Just Like I Learned in Journalism School: Dog Bites Man Equals No Story BUT When Woman Bites Pit Bull, There's a Story!

And it's here: the story of the little woman who bit a pit bull defending her dog.

They also used to tell us, besides that if it bleeds, it ledes, that we should never estimate the great interest in the people - especially, if always seemed, American people - to like to get themselves on the news. Sometimes, in anyway possible.

Of Disasters And Playing The Fear Card: Did You Notice?

Wednesday night, as the tragedy of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis played out in prime time, gave what (at least for me) seemed a potent example of how badly the media, especially hopelessly partisan and misleading venues such as virtually anything and everything Rupert Murdoch owns like Fox News, the Department of Homeland Security, AND the Bush Administration serve us in times of tragedy.

I've addressed my complete disgust with the Bushies on this subject in earlier posts today, so let me turn to the rest, starting with the Department of Homeland (Incompetence and In)Security, which took rather long Wednesday night to say they doubted terrorism was at fault for the devastation.

From what I could tell, more than 90 minutes elapsed before the DHS managed to say that probably Osama bin Laden - or a liberal blogger, for that matter - was responsible. Now that might not sound too bad, but this message came SIGNIFICANTLY AFTER one cable TV news source, notably Keith Olbermann doing live coverage on MSNBC, bothered to check the Minnesota DOT's Web site and learned important details like the fact significant pile-driving, which can cause fierce vibration and therefore could be a major contributing factor to such a structural failure, was to take place that very night. I flipped between MSNBC, CNN, and Fox for the better part of three hours, and I have to say Olbermann's crew was almost always not just ahead of the game, but putting out important and verifiable details that put the disaster in much better perspective. For example, they seemed the first to report that this bridge had been considered at only 50% of its structural best several years ago and was on a list with tens of thousands of other bridges throughout the country in dire need of repair or replacement. In Bush's America especially, little things like basic safety take a huge backseat to getting Halliburton ever greater unprecedented profits thanks to no bid contracts awarded by the Bushies. Was this information magically available globally to the World Wide Web somehow not available to the idiot DHS director Michael Chertoff and his band of corrupt incompetents calling themselves by a department name they aren't fit to wear? So yes, I wonder if the slowness by them wasn't convenient to the fear campaign.

Fox, on the other hand, at best behaved almost hysterically and at worst... well, I have to say that I seriously wondered whether they were deliberately playing into the fear card as part of the great leadup to the nonstop terror scare fest we must expect as we edge closer to the 2008 presidential election. It seems to be part of the Republican playbook to scare the bejesus out of everyone with the silliest of potential terror events (exploding cheese and grandmas with bombs in their Reeboks, for example) while completely ignoring the gravest of present dangers like the Bushies and Fox News. At one point, Shep Smith filling in for O'Reilly was as breathless as a scared schoolgirl talking about explosions and all but suggesting that Osama bin Laden had decided that the way to hurt America most was to make it tough to get to Minnesota's Mall of America. They had a terror alert banner running that seemed suspiciously like something to be used to scare the not-so-bright into thinking al Qaeda wants to win its war one structurally unsound American bridge at a time.

Folks, we're being played and for far worse than mere fools. Fox plays us, the Bushies play us, and our own desire to not worry about all this "pesky political stuff" also plays us directly into the hands of those who want to peddle fear while reaping huge profits for doing nothing more than none too talented sleight-of-hand, hoping you're too busy watching American Idol or the latest ball game to notice.

Of Hitler, Chamberlain, Iraq War I Revisited

[The reference to the "Neville Chamberlain Moment" was made in Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from Wednesday's Countdown on MSNBC available by transcript and video link here. Also, I strongly recommend - if you have the chance - to catch HBO's reshowing of the entry into the first war a Bush (Dubya's dribbling dad)... it's a POWERFUL retrospective compared against this Bush's war. And if you don't know who Neville Chamberlain is, shame on you and get thee to a Wikipedia immediately!] I happened to catch Keith and then flipped the channel to HBO-West which was just starting to show "Live From Baghdad", an HBO film of high quality that recounts CNN's days in Baghdad and Kuwait just as George Bush (the 41st) declared war with Iraq (from a book by Robert Weiner, part of the CNN production team on the ground and getting bombed in Baghdad). I also wrote about Olbermann's piece here and here.]

