-NBC deal and familiar cries of doom.

Every media merger seems to generate grand denunciations from liberal watchdogs and pro-regulatory policy makers. And sure enough, last week's long-expected announcement that Comcast is buying NBC Universal from General Electric prompted dire predications from all the usual suspects.
"This kind of massive media consolidation will lead to higher prices and fewer independent sources of information," said the apparently clairvoyant Joel Kelsey of Consumers Union. "This merger's potential to foreclose competition and stifle innovation is significant and real," added Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America.
Under the deal, cable giant Comcast takes control of several cable channels and the Universal film studio, in addition to the NBC broadcast network. GE—whose credit unit has suffered in the financial meltdown—gets to unload an entertainment unit that's been struggling and can focus instead on its core manufacturing business. Whether this is wise for either party beats us. But it's a determination best made by the marketplace, not by anticorporate activists.
As for the media analysts at Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, Free Press and similar outfits, an examination of their track record is instructive. In the past decade, such advocacy groups have warned against deals involving AT&T and SBC, AOL and Time Warner, Verizon and MCI, and Sirius and XM—on the grounds that such mergers would result in higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
Some of these business combinations have worked out and others haven't. But it's hard to detect any consumer harm. Whether the market is phone service, Internet access or cable programing, competition and innovation abound. In 1990, cable subscribers had some 70 channels to choose from. Today that number is closer to 600, and TV content can be viewed on a laptop, smart phone or iPod, take your pick.
In addition to being the nation's largest cable company, Comcast is also a leading Internet service provider. And some skeptics worry that Comcast could withhold programming from non-Comcast customers or charge rival cable companies more to carry NBC Universal content. But Comcast has little incentive to restrict choice in a media marketplace full of alternatives. Federal regulations already in place require cable operators to offer programming to competitors at reasonable rates. If Comcast breaks these rules, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division can address it on a case-by-case basis.
The Federal Communications Commission and Justice are expected to take a hard look at this deal. Let's hope they tune out the "consumer protection" alarmists who have a perfect record of error.

How Google Can Help Newspapers

2009-12-04T01:30:00.002-04:00

Video didn't kill the radio star, and the Internet won't destroy news organizations. It will foster a new, digital business model.

By ERIC SCHMIDT

It's the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.
Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt's Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right.
Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I'd never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.
This is a long way from where we are today. The current technology—in this case the distinguished newspaper you are now reading—may be relatively old, but it is a model of simplicity and speed compared with the online news experience today. I can flip through pages much faster in the physical edition of the Journal than I can on the Web. And every time I return to a site, I am treated as a stranger.
So when I think about the current crisis in the print industry, this is where I begin—a traditional technology struggling to adapt to a new, disruptive world. It is a familiar story: It was the arrival of radio and television that started the decline of newspaper circulation. Afternoon newspapers were the first casualties. Then the advent of 24-hour news transformed what was in the morning papers literally into old news.
Now the Internet has broken down the entire news package with articles read individually, reached from a blog or search engine, and abandoned if there is no good reason to hang around once the story is finished. It's what we have come to call internally the atomic unit of consumption.

View Full Image

Chad Crowe

Painful as this is to newspapers and magazines, the pressures on their ad revenue from the Internet is causing even greater damage. The choice facing advertisers targeting consumers in San Francisco was once between an ad in the Chronicle or Examiner. Then came Craigslist, making it possible to get local classifieds for free, followed by Ebay and specialist Web sites. Now search engines like Google connect advertisers directly with consumers looking for what they sell.

With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.
Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper's Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.
The claim that we're making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.
It's understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.
We recognize, however, that a crisis for news-gathering is not just a crisis for the newspaper industry. The flow of accurate information, diverse views and proper analysis is critical for a functioning democracy. We also acknowledge that it has been difficult for newspapers to make money from their online content. But just as there is no single cause of the industry's current problems, there is no single solution. We want to work with publishers to help them build bigger audiences, better engage readers, and make more money.
Meeting that challenge will mean using technology to develop new ways to reach readers and keep them engaged for longer, as well as new ways to raise revenue combining free and paid access. I believe it also requires a change of tone in the debate, a recognition that we all have to work together to fulfill the promise of journalism in the digital age.
Google is serious about playing its part. We are already testing, with more than three dozen major partners from the news industry, a service called Google Fast Flip. The theory—which seems to work in practice—is that if we make it easier to read articles, people will read more of them. Our news partners will receive the majority of the revenue generated by the display ads shown beside stories.
Nor is there a choice, as some newspapers seem to think, between charging for access to their online content or keeping links to their articles in Google News and Google Search. They can do both.
This is a start. But together we can go much further toward that fantasy news gadget I outlined at the start. The acceleration in mobile phone sophistication and ownership offers tremendous potential. As more of these phones become connected to the Internet, they are becoming reading devices, delivering stories, business reviews and ads. These phones know where you are and can provide geographically relevant information. There will be more news, more comment, more opportunities for debate in the future, not less.
The best newspapers have always held up a mirror to their communities. Now they can offer a digital place for their readers to congregate and talk. And just as we have seen different models of payment for TV as choice has increased and new providers have become involved, I believe we will see the same with news. We could easily see free access for mass-market content funded from advertising alongside the equivalent of subscription and pay-for-view for material with a niche readership.
I certainly don't believe that the Internet will mean the death of news. Through innovation and technology, it can endure with newfound profitability and vitality. Video didn't kill the radio star. It created a whole new additional industry.
Mr. Schmidt is chairman and CEO of Google Inc.

Obama: FOX News Channel's friend

2009-12-03T00:50:00.000-04:00

Nearly one year in with Obama, FOX is up, CNN and MSNBC are down

Lou Dobbs, who suddenly resigned at CNN, spoke about his move with FOX News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, on "The O'Reilly Factor," one of the top-rated programs on cable news. (Photo by Kathy Willens / AP)

by Mark Silva
Who says FOX News doesn't like Barack Obama?
The first year of the Democratic president has been good for the nation's leading cable news channel - its viewership up 7 percent in prime-time hours so far in 2009, compared to the same time last year.
Make that 10 percent among the 25-54-year-olds whom advertisers love to court.
As opposed to both rivals CNN, suffering an apparent post-Dobbs slump as well, and MSNBC - down by double-digits from year to year.
So say the Nielsen ratings in this year of living Democratically, when President Barack Obama's White House has taken on FOX for being something other than a traditional news network - "an arm of the Republican Party,'' according to the outgoing White House communications director. It could be, perhaps, that all the vitriol which commentator Glenn Beck and company have stirred up for Obama and crew has been box-office for the network that the press office loves to hate.
Beck's own audience - 2.67 million viewers in November - includes a 101 percent gain among the 25-54 year-olds since last year.
It's both FOX's standard news fare - Brett Baier's report - and its commentary - Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity - that have fared well during the first 10 months of the Obama administration.
FOX News, of course, has been dominant in the cable ratings for some time - No. 1 in total viewers for 95 consecutive months (since January of 2002), by Nielsen Media Research's count.
But Baier's Special Report and The O'Reilly Factor scored their best month of the year in November, both in total viewership and in the 25-54 cohort.
Both CNN and MSMBC were suffering their worst months of the year, by comparison - with CNN's Anderson Cooper down 70 percent from last year among the 25-54s, Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room off 63 percent among the same crowd.
And CNN's viewership was off 25 percent in the weeks following Lou Dobbs' surprise on-air resignation, comparing the pre-Dobbs and post-Dobbs segments of November's ratings.
Bill O'Reilly's audience of 3.669 million in November included a 12 percent gain in the 24-54 audience, compared with November of last year.
CNN's Campbell Brown's audience of 696,000 was down 62 percent in the same cohort. MSNBC's Countdown with Olbermann, with 1 million viewers, also was down 62 percent among the same audience, year to year.
Even Larry King's 853,000 was off 59 percent.
And Chris Matthews, playing Hardball over at MSNBC, pulled 672,000 viewers, including 184,000 in the 25-54 bracket, off 63 percent from the previous November. It could be all that interrupting of guests that the host does.

Anderson Cooper's Ratings Plummet

2009-12-03T00:49:00.000-04:00

Anderson Cooper is fading in the ratings.
The respected CNN anchor has seen his numbers slip significantly through the past year. His 10 p.m. show, "Anderson Cooper 360," has declined 62% in total viewers and 70% in adults 25-54 from November 2008, according to Nielsen figures.
Last month, in Cooper's time slot, Fox News' "On the Record" attracted an average viewership of 1.9 million while "360" averaged 672,000; repeats of MSNBC's "Countdown" and HLN's Nancy Grace show averaged 655,000 and 458,000, respectively.
But in the ad-friendly 25-54 demo, those same repeats won out over Cooper with 224,000 (MSNBC) and 214,000 (HLN).
Cooper -- who became an overnight sensation during his Hurricane Katrina coverage -- surely deserves better ratings. From the start of 2009, he began losing a huge chunk of his nightly audience.
So what happened? Let's see: There's no presidential election to ramp up ratings; there's heavy competition from centrist CNN's noisier rivals (see: Fox News, the No. 1 cable news channel); there's people catching up on DVR-ed TV shows in the late evening; then there's the loss of Lou Dobbs in the 7 p.m. anchor chair, among other possible factors.
Work those blue eyes, Coop!

FTC to Examine Possible Support of News Organizations

2009-12-02T00:46:00.002-04:00

By BRENT KENDALL And THOMAS CATAN

WASHINGTON –The head of the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday the agency will study whether government should aid struggling news organizations, which are suffering from a collapse in advertising revenues as the internet upends their centuries-old business model.
FTC Chairman Jon Liebowitz's comments came during day one of a two-day "workshop" sponsored by the agency that became a forum for arguments among the heads of a diverse array of news organizations over the future of journalism.
Mr. Leibowitz said his agency will examine whether government should change the way the industry is regulated, from making news-gathering companies exempt from antitrust laws to granting them special tax treatment to making changes to copyright laws.
The Federal Communications Commission is already reconsidering rules that prevent a company from owning newspapers and TV stations in a single market.
Mr. Leibowitz said other ideas include extending government subsidies to commercial news organizations, granting them special tax treatment or an exemption from antitrust regulations
While cautioning that changes in the news business must be much better understood before any policy changes are made, Mr. Leibowitz said: "We should be able to take action if necessary to preserve the news that is vital to democracy."
Mr. Leibowitz's wife, Ruth Marcus, is a columnist for the Washington Post, a fact he disclosed during the meeting.
Media executives said they might welcome some relaxation of antitrust and tax rules, but they also expressed wariness of government intervention in the news business.
"I think the message from today is be very, very cautious before you do anything," Mr. Leibowitz said in an interview.
News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said at the FTC workshop that media companies need to do a better job of convincing consumers that high-quality journalism isn't free. "Good journalism is an expensive commodity," he said.
Mr. Murdoch created a buzz last month by saying that News Corp. may block Google Inc. from searching its news sites. He didn't mention the company by name Tuesday, but criticized Internet sites that profit from reusing news articles published by others without bearing the costs.
"To be impolite, it's theft," he said. News Corp. owns the Wall Street Journal.
Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, followed Mr. Murdoch and blasted his criticism of Internet sites like hers that collect and link to news content from other providers. Ms. Huffington said her popular Web site drives a great deal of online traffic to The Wall Street Journal.
"It's time for traditional media companies to stop whining," she said.
Google and other Web companies say they help news organizations by referring Web users to their sites. "The reality is that the vast majority of publishers want to be discovered," Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google News, said at the FTC event. Mr. Cohen said it was technologically very simple for a publisher to instruct Google's Web crawler not to index its news site.
Federal and state officials this year have explored how the government might play a role in helping ease the financial travails of news organizations. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D., Md.) this spring proposed a bill that would allow newspapers to operate as tax-exempt institutions. Congress has held several hearings about the financial challenges facing the industry.
Previous government salves for the news industry have had limited success. The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 paved the way for ailing newspapers in the same city to share costs. Critics of these "joint operating agreements" say the law helped preserve multiple newspapers in cities that no longer were able to support them, reducing both papers' chances for survival. JOAs in cities such as Denver and Seattle have been among the first casualties in the newspaper industry's recent woes.
—Shira Ovide contributed to this article

'Overexposed' Obama begins to duck the WH press corps

2009-12-02T00:43:00.000-04:00

By Joseph Curl

After months of what some critics called overexposure, President Obama has of late avoided questions from the White House press corps at large, closing the Oval Office to traditionally informal question-and-answer sessions with reporters and pulling back from the fast pace of news conferences he established when taking office.
The president, whose job-approval ratings have been on a steady slide, hasn't held a formal news conference in 19 weeks, since July 22. That one ended badly, when Mr. Obama waded into a racial controversy by saying a white police officer "acted stupidly" when he arrested a black Harvard professor.
"It can't be a total coincidence that the last time he faced the press corps, we ended with beers in the Rose Garden with Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley, when the focus was supposed to be health care," said Julie Mason, a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner who also covered the Bush administration for the Houston Chronicle.
"It does seem like they are responding to the overexposure argument and trying to exert more control over his appearances," she said.
Veteran White House reporters have been grumbling about the lack of access to the president, who as a candidate vowed an unprecedented level of transparency.
On his recent trip to Asia, Mr. Obama took few questions - and none during a session with Chinese President Hu Jintao that the White House dubbed "joint press statements."
Mr. Obama has taken to limiting questions during press conferences with foreign leaders to one question each fromU.S. reporters and foreign correspondents, as he did last week when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was in Washington. He did the same "one-and-one" with the Japanese prime minister and the South Korean president while in Asia.
In a more unusual move, the president has altered the practice of allowing reporters into the Oval Office for what is called a "pool spray" - a few informal questions after a presidential meeting, often with a foreign leader. Mr. Obama's meeting Monday with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was closed to the press, even photographers, the White House said.
"It's surprising and quite unusual that President Obama meets with an allied leader like the prime minister of Australia and there's no photo op at the beginning or end of the session," said Mark Knoller, a longtime White House reporter for CBS Radio.
Mr. Obama on Tuesday will announce his new policy on the war in Afghanistan at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He won't be taking questions immediately afterward.
A White House spokesman bristled when asked Monday about the situation.
"I think the last time we got a question about the president answering questions, if I'm not mistaken, it was - wasn't it couched in the - in the notion that he was overexposed?" press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
"Hard for me to imagine that the president would submit himself to so many questions that the punditocracy would say he was overexposed, but the new thing happens to be that he's not answering enough questions," he said.
Still, the spokesman added: "The president enjoys taking your questions and questions from reporters throughout this process. And I am - assume he'll continue to do so."
The president did sit down one-on-one with reporters from all TV network and cable news outlets during his recent trip to Asia, including Fox News' Major Garrett, whom he skipped at his last White House news conference. Mr. Obama has conducted at least 139 press interviews with reporters, Mr. Knoller said.
The pace is on par with his predecessor's. By Mr. Knoller's count, Mr. Obama has held five formal news conferences at the White House during his first 10 months in office, not much different from President George W. Bush, who held four over the same period.
Bill Plante, another White House veteran for CBS News, said presidents prefer to duck the press from time to time, at least for a while.
"At the moment, Obama's silence has more to do with the coming Afghanistan announcement," he said in an e-mail. "Bush (both of them), Clinton, Reagan - all had periods where they preferred not to answer questions for reasons ranging from the economy to Iran Contra or Monica Lewinsky."
But the Obama White House is intent on controlling the flow.
"I get the strong impression this president just doesn't relish the spontaneous question," Miss Mason said.

The White House Takes On POLITICO

2009-12-01T00:54:00.002-04:00

It's not just Fox News that's become subject of White House derision. The following is an excerpt from a joke e-mail that is circulating among White House staffers. It's a response, of sorts, to the analytical essay that POLITICO editor-in-chief John Harris wrote about the "seven stories that Barack Obama doesn't want told." It's fairly caustic -- and, truth be told, the White House maintains good relationships with POLITICO reporters and has been known to try and agenda-set by dishing out a few tips to the publication. But make no mistake: many on the White House senior staff dislike POLITICO's brand of journalism, and they do not like the effect that POLITICO's metabolism has on the rest of the press corps, including this (i.e., my own) corner of it. Still, don't read too much into this. There's been plenty of back-and-forth between the Whit House and the POLITICO, and the White House accepts the role -- which is often substantial -- that POLITICO plays in the newsgathering process.

