CBS. Reuters. AP. And now The New York Times.

Which MSM outlets do we trust to make an honest effort to get facts straight, and own up to it when they don't? The only people I still sort-of-trust are those at WaPo. And even NPR, because their biases are on the table and they don't make up their own facts.

It seems that at least once a year one of the most venerable newsgathering institutions sticks a knife in the public's back. Staff up, Pajamaz people: we may need you more than ever in the years to come.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:53 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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It's the Pocket Iraq War Casualty Counter, from the Associated Press!

H/t: Ace.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:48 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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. . . and its apparent death wish?

The Anchoress just made Eric Boehlert her bitch.

Not that she needs a bitch, but now she's got one for emergencies.

Via Insty.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:37 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 Your blog sucks.

Posted by: Many Fellows at December 21, 2006 04:34 PM (fKgEC)

2 Okey-doke. See that little backward arrow at the top of your browser window? Hit that, and it will solve your problem.

Posted by: Attila Girl at December 21, 2006 04:39 PM (zxOEV)

3 Doesn't work. I hit the arrow but many fellows are still twits.

Posted by: Colin MacDougall at December 21, 2006 05:18 PM (2rGLQ)

4

Posted by: Attila Girl at December 21, 2006 06:04 PM (zxOEV)

5 Many Fellows is an award-winning jounalist, currently on leave battling Tourette Syndrome(Tourette's Disorder). Our thoughts go out to him. Read his last piece at the NYT, "This paper SUCKS!" Subscription required.

Posted by: Darrell at December 21, 2006 06:35 PM (CQG5A)

6 Many Fellows is an award-winning journalist, currently on leave battling Tourette Syndrome(Tourette's Disorder). Our thoughts go out to him. Read his last piece at the NYT, "This paper SUCKS!" Subscription required.

Posted by: Darrell at December 21, 2006 06:35 PM (CQG5A)

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Wired,or Popular Mechanics?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:01 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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. . . at Classical Values discusses the scarlet "R," and what it means today.

I believe that if you're in media, entertainment, or academia it means a hell of a lot.

There are people I'm still not "out" to, after knowing them for years. As a bisexual, yes. As a right-of-center libertarian, no.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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. . . praises the upturn in the economy in the few weeks since the Democrats won back the house. It's a Christmas miracle!

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. . . from reporting on bias in the Los Angeles Times to point out an outright falsehood in The New York Times.

Why do people trust these newspapers at all any more?

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She's produced a pretty comprehensive analysis of the flap over ABC's The Road to 9/11, and points out that the 9/11 Commission Report is a public document. Anyone can read about the Clinton Administration's difficulty in dealing with the CIA.

Censorship. Creepy.

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I may be falling in love with Christopher Hitchens.

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The blogosphere's most charming man-about-town was on Fox News this morning.

The Cotillion girls (except those of us who sleep late), waited breathlessly, aggrieved that the people at Faux spent so much time on an immobilized tank, and so little time with Ace.

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Rusty has the bandwidth.

Submit your best Reuters-worthy P-shop.

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Even Coyne Maloney takes Bill Keller behind the woodshed for hiding behind the skirts of the Founding Fathers.

(Yeah. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin wore skirts sometimes; a lot of people don't know about that, but they had to let their hair down somehow: they lived in stressful times. Who are you to judge?)

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It's happening at Krempasky's blog, and (primarily) at On Tap. Krempasky postulates:

Traditional (read: career) reporters who have never had a “run-in” with bloggers are a lot like the wide-eyed college kid who still drinks tequila.

Traditional reporters who have had that “run in” tend to become one of two people:

1. The cautious but respectful one that realizes that thereÂ’s fire in that there bottle. One? Two? No problem. Life of the party and all that. Five? Call your office, you wonÂ’t be in today.

2. The villain at the end of every Scooby Doo episode shaking his fist at the sky (or in handcuffs) saying, “if it wasn’t for those damn kids . . . ”

[Yes, everyone. I fixed a typo in the quote. I really can't help myself, okay? Get off my back. I didn't change "damn" to "stupid," so I'm not wearing my fact-checking hat. But the proofreading one is permanently attached to my head.]

