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

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (26374)	8/25/2003 4:36:55 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

THE O’REILLY FACTOR _________________________ by Ben McGrath The New Yorker Issue of 2003-09-01 newyorker.com "Where’s the Beef? The Mad Cow Disease Conspiracy.” “Positive Discipline: Don’t Leave Home Without It.” “The O’Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life.” These were among the more than a hundred book titles introduced in federal court at the end of last week as part of an amicus brief filed by the Authors Guild in defense of the comedian Al Franken and his publisher, Penguin, in this summer’s most celebrated trademark infringement case, Fox News v. Franken. It hardly seemed necessary, given that Fox’s request for a preliminary injunction against Franken’s new book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” had been widely ridiculed for its legal shortcomings and tactical wrongheadedness. Fox’s ostensible objection was to Franken’s use of the phrase “fair and balanced” (a company-owned trademark since December, 1998) in his subtitle and of the Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly’s face on the cover; supposedly, consumers might be deceived into thinking the book was Fox-friendly. But the language in the complaint—it characterized Franken as “increasingly unfunny,” “shrill and unstable,” and possibly even “deranged”—suggested that what Fox (or O’Reilly) really objected to was Al Franken himself. At any rate, the suit was a boon to the book, which shot up to No. 1 (from No. 489) on Amazon’s best-seller list, and an embarrassment to Fox. On Friday afternoon, in U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan, Judge Denny Chin listened with mounting impatience as Fox’s counsel dutifully presented its oral argument, and then quickly ruled against the network: “There are hard cases and there are easy cases,” Chin said. “This is an easy case, in my view, because it is wholly without merit, both factually and legally.” So what was Fox thinking? Old Hollywood hands ought to know. They might recognize, in the extravagance and folly of a flimsy lawsuit, the telltale signs of an appeasement gift, a sop to a sulking star—the sulker, in this case, being Bill O’Reilly, the top-rated anchor on cable. O’Reilly, of course, is the commentator known for shouting “Shut up!” at those with whom he disagrees—such as Jeremy Glick, the son of a World Trade Center victim, who, on “The O’Reilly Factor” in February, questioned the U.S. decision to wage war in Afghanistan (“Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces!” Glick recalls O’Reilly shouting after the microphones were turned off), or, indeed, Al Franken, in a memorable televised exchange at the Los Angeles Book Exposition, in May. The Book Expo was where O’Reilly first learned that he was one of the subjects of “Lies and the Lying Liars” (Chapter 13 is titled “Bill O’Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully”) and saw his likeness on a mockup of the book’s cover. “Somebody calls you a liar to your face, you don’t just laugh that off,” O’Reilly said afterward on his radio show. “In the Old West that would have got you shot.” According to someone close to the situation, Fox executives were not at all in favor of suing, correctly anticipating a P.R. debacle. They told O’Reilly as much in a series of meetings, but he continued to lobby aggressively for bringing a suit, pressing his case with Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman, and others. And so Fox enlisted its lawyers to cobble together a complaint. There once was a time in the industry when a fur coat or a Harry Winston pendant was all it took to show your love and support. Not anymore. When Robin Williams felt he’d been undercompensated for his role as the genie in “Aladdin,” Disney gave him a Picasso; NBC executives, trying to hold on to a restive David Letterman, reportedly had the idea of giving him a Mercedes with a vanity plate reading “4GETCBS.” Bill O’Reilly might be setting a new standard for placation presents. Take back your mink, your diamonds, and your pearls. For a real star, only a preliminary injunction will do.

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (26374)	8/25/2003 9:01:01 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