7 narratives politico is fighting in their efforts to get an interview with the President
1.       They are more interested in readers than accuracy
2.       Its okay to be wrong everyonce in a while, if your are the first to break the news
3.       More interested in gossip than news
4.       A spouter of the worst sort of insider conventional wisdom
5.       Their analysis about obama has been wrong more than any one
6.       Click ... period
7.       More obsessed with personality than policy

Federal Reserve tries theater ads to burnish its image

2009-11-27T02:04:00.002-04:00

Spots urging shoppers to use their credit cards wisely will be shown on big screens in 12 U.S. cities. The central bank has long been accused of neglecting its consumer protection duties.

By Jim Puzzanghera

November 26, 2009

Reporting from Washington - The Federal Reserve isn't too popular these days, what with its failure to predict or prevent the financial crisis and recession, not to mention its involvement in last year's bailouts. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has a bestselling book out called "End the Fed," and some lawmakers are looking to cut back the central bank's power.

It sounds like a perfect time for an ad campaign.

The Fed has made a 45-second public service announcement to help consumers use their credit cards wisely. The spot will run before movie previews at theaters in 12 U.S. cities, including Long Beach, from Friday through Dec. 3.

Over jazzy music, the announcer asks: "Want to use your credit card wisely? Here are some tips you can trust from the Federal Reserve." With the Fed logo featured prominently, the ad offers suggestions such as paying your bill on time and watching for changes in the terms of the account.

The Fed has been under fire for neglecting its consumer protection authority for years -- particularly for taking 14 years to enact rules protecting consumers from unscrupulous mortgage lending.

In April and September, the Fed ran public-service ads in cinemas in California, Florida and other states devastated by the housing crash advising viewers how to avoid foreclosure scams.

The latest ad, which comes as people are expected to flock to holiday movies, could help improve the Fed's battered image as Congress weighs an overhaul of financial regulations. Plus, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will be on Capitol Hill on Dec. 3 for a hearing on his renomination for a second four-year term.

With sentiment against the Fed running high, that event promises to be a Washington blockbuster.

jim.puzzanghera@

latimes.com

News Corp. Joined by Rivals Weighing Google Block

2009-11-25T00:31:00.000-04:00

By Greg Bensinger and Brian Womack

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News may pull some of their stories from Google Inc.’s news site, a move that would emulate News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch.
News Corp. is considering blocking Google’s search engine from displaying its news articles and is talking to Microsoft Corp. about displaying stories on its Bing site, people familiar with the situation said yesterday.
MediaNews Group Inc., the Post’s publisher, will block Google News when it starts charging readers in Pennsylvania and California for online content next year, Chief Executive Officer Dean Singleton said in an interview. Morning News owner A.H. Belo Corp. may introduce online subscription fees and also block Google, Executive Vice President James Moroney said.
“The things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic,” Singleton said.
Newspaper publishers, grappling with a collapse in the print-ad market, are considering Web-site charges and are pushing back against Google, which displays headlines and excerpts from stories on its free news site. News Corp., whose Wall Street Journal already charges for online subscriptions, has also said that it plans more paid content.
While newspapers have complained about Google using their news to attract users and boost revenue, fewer than 1 percent have opted out of the service, Josh Cohen, head of Google’s news division, said in an interview.
Value in Traffic
A significant number of publishers would have to block access to their content to produce a notable impact on Google’s search results, said Greg Sterling, principal at consulting and research firm Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco. “It’s a tree-in-the-forest kind of thing,” he said. “I don’t think people would notice” if a lone publisher took the action.
“There’s value in that traffic and I think publishers recognize that value,” Cohen said. “The reason they’re not opting out is they’re getting something from that relationship.”
Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in an interview this month that his company, owner of the most popular Internet search engine, would like to keep news providers on its site.
“We do worry about it, and we think it would be a bad outcome” for newspapers to leave Google, Schmidt said. “We would encourage them to stay in our program.”
Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman, declined to comment yesterday on any talks between News Corp. and Microsoft, as well as the other newspapers potentially opting out of Google News.
Paid Models
Murdoch, News Corp.’s chairman and CEO, said in an interview on Sky News Australia this month that he may remove the company’s content from Google searches. The company’s newspapers include the Times of London and the New York Post.
MediaNews, based in Denver, will block Google News from the content it puts behind a so-called pay wall early next year at newspapers in Chico, California, and York, Pennsylvania, Singleton said.
A.H. Belo, based in Dallas, hasn’t decided if it will block Google News and any action isn’t “imminent,” said Moroney, who is also publisher of the Morning News. Blocking Google would be part of a larger strategy, he said.
Belo is considering models for charging for some of its Web content and plans to implement a pay wall within six months at either the Morning News, Rhode Island’s Providence Journal or Riverside Press-Enterprise, published in California, Moroney said. That may require Web readers to go directly to the newspaper’s site to read stories, he said.
‘Not Monetized’
“This is traffic that’s not being monetized to any great degree,” Moroney said. “It’s akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.”
Google, based in Mountain View, California, added 74 cents to $583.09 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. Belo jumped 36 cents, or 8.2 percent, to $4.76 on the New York Stock Exchange. MediaNews is closely held.
Google News gathers stories from the Web and displays their headlines, photos and the first few lines with links to the full articles on the original publishers’ Web sites.
Google has also faced international criticism from media companies over the service. In 2007, Belgian newspapers won a copyright suit blocking Google from linking to their articles on Google News.
Fewer than 100 publishers have completely blocked their content from Google News search results, Cohen said.
“You can point back to the traffic that we’re sending and the fact that so few of those publishers have opted out as a pretty strong case that there’s value being delivered back to these publishers,” Cohen said.
Moroney said more publishers are “focused on attracting the really engaged consumers who come multiple times and stay for lots of minutes every time” rather than the casual online reader who happens upon a news site by chance.
U.S. newspaper publishers lost 28 percent of their print and online ad revenue in the third quarter from a year earlier, the Newspaper Association of America reported this month.
To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Bensinger in New York at gbensinger1@bloomberg.net; Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net

Lou Dobbs mulls White House bid

2009-11-24T16:49:00.000-04:00

: Former CNN host Lou Dobbs fueled already rampant speculation about his political future Monday, sending the clearest signals yet that he's mulling a bid for president — and leaving third-party political operatives salivating over the possibility of a celebrity recruit for the 2012 campaign. Photo: AP

Former CNN host Lou Dobbs fueled already rampant speculation about his political future Monday, sending the clearest signals yet that he's mulling a bid for president — and leaving third-party political operatives salivating over the possibility of a celebrity recruit for the 2012 campaign.

Less than two weeks after announcing his departure from the cable network — and after a series of interviews in which Dobbs encouraged speculation about his political plans — the anchorman known to fans as "Mr. Independent" finally made his presidential ambitions explicit on former Sen. Fred Thompson's radio show Monday.

Asked if he might make a run at the White House in 2012, Dobbs answered flatly: "Yes is the answer."

"I'm going to be talking some more with some folks who want me to listen in the next few weeks," Dobbs told Thompson. "Right now I'm fortunate to have a number of wonderful options."

Dobbs's political future, however, remains shrouded in question marks. He has left open a variety of paths to public office — in addition to toying with a presidential campaign, Dobbs hasn't ruled out a bid for the Senate in 2012 in New Jersey — and also left his party affiliation a mystery.

A representative for Dobbs said his schedule did not permit him to comment for this story by deadline.

Though Dobbs's criticism of the Obama administration and his famously conservative views on illegal immigration have raised the prospect he could run for office as a Republican, he has staked out a rhetorical position that places him outside both parties. In 2007, he penned a book titled, "Independents Day: Awakening the American Spirit," and in his final CNN broadcast, Dobbs took broad aim at a political culture "defined in the public arena by partisanship and ideology rather than by rigorous, empirical thought and forthright analysis and discussion."
And in an appearance on CNBC last week, Dobbs told Larry Kudlow that he "absolutely" planned to remain independent of a political party.
After two consecutive presidential cycles in which independent contenders had virtually no impact at the polls, independent political strategists are delighted at the prospect of a third-party campaign for the White House headlined by a high-profile, TV-friendly candidate with the potential to scramble the national political map.

"I would assume he's going independent, since he's made a very strong case that that's where he is," said Bay Buchanan, who ran Pat Buchanan's 2000 campaign for president as the Reform Party's candidate. "There's enormous movement out there, I think more so than when Pat ran. I think they've really given up on Republicans, they've given up on Democrats; so he would be stepping into something where a path had been laid."

Buchanan added: "I think he can win."

Even independent political operatives less ideologically aligned with Dobbs — Buchanan, like Dobbs, is an immigration hawk — say he represents an enormous opportunity for foes of the two-party system.

"Lou Dobbs, I think, would be a perfect candidate for us," said former Sen. Dean Barkley, the founder of the Minnesota Reform Party (later known as the Minnesota Independence Party) who managed former Gov. Jesse Ventura's successful third-party campaign in 1998. "We were hoping he would have run last time."

The notion of a cable news personality running for high office seems less far-fetched one year after former comedian and liberal talk-radio host Al Franken upset expectations by defeating an incumbent Republican senator in Minnesota, and after television stars such as MSNBC's Chris Matthews explored running for office and Fox's Glenn Beck leaped directly into political activism. Indeed, operatives say, Dobbs's talent for communicating with a national audience could serve him well as an outsider candidate.
"You know he's got a pretty good sensibility with an audience," said media consultant Bill Hillsman, who worked on third-party campaigns for Ventura and gubernatorial candidates Kinky Friedman in Texas and Chris Daggett in New Jersey.
"There aren't too many people who you can say have that particular skill on a national basis, if you're looking at independents," said Hillsman, who said he urged Dobbs in a letter to run as an independent candidate in New Jersey's 2009 gubernatorial election.

Still, even with his star power, there could be serious limits to the appeal of a candidate best known for his opposition to immigration reform and his indulgence of conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama's birth certificate.

While Dobbs's views on immigration might get him a toehold with some constituencies, there's little modern evidence that opposition to immigration can power a national campaign. In order to have a shot at gaining traction nationally, Dobbs would have to tap into populist anger on a broader range of issues, according to Clay Mulford, who managed Ross Perot's presidential campaign in 1992.
"There's a populist streak in the voting public that spans both left and right, and so you've got the combination of this protectionist element and immigration on one hand, on the right. And on the left you've got this anti-bailout, Wall Street, focus-on-Main Street kind of sentiment," Mulford said. "That streak in American politics is something that's often ignored."

But Mulford, whom New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg consulted in 2008 about a possible independent presidential bid of his own, also poured some cold water on the Dobbs-for-President talk, noting that even a charismatic television personality would face a tough adjustment to the campaign trail.

Dobbs would encounter daunting structural obstacles to fundraising and a patchwork of ballot-access laws that tilt the playing field against any third-party contender. On top of that, Mulford said, Dobbs's hard-line views on immigration might restrict his national appeal in "a country of immigrants."

"The Electoral College makes it, unless you're going to really be at the 30 percent level and go from there, it's a hard slog, nationwide," Mulford warned. "Without some really substantive positions, given his lack of experience, a national effort would be difficult."

And for all the talk of a presidential campaign, Dobbs has yet to contact leading third-party operatives such as Buchanan, Hillsman, Mulford or Ed Rollins, the Perot campaign veteran who shared Dobbs's affiliation with CNN until the anchor quit this month, the operatives said.

Given the hurdles Dobbs would have to clear in order to run nationally, Democrats in his home state of New Jersey are responding seriously to Dobbs's hints about a Senate campaign.

"I assume he'd be a formidable candidate in terms of his skills and his ability to raise funds or self-fund," said a Democratic consultant based in New Jersey. "None of us are sitting around going, 'Oh, that's a joke.'"

At the same time, the Democrat said, Dobbs would be hampered from the first day of a Senate campaign by the optics of running as a border security hard-liner against the Senate's lone Hispanic.

"He's probably out of the mainstream on a bulk of issues. He's going to have a particularly delicate time running against the Senate's only Latino member. He certainly has no infrastructure on which to build in New Jersey," the consultant said. "I don't sense that anyone is sitting around going, 'Lou Dobbs is the next big thing.'"

Even as independents look eagerly forward to a possible Dobbs campaign — for president or another office — Republicans have responded much more warily to suggestions that Dobbs, a resident of Sussex County, could run for Senate on the GOP ticket in 2012.

"I don't think people know whether he'd run as a Republican and also don't know where he stands on anything but immigration," said a Republican strategist from New Jersey.

Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told POLITICO: "It's not even on our radar screen. Neither New Jersey senator is up in 2010, and 2010 is where our sole focus is right now."

Thanks for Paying Attention Big Journalism

2009-11-24T00:40:00.002-04:00

by Andrew Breitbart
In response to the Columbia Journalism Review’s accusing me of “blackmailing” the Attorney General of the United States, I must take notice that the mainstream media as a journalistic establishment IS paying attention to the ongoing ACORN scandal. Good. I thought so.
What the Columbia Journalism Review is doing is very similar to what Media Matters is doing: protecting the Democrat-Media Complex, the natural alliance of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. This ACORN investigation has been going on for two months and Hannah, James, and I have proven to be truth-tellers every step of the way, while the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now has been proven time and again to be liars.

Yet instead of engaging the real, newsworthy issues of ACORN’s possible corruption, malfeasance and illegal behavior, the CJR, like its more overtly political online counterpart Media Matters, and indeed every other MSM outlet, has been sitting it out on the sidelines, waiting – rooting – for Hannah Giles, James O’Keefe and me to make a mistake. In fact, my appearance Thursday night is the only time in which the media has introduced itself into this ongoing narrative: proof that it’s paying attention and taking sides.
Neither, by the way, has the CJR challenged James Rainey, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, who has consistently shaded his coverage favorably toward ACORN since we first broke the story back in September, evincing little interest in the truth but instead muttering about the standards of the Society of Professional Journalists (take link, be sure to read the comments). “But the Society of Professional Journalists has set a standard that deception should be used only when every other reporting approach has been exhausted and only then in certain cases, most notably to reveal a severe social problem or to prevent people from being harmed.”
A “severe social problem”? Perhaps that’s exactly what Congress saw when both the Senate and the House de-funded ACORN (at least temporarily), and the group’s tie with the census was abruptly severed in the wake of our reports. So thank you for the clarification, CJR, and thank you to its appropriately named Mr. Marx for showing that hallowed institution’s true colors at a moment when any sentient being can recognize that the credibility of journalism is on the line. It’s a little like the Sarah Palin situation: the media simultaneously dismisses her as an inept idiot and yet hangs on her every word, hoping to entrap her. Why else would MSNBC send Norah O’Donnell, armed with talking points, to “fact-check” a tee shirt being worn by a young woman at one of Sarah’s recent book signings?
And now to address the fever-swamp’s notion that what I said on “Hannity” last night was “blackmail.” Blackmail occurs when one party threatens to reveal an unsavory piece of information about another party, and demands money in exchange for silence. For obvious reasons, it is most often conducted in private. I, on the other hand, went on national television with a challenge to the Attorney General to do his job; unlike this administration and its justice department, what I did was fully open and transparent.
There will be consequences if there isn’t an investigation into ACORN. The videos will be shown and at a particular moment. There is nothing illegal about my proposed response to the continued inaction from this justice department, and there’s nothing I’d like more than to have my day in court and let a jury hear why I have gone to such extraordinary measures to tell a major story that the dying, partisan, leftist media has worked so hard to suppress.
The days of the Democrat-Media Complex controlling the narrative are in their end times. And if the AG wants to turn his focus on me instead of ACORN, then that day will be closer than many of them think.

