Sunday, July 15, 2007

Jake Tapper Needs to get Over Himself

...he might also want to enter the 21st century.

According to his blog site, "Jake Tapper is ABC News' Senior National Correspondent based in the network's Washington bureau. He writes about politics and popular culture and covers a range of national stories."

He also recently got his head handed to him by our Patriarch of the Airwaves, Hugh Hewitt in a recent interview. Jake tried to do an ambush piece on Hugh and it backfired very badly. His assistant had sent Hugh a memo asking for an interview about Hugh's new book, A Mormon in the White House? Jake didn't seem that interested in discussing the book and the first question from Jake was about Louisiana Republican senator Vitter and his involvement with the DC madam.

Hugh answered the questions honestly, but about halfway into the interview, Hugh finally unsheathed his claws and went to work on the very unprepared Mr. Tapper. When confronted with the contents of the memo asking for the interview, Jake claimed no knowledge of it. That was like leaning into a left hook. His best bet was to apologize for the mistake and try to get off the subject as fast as possible. Instead, he tried to act like it was no big deal. What a moron. Hugh shredded him and rightfully so.

Look, either he knew about it or he didn't. If he did, then he's a liar. (I'm shocked, just shocked to find that the MSM isn't transparent about its methods!) If he didn't, then the vaunted advantage of the MSM over the blogospere, organizational cross-checking is just junk. (Like we didn't know that already, right Mr. Rather?)

Can you imagine ABC sending its senior correspondent to interview a nationally syndicated talk show host with an audience between 1 and 2 million and not having a prep meeting where they discussed the topic and the invitation they would send? That's total nonsense. When my organization sends invitations out to VIPs, we typically send out a draft agenda or at least a full list of topics we want to cover in the meeting. It allows the VIP to prepare. Meetings with unprepared people are a waste of time.

Unless you're trying to ambush them. Then unprepared people are exactly what you want.

My favorite portion of the interview was the one where Hugh asked Jake about how he voted in previous elections. Jake went off in a direction that sounded like it came straight from the Empress Jadis, out of C S Lewis' The Magician's Nephew. Compare the two and see if you can hear it.

Jake:
The answer is because I am conflicted about whether or not it is appropriate for somebody whose job it is to be an arbiter, a truth teller of these elections, whether or not it is appropriate for that person to ultimately step into the voting booth and choose. I do understand those who say that it’s not appropriate to vote, and that’s how I felt in the last election, and that’s generally how I’m coming to feel.
The Empress Jadis:
You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or any of the common people is not wrong for a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.
Borrowing from a James Lileks analogy that I've come to love, I left this comment on Jake's blog.
For the love of God, Jake, get over yourself. You're not some kind of superhero whose identity must be kept a secret for the safety of us all. You're a reporter and a commentator and in the era of the new media, you're just one of us. I have a blog, too, Jake. I do news stories and analysis, too, Jake. It's not a big deal...You're an ant who thinks he's an elephant.
For a while, I regretted the comment as too snarky. As I started to imagine the planning meetings at ABC that must have gone on prior to the interview, I realized that Jake's whole line about "I had no idea the memo had gone out" and also his claim that Senator Vitter's steamy indiscretions were somehow important enough to ask Hugh about were just a load of manure. He ambushed Hugh and was trying to humiliate him by asking questions about a Republican scandal. Jake deserves nothing but scorn and derision.

Update: Jake Tapper wants to fuss about Senator Vitter. Good choice. There might be a better one. Read this and then do a Google news search for any MSM stories about it. Find any? Neither did I. Jake Tapper, ABC senior national correspondent, call your office!

Links: Hugh and his blogging team have since followed up with a series of broadsides that leave Jake's protestations in tatters. They're glorious. Simply glorious. Why don't you wander on over and take a look. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Open your eyes by asking yourself who the men are that Hewitt is employed by, at 1200 station, Salem Radio Network, who also own townhall.com .

Consider how you "know what you know". Does it come from a broad spectrum of individual sources, from the pages of US government websites that contain information to fact check news reporting from domestic services, and say....BBC...or are you already relying mostly on information reaching you that has been transformed by this 17 years old "vision":

"Imagine, if you will, a future wherein the media willfully support the foreign policy objectives of the United States."

