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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (23648)	7/28/2003 1:15:40 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

Only if you buy into democratic spin & propaganda.

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (23648)	7/28/2003 1:18:10 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

LOL!! Say hi to chicken little for me.....

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (23648)	7/28/2003 5:43:46 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

THINKING THINGS OVER The Press: Time for a New Era? <font size=4> The BBC and New York Times scandals show that "objectivity" is dead. <font size=3> BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY - WSJ.com Monday, July 28, 2003 12:01 a.m. With the New York Times and the British Broadcasting Corp. both in the soup, something big must be going on in journalism. Let me give you one view of what that is, based on watching my craft evolve over 30 years as a senior editor. I think we're coming to the end of the era of "objectivity" that has dominated journalism over this time. We need to define a new ethic that lends legitimacy to opinion, honestly disclosed and disciplined by some sense of propriety. Though an opinion journalist myself, I'm certainly not against attempts at objectivity. Indeed I believe the ethic is a more powerful influence than disgruntled readers and viewers often seem to believe; it's simply not true that journalists conspire to slant the news in favor of their friends and causes. Yet it's also true that in claiming "objectivity" the press often sees itself as a perfect arbiter of ultimate truth. This is a pretension beyond human capacity. Especially so given the demands of modern technology. With instant radio, television and now the Internet taking over bulletin-board news, newspapers have to make their mark explaining not just events but their meaning. This is manifestly a matter of opinion. <font size=4> The opinion of the press corps tends toward consensus because of an astonishing uniformity of viewpoint. Certain types of people want to become journalists, and they carry certain political and cultural opinions. This self-selection is hardened by peer group pressure. No conspiracy is necessary; journalists quite spontaneously think alike. The problem comes because this group-think is by now divorced from the thoughts and attitudes of readers. <font size=5>To take politics as a test, in 1992, a sample of top Washington reporters and editors voted 89% to 7% for Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush. <font size=4> So an editor trying to put out objective reports has to contend with a newsroom dominated by a single viewpoint. Bringing some discipline to this process is no easy task, especially since the editor probably also subscribes to the dominant view.<font size=3> Some editors are better than others in instilling discipline, and some news organizations are better than others in building and sustaining a culture that supports their efforts at objectivity. The problem at the BBC looks classic. It admits that David Kelly, the scientist who took his own life, was indeed the principal source for the radio report by correspondent Andrew Gilligan. It alleged that the government "sexed up" its dossier, particularly by inserting a single-source report that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes. Later Mr. Gilligan amplified this in print, writing in The Mail on Sunday that his source blamed the prime minister's press spokesman Alastair Campbell. Mr. Kelly was not, as many had assumed, a senior official privy to negotiations with political leadership. And in testimony to a parliamentary committee, he said of Mr. Gilligan's report, "I don't see how he could make the authoritative statements he was making from the comments that I made." Mr. Gilligan stands by his original report, so either the BBC or the dead man is lying. Also, the committee cleared Mr. Campbell. <font size=4> The BBC is still defending its report with an implicit suggestion that it was not responsible for what its reporter wrote in The Mail on Sunday. But it develops that an earlier Gilligan report from Baghdad suggested that U.S. troops had not taken the airport when in fact they had. Clearly the fellow needed careful watching, and the BBC culture, anti-war and anti-Blair, was not up to the task. The New York Times case is complicated by the affirmative-action issue; as executive editor Howell Raines admitted before his resignation, their Jayson Blair was not watched closely enough in part because he was black. But Mr. Raines's tenure was also marked by a melding of news coverage and editorial commentary, most spectacularly in the crusade against the Augusta National Golf Club for its male-only membership policy--a crusade on behalf of a few millionairesses. <font size=3> The telling question is whether such things will continue under Bill Keller, the new executive editor. Mr. Keller has recently been a commentator, and his views have often been intelligent and nuanced, particularly as shown in a Times magazine profile of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. <font size=4>Even so, the Media Research Center was able to trot out an arresting set of screeching-liberal quotations. Times commentary has recently been lurching to the left, but it has just announced a new columnist, David Brooks, who started his career on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. I frankly doubt that Mr. Keller will succeed in restoring objectivity or balance to the Times newsroom.<font size=3> Former executive editor A.M. Rosenthal, actually a conservative, had a hard enough time. Then too, the current tone and culture are the work of publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., who remains in charge at the sufferance of his family. Indeed, as the Times leaves New York and becomes a national newspaper a liberal reputation might serve its business interests, as Fox News has prevailed over cable television rivals by offering a conservative flavor. As I suggested at the outset, I'm not disturbed by such prospects. I think these pages have established that opinion journalism, not following consensus group-think, can find a lot of news. <font size=4>But journalists can't have it both ways. Since they're increasingly dealing with subjective opinion, they should stop wearing "objectivity" on their sleeves.<font size=3> Mr. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (23648)	7/28/2003 5:52:03 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