Newspaper circulation may be worse than it looks

2009-11-23T01:14:00.002-04:00

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - While U.S. newspapers are losing subscribers at a staggering rate, a few dailies stand out because their circulation is rising. But they aren't necessarily selling more copies.
Here's why: Since April 1, new auditing rules have made it easier for newspapers to count a reader as a paying customer.
These looser standards are especially helpful to a newspaper if it sells an "electronic edition." That can include a subscriber-only Web site, such as what The Wall Street Journal has, or it can be a digital replica of a newspaper's printed product. Several dozen publications, including USA Today, sell access to these daily "e-editions" that show how the news was laid out in print.
Under the new auditing standards, if a newspaper sells a "bundled" subscription to both the print and electronic editions, the publication is often allowed to count that subscriber twice.
If not for these rules, the industry's numbers would look even worse. Average weekday circulation at 379 U.S. newspapers fell 10.6 percent during the six months ending in September. That was the steepest decline ever recorded by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the organization that verifies how many people are paying to read publications.
It's not clear what the numbers would have been under the old auditing standards. But the effects of the new rules were widespread. There were 59 newspapers that listed at least 5,000 electronic editions in their weekday circulations, according to an Associated Press review of the figures filed with the ABC for the April-September period. In all but a few instances, the number of electronic subscribers was substantially higher than a year ago.
The decline in newspaper circulation has several causes. Many publications have intentionally reduced the range of their deliveries, cutting out exurbs or distant parts of their states where they sold relatively few copies. Higher prices for home delivery and newsstand copies also have driven some readers away. Publishers are betting they can keep their most loyal readers and are charging them more to help offset their crumbling ad sales - the main source of newspaper revenue.
Nevertheless, many newspapers are still offering discounts to bolster their circulation so they don't risk losing even more advertising revenue. The size of the audience is one factor marketers consider when they buy ads.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal was among the newspapers whose weekday circulation rose from the same time last year. Nevada's largest newspaper saw its average weekday circulation rise 6.6 percent, or nearly 11,000 subscribers, to 175,841. It was a remarkable improvement, given that weekday sales of its print edition fell by 12,000 copies and Las Vegas ranks among the cities hardest hit by the Great Recession.
How did it happen? The Review-Journal's circulation this year included 23,132 electronic editions compared with just 511 at the same time last year.
The big difference didn't occur because that many more people suddenly decided to buy the Review-Journal's digital replica of its print edition.
The change happened because the price the newspaper was charging for the online replica - it costs print customers an extra 50 cents per week - hadn't been high enough to qualify as paid circulation until the ABC's April change. That let newspapers define their paying readers as anyone who spends at least a penny for a copy. Previously, a newspaper copy had to sell for at least 25 percent of the basic price to qualify as paid circulation.
The ABC said it changed the rules to reduce its auditing costs and "provide greater pricing and marketing flexibility" for publishers.
Steve Coffeen, the Review-Journal's circulation director, said it makes sense to count the bundled subscriptions twice, as well as other people buying the electronic edition at a sharp discount, because it provides a complete picture of the newspaper's paying audience. Advertisers generally prize readers who pay for a publication, reasoning they are more likely to peruse it.
"It's important to show advertisers we are fighting the good fight and using other platforms to reach readers," Coffeen said.
That rationale makes sense to Randy Novak, director of newspaper strategy for NSA Media, one of the nation's largest buyers of newspaper ads. He doesn't see much difference between readers who are getting the newspaper at a deep discount or the standard price. He wants to reach people who care enough about the newspaper to be willing to pay for it at all.
However, another big buyer of newspaper ads says the new ABC rules made the reported circulation numbers less credible.
"You really have to do your homework now and ask newspapers about how much double counting is going on," said Allison Howald, U.S. director of print investment at PHD Media.
A surge in digital sales propelled the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania to a 16.5 percent increase in weekday circulation - the highest among dailies selling at least 50,000 copies. The Daily Record listed 10,073 electronic editions in its latest circulation of 55,370. At the same time last year it counted just 42 electronic editions in its circulation of 47,549.
In most cases, the electronic edition is a replica of the printed product, right down to the ads. The technology even makes it possible to simulate the act of turning the pages of a paper edition. Most electronic editions are sold at a small fraction of the price for the printed edition, partly because publishers don't have to pay for newsprint or fuel to deliver the copy.
Web subscriptions were pivotal in The Wall Street Journal's growth over the past decade. The digital sales are the main reason that the Journal surpassed USA Today as the top-selling U.S. newspaper in the April-September period. USA Today, owned by Gannett Co., still holds the edge in print circulation.
The Journal charges its print subscribers an additional 40 cents per week for unrestricted access to its Web site. Journal spokesman Robert Christie wouldn't comment on whether the new rules for counting subscribers contributed to a 14 percent increase in the newspaper's 407,002 digital subscribers. Including the print side, the Journal's total circulation edged up by just 0.6 percent to 2.02 million.
"We followed the ABC's rules and methodology," Christie said.
Some newspapers that posted circulation gains say they are picking up readers who feel abandoned by bigger publications. Cutbacks at newspapers in Atlanta, Charlotte, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn., contributed to most of the 2 percent increase at the 70,000-circulation Chattanooga Times Free Press in Tennessee, said Publisher Tom Griscom. "We are keeping an eye on print and not letting it drift away," Griscom said.
A reduced emphasis on print at The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, which now deliver to homes only three days a week, also helped Michigan's Oakland Press increase its weekday circulation 7 percent to 68,067. But electronic sales were the main factor. The newspaper listed 6,500 more electronic editions in its latest circulation numbers than it did a year ago, offsetting a slight decline in print.

Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact

2009-11-23T01:06:00.002-04:00

By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles, Richard Waters in San Francisco and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York
Published: November 22 2009 23:01 | Last updated: November 22 2009 23:01

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.
The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.
However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.
News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.
One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”.
Microsoft’s interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content.
“This is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins,” said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan.
But the biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model that adequately replaces declining print and advertising revenues.
In a possible sign of negotiations to come, Google last week played down the importance of newspaper content.
Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director, told a Society of Editors conference that Google did not need news content to survive. “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue,” he said.
News Corp has been exploring online payment models for its newspapers and has taken an increasingly hard line against Google.
Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chairman, has said that he would use legal methods to prevent Google “stealing stories” published in his papers.
Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet.
Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, has said that the company is prepared to spend heavily for many years to make Bing a serious rival to Google.
Microsoft has sought to differentiate Bing by drawing in material not found elsewhere, though has not demanded exclusivity from content partners. Bing accounted for 9.9 per cent of searches in the US in October, up from 8.4 per cent at its launch, according to ComScore.
James Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp Europe and Asia, hinted last week that the company was making progress with its online plans. “We think that there’s a very exciting marketplace, potentially a wholesale market place for digital journalism that we’ll be developing,” he said

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Oprah Winfrey to Leave Talk Show in 2011

2009-11-20T00:08:00.000-04:00

Harpo President Announces Oprah Winfrey's Plans to Step Down From Iconic Show

By SHEILA MARIKAR

After more than 20 years at the top of the daytime talk show game, Oprah Winfrey's calling it quits.
According to insiders, Winfrey informed her staff of her decision late this afternoon in a company meeting, described as "emotional, supportive and respectful."
This afternoon, Tim Bennett, president of Winfrey's Harpo production house, announced that the media mogul will step off the "Oprah" set in September 2011. He said Winfrey will confirm the news on Friday's edition of her show.
"The Oprah Winfrey Show" will not move on to the cable Oprah Winfrey Network or OWN.
Since "Oprah's" 1986 inception, Winfrey's grown to be far more than a shoulder to cry on for scandal-scarred stars. Her empire -- which includes films, books, magazines and Web sites, in addition to her TV show -- influences people the world over, and her wealth -- at one point, she was the world's only African-American billionaire, according to Forbes magazine -- grants her access to people, places and things few others can conceive.
What's next for Winfrey? Perhaps she'll drop a hint on her show Friday.
Below, read the full text of Bennett's statement to stations across the country that carry Winfrey's show.

Dear Friends:
Over the past several weeks, my team and I have had conversations with many of you to help address your questions about the future of "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Of course, the one question we couldn't answer was the one that only Oprah could. And tomorrow, she will do just that.
But before she speaks to her loyal viewers, we wanted to share her decision first with you -- our valued partners for more than two decades.
Tomorrow, Oprah will announce live on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" that she has decided to end what is arguably one of the most popular, influential and enduring programs in television history. The sun will set on the "Oprah" show as its 25th season draws to a close on September 9, 2011.
We welcome you to share this news this evening with your colleagues and viewers. As we all know, Oprah's personal comments about this on tomorrow's live show will mark an historic television moment that we will all be talking about for years to come.
We want to thank you for the partnership and friendship we have shared over the years. Your invaluable support has helped us to create the phenomenon of the "Oprah Show" that we've all been so proud to be a part of for the last 24 years. My staff and I will be calling all of you directly tonight and tomorrow. We look forward to speaking with you.
And, if you think the last quarter century has been something, then "don't touch that dial" as together we plan to make history in the next 20 months ... and beyond.
Yours sincerely,
Tim Bennett
President, Harpo, Inc.
Oprah's production company Harpo says that while it has projects in development, they are not announcing anything at this time.

Sarah Palin gives Oprah biggest audience in two years

2009-11-19T11:55:00.002-04:00

Oprah Winfrey’s interview with former vp candidate Sarah Palin scored the talk show host her highest rating in two years.
Monday's episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" drew a 8.7 household rating and 13 share -- the best since Winfrey had the entire Osmond family on the show in 2007.
That means Palin also topped Winfrey's heavily viewed interviews with Whitney Houston at the start of the season.
Palin is making the rounds to promote her new book, "Going Rogue," which came out Tuesday.

Winfrey began the interview by asking Palin if she felt snubbed at not getting an invitation to appear on the show last year. Winfrey said she didn't have any candidates on her Chicago-based show during the campaign because of her support for President Barack Obama.
Palin said she didn't feel snubbed and told Winfrey, "No offense to you, but it wasn't the center of my universe."

Palin said in another interview broadcast Tuesday that a 2012 presidential bid is "not on my radar," but wouldn't rule out playing some role in the next presidential election.

"My ambition, if you will, my desire is to help our country in whatever role that may be, and I cannot predict what that will be, what doors will be open in the year 2012," she told Barbara Walters.
When asked whether she'd play a major role, the former Republican vice presidential candidate replied that "if people will have me, I will."
-- The Associated Press contributed to this report

Obama 'probably won't' read Palin's book

2009-11-18T12:26:00.002-04:00

BEIJING — Sarah Palin's new book may already be a best-seller, but President Barack Obama says he probably won't read it.
The president says he's sure sales of "Going Rogue" will do well without his readership. While he wouldn't say whether he thinks Palin will run for president in 2012, he says she has proved to be a popular figure with a large following in the Republican party.
In an interview promoting her book, Palin rated Obama's performance as president as a 4 out of 10. Obama dismissed the criticism, saying he and the former Republican vice presidential candidate have different political philosophies.
Obama spoke during interviews with CBS News, CNN and Fox News.

Newsweek Photo of Palin Shows Media Bias and Sexism

2009-11-16T23:21:00.002-04:00

For all of you who live in a dream world and think the mainstream media isn't biased, get a load of the latest cover of Newsweek below:

You've got to hand it to the folks at Newsweek. They have accomplished being biased and sexist at the same time. Quite a feat. This cover has got to be a new low right? They don't use a photo of Palin on the campaign trail. No instead they take the sexy Runners World photo. Yes she posed for it but don't tell me they didn't purposely use that photo to make a point? I predict this cover will become a bigger story over the next 24-48 hours and let's face it. This isn't JUST about media bias. This cover should be insulting to women politicians. Where's the sexy photo of Mitt Romney? Why not a picture of Tim Pawlenty with an unbuttoned shirt relaxing on a couch in the Twin Cities?
By the way, where's the Newsweek headline that says, "Going Rogue and Going Places?" No instead we get Newsweek covers throughout the years like this one:

Conservative women are portrayed as nuts and dopey. Liberal women are heroes for the next generation.
Oy-vey. Someone get me a sedative.

CNN reporter detained in Shanghai over Obama-Mao T-shirt

2009-11-16T22:59:00.002-04:00

Mon Nov 16, 2:39 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A CNN correspondent said Monday she was detained byChinese security guards in Shanghai for two hours for displaying a T-shirt on camera depicting US President Barack Obama as Mao Zedong.
Emily Chang, a Beijing-based correspondent for the US television network, said in a blog post on CNN.com that she hunted down the shirt after hearing they had been banned amid fears they "may offend the American president."
The shirt shows Obama, who is making his first visit to China as president, in a Red Army uniform staring into the distance in a pose made famous by the former Chinese leader.
The front of the shirt says "Serve the People" in Chinese, Chang said. "Oba-Mao" is written on the back in English.
Chang said she held the shirt up to the camera while filming a story in a Shanghai market.
"Two security guards happened to pass by at the moment I announced to the camera: 'This is the T-shirt everybody is talking about,'" she said.
"And that was it. They scrambled towards us and tried to pry the shirt out of my hands," Chang said. "I didn't give in.
"There was a bit of yelling and quite a scuffle," she said, adding that CNN "had everything on tape."
"We ended up being detained for two hours in the cold, maze of a market," she said. "A crowd gathered round. More security and then police showed up.
"They wanted our press cards, our passports, but most of all, they wanted the shirt," she said. "Finally, they let us go. Phew!"
Chang refused to surrender the offending shirt and joked that a number of jealous White House and CNN colleagues had tried to "bribe" her for it.

Source: CNN wanted Lou out

2009-11-16T22:56:00.000-04:00

CNN 'wanted him out'

By MICHAEL SHAIN

Last Updated: 12:41 PM, November 16, 2009

Posted: 3:14 AM, November 16, 2009

CNN was so sick of Lou Dobbs, it gave him an $8 million severance package to leave, The Post has learned.
"They wanted him out," according to a source.
Dobbs, who a source said had a year and a half to go on his $12 million contract, shocked viewers last Wednesday by announcing he was quitting.
CNN boss Jonathan Klein and Dobbs, 64, had been publicly feuding over the kind of reporting Dobbs was doing on his show -- especially stories about illegal immigration and the anti-Obama "birther" movement, which contends the president was not born in Hawaii and is not an American citizen.

LOU DOBBS "Liberating moment."

But it was not clear until now that CNN was willing to pay Dobbs so much money to leave.
"What they do is their business," Dobbs said yesterday. "I tried to accommodate them as best I could, but I've said for many years now that neutrality is not part of my being."
Klein long believed Dobbs was at odds with CNN's desire to position itself as an opinion-free, middle-of-the-road alternative to its cable news rivals -- conservative Fox News and liberal MSNBC.
Dobbs characterized his split with CNN after 27 years as "pleasant, friendly and professional" in an interview with the Atlanta Constitution-Journal.
But, he added, "I truly believe that it's also a liberating moment for me."
Dobbs said he is free to take a new job at another network, but said it would be "weeks, probably months" before he decides what to do next.
The end came quickly once the exit package had been negotiated, said Robert Dilenschneider, a spokesman for the anchorman.
Originally, plans had been for Dobbs to announce his decision to leave during last Friday night's broadcast.
"But when his assistant asked, 'Lou, do you really want to leave on Friday the 13th?' he decided to make it Wednesday instead," Dilenschneider said.
Dobbs is set to give his first TV interview since then to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly tonight, leading to speculation that he may be headed there. But TV insiders said such a move is highly unlikely.
Talk about a possible political career -- possibly as candidate for the Senate from New Jersey in 2012 -- is also probably overblown, friends said.
"He couldn't stand the scrutiny," said one colleague.

Al Gore's Current TV Calls Sarah Palin a 'Gun-Ho' and a 'TWILF'

2009-11-16T13:06:00.002-04:00

By Noel Sheppard (Bio | Archive)
November 15, 2009 - 11:58 ET

Days after announcing another huge layoff, Al Gore's Current TV referred to former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a "Gun-Ho" and a "TWILF."
These disgraceful, sexually-charged epithets were part of an attack on prominent conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and came in the form of a cartoon ironically titled "The Stupid Virus":

When a lab-monkey declares that President Obama wasn't born in America, he becomes Patient Zero for a new brand of fear-based news virus - Fearus Ignoramus. We watch as the virus goes ear-borne, spreading from Rush Limbaugh to CNN to the mainstream-media to the general public. America devolves into panic, convinced its President is an illegal alien anti-Christ.