-Brett Bozell III speech to Heritage Foundation, 1992

Hewitt, Bozell, and the two owners of Salem Media are not trying to "balance" the reporting of MSM, they are trying to muzzle it.

I don't want the press cooperating with government foreign policy, or with government "anything else". I want the press to engage the government in an adversarial approach.

Do some research on Hewitt's employers and you'll discover that their agenda includes picking the GOP candidate "in secret", and promoting him via a press that they control.

You, dear blog author, made the effort to post on Jake Tapper's blog and to type a page with praise for Hewitt, here. My views represent only what I've learned through indpendent research. No one put them in my head.

MSM isn't perfect, but Hewitt extolled the "work" of Rush and Foxnews as superior to MSM. I don't believe that it is a coincidence that you align yourself with Hewitt, but I strongly suspect that you do not know much about the people who own the stages that Hewitt performs on, or how their agenda..."the message" portion of it, has come to be yours, too.

Anonymous said...

host, please.

Hugh, Brett, Salem -- of course, they're biased. But they don't hide it under the supposed veil of objectivity.

I don't think there would be nearly the outcry that there is against the MSM if just stopped calling themselves "objective."

No one is perfect, MSM or Hugh and the conservo-right-center blogosphere. The latter, doesn't apologize for its intent, and doesn't mask its intentions, as the former does. This has been proven time and again.

Anonymous said...

i highly doubt that tapper held a "planning meeting" at ABC for a podcast interview. reporters like tapper are responsible for a large amount of content these days. a podcast is not a story on the nightly news. he probably spent a few minutes by himself prepping for the interview, if that.

now, hewitt was clearly well prepared. that's what PR people do.

Anonymous said...

C'mon, Chris....

Hewitt...open about his agenda ?....while the MSM is not? Who should the publishers of NY Times, WaPo, McClatchey, ABC, NBC, anc CBS, announce that they represent....what should they say their "agenda" is?
Do those publihsers, as the owners of Hewitt's "stage", Salem Communications, and townhall.com, belong to a "super secret" organization....like...Council for National Policy?

Hewitt, your president, and your republican congressional caucus do not represent you, or work for you. When they seem to be doing that, it is coincidence. They answer only to people who you should learn more about...the Examiner's Phil Anschulz, Blackwater's Eric Prince, Dick Devos of Amway, and Salem CC/townhall.com owners, Epperson and Altsinger III.

How do you think that the secretive CNP, whose principles and Hewitt's bosses, Epperson and Altsinger III, remains secretive, yet keeps it's tax free status?

"Guys like Hewitt don't dance to the Ken Mehlman's tune; if anything, it's the other way around. The RWNM is a subsidiary of the big money conservative movement not the Republican party. In fact, the Republican party itself is just the political arm of the big money conservative movement."


Taxpayers continue to fund right-wing meetings to assess presidential candidates

Posted by Sarah Posner at 11:46 AM on February 27, 2007.

As reported on these pages two years ago, the Council for National Policy is a secretive association of influential ultra-conservatives who get charitable tax breaks for their membership dues and thrice yearly trips to fancy resorts to hobnob with politicians and policymakers. The secrecy surrounding an organization that was the brainchild of end-timers and right-wing financiers is contrary not only to democratic principles generally, but also to the Internal Revenue Code, which requires tax-exempt educational organizations to educate the general public -- in other words, to make its lectures, publications and other materials publicly available.

The luxury resort meetings of the CNP have been reported for several years in the New York Times by David Kirkpatrick, who almost consistently notes the organization's secrecy but not the fact that its members get a tax break despite the fact that they operate in secret. It's a subject worth revisiting (and I don't say this to toot my own horn), because my article exposing the tax-exempt boondoggle was a runner up for one of the top 25 censored stories of 2005. This past Sunday, in a piece entitled Christian Right Labors to Find '08 Candidate, Kirkpatrick grants anonymity to a recent meeting's attendees, and that anonymity was granted based on the internal policy of the CNP -- although contrary to the law -- that it function as a secret organization.