POST WATCH _________________ washingtonian.com BY HARRY JAFFE Why Doesn’t the Post Love Walter Pincus? If President Bush suffers because it turns out he took the country to war on false pretenses, he might look back on stories by Walter Pincus for drawing first blood. On March 16, the eve of war, Pincus wrote in the Post that “U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At the time, the Bush White House was telling the world that America had to invade Iraq to root out weapons of mass destruction. Pincus quoted sources saying that there was “a lack of hard evidence.” And they also said the White House had “exaggerated intelligence” to back up its drive toward war. Pincus was uniquely positioned to delve into the intricacies of the weapons question. At 70, he had been reporting on national security for 25 years at the Post. Along the way he had cultivated sources in Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the scientific community. For decades, he has been close to chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix. Yet the Post buried Pincus’s March 16 story on page A17. It took help from Bob Woodward to get the story published at all. “His support gave the editors the guts to run it,” says Pincus. “They think I am a crusader and get on kicks.” Woodward, working the same sources for his forthcoming book on the war, put his name at the bottom of the March 16 story. Pincus had been writing about the buildup to theinvasion for months, along with Post writers Dana Priest, Karen DeYoung, Barton Gellman, and others who gathered at “war meetings” every day. But according to reporters, editors continually underplayed Pincus’s scoops and discounted their stories that ran counter to Bush’s call to arms. None of which deterred him, especially after he dissected Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 speech to the United Nations. “I suddenly realized everything he said was inferential,” says Pincus. As he did with stories about the neutron bomb in the 1970s and the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, Pincus burrowed deep and wrote often. “When I get hold of one of these things, I stay on it,” he says. “The American public doesn’t pay attention to one or two stories.” Pincus’s byline has appeared on nearly 100 stories since the invasion on March 19. He never stopped writing about the missing weapons of mass destruction. “He’s like a 28-year-old dogging the story,” says Woodward. “At the same time, he’s not overreaching.” In June Pincus sunk his teeth deeper into the emerging story of the nuclear material that Iraq was supposed to have sought from Niger to make nuclear bombs. US officials repeated the claim as fact and talked ominously of mushroom clouds. President Bush mentioned “significant quantities of uranium“ in his State of the Union speech. Other reporters questioned the nuclear transfer, including Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, David Sanger in the New York Times, and Joby Warrick, Priest, and DeYoung with Pincus at the Post. Pincus pursued it day after day. He says he had to fight to get it on the front page. “The best way to get a memo to the President is the front page of the Post,” he says. Finally, at the end of May, Pincus broke onto the front page with a story about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. He stayed there as his stories—some with other reporters—put pressure on the White House to admit that the President’s 16-word sentence about uranium going to Iraq was not credible. Pincus eventually prevailed within his own newspaper, but why did a veteran reporter have to bow and scrape to get his stories noticed and then printed? “It was ridiculous. Many of the stories were buried,” says Priest, also a star on the national-security beat. “Editors continually undervalued what he does.” What Pincus did was help put the Post in front of the biggest story of the day. Managing editor Steve Coll says of Pincus: “We were proud of his coverage before the war, and we’re proud of it now, and we’ve tried to give it prominent display throughout.” Says Woodward: “Editors would be kidding themselves if they discounted him.”

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (26374)	8/25/2003 11:28:55 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Clark backers raise close to $1 million for White House bid By James Harding in Washington The Financial Times Published: August 25 2003 21:27 news.ft.com Activists trying to persuade Wesley Clark (pictured), the retired four-star general, to run for president said on Monday that by this weekend they would have $1m pledged to finance a bid for the White House. The group behind draft-wesleyclark.com told a Washington briefing they had helped mobilise 30,000 people to write letters to Mr Clark urging him to stand. The polling data compiled by Zogby International also showed Mr Clark was just beginning to prick the US public consciousness, making it into the top five most popular contenders for the Democratic nomination. The opinion polls and the draftwesleyclark.com news conference showed just as convincingly that Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont once dismissed as a long-shot for the nomination, is now in the lead. The Zogby poll put support for Mr Dean's candidacy at 16.6 per cent, clearly on an upward trend. Gen Clark got 4.9 per cent, having barely - if at all - registered in previous polls. John Hlinko, one of the co-founders of the movement to co-opt Gen Clark into running for the Democratic nomination, said on Monday that the organisers had been "blown away" by the public response to the website they set up in April. But Gen Clark was conspicuous by his absence on Monday. He has acknowledged that he is taking seriously the public's pleas to declare his candidacy, but has still not revealed any intention to run at this late stage in the contest for the Democratic nomination. The primary elections for the Democratic nomination begin in January. The attention being generated by Gen Clark's would-be campaign workers - coupled with the momentum being built by the Dean campaign - is fuelling speculation that Gen Clark is being positioned as an ideal running mate for the former Vermont governor. Mr Dean has been a vocal opponent of President George W. Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, which has earned him recognition and support among the ranks of anxious and angry Democrats. Gen Clark, the former Nato allied supreme commander, would therefore add much needed national security credentials to a possible Dean ticket, Democratic strategists say. But Mr Hlinko, a Democrat, and his co-founder Josh Margulies, a Republican, were on Monday pushing Gen Clark for the presidency. The West Point graduate and Rhodes scholar, they said, not only boasted training as an economist but also 33 years of military experience that would serve him well as a "wartime president".