In the end, this was just a lot of conservative bashing in very bad taste, especially the shot of Palin's Twitter page and her astonishingly offensive screen name "Gun-Ho" (video embedded below the fold, vulgarity alert, h/t Breitbart TV):
Did you notice Palin's screen name at Twitter was "Gun-Ho?"

After Palin tweeted, Brian Williams of NBC's "Nightly News" reported it as the "Top Story," and in the right of the screen was the word "twilf" with a question mark after it (h/t Amanda Carpenter):

This appears to either be a take on the acronym MILF with the "TW" standing for "Twitterer," or an urban dictionary reference way too disgusting to address.

Regardless, is that what a former Vice President and Nobel Laureate believes is acceptable to call a former Governor and vice presidential candidate?
Lest we not forget the vulgar attack on Beck at the end.
And these folks wonder why they're continually having to lay people off!
Screencaps courtesy of Story Balloon.

The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda

2009-11-16T10:29:00.002-04:00

The government will have to choose between vigorous prosecution and revealing classified sources and methods.

By JOHN YOO

'This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision," President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.
No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.
Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.
Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.
KSM is the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and a "terrorist entrepreneur," according to the 9/11 Commission report. He was the brains behind a succession of operations against the U.S., including the 1996 "Bojinka plot" to crash jetliners into American cities. Together with Osama bin Laden, he selected the 9/11 terrorists, arranged their financing and training, and ran the whole operation from abroad.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan KSM eventually became bin Laden's operations chief. American and Pakistani intelligence forces captured him on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Now, however, KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.
Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.
This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the "blind Sheikh"), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.
In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.
Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be.
Even more harmful to our national security will be the effect a civilian trial of KSM will have on the future conduct of intelligence officers and military personnel. Will they have to read al Qaeda terrorists their Miranda rights? Will they have to secure the "crime scene" under battlefield conditions? Will they have to take statements from nearby "witnesses"? Will they have to gather evidence and secure its chain of custody for transport all the way back to New York? All of this while intelligence officers and soldiers operate in a war zone, trying to stay alive, and working to complete their mission and get out without casualties.
The Obama administration has rejected the tool designed to solve this tension between civilian trials and the demands of intelligence and military operations. In 2001, President George W. Bush established military commissions, which have a long history that includes World War II, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. The lawyers in the Bush administration—I was one—understood that military commissions could guarantee a fair trial while protecting national security secrets from excessive exposure.
The Supreme Court has upheld the use of commissions for war crimes. The procedures for these commissions received the approval of Congress in 2006 and 2009.
Stranger yet, the Obama administration declared last week that it would use these military commissions to try five other al Qaeda operatives held at Guantanamo Bay, including Abu Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged planner of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It should make no difference that this second group attacked a military target overseas. If anything, the deliberate attack on purely civilian targets in New York City represents the greater war crime.
For a preview of the KSM trial, look at what happened in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker who was arrested in the U.S. just before 9/11. His trial never made it to a jury. Moussaoui's lawyers tied the court up in knots.
All they had to do was demand that the government hand over all its intelligence on him. The case became a four-year circus, giving Moussaoui a platform to air his anti-American tirades. The only reason the trial ended was because, at the last minute, Moussaoui decided to plead guilty. That plea relieved the government of the choice between allowing a fishing expedition into its intelligence files or dismissing the charges.
KSM's lawyers will not save the government from itself. Instead they will press hard to reveal intelligence secrets in open court. Our intelligence agents and soldiers will be the ones to suffer.
Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03 and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

This trial's an error

2009-11-16T00:56:00.000-04:00

Take the iconic "I Love New York" poster and plunge a dagger into its heart. That's what the Obama administration is doing by bringing the mastermind of 9/11 and other terror freaks here for trial.
We don't deserve this. Why are we being punished again?
Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to ship Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay prisoners to Manhattan for federal trials is beyond bad judgment.
It is a radical call that puts his leftist legal theories over public safety and common sense. The war on terror is being relabeled as a crime problem, in the very shadow of Ground Zero.

Mohammed and his murderous crew don't belong in civilian courts, where they will get defendant rights designed for ordinary criminal suspects. They declared war on our nation, were captured on foreign battlefields and deserve no presumption of innocence or other constitutional protections.
They'll use our liberties to turn the trial into propaganda for their warped cause. Their images and words will fly around the world as fodder for a new generation of jihadists. The federal courthouse and detention center will become a fortress. The judge, prosecutors, witnesses, federal agents and jury will need protection, some for years. It's madness.
New York already took a big hit for the team. The 9/11 attacks were aimed at America, and it is sacrilege to the dead and the living to bring these defendants back and invite another attack.
Here's an idea: Put the trial in Chicago.
The timing reveals Holder's tin ear, with some of the 13 soldiers massacred by a comrade-turned-terrorist at Fort Hood not yet buried. It's hard to escape the thought he chose the day because Obama was in Asia and could duck blame.
Mayor Bloomberg's instant support is also suspect. Given his cozy relationship with Obama, it's likely Bloomberg's nod was obtained in advance and Holder held the announcement until after last week's election. That way Bloomberg wouldn't have to face voters while backing this outlandish attack on his city.
And where is our congressional team, especially Senators Chuck Schumer and his amanuensis, Kirsten Gillibrand? Oh, I forgot, out fighting for banking rules that will hamstring Wall Street and for a health-care plan that will wreck city and state budgets, hospitals and insurance companies.
Whose team are they on, Obama's or New York's?
We already know about Holder's fishy sense of justice. He OK'd the pardon of fugitive Marc Rich, is now investigating CIA agents who played hardball with terrorists, and wants to give those bloodthirsty maniacs rights they don't deserve.

The worst-case outcome is frightening. The beasts who helped kill nearly 3,000 Americans could walk free, while the brave agents who protected the country get locked up.
And contrary to press reports, Holder didn't commit to seeking the death penalty, saying only he expects to. He also didn't say what the charges would be.
Do you trust him? Neither do I.
There are two better alternatives. Either try the detainees in military courts on secure bases or, best of all, give them death now. Mohammed and some others already acknowledged guilt and said they were ready to die.

I say we take yes for an answer.
Dobbs more correct than 'right'
Years ago I overheard two editors talking about a reporter. "He's a pain in the ass," the first said, to which the second gave an unforgettable response: "He is, but he's worth it. A lot of them aren't."
Lou Dobbs was worth it, and CNN is diminished for losing him.
In the cliché of the day, he was "controversial." He was a lightning rod who wore out his welcome after 30 years.
But before we bury him for his flaws, let's remember Dobbs was right on many issues facing America, and was often first. Even Jon Klein, his former boss at CNN, conceded Dobbs defined the terms of key debates.
"Lou is an original thinker who didn't defer to the herd," Klein told me. "The herd often looked to him."
Take illegal immigration. When more than 600,000 people marched in LA in 2006, shutting schools and stopping commerce, news reports caught the crowds' fever and found nothing objectionable in Democrats urging them on.
Not Dobbs. Why, he wondered, were so many waving Mexican flags? He found demands for "our rights" curious, given many marchers were in the US illegally. Why were politicians supporting them and encouraging students to skip school?
The result was that, along with mostly Republicans, he helped defeat an amnesty bill. At the same time, he championed the status of legal immigrants, a distinction his critics ignored as they accused him of "hate" speech.
I saw his passion firsthand as a proud contributor to his show for two years.
But Klein is right that Dobbs' populist advocacy made him an odd fit at CNN, which calls itself neutral but in truth fits comfortably into media soft-shoe liberalism. Whatever its virtues, audiences are abandoning CNN for its rivals.
Sometimes Dobbs enjoyed fights too much. Calling people "idiots" and "scumbags" undermined his towering talent and embarrassed his colleagues.
Yet his commitment to facts trumped his stridency, as it did in his crusade against a Bush White House plan to let a Dubai firm operate U.S. ports. This time it was Dems jumping on his bandwagon to scuttle the deal.
His books expounded on his themes, their titles reflecting Dobbs' aversion to nuance: "Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed is Shipping American Jobs Oversees."
The second was "War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back."
Last year, it was "Independents Day: Awakening the American Spirit."
For certain, his spirit is awake and independent and, if we are lucky, we have not seen the end of Lou Dobbs.
Grade-A moron
A North Carolina school gets a gold star for the dopiest idea of the month. As the Raleigh News & Observer reported, selling candy didn't raise much money, so the principal decided to sell grades. Before higher-ups slammed on the brakes, test points were a dollar each -- a $20 contribution would yield 10 extra points on two tests of a student's choice. And for $50, the principal gets a brain.
Times that try men's souls
Did you catch the latest exposé in The New York Times? Starting with a front-page box, the Thurs day paper spent nearly two pages proving people like to look out windows. Coming next week, birds like to fly.

Dobbs says his departure from CNN was 'amicable'

2009-11-16T00:43:00.005-04:00

By DAVID BAUDER

NEW YORK (AP) - Lou Dobbs says he doesn't feel like he was pushed out of CNN, the news organization where he worked for all but two years of its existence until last Wednesday.
In a weekend interview with The Associated Press, Dobbs says he had "a very amicable parting on the best of terms."
Although the decision to leave was characterized as mutual, Dobbs says he approached CNN President Jon Klein to say the show wasn't working for him anymore.
He plans to take time deciding what he wants to do next, beyond his daily radio show. He has promised to reach out to groups who criticized him, most prominently because he advocated stern measures to halt illegal immigration.
He says a run for public office is one option he's considering.

Objectively, Ayn Rand Was a Nut

2009-11-15T00:38:00.002-04:00

According to Politico.com, Ayn Rand — the subject of two new biographies, one of which is titled Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right — is “having a mainstream moment,” including among conservatives. (Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina wrote a piece in Newsweek on Rand, saying, “This is a very good time for a Rand resurgence. She’s more relevant than ever.”).

I hope the moment passes. Ms. Rand may have been a popular novelist, but her philosophy is deeply problematic and morally indefensible.

Ayn Rand was, of course, the founder of Objectivism – whose ethic, she said in a 1964 interview, holds that “man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.” She has argued that “friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man’s life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite; whereas, if he places his work first, there is no conflict between his work and his enjoyment of human relationships.” And about Jesus she said:

I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. Isn’t that what it does mean? Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.

Many conservatives aren’t aware that it was Whittaker Chambers who, in 1957, reviewed Atlas Shrugged in National Review and read her out of the conservative movement. The most striking feature of the book, Chambers said, was its “dictatorial tone . . . Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal . . . From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’”

William F. Buckley Jr. himself wrote about her “desiccated philosophy’s conclusive incompatibility with the conservative’s emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral; but also there is the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable.”

Yet there are some strands within conservatism that still veer toward Rand and her views of government (“The government should be concerned only with those issues which involve the use of force,” she argued. “This means: the police, the armed services, and the law courts to settle disputes among men. Nothing else.”), and many conservatives identify with her novelistic hero John Galt, who declared, “I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

But this attitude has very little to do with authentic conservatism, at least the kind embodied by Edmund Burke, Adam Smith (chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow), and James Madison, to name just a few. What Rand was peddling is a brittle, arid, mean, and ultimately hollow philosophy. No society could thrive if its tenets were taken seriously and widely accepted. Ayn Rand may have been an interesting figure and a good (if extremely long-winded) novelist; but her views were pernicious, the antithesis of a humane and proper worldview. And conservatives should say so.

A loss for America

2009-11-14T11:24:00.000-04:00

Why NYC terror trial is a major mistake

By KRIS W. KOBACH

Last Updated: 9:58 AM, November 14, 2009

Posted: 1:11 AM, November 14, 2009

Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees in civilian federal court in New York City is the latest in a long series of missteps in the war against radical Islamist terrorism. KSM -- the notorious, self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks -- and the other accused terrorists will no longer face trial in military commissions, which the US government has historically used for such cases. The administration's decision is a blatantly political one -- intended to placate the ACLU and the radical Left -- that jeopardizes the interests of the nation. VIDEO: 9/11 SUSPECTS TO BE TRIED IN NY The five main problems: * Military commissions are the appropriate venue for trials of unlawful combatant. The US military seized these terrorists on foreign battlefields -- and so didn't read them Miranda rights. The evidence against them was collected by soldiers under war-fighting conditions -- not with sterile gloves and clear plastic bags. And much of the best evidence against them is classified, because making it public would compromise the sources and methods of US intelligence gathering. In short, these cases do not fit the mold of a typical murder trial in a civilian court. Military commissions were designed for this purpose. They provide a secure environment that allows for the introduction of classified evidence without making it public. Yet the accused still enjoys the right to an attorney, the right to make his case in full and all of the fundamental rights of due process. The commissions are also the ideal forum for trying unlawful combatants-belligerents who make war without following the law of war. One of the central tenets of the law of war is that civilians must never be attacked. Since terrorists shatter this rule completely, they are appropriately tried before military commissions. These commissions provide a fair forum that takes into account the military context of the terrorists' acts. Just because the government has enough unclassified evidence to win a guilty verdict in civilian court doesn't make the civilian court the right venue. The last time the United States used military commissions in a comparable context was during the Second World War, for the trial of eight Nazi saboteurs transported here by German submarines under cover of darkness in 1942. They landed on US soil carrying explosives with the intent to engage in acts of sabotage. The Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions were an entirely fair and appropriate forum for their trial. They were "offenders against the law of war, subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals." The same is true of these five terrorists. * The administration is again blurring the line between ordinary crimes and acts of war. Likening terrorists at war with the United States to common shoplifters is wrongheaded. These are not members of our society who refuse to obey our laws: They are enemies of the United States, engaged in war against America and all that it stands for. * The administration has offered no clear criteria for deciding which terrorists will be charged as criminals in federal court and which ones will face military commissions. Attorney General Holder, in announcing the decision, suggested that the five cases were appropriate for civilian trial simply because the evidence against the terrorists is so strong that they'll surely be found guilty. Choosing which terrorists will get civilian trials on the basis of who you can convict is not a principled way to administer justice. It also fosters the false impression that military commissions are unfair tribunals, where the government can win with a weaker case. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, military commissions satisfy the Constitution's due-process requirements. The radical Left refuses to accept this fact -- and now the Obama administration is giving them rhetorical ammunition. * A very real safety threat exists when a terrorist like KSM is tried in an urban area: The city becomes an enticing target for terrorists around the world. Holder yesterday claimed that New York City is "hardened" and somehow secured against such terrorism. Yet he seemed to be focused on the courtroom itself. But US marshals' ability to protect the courthouse doesn't mean they can protect the whole city. During the trial, every building in Manhattan becomes a target for the jihadists. They don't need to specifically hit the courthouse to make their point to the world. *Finally, the trial will take many years to complete. Indeed it may not even start for five years or more. Once these terrorists are placed into the civilian justice system, an avalanche of motions from their lawyers will ensue. Military commissions can avoid these delays. It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied. For many who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, those words ring painfully true. Obama's actions will only prolong their pain, for no good reason. Holder insists that the government will win in these civilian trials. I'm sure he's correct. But winning a trial and winning the approval of the ACLU means little when so much more is lost. Kris W. Kobach is professor of constitutional law at the Univer sity of Missouri (Kansas City). He served as a White House Fel low and as counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft, 2001-'03.

Holder: Has no clear principle of justice.

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VIDEO: 9/11 SUSPECTS TO BE TRIED IN NY
The five main problems:
* Military commissions are the appropriate venue for trials of unlawful combatant. The US military seized these terrorists on foreign battlefields -- and so didn't read them Miranda rights. The evidence against them was collected by soldiers under war-fighting conditions -- not with sterile gloves and clear plastic bags. And much of the best evidence against them is classified, because making it public would compromise the sources and methods of US intelligence gathering.
In short, these cases do not fit the mold of a typical murder trial in a civilian court.
Military commissions were designed for this purpose. They provide a secure environment that allows for the introduction of classified evidence without making it public. Yet the accused still enjoys the right to an attorney, the right to make his case in full and all of the fundamental rights of due process.
The commissions are also the ideal forum for trying unlawful combatants-belligerents who make war without following the law of war. One of the central tenets of the law of war is that civilians must never be attacked. Since terrorists shatter this rule completely, they are appropriately tried before military commissions.
These commissions provide a fair forum that takes into account the military context of the terrorists' acts. Just because the government has enough unclassified evidence to win a guilty verdict in civilian court doesn't make the civilian court the right venue.
The last time the United States used military commissions in a comparable context was during the Second World War, for the trial of eight Nazi saboteurs transported here by German submarines under cover of darkness in 1942. They landed on US soil carrying explosives with the intent to engage in acts of sabotage. The Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions were an entirely fair and appropriate forum for their trial. They were "offenders against the law of war, subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals." The same is true of these five terrorists.