But the real point of the piece, of course, was not to question what the heck CNP is still doing doling out secret tax breaks to its influential members. Instead, it was a very public alert to all the Republican presidential candidates: as the Times put it, "A group of influential Christian conservatives and their allies emerged from a private meeting at a Florida resort this month dissatisfied with the Republican presidential field and uncertain where to turn." Although the CNP's meeting invitations are still secret, this particular invitation was quite public. A warm welcome to the first viable Republican presidential candidate to start pandering, pronto.

Digg!

Sarah Posner is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared on Alternet, The American Prospect, The Gadflyer, and in other publications.

K T Cat said...

Anon,

Tapper had to have had a meeting to plan the interview. Otherwise the memo would never have been sent. What do you think, the memo and the interview happened with the same person completely out of serendipity?

As for Hugh being partisan, well, duh. We all knew that. He admits that. The MSM is partisan and refuses to acknowledge it. It's like the penultimate act of "The Wizard of Oz" went on for years where the con man, having been unmasked, goes on and on and on that there really is a wizard.

Anonymous said...

K T Cat, is there any possibility that your "take" on MSM reporting, is the opposite of what you have decided that it is, issn't the accuracy of the reporting, how the details in a news report, hold up, over time....with what unfolds later?

Have you closed yourself off from the wide variety of news gathering and reporting that is available via the internet/TV/radio/print, to the point that you allow only a narrowcast "in", that is remarkably "in synch" with everything conveyed by Brett Bozell III abd Hugh Hewitt, for example?

The NY Times has been criticized for practicing the opposite bias that you assert is prevalent:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/09/hoyt/

Monday July 9, 2007 06:50 EST
The ongoing journalistic scandal at the New York Times

"Back in February, when Michael Gordon's gullible, government-reliant reports about Iran's actions in Iraq prompted a tidal wave of blogosphere-generated (and FAIR-generated) reader complaints, then-Public Editor Byron Calame spoke with NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller about these complaints:

The situation [of the Times' reporting on Bush's claims about Iran] closely parallels the pre-war period when The Times prominently reported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Deeply shamed when they were not found, the paper publicly acknowledged that its coverage had been "insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged."

Times editors clearly were mindful of the W.M.D. coverage as they pursued the Iranian weapons issue. "W.M.D. has informed everything we've done on Iran," Bill Keller, the executive editor, told me three days after the Baghdad briefing. "We don't have to tell the reporters to be as skeptical as possible. W.M.D. restored a level of skepticism."

But Hoyt's column yesterday demonstrates that exactly the opposite is true. The Times is still doing exactly what it did before the invasion of Iraq -- the activities that supposedly brought it such "shame" -- and in many cases, it is exactly the same people who are doing it.

Just consider what Hoyt's criticisms yesterday mean. These criticisms apply not only to one article, but rather, to a whole series of articles. The criticisms concern not some obscure topic or isolated special report, but rather, the single most important political and journalistic issue of this decade -- the war in Iraq and the American media's coverage of government claims about that war.

And most significantly of all, Hoyt's criticisms are grounded not in a technical violation of some petty rule or failure to adhere to some debatable journalistic custom, but rather, involve the worst journalistic sin of all: namely, a failure to treat government claims with skepticism and a willingness mindlessly to recite such claims without scrutiny. If a newspaper simply prints government claims without skepticism, what remote value does it have other than as a propaganda amplifier? None. And yet, as Hoyt's column potently demonstrates, that is exactly what the NYT is doing in Iraq -- yet again.

In light of all of this, what rational argument can be mounted in response to the claim that the NYT is simply not interested in practicing real journalism when it comes to the Bush administration's actions in Iraq, or worse, that at least some editorial factions at the Times support the war and want to prop up the administration's political case? What other explanation is possible in light of the clear, lengthy record of the newspaper?

Just consider the record of Michael Gordon -- who, I want to stress, is not personally the problem but merely the most vivid manifestation of the ills of American political journalism. Based exclusively upon what has appeared in the Times itself -- thus excluding all external criticisms of his reporting -- this is Gordon's record of shame over the last four years:

* A May 26, 2004 NYT Editors' Note identifies several articles written or co-written by Gordon about the Bush administration's pro-war Iraq claims and says about that reporting "that it was not as rigorous as it should have been"; that the war-fueling case "was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged"; and the reporting was flawed because "Administration officials were allowed to hold forth at length" with virtually no challenge or dissent.