The degree of retrospective comparisons between THEN and Bush 43rd horrific NOW is astonishing, including:

• how quickly the American public was sold on lies of "dumped incubators" killing babies in Kuwait (disproven as any substantial event)
• how hard the press was bashed for everything from interviews with Saddam Hussein and high Iraqi officers (and we repeated this in March 2003, Dan Rather was hated for interviewing Saddam again and CNN's main war reporter in the Bush 1 Iraq War was hated then and during Bush 2's great adventure, fired from MSNBC for suggesting there might be two sides to the story)
• Bush 41's comparison of Saddam to "Hitler Revisited" (a powerful comparison, given that Bush 43, 41's son, may now be responsible for more deaths of Iraqi civilians than Saddam ever was) when I think a case can be made for seeing Bush 43 as a perpetrator of racial hatred (substituting Muslims for Jews in the terrible old saying, "When all else fails, gather up the Jews") against what Keith said about the Dems' Neville Chamberlain moment
• Just see the difference in the city then as opposed to now, after all those years of sanctions (estimated to have claimed the lives of UP TO one million Iraq children, primarily through incredible restriction on medical care and food that turned one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East into a shell of its former self)
• As Weiner wrote, "When the talking stops, that's when people die. So let's keep talking until we're old men."

Pentagon Tried to Thwart LA Times' Investigation Into U.S. Soldiers' Alleged Murder & Torture of Afghans

They say that truth is always the first casualty of war, but with the Pentagon - and the Bush Administration in general - truth is regarded as a MUCH larger enemy than al Qaeda OR Cindy Sheehan. ::smirk::

From Editor & Publisher:

The military, including Pentagon officials, sought to thwart a Los Angeles Times investigation into deaths and possible torture by soldiers in Afghanistan last year, according to a report by Craig Pyes on Harvard University's Nieman Watchdog Web site.

The article details how officials sent hundreds of emails to try to control information about Special Forces activities, and offered "media engagement training" and "family readiness groups" to soldiers and their families in case Times reporters called about the issue.

To read the full article, click here.

Bob Herbert: "From Anna to Britney to Zawahri"

Bob Herbert certainly gets today's media - and those willing to buy into their brain drain - correct with this piece you can read in full here:

Have they buried Anna Nicole Smith yet?

Are you kidding? Ms. Smith may be dead and rapidly decomposing, but there’s too much fun still to be reaped from her story to let it die just yet. This is world-class entertainment: Larry King, “Today,” CNN, The New York Times.

Even the judge in the televised hearing over what to do with Ms. Smith’s remains is milking his 15 minutes, like Judge Ito of O. J. Simpson fame. In a burst of wisdom from the bench, the judge, Larry Seidlin, said, “Like a Muhammad Ali fight, sometimes you have to wait the whole 10 rounds.”

When we were kids we were taught not to laugh at people who were obviously mentally or emotionally disturbed. With Ms. Smith, who was deeply and unmistakably disturbed, we put her on television and laughed and laughed. Would she say something stupid, or spill out of her dress, or pass out in public from booze or drugs? How hysterically funny!

Then her son died. Then she died, leaving an orphaned infant daughter. Instead of turning away chastened, shamed, we homed in like happy vultures. Whatever entertainment value Ms. Smith had when she was alive increased exponentially when she was kind enough to die for us. Now she’s on the tube around the clock.

The story, as they say, has legs.

There are other stories out there, but they aren’t nearly as much fun. The Times reported on Monday, for example, that Al Qaeda is getting its act together in Pakistan and is setting up training camps in an area that, apparently, we don’t dare trespass in.

According to the article, “American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.”

The article went on to say, ominously, “The United States has also identified several new Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan.”

I imagine that there are a fair number of television viewers and newspaper readers who have trouble distinguishing the relative importance of celebrity stories, like the death of Anna Nicole Smith, from other matters in the news, like the reconstitution of forces responsible for the devastating Sept. 11 attacks.

Read it all here.