You know things are bad when even liberal media outlets see the problem....... In the Political Arena, the Gladiators Are Now Engaged in Total War Ronald Brownstein: Washington Outlook Karl von Clausewitz, a 19th century German military theorist, famously said that war is the continuation of politics by other means. But in the last few years, it's become increasingly difficult to draw any meaningful line between the two. From the House impeachment of Bill Clinton on a virtual party-line vote, to the routine use of the filibuster by both parties to block nominations in the Senate, to the recall election now confronting California Gov. Gray Davis, the boundaries of civilized behavior in the political world are crumbling. If there was ever a Geneva Convention in politics — a set of rules that governed even the fiercest combat — it has lapsed. The only rule is that there are no longer any rules. In American politics, we now live in an age of total war. Politics in America was born a bare-knuckled sport. Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel because of the nasty things Hamilton said about Burr in a gubernatorial campaign. When Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, congressional Republicans who believed the former Democrat was betraying Lincoln's legacy tried to stop him with trumped-up impeachment charges. Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court when it overturned too much of his New Deal legislation. Lyndon B. Johnson initially rode to the U.S. Senate on stolen votes from South Texas. So, American political life has always required a tolerance for mud and expediency. John J. Ingalls, a Republican senator scornful of Progressive-era reforms, had it right more than a century ago when he sneered: "The purification of politics is an iridescent dream. Government is force. Politics is a battle for supremacy. Parties are the armies." But over the last generation, the level of combat in this endless battle has escalated to the point where the extreme has become the routine. What earlier generations considered a last recourse — impeachment, recall, filibuster — is now deployed casually. It is as if the nuclear weapons of politics have lost their stigma. Consider all the red lines that have been crossed in just 20 years. During Ronald Reagan's presidency, congressional Democrats employed scandal as a political tool more overtly than ever before, railing against what they termed the "sleaze factor" in the administration. Later in the decade, Newt Gingrich, initially a backbencher in a seemingly permanent Republican House minority, promoted another succession of scandals (with the help of the emerging conservative talk-radio transmission belt) that helped undermine the Democratic hold on the House. Along the way, the battle over Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court, pivoting on charges of sexual harassment, set a new standard for acrimony and exposure of the most intimate details in a national figure's life. That standard for vitriol was quickly surpassed in the Clinton years — Republicans took the sword that Democrats had used against Reagan and sharpened it to a new lethality. For eight years, GOP leaders used ethical allegation, congressional investigation and demands for the appointment of special prosecutors to weaken the president and frustrate his agenda. That process culminated in a House vote to impeach Clinton that was as blatantly partisan as the crusade against Andrew Johnson. If never so egregiously, Clinton pushed boundaries of his own. More than any president before him, he broke the barriers of decorum about the use of the White House to court donors and raise money; with the funds he collected, he launched an unprecedented series of early attack advertisements that smothered in the crib Bob Dole's 1996 campaign against him. The accumulated anger from the Clinton years exploded during the legal war between George W. Bush and Al Gore over the disputed Florida results in the 2000 presidential race — a fight so ferocious that it obliterated, maybe forever, the quaint tradition that campaigns should end on election day. The fall of each of these restraints has made it easier to topple the next one. For the last century, states have almost never redrawn their congressional district boundaries more than once in a decade except when ordered by a court. Now, Republicans have redrawn the lines in Colorado and tried to do so in Texas, simply because the 2002 election gave them enough votes in the state legislatures to push plans that would benefit them more. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Democrats for the first time are repeatedly using the filibuster to block judicial nominees whose views they consider unacceptable — after an earlier Republican majority simply denied hearings to Clinton nominees it opposed. The recall drive against Davis stands at the end of these crumbling prohibitions. Davis himself last year smashed an important taboo when he tried to pick his opponent by spending millions to undermine the candidacy of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan during the GOP primary. Now, Davis faces opponents equally willing to use a weapon that has almost never been unsheathed: Only one U.S. governor, in North Dakota in 1921, has ever been recalled. One reason Davis is in this fix is that California law makes it too easy to recall a governor: It requires fewer signatures than any of the other 17 states that allow the procedure. But much of Davis' problem may be that after years of political war without rules, activists and even many voters don't seem to feel as much hesitation as previous generations about dropping a bomb this big without irresistible cause, such as criminal conduct. In a world of impeachment, routine filibuster and re-redistricting, recall doesn't look as radical as it should. But no one really wins in a political climate where the end always justifies the means. Both parties suffer when their competition has no restraints. The public suffers the most because the intensity of modern political combat makes it tougher, often impossible, for the two major parties to work together to solve problems when the shooting stops. If it ever does stop. The political warriors need to remember what the real generals learned a long time ago: The reason to accept rules for warfare isn't to be nice to the other guy. It's to protect your own side from the atrocities that are inevitable when there are no standards except survival. latimes.com.

