By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I hadn’t noticed this Washington Post feature before, but I love the name of it: “Both Sides,” in which Tucker Carlson and Ana Marie Cox “debate the issues and latest developments.”
Why do I love the name? Because Carlson isn’t really a conservative. And Cox isn’t really a liberal. Both sides of what, exactly?
I’m going to break one of my rules for blogging by engaging in a little mind-reading. That’s because it seems fairly obvious that the folks at the Washington Post have decided they don’t want to engage in a battle with the McCain-Palin campaign over Sarah Palin’s crystal-clear, public statement linking the war in Iraq to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
How else can we possibly explain Post ombudsman Deborah Howell’s column accepting the line that Palin was actually referring to a terrorist group known as Al Qaeda in Iraq? How else can we understand reporter Anne Kornblut’s contention that there was more than one interpretation that could be given to Palin’s remarks? Why else would the Post run a “clarification” to Kornblut’s article that might as well have been headed “obfuscation”?
By all means, watch the video above, but here’s the key sentence from Palin’s talk to Iraq-bound Alaskan soldiers, including her son Track: “You’ll be there to defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans. You’ll be there because America can never go back to that false sense of security that came before Sept. 11, 2001.”
Is this difficult? There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq on Sept. 11, 2001. Al Qaeda in Iraq did not plan and carry out the attacks. Every one of the terrorists was either Saudi or Egyptian. I mean, come on. Palin’s words were plainly spoken. There is no alternative interpretation.
The U.S. military, after extensive study, found there were no ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The military also believes that Al Qaeda in Iraq is merely a homegrown, Iraqi insurgent movement.
Why is the Washington Post acting as enablers for the McCain-Palin campaign’s transparent attempt to explain away Palin’s ludicrous statement?
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that Dana Milbank’s smear of Barack Obama in the Washington Post — a self-regarding quote that’s neither verified or presented in context — is just the latest example of how the so-called liberal media establish their bona fides by beating up on liberal politicians.
The John McCain story has led to the media-ethics feeding frenzy of 2008. We’re going to know a lot more in a few days. Right now, we should just hang on. Still, I can’t resist posting a few tidbits.
The New Republic’s backgrounder, by Gabriel Sherman, is a must-read. It seems possible — even probable — that it was Sherman’s nosing-around that finally led the New York Times into running what it had. Bill Keller sounds really steamed. I’d love to hear a recording of him sarcastically spitting out the phrase “special correspondent.” Except that it was in an e-mail.
I and others have already speculated how miffed Mitt Romney must be that the Times waited until after McCain had all but wrapped up the nomination before dropping its bombshell. Well, Charles Kaiser of Radar now says one of the Times’ tipsters was former congressman Vin Weber, who just so happened to have been an official with the Romney campaign. Weber has denied it, but Kaiser’s not taking it back. So who knows?
Adam Reilly points out that the Boston Globe chose to run the Washington Post’s version rather than the Times’ more incendiary (i.e., sex rumors included played up) story, even though the Globe is owned by the New York Times Co. Interesting. But last night, I noticed that there was a link to the Times story featured prominently on the home page of the Globe’s Boston.com site.
Finally, no offense to Ryan Lizza, but I don’t think I’m going to get around to reading his New Yorker article on whether McCain can remake the Republican Party. Talk about bad timing.
File photo of Cindy and John McCain (cc) by Chris Dunn and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Clint Hendler tries to be kind in his assessment of washingtonpost.com’s primary-night video coverage. But in the end, he observes at CJR.org, it was just TV. That the Grahams can now offer a fourth cable news channel via the Web is nice, but it’s not exactly the new-media breakthrough we’ve been waiting for. He writes:
Here’s an organization with an impressive roster of journalism pros, people who cover beats day in and day out. Bring all that to bear on an election night, and you can see how it might be the start of something special. At the same time, I could help thinking that this future looked rather old. I was seeing a newspaper ape a newscast.
I caught a few minutes of it on Tuesday. I logged in for Barack Obama’s speech. It was nothing special, and it was jerkier and less in sync than it would have been if I’d watched CNN. According to Hendler, if I’d stuck around I could have heard Jeff Jarvis say “There is no such thing as print journalism any more” for the nine-millionth time.
It might have been better than the cable nets, but it was too hard to watch. Level the technological playing field and I’ll pick the one I like best.
This map on WashingtonPost.com is a hoot. Click on the candidate, and you get lines showing where he or she has been and a brief explanation of the campaign’s geographic strategy. But why so sparse? I’d have loaded in any previously published stories, photos and videos from those locations in order to turn this into something readers would stay with for a while. Still, it’s a good example of graphical journalism.
WashingtonPost.com is running live video from one of the Iowa caucus sites.
I have been watching with interest as Boston University journalism professor Christopher Daly gets raked over the coals for criticizing a Washington Post reporter who wrote a story about Barack Obama’s ties to Islam without sufficiently observing that those ties are non-existent. So, far, though, I’ve refrained from writing about it.
And I’m going to remain in the shallow end of the pool, at least for now. I’m heading up to New Hampshire to cover a Giuliani event for the Guardian, and I don’t want to make the same mistake that Daly did: committing pixels to screen without giving it quite enough thought.
Still, I am amazed at the amount of vitriol Daly has received, including a scorching note from Post executive editor Leonard Downie taking the legendary Jim Romenesko to task merely for linking to Daly’s missive. Today, the dispute makes the New York Times, which is why I’m taking note of this now.
If you’re interested, here are a few links that the Times doesn’t give you:
My quick take: Bacon’s story was already under heavy attack before Daly weighed in because of the peculiar manner in which it had been constructed. Supposedly the story was about false rumors being perpetrated by fringe elements of the paranoid right that Obama’s Muslim roots are a lot deeper than he’s let on, or even that he’s some sort of secret agent for Islamist extremists.
Even though Bacon describes Obama as a church-going Christian near the top of his story, the rest of the article wallows in rumorville without quite making it clear that those rumors had been thoroughly debunked months earlier. Unfortunately, given the mainstream media’s role in sliming past Democratic presidential candidates, especially Al Gore and John Kerry, liberal bloggers were on full alert and perhaps overreacted to the flaws in Bacon’s piece.
As far as I can tell, Daly’s principal mistake was to whack Bacon for being 27 years old. If an experienced editor had run Bacon’s story through the mill for just another 15 minutes, the result probably would have been a piece that no one could complain about. Reporters deserve no less, regardless of whether they’re 27 or 51, an age I (ahem) do not pull out of a hat.
Postscript: Politicians in general spend more time being seen going to church than ministers, especially just before an election. So why would the Associated Press assert that Obama’s decision to go to church yesterday was “a rejoinder to the e-mailed rumors that he is a Muslim and poses a threat to the security of the United States”? Obama attended a Congregationalist church. He is a Congregationalist. Hello?
I don’t need to say anything about the Washington Post’s shockingly bad story today about persistent but false rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and about how that may affect his presidential candidacy. Paul McLeary has already hit every low point at CJR.org.
But just to pile on a little — the Post fails to point out that one of the purveyors of religious hatred against Obama, the online magazine Insight, is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.
Check out NYTimes.com’s interactive map of yesterday’s congressional vote on the Iraq war. You can do breakouts by urban, suburban and rural districts; affluent and poor districts; mostly white and mostly minority districts; and Kerry and Bush districts. Roll your cursor over a square and you get thumbnail information on each House member and how he or she voted.
Washingtonpost.com does something similar with its Votes Database. It’s not as graphically interesting, but it does let you break out the vote by, among other things, a House member’s astrological sign and by whether or not she or he is a Baby Boomer.