Media Nation

Crucial to the Bush administration’s defense of the NSA wiretapping program has been to paint opponents as partisan Democrats who are weak on terrorism — and to pretend that Republican opponents such as Sen. Arlen Specter, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, don’t really exist.

So for Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, to switch sides is nothing short of a bombshell. Roberts has been among the most vociferous defenders of the White House. Just yesterday, the New York Times ran a tough editorial about Roberts headlined “Doing the President’s Dirty Work.”

Today, the Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports that Roberts now wants the spying program brought under the purview of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Essentially, Roberts is acknowledging that President Bush violated the 1978 FISA law by spying on people in the United States without obtaining warrants from the FISA court.

In discussing how the law ought to be changed, Roberts is quoted as saying, “I think it should come before the FISA court, but I don’t know how it works. You don’t want to have a situation where you have capability that doesn’t work well with the FISA court, in terms of speed and agility and hot pursuit. So we have to solve that problem.” What Roberts now seeks, Stolberg writes, is “a move President Bush has argued is not necessary.”

Given Roberts’ turnaround, I thought it would be interesting to roll the clock back to those golden days of — oh, last Sunday, when he got quite testy on NBC’s “Meet the Press” upon being challenged by host Tim Russert on the legality of the no-warrant wiretaps. The transcript is here. A few highlights from Chairman Roberts follow.

If you wanted, you could simply introduce an amendment during whatever we’re considering and saying, “Let’s de-authorize the program.” Or you can say, “I oppose the program and I want another briefing” and make those points in those sessions. That was not done. As a matter of fact, just to be very frank, my recollection is that virtually everybody that received those briefings was comfortable with it, I’m going to say thought it was legal, and that actually knew that this was a very crucial, crucial tool of intelligence that we have to have. It is a military capability to stop an attack on the country, I can’t think of anything more important.
…
The president has the constitutional authority. It rises above any law passed by the Congress. President Roosevelt did that during World War II. Every president has done that under the Constitution, saying that the president has the primary duty to protect our national security.
…
We’re to the point now where we’re about to lose the capability. That’s the big issue here in terms of going deaf. You’re right back where you started from with a president’s authority that he has under the Constitution, and you have that — the very same thing that you have now.

No doubt Roberts could torture his words and argue that his new stance is perfectly consistent with what he said on “Meet the Press.” But he’s now made it that much harder for the White House to try to cast this as a partisan issue.

None of the Internet companies called before Congress this week to defend their business practices in China deserves a good-conduct medal. But distinctions are important. Which leads Media Nation to ask: Isn’t Yahoo’s behavior quite a bit more troublesome than that of Google, Microsoft or Cisco?

The latter three companies stand accused — all right, are guilty — of enabling the Chinese government’s censorship laws by blocking terms such as “democracy” and “human rights.” But only Yahoo, as far as we know, turned over information that enabled the Chinese authorities to arrest a dissident. According to Reporters Without Borders, Yahoo’s actions led to the 2003 arrest of Li Zhi, an anti-corruption crusader who was handed an eight-year prison sentence. The Paris-based organization adds that Li Zhi is not alone in being victimized by Yahoo’s rapaciousness.

What’s more, according to this article in USA Today, Yahoo, by turning over a majority share of its Chinese operation to a Chinese company, may have insulated itself in a way that is truly sleazy. (Disclosure: I own a few shares of Microsoft.)

Yahoo’s actions strike me as magnitudes worse than those of the other companies. By lumping them all together, I fear we may lose sight of exactly how awful Yahoo’s behavior has been.

If Peter Blute really does run against Ted Kennedy for the U.S. Senate, he could have a bit of trouble on the Internet front.

The domain name peterblute.com was registered in July 2004 by someone who appears to be a prankster. According this “whois” search, the domain is owned by a W. Bates of Boylston, who uses the e-mail address NotRobi (at) roncrews.com. Ron Crews is a notorious anti-gay activist. Robi happens to be the name of Blute’s wife.

The mysterious Mr. (or Ms.) Bates owns roncrews.com as well. No surprise there.

As you will see by clicking here, the parody Ron Crews Web site is up and running. But there’s nothing when you try to go to peterblute.com. Not yet, anyway.

Here is how the Daily Collegian of UMass Amherst covered yesterday’s rally in support of kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll, a UMass alumnus. The rally, which drew more than 100 people, was sponsored by the Collegian, where Carroll was a reporter during her student days.