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (23648)	7/28/2003 6:04:49 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

The oh so liberal NYT caught lying & being outright deceitful again...... TIMES' 'ABUSE' HOOEY By HEATHER MAC DONALD July 28, 2003 -- DRIVEN by a precipitate lust to discredit the Bush administration, The New York Times has misread a recent Justice Department report on alleged government abuse of terror suspects. More important, the front-page smear job set off a chain reaction of imitation news articles across the country, parroting the Times' error. Thus has the war on the war on terror been waged - with misrepresentation, group thinking and blinding biases. The Times announced on July 21 that the Justice Department's inspector general had "received 34 complaints of civil rights violations by department employees that it considered credible." Lest the reader miss the significance of this purported scoop, reporter Philip Shenon editorialized: "The inspector general's report . . . is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants swept up in terrorism investigations under the [USA Patriot Act]." The linchpin of the Times' purported expose is its statement that the inspector general "considered" those 34 complaints "credible." This phrasing suggests that the inspector general had investigated the complaints and reached a factual judgment about their truth. But the office of the inspector general puts the matter differently. According to its July 17 report, the office received several hundred filings over the last six months that appeared to state a claim within its jurisdiction. Upon closer analysis, however, the vast majority of those several hundred complaints, as written, proved to be unrelated to the Patriot Act. That left 34 that, according to the report, "raised credible Patriot Act violations on their face." The key phrase here is "on their face" -a lawyer's usage that means that a claim, as written, meets legal requirements of sufficiency. The July 17 report drew no conclusions about the likely truth of those 34 facially valid complaints - nor could it, for it has opened investigations into only six of them. Yet the nation's press corps dutifully took the Times' bait. "Abuse of post-9/11 detainees detailed; 34 'credible' cases in follow-up report," trumpeted the Chicago Tribune the next day. "Report outlines rights violations in Sept. 11 Act," announced USA Today. Only the Washington Post got the story right: "The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating six complaints from Muslims who have alleged that federal employees pursuing enforcement of the USA Patriot Act violated their civil rights or civil liberties," read its lead. I spoke with the inspector general's spokesman, Paul Martin, on the day of the Times' front-page expose. Martin was being inundated with calls from reporters piggybacking on the Times' article. "What they should be doing is reading the report," he lamented. "The New York Times didn't get it quite right," he said, noting that the Times did not speak with his office before publishing its story. "It overplayed what this is and isn't. We have received 34 allegations which on their face cite a Justice Department employee and a Section 1001-related abuse [the Patriot Act section empowering the inspector general to investigate civil-rights violations]. That's all it is." But the Times "sets the agenda," he observed, rightly anticipating the next day's lemming invasion. But enough of this legal nit-picking! Just because the Justice Department has yet to investigate all 34 of the Patriot Act complaints doesn't mean that they don't show a real civil-rights problem, right? Wrong. Here are summaries of the cases that the inspector general recently closed after further investigation. * Case Number One: An illegal alien detainee claimed that he had been beaten, denied adequate medical treatment and forced to eat pork on a regular basis. The investigation showed, however, that the detention facility had a 100 percent pork-free diet and that the detainee had consented to having his badly infected teeth removed. * Case Number Two: A detainee claimed that an unidentified guard had slammed his cell's food tray door in his face and failed to provide medical treatment. But the detainee refused to look at a photo line-up of guards that the inspector general had created to help him pick out his assailant or to submit to an interview. Despite conducting numerous interviews in the jail, investigators were unable to substantiate the alleged attack. The Times' front-page scoop presumes that an allegation of abuse is the equivalent of proof of abuse. If the closed cases are any indication, that is a shaky assumption. The inspector general recounts only two complaints for which substantiating evidence has been found. In the first, a prison guard has admitted to verbally abusing a Muslim inmate - the charge against him was that he had ordered the inmate to remove his shirt so he could shine his shoes with it. In the second, the Bureau of Prisons substantiated the charge that a prison doctor had taunted an inmate. The inmate had claimed that the doctor said during a physical exam: "If I was in charge, I would execute every one of you . . . because of the crimes you all did." Such insults are deplorable. But they are irrelevant to the validity of the legal authority granted under the Patriot Act. Neither the guard nor the doctor was acting under Patriot Act powers; they were fulfilling prison duties that existed long before the act. The vast majority of post-9/11 complaints are garden-variety prison-abuse cases, almost always by guards. Some perspective is in order: The number of complaints under investigation, even if all prove true, is a minute fraction of the thousands of contacts that the government has had with immigrants from terror-sponsoring and -breeding countries over the last two years. Thirty-four facially valid complaints of abuse and disrespect out of tens of thousands of contacts is a testimony to the professionalism of the law enforcement community. <font size=4> Second, the Times' ongoing attacks on the Bush administration fail to acknowledge how unprecedented the bureaucratic machinery is that was put in place immediately after 9/11 to protect Muslims from bigotry. Never before in the history of war has a government taken such care and spent such money to safeguard the rights of aliens, immigrants and enemy-combatant suspects. In the last six months, the Special Operations Branch has spent nearly half a million dollars advertising for civil-rights complainants on TV, radio and in newspapers and then investigating the resulting complaints. <FONT SIZE=5> A true news analysis of the Bush administration's war on terror would read: Government safeguards civil liberties while strengthening national defenses. Don't expect The New York Times to write that story, however; it's not news the Times deems fit to print. <FONT SIZE=3> Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Adapted from an article on City-Journal.org. nypost.com