* The administration is again blurring the line between ordinary crimes and acts of war. Likening terrorists at war with the United States to common shoplifters is wrongheaded. These are not members of our society who refuse to obey our laws: They are enemies of the United States, engaged in war against America and all that it stands for.
* The administration has offered no clear criteria for deciding which terrorists will be charged as criminals in federal court and which ones will face military commissions. Attorney General Holder, in announcing the decision, suggested that the five cases were appropriate for civilian trial simply because the evidence against the terrorists is so strong that they'll surely be found guilty.
Choosing which terrorists will get civilian trials on the basis of who you can convict is not a principled way to administer justice. It also fosters the false impression that military commissions are unfair tribunals, where the government can win with a weaker case.
As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, military commissions satisfy the Constitution's due-process requirements. The radical Left refuses to accept this fact -- and now the Obama administration is giving them rhetorical ammunition.
* A very real safety threat exists when a terrorist like KSM is tried in an urban area: The city becomes an enticing target for terrorists around the world.
Holder yesterday claimed that New York City is "hardened" and somehow secured against such terrorism. Yet he seemed to be focused on the courtroom itself. But US marshals' ability to protect the courthouse doesn't mean they can protect the whole city.
During the trial, every building in Manhattan becomes a target for the jihadists. They don't need to specifically hit the courthouse to make their point to the world.
*Finally, the trial will take many years to complete. Indeed it may not even start for five years or more.
Once these terrorists are placed into the civilian justice system, an avalanche of motions from their lawyers will ensue. Military commissions can avoid these delays.
It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied. For many who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, those words ring painfully true. Obama's actions will only prolong their pain, for no good reason.
Holder insists that the government will win in these civilian trials. I'm sure he's correct. But winning a trial and winning the approval of the ACLU means little when so much more is lost.
Kris W. Kobach is professor of constitutional law at the Univer sity of Missouri (Kansas City). He served as a White House Fel low and as counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft, 2001-'03.

Explaining Away Mass Murder

2009-11-13T15:05:00.002-04:00

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- What a surprise -- that someone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" (the "God is great" jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan's religious beliefs.
"I cringe that he's a Muslim. ... I think he's probably just a nut case," said Newsweek's Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time's Joe Klein decried "odious attempts by Jewish extremists ... to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." While none could match Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

They suffered. He listened. He snapped.
Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?
And what about civilian psychiatrists -- not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics -- who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?
It's been decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.
But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.
And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won't find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as "compassion fatigue." The poor man -- pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.
Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It's a danger, clear and present.
Consider the Army's treatment of Hasan's previous behavior. NPR's Daniel Zwerdling interviewed a Hasan colleague at Walter Reed about a hair-raising Grand Rounds that Hasan had apparently given. Grand Rounds are the most serious academic event at a teaching hospital -- attending physicians, residents and students gather for a lecture on an instructive case history or therapeutic finding.
I've been to dozens of these. In fact, I gave one myself on post-traumatic retrograde amnesia -- as you can see, these lectures are fairly technical. Not Hasan's. His was an hour-long disquisition on what he called the Koranic view of military service, jihad and war. It included an allegedly authoritative elaboration of the punishments visited upon nonbelievers -- consignment to hell, decapitation, having hot oil poured down your throat. This "really freaked a lot of doctors out," reported NPR.
Nor was this the only incident. "The psychiatrist," reported Zwerdling, "said that he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway saying: Do you think he's a terrorist, or is he just weird?"
Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague's religion?
One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, The New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.
What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn't cry "Allahu Akbar" as they squeezed the trigger.
The delicacy about the religion in question -- condescending, politically correct and deadly -- is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: "Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center."
Ah yes, those Jersey men -- so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Dobbs gave up on $9M

2009-11-13T12:56:00.003-04:00

Nixed CNN pact in 'Obama birther' flap

By MICHAEL SHAIN & DAVID K. LI

Last Updated: 11:33 AM, November 13, 2009

Posted: 4:23 AM, November 13, 2009

Lou Dobbs walked away from more than $9 million when he quit CNN, ending a long-running clash that boiled over during a debate about President Obama's birth certificate, sources said yesterday. Dobbs, who will be replaced on the network by veteran Washington political correspondent John King, abruptly announced his resignation on air Wednesday night and offered no clue about what he planned to do next. But the beginning of the end really came in July, when CNN President Jonathan Klein told Dobbs' staff in a memo to drop so-called birther stories about conspiratorial doubts that Obama was US-born, sources told The Post. "It seems this story is dead because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef," read Klein's memo to employees of "Lou Dobbs Tonight." Klein's move incensed Dobbs, who wasn't shy about telling off his boss. "They have been talking pretty regularly since then," a source said. "And it's been pretty bad." CNN had also long been asking Dobbs, known for his tough stance on immigration, to tone down his harsh rhetoric. Last month, Dobbs' William Morris agent, CNN sources said, bluntly told Klein: "You're unhappy, he's unhappy. Let him go." Dobbs told Klein in recent weeks he wanted to go "the opinion route," laying the final groundwork for his departure. CNN had been unlikely to renew Dobbs' contract in 2011 anyway, sources said. CNN is pushing hard to position itself as a middle-of-the-road news source, between left-leaning MSNBC and conservative Fox News Channel. "Lou was polluting the CNN brand," said a TV insider. The departure came at significant personal cost to Dobbs, who still had 1½ years left in his back-loaded, five-year, $35 million contract. Dobbs' final year would have brought him $9 million. A Fox News Channel spokeswoman insisted her network wasn't interested in hiring the veteran. CNN yesterday named King to take Dobbs' 7 p.m. slot, with a production starting in January. Dobbs, on his syndicated radio show yesterday, thanked callers for their praise. When a caller from New Jersey urged him to run for the US Senate, Dobbs said: "All right, Josh. I'm taking notes." Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton and Michael Starr david.li@nypost.com

Christopher Sadowski

DROP ANCHOR: Lou Dobbs, last night at home in New Jersey, announced his shock resignation after an ego clash with CNN's chief. Anchor John King (below left) replaces Dobbs in the 7 p.m. time slot.

"It seems this story is dead because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef," read Klein's memo to employees of "Lou Dobbs Tonight."
Klein's move incensed Dobbs, who wasn't shy about telling off his boss.
"They have been talking pretty regularly since then," a source said. "And it's been pretty bad."
CNN had also long been asking Dobbs, known for his tough stance on immigration, to tone down his harsh rhetoric.
Last month, Dobbs' William Morris agent, CNN sources said, bluntly told Klein: "You're unhappy, he's unhappy. Let him go."
Dobbs told Klein in recent weeks he wanted to go "the opinion route," laying the final groundwork for his departure.
CNN had been unlikely to renew Dobbs' contract in 2011 anyway, sources said.
CNN is pushing hard to position itself as a middle-of-the-road news source, between left-leaning MSNBC and conservative Fox News Channel.
"Lou was polluting the CNN brand," said a TV insider.
The departure came at significant personal cost to Dobbs, who still had 1½ years left in his back-loaded, five-year, $35 million contract. Dobbs' final year would have brought him $9 million.
A Fox News Channel spokeswoman insisted her network wasn't interested in hiring the veteran.
CNN yesterday named King to take Dobbs' 7 p.m. slot, with a production starting in January.
Dobbs, on his syndicated radio show yesterday, thanked callers for their praise. When a caller from New Jersey urged him to run for the US Senate, Dobbs said: "All right, Josh. I'm taking notes."

On Lou Dobbs’ Last Night, CNN Finishes 5th In Prime Time Demo

2009-11-13T01:23:00.001-04:00

by Steve Krakauer | 5:59 pm, November 12th, 2009

» 1 comment

ratings

Cable news ratings, November 11, 2009: Check out the highlights, and see the full ratings below:
• On a night that Lou Dobbs said goodbye the hour before, CNN finished in 5th place – behind Fox News, MSNBC, HLN and CNBC – in the prime time A25-54 demographic. This was only the 2nd time in 2009 the network finished 5th, with the first time coming in March. Dobbs’ 7pmET hour finished 4th in the demo and 3rd in total viewers.
• The top show on cable news was, once again, Bill O’Reilly’s 8pmET in both total viewers and the demo. Glenn Beck’s return to the airwaves gave him 2nd place in both.
• Larry King was not helped by an awkward interview with Carrie Prejean – his hour was the lowest for CNN in the prime time demo.
Check out all the ratings below, and leave your own thoughts in the comments:

TV NEWS RATINGS: 25-54 DEMOGRAPHIC (L +SD)

5 pm	Beck 742	Blitzer 103	Matthews 139	Prime 100
6 pm	Baier 556	Blitzer 127	EdShow 178	Prime 108
7 pm	Shep 572	Dobbs 153	Matthews 201	Issues 183
8 pm	O’Reilly 1042	Brown 174	Olbermann 413	Grace 294
9 pm	Hannity 714	King 156	Maddow 270	Behar 162
10 pm	Greta 486	Cooper 174	Olbermann 298	Grace 215
11 pm	O’Reilly 491	Cooper 169	Maddow 220	Showbiz 192
TOTAL DAY	436	144	141	162
PRIME TIME	749	168	327	220
Data by Nielsen Media Research. Live and same day (DVR) data.

TV NEWS RATINGS: TOTAL VIEWERS (L +SD)

5 pm	Beck 2837	Blitzer 624	Matthews 558	Prime 193
6 pm	Baier 2247	Blitzer 570	EdShow 516	Prime 236
7 pm	Shep 2132	Dobbs 641	Matthews 661	Issues 520
8 pm	O’Reilly 3647	Brown 692	Olbermann 1236	Grace 815
9 pm	Hannity 2609	King 633	Maddow 1143	Behar 527
10 pm	Greta 1942	Cooper 572	Olbermann 812	Grace 427
11 pm	O’Reilly 1658	Cooper 616	Maddow 588	Showbiz 370
TOTAL DAY	1620	610	471	331
PRIME TIME	2735	632	1063	581
Data by Nielsen Media Research. Live and same day (DVR) data

The Fort Hood double standard

2009-11-12T09:52:00.000-04:00

Father Raymond J. de Souza, National Post Published: Thursday, November 12, 2009

Add Fort Hood to the list. It's getting longer: New York, Washington, Jerusalem, Bali, Madrid, London, Bombay. It's the list of places where, we are told, it is important to be vigilant about anti-Muslim activity.
The phenomenon is by now well-established. An apparent jihadist visits death and destruction upon innocents, motivated in part by a violent brand of Islamic extremism, and soon the violence becomes an apt occasion to raise awareness about the danger of anti-Muslim thoughts, words and deeds. Violence by Muslims has a unique ability to spur a Canadian prime minister, British royal, or, as was the case this time, the American secretary of homeland security, to sound the alarm about violence against Muslims.
"The tragic shootings at the Fort Hood U.S. Army Base raise the spectres of hostility against Muslims within the United States, and of Islamic hostility toward the U.S.," editorialized Toronto's Globe and Mail. That's a strange symmetry. On one hand there may be a "spectre," but on the other there is the reality of 13 dead victims.
Denying at the outset the Islamist motivations of men such as Major Nidal Malik Hasan does no favour to Muslims who, after all, bear the largest share of the global death toll caused by Islamist extremism. But we're getting pretty used to the routine: Islamist violence, followed by pundits getting upset when anyone mentions the link between extreme Islamism and violence.
On Tuesday, for example, my colleague Colby Cosh argued that we should be wary about putting too much emphasis on religion as the "evidence of the specifically Islamic nature of Hasan's mania emerges." After all, there were no doubt other factors at play. It would be "pretty stupid," he argued, to draw a straight, simple line between jihadist beliefs and the Fort Hood massacre.
But back in June, when George Tiller, America's most enthusiastic practitioner
of partial-birth abortion, was murdered, Mr. Cosh took to these pages to argue that the killer was the logical extension of the pro-life movement, and that pro-life activists who denounced the abortionist's murder were no better than Pontius Pilate, washing their hands of something in which they were deeply complicit.
Mr. Cosh generally is more careful and rigorous than most, so that even he can use double standards on this issue indicates how widely they are accepted.
Just a few weeks ago, the arrest of a Nova Scotia Roman Catholic bishop on pornography charges sparked all sorts of commentary on how being a Catholic priest was a contributing factor. It's just the norm -- clerical malfeasance is always discussed in the context of a religious doctrine or disciplinary practice. The linkage is made more quickly than one can say double standard.
Or consider the rape case at Duke University. No, not the false rape charges made against the boys on the lacrosse team, which were widely presented as a case of rich white boys exploiting poor black girls. I mean the other Duke rape case, in which Frank Lombard, associate director of the center for health policy, was charged with raping his adopted five-year old son, and offering him on the Internet to be raped by other men. Mr. Lombard is openly gay, but this case was certainly not about identity -- it wasn't about gay men at all, just a one-off weird, wicked guy who happened to be gay. Duke fired him, and newspapers across the country took no notice at all.

In a few weeks, we shall be gearing up for the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, the mass killing of women students at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal by Marc Lepine. The identity linkages there were made right from the beginning--Lepine was representative of Canadian misogyny, a reasonable enough conclusion given his specific admission that he was killing women to protest "feminism." Yet how representative of Canadian men was Lepine? Was it at all relevant that he was born Gamil Gharbi, son of an Algerian father who was abusive to his French-Canadian mother? That part of the identity package has long been left untouched.
It's a matter of basic honesty to look at all factors, and a matter of basic justice not to attribute to the whole the actions of the one. But it would be more honest and more just if that standard were applied to all.

The Pitfalls of Political Correctness

2009-11-12T00:32:00.002-04:00

This was the key passage yesterday in President Obama's Fort Hood eulogy: "It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice -- in this world, and the next."
Finally, after days and days of political correctness in high places and in the press, we got an acknowledgement, from the president himself, that the alleged killer was driven to his misdeeds not because he was mentally batty or because he was lonely and troubled or because he was stressed by the issue of overdeployment, but because he was an Islamic jihadist.
Obama didn't specifically say that, of course - he obviously wanted to keep the focus on the terrorism victims, and avoid saying anything that might compromise the federal probe - but his line about "faith" clearly refers to Maj. Nidal Hasan's misbelief that he was acting as a true Muslim. Although Obama could have been more explicit in his condemnation (more on that below), he at least signaled that PC Americans should now dispense with the ritual pussyfooting and call out Hasan for what he really is.
Ever since the shootings, too many smart people have preferred to ignore the mountain of evidence about Hasan's true motives, because (a) they don't want to be viewed as "anti-Muslim" or intolerant of religious freedom, (b) they don't want to say anything that might help trigger a backlash against the Muslim-American community, and/or (c) they don't want to believe that we have, living in our midst and even within the military, religious extremists who want to murder us. To cite just one example, respected New Republic thinker and author John Judis was still insisting yesterday that "we don't know yet what motivated Nidal Hasan...I am reluctant to call him a terrorist, particularly because doing so arouses fears of a jihadist conspiracy in our midst that may not exist."
His argument misses the point; it's now clear that extremists like Hasan can terrorize without being part of any organized conspiracy. Yes, he acted alone...but he didn't think alone. This murder spree proves that jihadist thinking is a clear and present danger, in isolated pockets of the Muslim-American community. And we should be able to say that, out loud - without it being misinterpreted as a slur against the peaceful Muslim-Americans who constitute the overwhelming majority, or somehow as an invitation to round them all up and ship them to Guantanamo.
We have enemies among us. Hasan was apparently one of them. The warning signs were clear for a long time, even though the military preferred to look the other way (for many of the same reasons that made people so reticent after the shootings). As an Army shrink, he gave two lectures, complete with PowerPoint, about how America's war on terror was really just a war on Muslims; about how all Muslims should "fight those who do not believe in Allah"; about how suicide bombings are a way of "fighting for God against injustice of the 'infidels'"; and about how "we love death more than you love life!"
Hasan delivered one of these lectures to a Pentagon medical audience; hia topic was supposed to be environmental health, but the course director chose to indulge him. One military officer, speaking on background to Time magazine, says that people in uniform these days are reluctant to challenge people like Hasan "because they're afraid of getting an equal-opportunity complaint that can end careers." This probably explains why nobody on the intelligence side was able to connect all the dots - which included Hasan's contacts with a radical Islamic cleric (who has since praised Hasan), and his reputed attempts to contact al Qaeda. And if yelling "Allahu akbar" as he opened fire isn't enough for the federal investigators, what is?
Obama took steps yesterday to confront the truth yesterday - tentatively so. He referred to the shooter's "twisted logic," but the grim reality is that those who think like the shooter do not see their logic as twisted. Obama said that "no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts," but those who sympathize with the shooter sincerely believe that their faith does justify such acts. Obama said that no God "looks upon them with favor," but, as Hasan himself insisted in his lectures, God absolutely does.
Obviously, this is highly sensitive stuff. Diversity, freedom of religion, and civil liberties are cornerstones of our creed. And, as a practical matter, the military has a dire need for more Muslim-Americans in the ranks - not just as soldiers, but as language specialists who can help us communicate better in hostile settings. At the same time, the Fort Hood shootings are proof that we can ill afford to ignore warning signs in name of political correctness, or to delude ourselves about a domestic danger.