But Dana Milbank, We're Frigging Tired of The Washington Press Corps Making Nice With the Bushies

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post tells us all about a mock press gaggle at the White House where Tony Snow gets to question reporters. It all went so nicely.

Dana? We are soooooooo unbelievably tired of the Washington press corps - with the noble exception of the tenacious little nicely-attired pitbull named Helen Thomas, God love her! - making nice with the White House.

Do you really think there would be so many blogs being written if we thought the Washington press corps was up to their jobs? But they aren't.

Speaking of Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell

Greg's latest Pressing Issues column brings us a hell of a story from a former U.S. interrogator in Iraq, one you really must read:

A former U.S. interrogator in Iraq confesses his sins in a dramatic Washington Post opinion column. Just three months ago, he wasn't quite willing to take that step. Who will now join him?

We need to know this stuff. We just do. What is done in our name makes us all culpable and when it's this egregious, we must take steps to make it s-t-o-p.

Thanks, Greg, for bringing it to us.

Carl Bernstein on Nixon Vs. Bush (Nixon Was Bad, Bush Is Orders of Magnitude Worse)

The excellent Editor & Publisher magazine (with a wave to the every-bit-as-excellent E&P editor, Greg Mitchell) brings us nuggets of gold from the PBS Frontline program's series of interviews with Watergate-era journalist Carl Bernstein (infinitely more a journalist than his corporate-polished former cohort, Bob Woodward) on the differences/similarities between Richard M. Nixon and George W. Bush:

Q. Finally, I just want to get your reflections on the [famously contentious] relationship of Richard Nixon and the press. ... How does that compare to George W. Bush and the press?

BERNSTEIN: First, Nixon's relationship to the press was consistent with his relationship to many institutions and people. He saw himself as a victim. We now understand the psyche of Richard Nixon, that his was a self-destructive act and presidency.

I think what we're talking about with the Bush administration is a far different matter in which disinformation, misinformation and unwillingness to tell the truth -- a willingness to lie both in the Oval Office, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in the office of the vice president, the vice president himself -- is something that I have never witnessed before on this scale.

The lying in the Nixon White House had most often to do with covering up Watergate, with the Nixon administration's illegal activities. Here, in this presidency, there is an unwillingness to be truthful, both contextually and in terms of basic facts that ought to be of great concern to people of all ideologies. ...

This president has a record of dishonesty and obfuscation that is Nixonian in character in its willingness to manipulate the press, to manipulate the truth. We have gone to war on the basis of misinformation, disinformation and knowing lies from top to bottom.

That is an astonishing fact. That's what this story is about: the willingness of the president and the vice president and the people around them to try to undermine people who have effectively opposed them by telling the truth. It happened with [Sen.] John McCain in South Carolina. It happened with [Sen.] John Kerry. It's happened with [Sen.] Max Cleland in Georgia. It's happened with many other people. That's the real story, and that's the story that [the press] should have been writing. ...

It's very difficult, as a reporter, to get across that when you say, "This is a presidency of great dishonesty," that this is not a matter of opinion. This is demonstrable fact. If you go back and look at the president's statements, you look at the statements of the vice president, you look at the statements of Condoleezza Rice, you go through the record, you look at what [counterterrorism expert] Richard Clarke has written, you look at what we know -- it's demonstrable.

It's fact. Now, how do you quantify it? That's a different question.

But to me, if there is a great failure by the so-called mainstream press in this presidency, it's the unwillingness to look at the lies and disinformation and misinformation and add them up and say clearly, "Here's what they said; here's what the known facts were," because when that is done, you then see this isn't a partisan matter. This is a matter of the truth, particularly about this war. This is a presidency that is not willing to tell the truth very often if it is contrary to its interests. It's not about ideology from whence I say this.

It's about being a reporter and saying: "That's what the story is. Let's see what they said; let's see what the facts are." ...

Emphasis mine. Read it all here.

Most Apt Headline: Bush's War Is With Reality"

This headline at Buzzflash, promoting this article in the Times Union, is the best, most honest goddamned headline I've seen in a very, very (pathetically, even) long time.

Bush's most pressing war IS with reality. And it's one he clearly is unprepared ever to win.