On the Christian Science Monitor’s Carroll weblog, you can watch the one of the public-service announcements being shown on Iraqi television that urges Carroll’s release.

Finally, while searching for something else, I came across a tribute that Carroll wrote in 2004 about a classmate named Casey Kane, who had died. Here is part of what Carroll wrote:

I spent the “greatest day ever” with her playing softball and eating hotdogs in my backyard at the one-time-only Collegian picnic. Years later she sent me a picture of all of us from that day, festooned in the rhinestones and glitter she knows I love. She came in the beautiful green dress she wore in Holyoke’s Irish festival pagent in (whose name escapes me) to the Collegian formal at my house—an event she conceived. We danced so hard the floorboards flexed and pictures were knocked off my neighbors’ walls.

In honoring her classmate, Carroll showed herself to be a compassionate and devoted friend, full of life, a keen observer of the world around her. With luck, Carroll will be coming home soon.

And no, I’m not referring to the polar ice caps.

Jay Fitzgerald reports in today’s Boston Herald that CNHI — the Alabama-based newspaper chain that scooped up the Eagle-Tribune papers last year — is suspected of retaliating against employees who were involved in a failed union organizing campaign by sticking them in far-flung bureaus or saddling them with night shifts. A company official denies all.

The papers involved are the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence (well, North Andover), the Salem News, the Gloucester Daily Times and the Daily News of Newburyport.

Regardless of what happened — and I hope someone gets to the bottom of this — it’s sad to ponder the decline of the newspaper scene north of Boston over the past decade.

A dozen or so years ago, the region was dominated by three independently owned papers: the Eagle-Tribune, the Salem News (then the Salem Evening News) and the Sun of Lowell. Ottaway, a division of Dow Jones, owned three smaller dailies: the Beverly-Peabody Times and the Gloucester and Newburyport papers.

Today, those six papers have become five (the Beverly-Peabody Times was merged into the Salem News), and the three local owners have all given way to out-of-state corporations.

And it could get worse. Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell has his flagship tabloid and Community Newspaper Co. subsidiary on the block, which could result in out-of-town ownership for another 100 or so papers. Among those rumored to be interested: CNHI.

Is the Entwistle murder saga the biggest story of this or any other time? That was the rather overheated question tonight on “My TV Prime,” a New Hampshire talk show hosted by Democratic politico Deborah “Arnie” Arnesen. I was a guest along with Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan (sub. req.) and defense attorney John Swomley. Just as Eagan and I were wrapping up, we disagreed. “Take it outside,” Arnesen instructed us. So here I go.

I expressed the opinion that stories such as Entwistle are obsessively followed by just a small subset of viewers who gorge on cable news programs — and that, therefore, the end of civilization is not at hand. No, I heard Eagan say as we were fading out; the ratings for those shows are “huge.”

Well, then. Here are the audiences for such shows on Wednesday night (a big Entwistle night), as reported by the redoubtable TVNewser:

• Nancy Grace, CNN Headline News, 8 p.m., 545,000
• Rita Cosby, MSNBC, 9 p.m., 346,000
• Greta Van Susteren, Fox News, 10 p.m., 1.26 million

Not chickenfeed. But the combined audience for the three network nightly newscasts is more than 20 million, and it can approach 30 million when there’s major news breaking. The Tyndall Report right now is a bit behind, but Entwistle was pretty big news at the beginning of February, which is when it gathered its most recent numbers. Yet it didn’t even move the needle on the nets.

Similarly, NPR claims that its drive-time newscasts, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” are the second- and third-most-listened-to radio programs in the United States. And NPR has not exactly been a bastion of Entwistle excess.

So I’ll stick with what I said: Though there’s undoubtedly more Entwistle coverage out there than is absolutely necessary, it is primarily a phenomenon of low-rated cable news shows that get far more attention from media-watchers than they deserve given their small audiences.

Anyone who’s watching Entwistle coverage rather than presumably more nutritious fare is doing so by choice.

Assuming that Harry Whittington makes a rapid recovery, Dick Cheney today — finally — did what he had to do to put the hunting accident behind him. FoxNews.com just quit on me, so I’ll link to the Washington Post account of Cheney’s interview with Brit Hume:

“You can’t blame anybody else,” Cheney said in an interview with Fox News Channel. “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. It’s a moment I’ll never forget.”

Cheney said that after he shot Harry Whittington on Saturday afternoon at a Texas ranch, he ran over to him and said, “I had no idea that you were there. He didn’t respond.”