Hyping a phantom "backlash"

2009-11-12T00:29:00.002-04:00

Nearly a week after the Fort Hood massacre, the anti- Muslim backlash that our leaders and some in the media feared remains a no-show.
No mobs of braying bigots marching on mosques; no calls for banning Muslims from the military; no anti-Muslim legislation being drafted in Congress or state capitals; no spate of attacks on Muslim students, shop owners, or neighborhoods.
What happened? What's holding the angry, red-blooded vigilantes in check?
Why, if this keeps up, we might have to conclude that the United States is a remarkably fair-minded society as opposed to the cauldron of seething prejudice that many enlightened persons apparently perceive.
Perhaps their view explains why, after a jihadist incident of this kind, some feel compelled to treat Americans like youngsters who cannot be trusted to react appropriately to the truth — and so must be told a clipped or shaded version of it.
"We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing," the president cautioned the nation last weekend, while mentioning Islam only in the context of praising the diversity of the armed forces. In fact, we cannot fully know what spurs any evil man into action, but we often have an excellent fix on his principal motives. And such is certainly true of an Army major who shouts "Allahu akbar" before a murderous rampage.
On Sunday, the Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey Jr., not only offered the obligatory warning that "we have to be careful, because we can't jump to conclusions now based on little snippets of information that come out," he also proceeded to question the maturity and self-control of his own troops.
"Frankly," he told CNN, "I am worried — not worried, but I'm concerned that this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I've asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that. It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well."
On ABC, Casey escalated this baseless rhetoric, claiming "it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here" — as if there were any chance of that happening. Indeed, according to The Associated Press, the military culture is so far removed from the aggressive scapegoating feared by Casey that even after Hasan's anti-American views became apparent to classmates at a graduate military medical program, "a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal complaint."
Not to be outdone by Casey, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano pledged to devote resources from her department to "prevent everybody being painted with a broad brush."
Shouldn't this country's experience after 9/11 reassure those who fear a backlash against Muslims? While hate crimes targeting Muslims have indeed been more plentiful this decade than in the 1990s, even in 2001 they were less than half as numerous as reported incidents against Jews, according to the FBI.
The most recent data, from 2007, is typical of most years: Of 1,477 offenses motivated by religious bias, only 9 percent were directed at Muslims. By comparison, even Catholics and Protestants were the targets of 8.4 percent of the offenses. In a nation of 300 million citizens, such paltry totals are hardly cause for panic.
Meanwhile, 68.4 percent of the incidents in 2007 were anti-Jewish — yet no one seriously imagines this nation has suddenly become inhospitable to Jews.
Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan "complained bitterly to people at his mosque about the oppression of Muslims in the Army," reports The New York Times. But what is the definition of "oppression" to an Islamist creep like Hasan — that he had to fraternize on an equal basis with non-Muslims?
His alleged victimhood, like the phantom backlash to the Fort Hood rampage, is a diversion from what really matters in the aftermath of this shooting: the dead, the injured, and those whose dreams were shattered with them.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.

Lou Dobbs Resigns From CNN After 30 Years...Says He Can Only Do His Job Honestly If Released From Contractual Obligations....

2009-11-11T22:39:00.002-04:00

CNN finding that prime-time success is elusive

2009-11-11T14:35:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK (AP) - The latest rough patch for CNN illustrates the two contradictions at the network's heart.
In a brutal time for the news business, CNN is one of the few media organizations thriving while its most visible part in the United States—prime-time on the flagship network—is hurting. The company has built its brand on nonpartisan reporting, while CNN's audience tilts Democratic as much or more as Fox News Channel's audience is Republican.

CNN's average prime-time audience
was third behind Fox and MSNBC during October, and it was even eclipsed by sister network HLN among younger viewers, according to the Nielsen Co. Perhaps more ominous, CNN finished well behind Fox when big news was breaking—Election Night and the Fort Hood massacre. Big stories usually sent viewers flocking to CNN.
Prime-time success isn't a new problem in a place that has long lived and died by the news cycle, to which former hosts such as Aaron Brown, Connie Chung and Paula Zahn can attest. It seems more acute because CNN's younger rivals were faster in figuring out a way to make appointment viewing at night.
"We sometimes scratch our heads and wonder, `Why can't they figure this out?'" said former CNN correspondent Charles Bierbauer, dean of the College of Mass Communication and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina, describing his talks with another old CNN hand on his faculty.
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, whose reruns often beat Anderson Cooper's first-run newscast on CNN, mocked his rival for trafficking in news rather than analysis at night: "CNN seems to still think it is the primary source for its viewers, that they know nothing until they tune in. This is, ever increasingly, nonsensical."
At CNN, they suggest critics take a narrow view of what it does.
The network could cast aside Cooper, Larry King and Campbell Brown for opinionated analysis and probably see its ratings go up, said Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide.
The benefit for one arm of the company isn't worth the potential damage to others, he said.
CNN has built its business—encompassing international networks and wholesale news reports, mobile device services, a Web site, a wire service to print publications and radio—around the notion that it is delivering nonpartisan, straight news reporting, he said. The company has shown double-digit growth for the past few years and is on pace to continue. It invests by hiring more personnel, and this month opening a new production facility in Abu Dhabi.
"People hear what's being said and it's branded CNN and (they say), `OK, that's news. That's nonpartisan, that's factual, it's timely," Walton said. "That's what we want to deliver around the world. We compete against a lot more than Fox and MSNBC."
The rising fortunes of HLN means the company makes money off opinion, too. One of the reasons that network's name was changed from CNN Headline News was to avoid having CNN's name associated with that type of programming.
Of the flagship network's sagging fortunes, Walton said, "It matters to us. Trust me, it matters. We want all of our networks to grow their audiences. But the fact is, (CNN) is a vibrant, healthy company that's growing in an industry where we're pretty much one of one."
MSNBC's move to the left and Fox's ownership of the right would, theoretically, give CNN a wide middle to conquer. The problem is, that middle might be more inclined to watch Tom DeLay on "Dancing With the Stars" than on "Larry King Live."
Statistically, CNN's audience is far from nonpartisan.
Of people who say their main source of news is CNN, 46 percent identify themselves as Democrats and 13 percent as Republicans, according to a July survey by the Pew Research Center (the rest say they're independent or don't identify themselves politically). The same study found that Fox's main source audience was 38 percent Republican and 18 percent Democratic.
To a certain degree, it stands to reason: If so many Republicans find Fox a comfortable home, there are fewer remaining for CNN, particularly in a country where Democrats have an enrollment edge.
One-third of news viewers questioned by Pew this fall said they didn't perceive CNN as advancing an ideology, more than Fox (24 percent) or MSNBC (27 percent). Still, 37 percent of those questioned view CNN as liberal, and 11 percent as conservative.
It wasn't always this way. In a pre-Fox world, many on the right saw CNN as a good alternative to the broadcast networks, said Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center. They loved "Crossfire," he said.
But conservatives began to identify CNN with President Bill Clinton, in part because a president is a natural time-killer for a network on 24 hours a day, he said. They believe conservative voices are weak and outnumbered on CNN.
"Could they claim to be in the middle?" Graham asked. "I think they could. I don't think they're doing it."
Liberals are suspicious about CNN because of Lou Dobbs and his anti-illegal immigration efforts, said Karl Frisch of Graham's liberal counterpart, Media Matters. CNN points out that Dobbs' show has become less opinionated this year. In the meantime, Fox News Channel and the Obama administration have publicly squabbled.
What CNN needs is to find a way to bring the passion to stories that its rivals bring to arguments, said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief and now professor at George Washington University.
"Will people sit down in the evening and find news reporting interesting?" Walton asked. "That's the question, really."
CNN is still searching for the answer.

Senior Official: More Hasan Ties to People Under Investigation by FBI

2009-11-11T01:22:00.002-04:00

Alleged Shooter Had "Unexplained Connections" to Others Besides Jihadist Cleric Awlaki

By MARTHA RADDATZ, BRIAN ROSS, MARY-ROSE ABRAHAM, and REHAB EL-BURI
Nov. 10, 2009

A senior government official tells ABC News that investigators have found that alleged Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan had "more unexplained connections to people being tracked by the FBI" than just radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. The official declined to name the individuals but Congressional sources said their names and countries of origin were likely to emerge soon.

Nidal Malik Hasan, left, is seen in 2007 when he entered the program for his Disaster and Military...

(Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences/Muhammad ud-Deen/AP Photos)

Questions already surround Major Hasan's contact with Awlaki, a radical cleric based in Yemen whom authorities consider a recruiter for al Qaeda. U.S. officials now confirm Hasan sent as many as 20 e-mails to Awlaki. Authorities intercepted the e-mails but later deemed them innocent or protected by the first amendment.
The FBI said it turned over the information to the Army, but Defense Department officials today denied that. One military investigator on a joint terror task force with the FBI was shown the e-mails, but they were never forwarded in a formal way to more senior officials at the Pentagon, and the Army did not learn of the contacts until after the shootings.

Justice Dept. Asked For News Site's Visitor Lists

2009-11-10T11:01:00.000-04:00

(AP / CBS)

Posted by Declan McCullagh

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department's subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward "promoting social and economic justice" and "social change.")

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

"I didn't think anything we were doing was worthy of any (federal) attention," Clair said in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com on Monday. After talking to other Indymedia volunteers, Clair ended up calling the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost.

Under long-standing Justice Department guidelines, subpoenas to members of the news media are supposed to receive special treatment. One portion of the guidelines, for instance, says that "no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media" without "the express authorization of the attorney general" – that would be current attorney general Eric Holder – and subpoenas should be "directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter."

Still unclear is what criminal investigation U.S. Attorney Morrison was pursuing. Last Friday, a spokeswoman initially promised a response, but Morrison sent e-mail on Monday evening saying: "We have no comment." The Justice Department in Washington, D.C. also declined to respond.

Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, replied to the Justice Department on behalf of his client in a February 2009 letter (PDF) outlining what he described as a series of problems with the subpoena, including that it was not personally served, that a judge-issued court order would be required for the full logs, and that Indymedia did not store logs in the first place.

Morrison replied in a one-sentence letter saying the subpoena had been withdrawn. Around the same time, according to the EFF, the group had a series of discussions with assistant U.S. attorneys in Morrison's office who threatened Clair with possible prosecution for obstruction of justice if she disclosed the existence of the already-withdrawn subpoena -- claiming it "may endanger someone's health" and would have a "human cost."

Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of The Press, said a gag order to a news organization wouldn't stand up in court: "If you get a subpoena and you're a journalist, they can't gag you."

Dalglish said that a subpoena being issued and withdrawn is not unprecedented. "I have seen any number of these things withdrawn when counsel for someone who is claiming a reporter's privilege says, 'Can you tell me the date you got approval from the attorney general's office'... I'm willing to chalk this up to bad lawyering on the part of the DOJ, or just not thinking."

Making this investigation more mysterious is that Indymedia.us is an aggregation site, meaning articles that appear on it were published somewhere else first, and there's no hint about what sparked the criminal probe. Clair, the system administrator, says that no IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are recorded for Indymedia.us, and non-IP address logs are kept for a few weeks and then discarded.

EFF's Bankston wrote a second letter to the government saying that, if it needed to muzzle Indymedia, it should apply for a gag order under the section of federal law that clearly permits such an order to be issued. Bankston's plan: To challenge that law on First Amendment grounds.

But the Justice Department never replied. "This is the first time we've seen them try to get the IP address of everyone who visited a particular site," Bankston said. "That it was a news organization was an additional troubling fact that implicates First Amendment rights."

This is not, however, the first time that the Feds have focused on Indymedia -- a Web site whose authors sometimes blur the line between journalism, advocacy, and on-the-streets activism. In 2004, the Justice Department sent a grand jury subpoena asking for information about who posted lists of Republican delegates while urging they be given an unwelcome reception at the party's convention in New York City that year. A Indymedia hosting service in Texas once received a subpoena asking for server logs in relation to an investigation of an attempted murder in Italy.

Bankston has written a longer description of the exchange of letters with the Justice Department, which he hopes will raise awareness of how others should respond to similar legal demands for Web logs, customer records, and compulsory silence. "Our fear is that this kind of bogus gag order is much more common than one would hope, considering they're legally baseless," Bankston says. "We're telling this story in hopes that more providers will press back and go public when the government demands their silence."

Despite ban, Holder to speak to CAIR-linked group

2009-11-09T22:07:00.000-04:00

Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to give a keynote speech next week to a Michigan group which includes the local branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations even though the FBI has formally severed contacts with the controversial Muslim civil rights organization.

On Nov. 19, Holder is scheduled to speak in Detroit to the first annual awards banquet of Advocates and Leaders for Police and Community Trust, a coalition of several dozen law enforcement and community groups. An online registration form for the event includes the Council on American Islamic Relations-Michigan on a list of “official & participating organizations.”
A spokeswoman for ALPACT confirmed that CAIR is a member of the coalition.

“CAIR has been involved for a while,” said Chandra McMillion, community development facilitator for ALPACT. “CAIR is listed as an official member.”

The executive director of CAIR’s Michigan chapter, Dawud Walid, also confirmed its involvement with ALPACT. “It’s really nothing controversial. We’ve been part of this organization for years,” he said. “We meet every month and included with us is the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI.”

Walid said he is a regular at ALPACT meetings—including one held Friday at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit. “A lot of people are there: the NAACP, the ACLU, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee…the National Lawyers’ Guild,” he said.

The FBI claims it cut “formal contacts” with CAIR after federal prosecutors in the 2007 criminal trial of officers of a Texas-based Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, introduced documents the government said showed links between CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood, which gave rise to Hamas.

“Until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS, the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner,” FBI Congressional liaison Richard Powers wrote in an April letter to Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

The Justice Department referred questions about Holder’s speech and CAIR’s involvement to the FBI’s field office in Detroit which, in turn, referred the questions to FBI headquarters in Washington.

An FBI spokeswoman confirmed that the FBI’s Special Agent-in-Charge in Detroit, Andy Arena, will serve as co-chair for the Nov. 19 dinner.

“We are co-chairing the event. We are not sponsoring the event,” spokeswoman Jennifer Burnside said. She said the FBI “didn’t have any role” in selling tickets for the event or in issuing invitations.

Burnside also stressed the fact that the dinner is not a closed briefing. “It’s a public event and Joe off the street could attend,” she said.

Another factor contributing to federal law enforcement’s prominent role in the event is that the dinner will involve a tribute to Paul Sorce, an FBI agent killed in a traffic accident in March while conducting surveillance. “Honoring a fallen agent is very important to us,” Burnside said.

Asked about the FBI’s limits on contacts with CAIR, Burnside said, “Our policy doesn’t prohibit the FBI participating in meetings where CAIR is going to be involved.”