* On January 28, 2007, NYT Public Editor Byron Calame reports that "Times editors have carefully made clear their disapproval of the expression of a personal opinion about Iraq on national television by the paper's chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon," in which Gordon expressed clear support for President Bush's "surge" plan. The Times Washington Bureau Chief, Philip Taubman, said that Gordon "stepped over the line" by admitting that he supported escalation in Iraq.

* On February 27, 2007, Calame gently though clearly criticized an article by Gordon written about the Bush administration's "saber-rattling about Iranian intervention in Iraq" (and other articles on the same topic) on the ground that (a) Gordon's article violated the paper's rules on the use of anonymous government sources; (b) the reported government claims about Iran "needed some qualification" about whether they were based on evidence or inference; (c) readers "deserved a clearer sense" of whether such a belief about the Iranian leadership's involvement in Iraqi insurgent attacks is shared by a consensus of intelligence officials (which, as even the President subsequently admitted, it was not); and, most incriminatingly (given its obvious similarity to Gordon's pre-war failures), (d) "editors didn't make sure all conflicting views were always clearly reported" and the "story also should have noted . . . that the president's view on this point differed from the intelligence assessment given readers of [Gordon's] Feb. 10 article."

* Hoyt's column yesterday identifies a series of articles about Iraq, many written or co-written by Gordon, which "slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda's role in Iraq," and further criticized the articles because "in using the language of the administration," these articles presented a misleading picture of Iraq.

Does anyone at the NYT really need help seeing the clear pattern here? What more does Gordon need to do in order to show how journalistically irresponsible he is, how either incapable or unwilling he is to treat Bush administration claims about the war with skepticism and do anything other than serve as an obedient vessel for pro-war government claims?

This is a disgraceful record that continuously exhibits the same journalistic sins and the same exceedingly transparent pro-war, pro-Bush bias, not just bias that Gordon harbors personally but bias which time and again permeates his "reporting." And again, this is the record as established by the Times itself. There are countless other instances where Gordon does this that do not make it into the pages of his newspaper, but which are nonetheless egregious.

And yet, the Editors of the NYT continue not only to make Gordon their featured star reporter when it comes both to Iraq and related stories about Iran, but also to approve of the same defective, corrupt journalistic methods that are his hallmark. The deficiencies in his reporting are not complex or hidden. They are all right there out in the open, easy to see. All one has to do is read Gordon's articles and it is immediately apparent that, time and again, they do nothing other than recite highly questionable and highly inflammatory claims from the military and the Bush administration, and he conveys them with no meaningful question, challenge, dissent, or qualification.

And he does this not once, but over and over. This is exactly what the NYT claims to be so ashamed of its having done prior to the war, and yet it so plainly continues to do it, four years later -- in the form of the same reporter and likely the same editors. After all, as Hoyt's column demonstrate, it is not just Gordon who is guilty of these failures. If bloggers can see it, and Hoyt sees it, isn't it safe to assume that the editors who approve of these articles see it, too? How can they not?

There is important and revealing symbolism in having these criticisms voiced in the NYT by Hoyt. As blogger and journalist Joe Gandleman, who worked briefly with Hoyt, notes, Hoyt has one of the most impressive resumes in modern journalism -- including his work at McClatchy, which exhibited the requisite skepticism of Bush's pre-war claims exactly at the time when the NYT, along with most of our establishment press, so notably -- and so destructively -- failed to do so.

And it bears emphasizing how obvious, basic and long-recognized are the dangers posed when journalists fail to subject government claims -- especially about war -- to real skepticism. In 1994 -- on the 30-year anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that spawned the escalation of the Vietnam war -- journalists Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon documented the role of the shoddy reporting by the American media, tragically led by the NYT, which enabled the government to perpetuate false claims about that incident:

Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear.

"American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression", announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.

That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: "President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and 'certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam' after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin."

But there was no "second attack" by North Vietnam -- no "renewed attacks against American destroyers." By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.