Cheney said that Whittington was laying on his back, bleeding on the ground. “You could see where the shot had struck him,” Cheney said. “It was one of the worst days of my life.”

What else could Cheney say? Nevertheless, these are the right words, and he should have spoken them three days ago.

This just in from the Associated Press:

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had a “minor heart attack,” a hospital official said Tuesday.

Peter Banko, the hospital administrator at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial, said Harry Whittington had the heart attack early Tuesday while being evaluated.

He said there was an irregularity in the heartbeat caused by a birdshot pellet, and doctors performed a cardiac catheterization. Whittington expressed a desire to leave the hospital, but Banko said he would probably stay for another week.

Ol’ Harry got peppered pretty good, didn’t he?

Your move, Rush.

Pending any further developments, the Washington Post today may have the last word on the Dick Cheney affair.

It turns out that a Post staff member, the aptly named Stephen Hunter, is himself an experienced bird hunter. He’s not entirely unsympathetic to Cheney, as he acknowledges how easy it is to be so focused on your prey that you lose sight of your surroundings. But Hunter makes two important points about Cheney:

1. Yes, folks, the accident was Cheney’s fault. Incredibly, the White House spinners are still trying to blame this on the victim, Harry Whittington. But Hunter writes:

The fundamental etiquette and safety device of bird hunting is: Obey the line.

The line is between you and the game ahead of you, and by you I mean everybody in your party. The line is invisible but should exist in the imagination as powerfully as the Great Wall of China. It is the simple geography of safety that determines that we are here and we only shoot there — that is, ahead of us. It has certain mandates. One is that at any given moment, one should know where everybody in the hunting party is. You have to keep those images in mind as you move over the ground. It has to be second nature….

It appears the vice president lost contact with the line.

2. Whittington is very fortunate to be alive. According to Hunter, if Cheney were not such an expert shot, he would likely have been firing heavier, cruder ammunition. Hunter explains:

He [Cheney] was lucky to be so superb a wing shot that he carried a shotgun in 28-gauge rather than 12-gauge. That probably saved Harry Whittington’s life. The 28 is for advanced bird hunters who’ve killed their thousands with a 12 — the common hunting shell of America’s shotgunners — and want something more refined, lighter, more beautiful. With the 28 you have to get closer, shoot faster and more accurately. The little pieces of shot break their cluster sooner, spray more widely, lose velocity faster.

Incredibly, the White House and its partisan allies continue to attempt to minimize this and to shift the blame to the victim. Here is how Anne Kornblut ends her New York Times account today:

Ms. Armstrong and Ms. Willeford said the accident was largely the fault of Mr. Whittington, who had reappeared alongside two of his hunting companions without giving proper warning. Mr. Cheney, who was carrying a 28-gauge shotgun, had already begun to fire and sprayed Mr. Whittington.

“He got peppered pretty good,” Ms. Armstrong said. “He fell with his head toward me.” She said she ran over to Mr. Whittington, who had fallen, but stayed out of the way while Secret Service agents tended to him.

“There was some bleeding, but it wasn’t horrible,” she said. “He was more bruised.”

Ms. Willeford, whose husband was also at the ranch, said in an interview after visiting the victim at the hospital that Mr. Whittington accepted responsibility for the accident. “He understands that he could have handled it better,” Ms. Willeford said. “Harry should have let us know he was back there.”

This is bogus, and Stephen Hunter has exposed it as such. “He got peppered pretty good.” Please. The bottom line remains the same: The vice president shot a 78-year-old man in the face, putting him in intensive care for several days, and let nearly a day to pass before allowing the news to become public. That’s kind of important, isn’t it?

Katharine Armstrong’s spin has given way to reality. The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reports:

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s incident report on Vice President Dick Cheney’s accidental shooting of a hunting partner Saturday pins the blame largely on Cheney….

In evaluating “contributing factors,” the game warden checked off the box: “Victim covered by shooter who was swinging on game.”

The game warden’s report contradicts earlier claims from the White House and Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the Texas ranch where the shooting occurred. Earlier Monday, the White House cited Armstrong’s view that Whittington was at fault.

Here are the documents, from (of course) The Smoking Gun.

On the plus side for Cheney, it does appear that he stuck around until the local authorities had completed their investigation.

Not to mention the fact that his reputation as the baddest veep ever has been enhanced considerably. (Via Wonkette.)