Former terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, a CAIR critic, said he was disappointed but not taken aback by the FBI’s parsing of its ban on “formal contacts” with the Muslim group.

“I wish I could say I’m surprised but I’m not remotely surprised,” McCarthy said. “When [the FBI] said they cut off formal ties with them, whenever they say something like that you have to look very carefully at the way it’s worded… The last administration was guilty of it, this administration is guilty of it—they have determined it is more important to have what it can publicly hold out as ties to the Muslim community than it is to be careful about who you have the ties with.”

In the FBI’s letter to Kyl, the agency said the limits on contacts with CAIR stemmed from its status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. In 2007, five Holy Land officers were acquitted on some charges, while a mistrial was declared on others after jurors deadlocked. In a retrial in 2008, all the men were convicted.

“During that trial evidence was introduced that demonstrated a relationship among CAIR, individual CAIR founders…and the Palestine Committee,” the FBI’s Powers wrote. “Evidence was also introduced that demonstrated a relationship between the Palestine Committee and HAMAS, which was designated as a terrorist organization in 1995. In light of that evidence the FBI suspended all formal contacts between CAIR and the FBI.”

CAIR officials have denied any connection to terrorism and have complained bitterly about being named as co-conspirators in the Holy Land case. They note that since the group was never charged it had no forum to challenge the documents prosecutors said linked CAIR to the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR officials have also noted that aspects of the documents are not consistent with CAIR’s activities.

CAIR and two other Islamic groups named as co-conspirators asked a federal judge to nullify the designation, but POLITICO reported recently that the groups’ motion was rejected in a secret ruling. However, the judge faulted prosecutors for publicly filing the conspirators list, a source said.
In March, an array of American Muslim groups threatened to cut ties with the FBI, citing, among other concerns, the agency's treatment of CAIR.

McMillion said the connection ALPACT creates between CAIR and the FBI’s Detroit office has been vetted by top officials in Washington.

“This issue came up,” she said. “We know….of the real tension in terms of the FBI nationally having a very different posture. It actually did have to be approved through national channels not only for the FBI being a member but a co-chair…It ultimately was approved.”

Walid said he was unaware of any problems created by CAIR’s involvement in ALPACT. “It’s never been an issue,” he said.

The relationship between the FBI and Muslim groups in Michigan has been strained in recent days after agents shot and killed a local imam they said was the leader of a radical fundamentalist group. Luqman Abdullah, 53, was killed on Oct. 28 in Detroit after he refused to surrender and opened fire on agents attempting to arrest him and a band of his followers on federal weapons and conspiracy charges, the FBI said. An FBI dog was also killed in the exchange of fire, the agency noted in press released.

Walid has been sharply critical of the FBI for using deadly force in the operation, but the CAIR official said that doesn’t mean the group is at loggerheads with the federal law enforcement agency.

“We all have each other’s cell phone numbers,” Walid said. “There’s not the level of hostility that some people may think…..There are a number of organizations, not just CAIR, raising concerns about that situation with the imam.”

News Corp Sites May Be Removed From Google

2009-11-09T13:35:00.001-04:00

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has suggested the company's online newspaper pages will be invisible to Google users when it launches its new paid content strategy.

Google may not be able to find News Corp sites under new plans

He claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via an internet search hold little value to advertisers.
When asked by Sky News Australia's political editor David Speers why News Corp has not stopped Google from finding its content, Mr Murdoch replied: "I think we will."
He cited the Wall Street Journal as an example of where only the first paragraph comes up on search engines and is free. Anything after that is subscription-based.
He is planning to make newspapers like The Times and Sunday Times chargeable online.
Using the robots.txt protocol on a site indicates to automated web spiders such as Google's not to index that particular page or to serve up links to it in users' search results.

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch

As well as Google, he criticised other sites like Microsoft and Ask.com for also taking a free ride on its content - "the people who just simply pick up everything and run with it - steal our stories ... without payment", he claimed.
He said: "There's not enough advertising in the world to make all the websites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying.
"There are no news websites or blog websites anywhere in the world making any serious money, some may be breaking even or making a couple of million."
Referring to people finding News Corp stories via search engine websites, he said: "When they click it, they get the page with the story that's in our paper.
"Who knows who they are or where they are. They don't suddenly become loyal readers of our content."
He then turned his attention to the BBC, saying it was a "scandal" that everyone with a TV was "compelled" to pay a licence fee.
He said although the BBC did not charge for its own online content, it was the taxpayer who was ultimately paying for it.
Earlier in the year, his son, James Murdoch, called for major changes in the way UK broadcasting is run and regulated, and strongly criticised the BBC and TV watchdogs.
:: News Corporation is a major shareholder in BSkyB, which owns Sky News.

Bloodless President Barack Obama makes Americans wistful for George W Bush

2009-11-08T23:28:00.000-04:00

Barack Obama's reaction to bad news is to play it so cool that Americans yearn for a bit more drama - and some even for his predecessor, writes Toby Harnden in Washington.

Toby Harnden's American Way
Published: 5:57PM GMT 07 Nov 2009
Comments 327 | Comment on this article

Barack Obama has spent more than two months considering a troop increase but do we know how he really feels about the Afghan war? Photo: GETTY

During the election campaign, Barack Obama's cool detachment was a winning quality, the "No Drama Obama" a welcome contrast with the "Mr Angry" John McCain, never mind the hot-headed "I'm the decider" President George W Bush.
A year into his presidency, however, Mr Obama seems a curiously bloodless president. If he experiences passion, he seldom shows it. It is often anyone's guess as to whether an event or issue truly moves him.

He has spent more than two months considering a troop increase but do we know how he really feels about the Afghan war?
In a sign that the Obama honeymoon truly is over, I began to hear this week the first stirrings of a wistfulness about Mr Bush. "I never thought I'd hear myself say it," one Democrat told me. "But Obama makes you feel that at least with Bush you knew where he was on something."
When Mr Bush's Republicans were defeated in the 2006 mid-term elections, it was the President himself who stepped up and declared that his party had received "a thumpin'". The Democratic defeats on Tuesday were not on anything like the same scale but Mr Obama acted as if nothing at all had happened.
Mr Obama had campaigned for Jon Corzine, New Jersey's Democratic governor, five times, twice just last Sunday. But when Mr Corzine lost by four points in a state Mr Obama won by 15 last year - a 19-point swing to Republicans - White House aides just shrugged.
In Virginia, which Mr Obama won by six points last year, prompting Democrats to declare an historic political realignment in the state, the Democratic candidate went down by 17 points in the biggest landslide since 1961 - a 23-point swing to the Grand Old Party.
It took Senator Mark Warner of Virginia to admit that his party "got walloped". For three days, Mr Obama maintained a studied silence about the results while his aides blamed them on local factors that had nothing to do with the President. And to think that it was Mr Bush who was always accused of being "in denial".
More serious perhaps was Mr Obama's strange disconnectedness over the Fort Hood massacre of 13 soldiers by an Army major and devout Muslim who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had praised suicide bombing and shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire.
Maybe Mr Obama had been reading the American press, much of which somehow contrived to present the atrocity as a result of combat stress due to soldiers going on repeated war deployments (though Major Nadal Hasan had not been on any) and therefore, no doubt, Mr Bush's fault.
When the television networks cut to the President, viewers listened to him spend more than two surreal minutes talking to a gathering of Native Americans about their "extraordinary" and "extremely productive" conference, pausing to give a cheery "shout out" to a man named Dr Joe Medicine Crow. Only then did he briefly and mechanically address what had happened in Texas.
On Friday, when most of the basic facts were available, Mr Obama tried again. It was scarcely any better. He began by offering "an update on the tragedy that took place" - as if it was an earthquake and not a terrorist attack from an enemy within - and ended with a promise for more "updates in the coming days and weeks".
Completely missing was the eloquence that Mr Obama employs when talking about himself. Absent too was any sense that the President empathised with the families and comrades of those murdered.
It was a reminder that for the past 16 years Americans have had two Presidents who would often extemporise and express emotion. President Bill Clinton could certainly "feel your pain" while Mr Bush sometimes struggled to hold back tears. Mr Obama is more like President George Bush Snr, who famously communicated his concern for people by blurting out: "Message - I care."
The White House argues that Mr Obama was not on the ballot last week and there is therefore no need to fret. The problem with this complacency is that voters were angry about the state of the economy, which Mr Obama can't keep blaming on his predecessor. With unemployment now above 10 per cent, Mr Obama needs to show Americans that he can relate to what they're going through, and take responsibility.
It could do him good to show he has a bit of fire in his belly. Perhaps he might make a decision or two based on gut instinct and deep conviction. In other words, maybe he should try being a bit more like Mr Bush.

THE END OF 'OPRAH' AS WE KNOW HER: Daytime Diva Giving Up Syndie Talk Show & Moving It To Her Cable Network In 2011

2009-11-05T16:52:00.001-04:00

EXCLUSIVE: One of the biggest questions in the TV biz has been when, and even if, Oprah Winfrey would give up her daytime syndicated talk show to focus on OWN, her long delayed Oprah Winfrey Network in 70 million homes that was supposed to launch in place of the Discovery Health Channel as a joint venture between Winfrey and Discovery Communications. The industry has been betting that the daytime diva would extend The Oprah Winfrey Show for at least another year or two because of the huge cash license fees which stations have long paid her. But people around Oprah are telling me that won't happen. They say that Discovery Communications chief David Zaslav has demanded that Oprah "move it or lose it" -- move her talk show to OWN, or risk losing the Oprah Winfrey Network altogether. I've learned that in coming days Winfrey and Discovery will issue a press release announcing OWN's on-air launch for the start of 2011. And, in several weeks, Oprah will tell the public that she's ending her syndicated Chicago-based daytime talk show when her current deal runs out and moving it to OWN headquarters in Los Angeles probably as soon as mid-2011.

Hardest hit by the news will be CBS Television Distribution which syndicates the show, Also hit will be ABC's owned-and-operated stations which make up Oprah's core station group, and also Sony TV execs who'd been hoping Oprah would deliver any extension of her daytime talker into their hands based on the success they've had this season syndicating Dr Oz, Harpo's latest daytime talk show star). "Les Moonves, Bob Iger, and Sony will flip out," one of my insiders says about Oprah's news. "The only winner is David Zaslav."

*UPDATE: My news this morning caught CBS by surprise. The Eye was counting on a 1- or 2-year renewal of The Oprah Winfrey Show. "In all honesty, we have not heard she's made a decision yet whether to continue," an insider tells me. "We think we're still in the talking stages. To our minds, it's a non-decision." CBS had scheduled a face-to-face meeting a month ago with Oprah and her personal and professional posse at her Santa Barbara compound to discuss her plans. But one of the people in the close group of people around her passed away. So it was canceled, I've learned. CBS is quick to point out that, a few years back, Winfrey re-negotiated her distribution deal with CBS TV Distribution so it "gets a lesser fee now". The result is that, when Oprah stops her syndicated talk show and moves it to OWN, "It will be a hit for us, but not until 2012. And with the lower syndication fee, it's not as big a hit as it would have been," a CBS insider tells me. Besides, CBS has seen Oprah claim time and time again over the years that she's "retiring" from the syndicated show. But to take Oprah to a nosebleed cable channel even if it reaches into 70 million homes? "She has always respected the fact that the pulpit she has now gives her such a huge amount of influence." And CBS also plans to remind her that, thanks to the syndicated show, "she by far makes more money on TV than anybody else." Now let's see how persuasive Les Moonves and his people can be.*

I'm told that right now Oprah and her advisers are trying to figure out what to do with her mini-city in Chicago, and which personnel she can and will move out to LA in the next six months. Also Discovery will have to renegotiate her own deal. Even though it has yet to go on the air, OWN has experienced tremendous turmoil since it was announced, including the entrances and exits of many top female TV executives -- three in just the last 7 months. Combined with the unprecedented delays, that has come at a cost for Discovery. "It's so upside down because Discovery has lost millions of dollars since it was announced," a source tells me. "It was rumored 50/50 that Zaslav would throw in the towel and her network wouldn't launch. But Zaslav sees it as a loss leader."

Last week, Oprah called a confab in Los Angeles and met with everyone associated with OWN. She also personally heard programming pitches. Only very recently has she put in place her two current top lieutenants to run OWN (but for how long?): Christina Norman, who at the start of the year was named CEO after spending 17 years with Viacom Inc's MTV cable empire before stepping down as MTV president. And Lisa Erspamer who this week was named OWN's Chief Creative Officer and is a 15-year veteran of Harpo Productions where she served as co-executive producer of Oprah since 2006. But I hear that recently appointed OWN head of programming Jamila Hunter, NBC’s former SVP of alternative entertainment, is out looking for a job after just 3 months.

I understand that Oprah was supposed to tell CBS Inc chief Les Moonves back on October 1st what her plans were but then cancelled several scheduled calls to him. Winfrey’s distribution deal was re-signed in 2004 with King World which is now part of CBS Television Distribution. It expires in fall 2011 which marks the end of Oprah’s 25th season. (News reports said a clause existed in her current contract that would have let her end the show in 2010, but that she chose last year to extend the show’s run through the contract’s full term.)

She said in 1997 that she was planning to retire, then renewed her contract through 2002. Then in 2002 she said she would call it quits in 2006, but in 2004 she re-upped through 2011. Back then she was still enjoying high ratings and fat cash license fees from TV stations and big popularity. But that was then, and this now. Her ratings have been in double-digit decline in recent years. And given the financial crisis which has put TV stations on life support because of the plunge in advertising, Oprah was unlikely to be able to demand another big cash raise to continue her show in syndication -- especially in today's climate when stations are bartering with syndicators, not paying them. "It had the potential to bankrupt stations. She would have wanted all cash up front. GMs would have told her to go away," one source explains to me. When Oprah leaves syndication, it will open up time slots and free up station cash not just for syndication's existing stars (which now include Harpo's own Dr Phil, Rachael Ray and Dr Oz) but also new ones.

Leaving the extraordinary visibility she enjoyed through syndication for a nosebleed cable channel is a huge gamble for Oprah as a TV brand. There's the possibility that OWN could distribute her new talk show for syndication. But I hear no one is talking about that now. In the U.S., Oprah is viewed by an estimated 7 million people a day (though that audience has fallen by half over the past 10 years) and in 140 countries. It has been estimated that she currently earns about $275 million a year in showbiz income. Long the No. 1 rated daytime talk show, Oprah also made Winfrey into the richest African American woman worth $2.3B at last count, a worldwide media personality with a powerful media empire around her, a celebrated actress who doubled as a film and television producer, a force in both book and magazine publishing.

Oprah inaugBut there's also no question that Oprah is a much more controversial figure now than she's ever been before because of her wealth and fame and politics. "She's lost her authenticity. Like when she said, 'It's good to have your own private jet.' Or when she shut down the City of Chicago with this season's 'flash mob' for the opening show. Where's the relatability?" The word internally at ABC is that TV stations have been cringing at Oprah's past and present and continuing support for Barack Obama, from her appearance at his inauguration (see photo) to her visits to the White House, because it antagonizes half the viewing public who don't share her politics. Now Oprah will no longer be in their faces: instead she'll be isolated on cable. The biggest question now in the TV industry is whether it's "Good Luck!" or "Good Riddance!"

The Double Standard About Journalists' Bias

2009-11-04T15:39:00.000-04:00

By John Stossel

I made The New York Times last week. It even ran my picture. My mother would be proud.
Unfortunately, the story was critical. It said, "Critics have leaped on Mr. Stossel's speaking engagements as the latest evidence of conservative bias on the part of Fox."