A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties. . . . "

....and on July 13, the NY Times published this....under the co-byline of Michael Gordon, exposed in the above critique, for reporting opinions opposite to this:

"July 13, 2007
Bush Distorts Qaeda Links, Critics Assert
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JIM RUTENBERG

BAGHDAD, July 12 — In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq,” he said, “were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home.”

It is an argument Mr. Bush has been making with frequency in the past few months, as the challenges to the continuation of the war have grown. On Thursday alone, he referred at least 30 times to Al Qaeda or its presence in Iraq.

But his references to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and his assertions that it is the same group that attacked the United States in 2001, have greatly oversimplified the nature of the insurgency in Iraq and its relationship with the Qaeda leadership.

There is no question that the group is one of the most dangerous in Iraq. But Mr. Bush’s critics argue that he has overstated the Qaeda connection in an attempt to exploit the same kinds of post-Sept. 11 emotions that helped him win support for the invasion in the first place.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sunni group thrived as a magnet for recruiting and a force for violence largely because of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which brought an American occupying force of more than 100,000 troops to the heart of the Middle East, and led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

The American military and American intelligence agencies characterize Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a ruthless, mostly foreign-led group that is responsible for a disproportionately large share of the suicide car bomb attacks that have stoked sectarian violence. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, said in an interview that he considered the group to be “the principal short-term threat to Iraq.”

But while American intelligence agencies have pointed to links between leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the top leadership of the broader Qaeda group, the militant group is in many respects an Iraqi phenomenon. They believe the membership of the group is overwhelmingly Iraqi. Its financing is derived largely indigenously from kidnappings and other criminal activities. And many of its most ardent foes are close at home, namely the Shiite militias and the Iranians who are deemed to support them.

“The president wants to play on Al Qaeda because he thinks Americans understand the threat Al Qaeda poses,” said Bruce Riedel, an expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former C.I.A. official. “But I don’t think he demonstrates that fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq precludes Al Qaeda from attacking America here tomorrow. Al Qaeda, both in Iraq and globally, thrives on the American occupation.”

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who became the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, came to Iraq in 2002 when Saddam Hussein was still in power, but there is no evidence that Mr. Hussein’s government provided support for Mr. Zarqawi and his followers. Mr. Zarqawi did have support from senior Qaeda leaders, American intelligence agencies believe, and his organization grew in the chaos of post-Hussein Iraq.

“There has been an intimate relationship between them from the beginning,” Mr. Riedel said of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the senior leaders of the broader Qaeda group.

But the precise relationship between the Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden and other groups that claim inspiration or affiliation with it is murky and opaque. While the groups share a common ideology, the Iraq-based group has enjoyed considerable autonomy. Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, questioned Mr. Zarqawi’s strategy of organizing attacks against Shiites, according to captured materials. But Mr. Zarqawi clung to his strategy of mounting sectarian attacks in an effort to foment a civil war and make the American occupation untenable.

The precise size of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is not known. Estimates are that it may have from a few thousand to 5,000 fighters and perhaps twice as many supporters. While the membership of the group is mostly Iraqi, the role that foreigners play is crucial.

Abu Ayyub al-Masri is an Egyptian militant who emerged as the successor of Mr. Zarqawi, who was killed near Baquba in an American airstrike last year. American military officials say that 60 to 80 foreign fighters come to Iraq each month to fight for the group, and that 80 to 90 percent of suicide attacks in Iraq have been conducted by foreign-born operatives of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

At first, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia received financing from the broader Qaeda organization, American intelligence agencies have concluded. Now, however, the Iraq-based group sustains itself through kidnapping, smuggling and criminal activities and some foreign contributions.

With the Shiite militias having taken a lower profile since the troop increase began, and with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia embarking on its own sort of countersurge, a main focus of the American military operation is to deprive the group of its strongholds in the areas surrounding Baghdad — and thus curtail its ability to carry out spectacular casualty-inducing attacks in the Iraqi capital.

The heated debate over Iraq has spilled over to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as well. Mr. Bush has played up the group, talking about it as if it is on a par with the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. War critics have often played down the significance of the group despite its gruesome record of suicide attacks and its widely suspected role in destroying a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that set Iraq on the road to civil war.