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One of these stories is clearly important. The other one involves the public's right to know. Once again, I feel like I've stepped through the looking glass.

Captain Ed:

David Gregory, whose network has not even allowed a pixilated version of the Prophet cartoons to appear lest they incur the wrath of Muslim terrorists, accused the White House of censorship and coverups in supposedly hiding the shooting from the nation.

Jacoby has this correct. The media attacks those who they know will not spend much energy fighting back. Gregory could act like a rude, spoiled child denied his choice of birthday gift because he knew the White House would not dare to even expel him from the room. However, their supposed calling to keep the people informed suddenly takes a powder when the remote threat of violence appears. This only acts to encourage such threats in the future, as the nutcases take a lesson from the pusillanimity of the mainstream American media, especially in contrast with their European counterparts that have taken a stand against extortion and published the cartoons in defense of the Danish press.

When our media has the testicular fortitude to report on terrorists honestly, then they will have gained the moral authority to lecture any White House on censorship and the responsibility of fully informing the public. Until then, such demonstrations as we saw this week by the White House press corps only stands as a perverse monument to the media's hypocrisy and venality.

Via Glenn.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:48 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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. . . when the media is controlled by large corporations, beholden to the military, and in bed with a Republican Administration. From a David Boaz article posted to Reason Online:

Remember all those news stories in 1993 about how the nomination of former ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to replace conservative Justice Byron White on the United States Supreme Court would "tilt the balance of the court to the left?"

Of course you don't. Because there weren't any.

In the past three months, the major media have repeatedly hammered away at the theme that Judge Samuel Alito Jr. would "shift the Supreme Court to the right" if he replaced retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

According to Lexis/Nexis, major newspapers have used the phrase "shift the court" 36 times in their Alito coverage. They have referred to the "balance of the court" 32 times and "the court's balance" another 15. "Shift to the right" accounted for another 18 mentions.

Major radio and television programs indexed by Lexis/Nexis have used those phrases 63 times. CNN told viewers that Alito would "tilt the balance of the court" twice on the day President Bush nominated him. NPR's first-day story on "Morning Edition" was headlined "Alito could move court dramatically to the right."

Now maybe all this is to be expected. Alito is a conservative, he's been nominated to replace a centrist justice, and he probably will move the Supreme Court somewhat to the right—which is probably what at least some voters had in mind when they elected a Republican president and 55 Republican senators.

But note the contrast to 1993, when President Bill Clinton nominated the liberal Ginsburg to replace conservative White. White had dissented from the landmark decisions on abortion rights in Roe v. Wade and on criminal procedure in the Miranda case, and he had written the majority opinion upholding sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick. Obviously his replacement by the former general counsel of the ACLU was going to "move the court dramatically to the left."

So did the media report Ginsburg's nomination that way? Not on your life.

Not a single major newspaper used the phrases "shift the court," "shift to the left," or "balance of the court" in the six weeks between Clinton's nomination and the Senate's ratification of Ginsburg. Only one story in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer mentioned the "court's balance," and that writer thought that Ginsburg would move a "far right" court "toward the center."

The only network broadcast to use any of those phrases was an NPR interview in which liberal law professor Paul Rothstein of Georgetown University said that Ginsburg might offer a "subtle change...a nuance" in "the balance of the court" because she would line up with Justice O'Connor in the center.

No one thought that some momentary balance on the Court had to be preserved when a justice retired or that it was inappropriate to shift the ideological makeup of the Court. And certainly no one had made that point during 60 years of mostly liberal appointees from Democratic presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson—even as they replaced more conservative justices who had died or retired. ut suddenly, we are told by senators, activists, and pundits that a nominee should not change the makeup of the Court.

h/t: Eugene Volokh

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An editorial by a friend of mine who leans leftward and might be regarded as a present-day conventional liberal (as opposed to those like Dean Esmay, Jeff Goldstein, and this author, who call themselves classical liberals).