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Which "critics" had "leaped"? The reporter mentioned Rachel Maddow. I wouldn't think her criticism newsworthy, but Times reporters may use MSNBC as their guide to life. He also quoted an "associate professor of journalism" who said my speeches were "'pretty shameful' by traditional journalistic standards." All this because I spoke at an event for Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a "conservative advocacy group."
It is odd that this is a news story. In August, AFP hired me to do the very same thing. I give the money to charity. The Times didn't call that "shameful."
But in August, I worked for ABC News. Now, I work for Fox. Hmmm.
It reminds me of something that happened earlier in my career.
I was one of America's first TV consumer reporters. I approached the job with an attitude. If companies ripped people off, I would embarrass them on TV -- and demand that government do something. (I now regret the latter -- the former was a good thing.)
I clearly had a point of view: I was a crusader out to punish corporate bullies. My colleagues liked it. I got job offers. I won 19 Emmys. I was invited to speak at journalism conferences.
Then, gradually, I figured out that business, for the most part, treats consumers pretty well. The way to get rich in business is to create something good, sell it for a reasonable price, acquire a reputation for honesty and keep pleasing customers so they come back for more.
As a local TV reporter, I could find plenty of crooks. But once I got to the national stage -- "20/20" and "Good Morning America" -- it was hard to find comparable national scams. There were some: Enron, Bernie Madoff, etc. But they are rare. In a $14 trillion economy, you'd think there'd be more. But there aren't.
I figured out why: Market forces, even when hampered by government, keep scammers in check. Reputation matters. Word gets out. Good companies thrive, and bad ones atrophy. Regulation barely deters the cheaters, but competition does.
It made me want to learn more about free markets. I subscribed to Reason magazine and read Cato Institute research papers. Then Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Aaron Wildavsky.
My reporting changed. I started taking skeptical looks at government -- especially regulation. I did an ABC TV special, "Are We Scaring You to Death?" that said we TV reporters often make hysterical claims about chemicals, pollution and other relatively minor risks. Its good ratings -- 16 million viewers -- surprised my colleagues.
Suddenly, I wasn't so popular with them.
I stopped winning Emmys.
I was invited on CNN's media program, "Reliable Sources," to be interviewed by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz and an indignant Bernard Kalb. They titled the segment, "Objectivity and Journalism: Does John Stossel Practice Either?" It was in big letters over my head.
Apparently, I had broken the rules.
On the air they told me that I was no longer objective. I was too stunned to defend myself effectively. I said something like: "I've always had a point of view. How come you had no trouble with that when I criticized business?"
In hindsight, I wish I'd said: "Look at the title on the wall, you hypocrites! It shows you have a point of view, too. Many reporters do. You just don't like my arguments now that I no longer hew to your statist line. So you want to shut me up."
But I didn't.
So I'll say it now: Reporters who think coercive government control is generally good and I, who thinks voluntary market forces are generally better, both have a point of view.
So why am I the one called biased?
I like what "Americans for Prosperity" defends. I'm an American, and I'm for prosperity. What creates prosperity is free and competitive markets. That means limited government.
And I will speak about that every chance I get.

Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere

2009-11-04T12:41:00.001-04:00

Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark pleading-puppy look.

What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call."

One of the specific answers Mr. Beck wanted, on one of the days I watched his program last week, had to do with White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has been caught on film quoting one of those Mao Zedong aphorisms that wouldn't look out of place on a motivational poster. She also remarked that Mao was one of her "favorite political philosophers," an honor the Chinese Communist shared with Mother Teresa.

Obviously Ms. Dunn was yet another person who deserved to be added to the long list of radicals that Mr. Beck had uncovered within the government.

What's more, no one would call that red phone to reassure Mr. Beck, to tell him that the Obama administration isn't crawling with traitors or to explain why his many nightmare scenarios will not actually come to pass.

"They won't call me," he tells the camera. "Communists, revolutionaries, socialists, Marxists, followers of Chairman Mao appointed by Obama to the executive branch in positions of the government—call, call me. Explain it. Explain it any other way. Call me, right now."

Yet there the mute telephone sits, a quiet symbol of Middle America's frustration. The diabolical liberals in the White House refuse even to acknowledge our queries. "Their silence is their answer," the host sighs.

Is it really? On Monday I wrote to an old friend, Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois who has been a frequent target of Mr. Beck in recent weeks for his left-wing views and also for co-founding Free Press, an advocacy group on media policy. Did Mr. McChesney get a chance to respond on the red phone or any other way? No. "He never asked me or Free Press to call the red phone," Mr. McChesney wrote me.

Then I emailed Mark Lloyd, the Chief Diversity Officer at the Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Beck has attacked Mr. Lloyd numerous times in recent weeks, repeatedly airing video clips in which he appears to hold noxious views. Did Mr. Lloyd get a chance to call the red phone? "No, no one gave me a phone number to call Beck."

Nor should Mr. Beck require a phone call from the White House to understand that lots of people, including conservatives, have cited Mao and Lenin and other such demonic figures in all sorts of contexts, and that they aren't always careful, when so citing, to point out what bad people these were.

No discerning person would conclude from Ms. Dunn's dimwitted remark that she is a Maoist. That would require more evidence—and that's what makes Mr. Beck's pantomime fear and trembling so odious: He doesn't appear to be interested in further evidence, or really any evidence that doesn't serve his shtick.

Consider a few of the other grand assertions tossed out by the panic-peddling host last week: that the cause of last year's financial crisis was pressure exerted by Acorn and "the people in Washington" on otherwise-reluctant mortgage lenders; that the cause of the inflation of the 1970s was President Jimmy Carter's quest for a "socialist utopia."

These are postulates that it is only possible to believe after you have utterly closed yourself off to conventional ways of knowing, after you have decided that the reporting and analysis and scholarship on these subjects are not worth reading, and that you will choose ideological fairy tales over reality until the day a magical phone call comes from on high.

What Mr. Beck's silent phone really symbolizes is a new kind of ignorance, a coming high-tech dark age in which people can choose to blow off professional standards of inquiry; in which they can wall themselves off with cable TV and friendly Web sites, dismiss what displeases as liberal bias, and demand that any contrary view be transmitted to them via telephone call from the president himself.

Why not let Mr. Beck and his viewers have their fun? Because ideas have consequences. Maybe, as many believe, Glenn Beck is indeed the future of the conservative movement. From tea parties to town-hall meetings, thousands are signing up and fitting themselves out with their very own hotline to nowhere.

The NEA is Completely Committed to Obamaism

2009-11-01T23:50:00.001-04:00

By Jonah Goldberg

It seems Rocco Landesman, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, didn't get the memo, literally.
On September 22, stung by controversy over the administration's effort to turn the arts community into proselytizers of its very special brand of hope and change, the White House issued a stern warning to all government agencies: Keep politics out of the arts.

The White House denied that was ever the intent. Many in the media, as is their wont, took the Obama administration at their word.
But not the website Big Government (which broke the story) and the Washington Times. They demonstrated that from the earliest days of the presidential transition, Barack Obama's political operation sought to entrench the arts community in its "outreach" operations. Bill Ivey, Obama's transition adviser on the arts, admitted in June: "I wanted to see some real connection between administration objectives and the capacity of all the cultural actors in government. I made some progress. I got some agreement."
That "progress" mostly came in the form of enlisting arts groups - groups that received stimulus money - in Obama's national-service agenda.
Three days after Landesman was confirmed as the head of the NEA, his communications director, Yosi Sergant, told NEA grantees in a conference call: "I would encourage you to pick something, whether it's health care, education, the environment - you know, there's four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service."
Two days later, a host of arts organizations endorsed Obama's health-care plan: "We call on Congress to pass: A health-care reform bill that will create a public-health option. . . . There is little time to waste . . . " Of the 21 groups signing the statement, 16 had recently received grants from the NEA or were affiliated with organizations that had.
Sergant was thrown under the bus, and the September 22 memo put an end to the story for the supportive media.
But the story continues. Last week, Landesman gave the keynote address to the 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference. In fairness, Landesman did not reaffirm the White House and NEA's obvious initial intent to turn the allegedly independent government agency into an adjunct of Obama's "Organizing for America" operation. He was more subtle than that.
Instead, Landesman embraced a timeless tactic of power politics. He debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. "There is a new president and a new NEA," he proclaimed. "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists."
After more fawning praise for the "Optimist in Chief," he added that proof of Obama's desire to take the NEA in exciting new directions was the president's "out-of-left-field choice to head the NEA, a signal I certainly took to mean he wasn't interested in business-as-usual for the arts." One must trust that Landesman's interpretation of his own appointment is accurate.
Let us pause to reflect on Landesman's odd - by which I mean absurd - historical analysis. Obama has written two books, one good, the other a plodding concatenation of political clichés and bromides. Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, published by Mark Twain, were a literary triumph. Woodrow Wilson wrote many books of great import but of less literary worth. JFK won a Pulitzer for one of his books - the one he didn't write, alas. But Richard Nixon wrote plenty, as did Herbert Hoover, including two definitive texts, one on mining, the other on fishing.
Oh, and Lincoln never wrote any books.
In short, Landesman doesn't know what he's talking about. But he does know what he's doing.
What matters to him is not the power of Obama's writing but the power of the writer. Why else compare a democratically elected president to one of history's most iconic dictators? That is, unless we are to believe he is a huge fan of Caesar's De Bello Gallico.
There have been far greater writers with power than Obama since Caesar. Among them: Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru, Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, and Marcus Aurelius.
By demonstrating with brazenly self-abasing ignorance that he is wholly Obama's man, Landesman is making it clear that the NEA is completely committed to Obamaism. There's no need for any more of Mr. Sergant's tacky, Chicago-style pay-to-play. Self-humiliation sends a far more powerful signal.
No doubt the provincial official has pleased his Caesar.

Troubling Signals On Free Speech

2009-10-30T13:16:00.001-03:00

In his eagerness to please international opinion, President Obama has taken a small but significant step toward censoring free speech.

by Stuart Taylor Jr.

Saturday, Oct. 31, 2009

It was nice to hear Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton say on October 26, "I strongly disagree" with Islamic countries seeking to censor free speech worldwide by making defamation of religion a crime under international law.
But watch what the Obama administration does, not just what it says. I'm not talking about its attacks on Fox News. I'm talking about a little-publicized October 2 resolution in which Clinton's own State Department joined Islamic nations in adopting language all-too-friendly to censoring speech that some religions and races find offensive.
The ambiguously worded United Nations Human Rights Council resolution could plausibly be read as encouraging or even obliging the U.S. to make it a crime to engage in hate speech, or, perhaps, in mere "negative racial and religious stereotyping." This despite decades of First Amendment case law protecting such speech.
To be sure, the provisions to which I refer were a compromise, stopping short of the flat ban on defamation of religion sought by Islamic nations, and they could also be construed more narrowly and innocuously. It all depends on who does the construing.
Is it "negative stereotyping" to say that the world's most dangerous terrorists are Islamists, for example? Many would say yes.
I sketch below how the resolution could be construed to require prosecuting some offensive speech and how it could be used in the long run to change the meaning of our Constitution and laws, based on doctrines developed by legal academics including Obama appointee Harold Koh, the State Department's top lawyer.
Also troublesome on the free-speech front are various remarks by Mark Lloyd, the Federal Communications Commission's associate general counsel and chief diversity officer. Lloyd asserted in a 2006 book, "The purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance." He co-authored a 2007 report calling for regulatory changes to close "the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio." In 2008, he praised the "incredible ... democratic revolution" of Hugo Chavez and implied approval of the thuggish Venezuelan strongman's pattern of shutting down news media opposed to him.
That's how I read Lloyd's videotaped statement, first aired by Glenn Beck of Fox News, in which he said: "The property owners and the folks who then were controlling the media rebelled [against Chavez], worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government, worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country."
Then there was the June 5 high school commencement speech in which White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Mao Zedong -- one of history's greatest mass murderers and an implacable enemy of free speech -- one of "my favorite political philosophers." Dunn has, coincidentally, been the point person in President Obama's attacks on Fox News.

The administration is seeded with left-liberal thinkers who have smiled on efforts to punish speech that is offensive to favored racial and religious groups.

This is not to suggest that Dunn approves of mass murder or that Obama wants to censor critics. But the ideologies of appointees such as Lloyd and Dunn can have consequences. And in his eagerness to please international opinion, Obama has now taken a small but significant step toward making bad law.
Law -- especially international law -- evolves below the radar, in small moves largely ignored by the mainstream media. Although international resolutions have traditionally not been seen as binding law, the Obama administration is seeded with left-liberal thinkers who have long sought to spin what some call "transnational" law out of such stuff, and who have smiled on efforts to punish speech that is offensive to favored racial, religious, and other groups.
Such attitudes may help explain the administration's decision to join the U.N. Human Rights Council in the first place. Obama reversed a Bush administration policy of shunning this deeply politicized body, which counts as members several flagrant human-rights abusers and which is preoccupied with attacking Israel.
The council's October 2 resolution is ostensibly an endorsement of "freedom of opinion and expression," which seems ironic, given the track records of such members as China, Cuba, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
But the real problem is a provision, which the U.S. championed jointly with Egypt, exuding hostility to free expression.
That provision "expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world, and condemns, in this context, any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human-rights law, to address and combat such incidents" (emphasis added).
What is this clot of verbiage supposed to mean?
It could be read narrowly as a commitment merely to denounce and eschew hate speech. But it could more logically be read broadly as requiring the United States and other nations to punish "hostile" speech about -- and perhaps also "negative stereotyping" of -- any race or religion. It's a safe bet, however, that the Islamic nations that are so concerned about criticisms of their religion will not be prosecuting anyone for the rampant "negative racial and ethnic stereotyping" and hate speech in their own countries directed at Jews and sometimes Christians.
Eugene Volokh of the University of California (Los Angeles) Law School pointed out on his Volokh Conspiracy blog that the reference to "obligations under international human-rights law" could be seen as binding the United States to a provision of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requiring that hate speech "shall be prohibited by law." The U.S. has previously rejected that provision.
Added Volokh: "Advocacy of mere hostility -- for instance... to radical strains of Islam [or any other religion] -- is clearly constitutionally protected here in the U.S.; but the resolution seems to call for its prohibition. [And] if we are constitutionally barred from adhering to it by our domestic Constitution, then [the administration's vote was] implicitly criticizing that Constitution, and committing ourselves to do what we can to change it." Such a stance could be seen as obliging the executive branch to urge the Supreme Court to overrule decades of First Amendment decisions.

Obama should not take even a small step down the road toward bartering away free speech for the sake of international consensus.

Far-fetched? Not according to the hopes and expectations of many international law scholars. "An international norm against hate speech would supply a basis for prohibiting it, the First Amendment notwithstanding.... In the long run, it may point to the Constitution's more complete subordination," Peter Spiro, a professor at Temple University Law School, asserted in a 2003 Stanford Law Review article.
Similarly, if more ambiguously, Koh wrote in another 2003 Stanford Law Review article, "Our exceptional free-speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet." The Supreme Court, suggested Koh -- then a professor at Yale Law School -- "can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation" that he espouses.
Translation: Transnational law may sometimes trump the established interpretation of the First Amendment. This is the clear meaning of Koh's writings, although he implied otherwise during his Senate confirmation hearing.
In my view, Obama should not take even a small step down the road toward bartering away our free-speech rights for the sake of international consensus. "Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech," as Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, wrote in an October 19 USA Today op-ed.
Even European nations with much weaker free-speech traditions than ours were reportedly dismayed by the American cave-in to Islamic nations on "racial and religious stereotyping" and the rest.
The pressure to censor harsh criticisms of Islam, as well as other religions and groups, began to intensify after bloody riots by Muslims around the world in 2006 over the publication in Denmark of cartoons ridiculing Muhammad.
People have reportedly been prosecuted in Austria, Finland, and India for asserting that Muhammad's marriage to a 9-year-old girl made him a "pedophile." Brigitte Bardot was convicted in 2008 of provoking racial hatred for saying in a letter to France's interior minister that Muslims were ruining France. A 15-year-old boy in Britain was charged under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act last year for holding up a sign outside a Scientology building calling the practice "a dangerous cult." And so on.
We have had no such overt federal government censorship in this country so far. But we have seen plenty of private censorship and self-censorship, especially at our universities, most of which have thinly disguised speech codes.
One example is the spineless decision in August by Yale President Richard Levin and the Yale University Press to remove the Danish cartoons (and all other pictures) of Muhammad from a book about the drawings.
The reaction of the academic world to such episodes has been apathy. The same is true of the response by the academic world, the news media, and civil-liberties groups to the October 2 resolution.
Take The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union. Both were once dependable guardians of uninhibited, robust, and wide-open debate, regardless of whose ox was gored. But as best I can tell from their websites, neither has said a word about the Obama administration's collaboration with would-be censors sitting on the U.N. Human Rights Council.