Just last week, Mr. Zawahri called on Muslims to travel to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia to carry out their fight against the Americans and appealed for Muslims to support the Islamic State in Iraq, an umbrella group that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has established to attract broader Sunni support.

The broader issue is whether Iraq is a central front in the war against Al Qaeda, as Mr. Bush maintains, or a distraction that has diverted the United States from focusing on the Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan while providing Qaeda leaders with a cause for rallying support....."

SURE....it's easier to dismiss the MSM as "biased"... Salem Comm's Hewitt, and the CNP, and Brett Bozell III want you to take that as a "given"....but what if it is much more complicated than you've been convinced to make it all out to be.

Are the sources for your news that you allow "in", proving to be correct, in what they report to you? Hewitt backs a president with a sub 30 percent approval rating? Can that approval rating really be blamed on "Liberal Media Bias"? If the media was "liberal", wouldn't you expect to view more reporting about the facts displayed on the Federal Reserve website....about the top one percent in the US owning 33 percent of all assets in the US, the next nine percent owning 37 percent, and the bottom 50 percent, 150 million people, owning just 2-1/2 percent?

You've embraced and are repeating a message that the Salem Media/CNP billionaires, Epperson and Altsinger III are delighted to have Hugh Hewitt, and Medved, Praeger, and Mike Reagan drum into your head.....that the MSM is biased...so, don't listen to "them" listen to our media personalities.. get your "news" from us, from Rush, from Drudge....

You all end up thinking and saying the same things, at the same time. How much time do you spend thinking about why it is that 140 million people in this country possess 2-1/2 percent of the total wealth, while 30 million own 70 percent of all of it....or why your president now admits that the Libby jury came to a verdict, based on the facts, or why he admitted that there were no WMD in Iraq, and denied that he ever linked Saddam, "operationally" to al Qaeda? Hugh Hewitt never wanted to dwell on those things being possible, did he?

K T Cat said...

host,

Thanks for the lengthy comments! I hope it was a cut and paste job. I promise I won't delete it. You certainly have broken the record for the longest comment on this blog.

I'll have to admit I haven't read the whole thing. It was kind of a MEGO post (My Eyes Glazed Over). I might tackle it someday soon. In the meantime, congratulations!

Anonymous said...

I am always amused when our friends on the left attempt to show that the MSM is balanced by holding up some far-left criticisms of NYT, LAT, etc as being biased to the right. While these MSM pubs may not be in the Kos camp, they still are on left side of the political spectrum, period.

As has been stated far more eloquently by others, it isn't the leftism of the MSM that really gets under our skin. It is the fact that they continue to market themselves as "objective". The fact that their sales and advertising numbers are way down shows that they continue to fail in these endeavours.

Anonymous said...

I found this blog entry linked from K T Cat's post, here:

K T Cat | Jul 15, 2007 8:05:38 AM

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2007/07/from-the-right.html#comments

.....In my post at the same link (above):

Posted by: host | Jul 16, 2007 4:00:16 AM

I've posted, with ten links to supporting information, why I'm convinced that your accusation that MSM news is biased and refuses to provide disclosure or even to admit it's bias, is ironic, since it is the same opinion that a group of billionaires who belong to one of the most secretive political organizations in the U.S. have been paying a sizeable amount of money to disseminate since the founding of the group in 1981. In addition, much of the money to get the "MSM is biased but won't tell us", and the money to found the aforementioned, secretive organization, itself, comes from just two sources....foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife and the Coors family. Hugh Hewitt prominently promotes the same message, on radio and web properties owned by a company controlled by two prominent members of....you guessed it....the afore- mentioned, secretive political organization......

K T Cat said...

host,

Thank goodness it was a cut and paste job! My blog is far too silly to be worthy of such analysis. My next post was going to be some photos of wildflowers I had seen. We're not the most consistent of bloggers here at the 'Post.

:-)

And thanks again for visiting. May I suggest you take a look at our true raison d'etre?

AMac said...

Best I can tell, NYT reporter Gordon was being blasted by "host" for claiming that Iran is undertaking military operations in Iraq.

The assessment that Iranian Qods Force agents, Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah, and Iraqi militias on the mullah's payroll are killing American soldiers is correct.

Read Bill Roggio's reports for information on the subject.