Terrible news about the miners in West Virginia. I was awake, of course, and watching when CNN broke the news that initial stories of twelve survivors were wrong and, in fact, there was only one survivor. Over on MSNBC, they were running tape of an eariler press conference on the subject, and on FOX a panel of conservatives were assuring each other that the scandals surrounding the White House and Republican congressmen weren't really scandals and wouldn't affect the Administration or the Republican grip on Congress.



Only CNN was live. Only CNN had the story. An astonished Anderson Cooper broke the news of a single survivor after a women ran down from the Baptist Church where miner's families were gathered and blurted the distressing news to him.



The New York newspapers, which are put to bed before 3 a.m., when the news of the "miscommunication" broke, all ran headlines like "ALIVE" (the New York Daily News).



But again, experience and class tells. The New York Times ran the story saying that families had told them twelve miners were alive, but they (the Times) were unable to confirm it. It seems the other papers published the news as fact, whereas the Times did not.



CNN and The New York Times take it in the balls about every fifteen minutes on FOX and conservative talk radio, where they are called un-American, pro-terrorist and things even more vile. They are favorite targets of the Right wingnuts. It's all bullshit, of course.



Last night, CNN and the New York Times showed why they are the preeminent news sources, world-wide. They are the best at what they do, and the fact that they're not perfect detracts not one whit from that.

I'll remind everyone here that this friend of mine has been very kind to me in a lot of ways. So, sticking to the facts, how would you begin to quantify the degree of error in various news sources? If you accept the premise that we all want to believe what we want to believe—and would prefer to get our information from organs that share our respective slants—how would you cast doubt on either my friend's conviction about the New York Times, or my own?

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. . . that the claims of left-wing bias in academia are just as overwrought as those hackneyed claims of liberal bias among mainstream news outlets.

Whew.

(Via Insty.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:38 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Vanderleun writes a nice meditation on Pajamas Media/OSM and its launch party. Trust him to refrain from casting the first, second, 30th, or 80th stone when everyone else is having a merry time throwing.

I realize I haven't shared my perspective on PJM. I came very close to joining. Twice. But the type of commitment required to participate seemed very large to me, and I was at the break-even point going the BlogAds route. So I decided to trust my inner rebel and stay independent for the time being, realizing the risk: I'm not a big name, and if I didn't get my foot in the door then, there was every chance PJM would grow too big and important for the likes of me. Which is fine.

So I'm sticking with Blogads for now. (By the way? Buy one. Thanks. If not, buy two.)

But I think it's a brilliant idea: we who swim in the bloggy waters may not realize how overwhelming it is for those who are just starting out to find the quality material that will keep them coming back. Hence the need for a reliable portal to get them started. Without mechanisms like PJM (and, perhaps, another left-tilting one to play CNN to PJM's Fox News), it's going to be a lot harder for the average person to find information he/she feels is trustworthy.

Of course, as Gerard points out—and Dean echoes—everyone wants to take a shot at the new kid. But PJM represents a hell of an online brain trust, and even if it pays the price for being the pioneer (sometimes, you pave the way, and the next enterprise steals the glory), it's a more-than-worthy endeavor, and a swashbuckling achievement for Roger, Charles, et al.

I reserve the right to shoot holes in it: I'm a blogger. That's what I do. But win, lose, or draw, the Pajamas People have brought an aura of something like respectability to what we do—without taking away our outlaw charm—and I'm grateful for it.

And by the way? I live in Los Angeles. Roger L. Simon only wears the fedora on special occasions. At ordinary events, he's always in a baseball cap. Trust me on this. After all, I'm your local-girl-on-the-scene.

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In celebration of the StyenOnline's Third Anniversary, the site is highlighting classic Steyn articles from three years ago. This one discusses the damage the media's leftward tilt does to the Democratic Party, via the occasional obsession with dividing politics into "women's issues" and (presumably) "real people's issues."

Enjoy.

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Iowahawk clarifies what this new venture will mean—both to the readers he seems to regard as a necessary evil, and to the OSM bloggers who appear to be rolling [or hoping to roll] in the long green.

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