All Blog Posts from Public Eye

What’s more meta than a blog about blogs and funner than a barrel of monkeys? An ombudsman column roundup of other ombudsmen’s columns, of course!

Today, Public Eye continues its semi-regular look at the issues at play in Print MediaLand -- at least the ones that seem worth passing along. (As sometimes these things get too insider-y even for us.) So keep your hands inside the car at all times, and we’re off:

The War of the Words

Words carry political weight. “Pro-choice” or “pro-life.” “Gun rights.” “Illegal immigrants.” “Surge.” And the Kansas City Star had to explain why it uses words like “militant” and “vigilante” to describe the Minutemen who watch America’s border.

I can see these readers’ point. But “militant” can also mean “aggressively active” or “strident,” and I think many people would find much of the language at their Web site fits those descriptors. One article refers to the U.S. Senate as “traitorous,” which is “putting a gun to the head of America’s national security and repeatedly pulling the trigger.”…

Then what about “vigilante?” Again to the dictionary, which says a vigilante is a group or individual volunteering to promote an interest, or to suppress and punish crime. That seems to me the exact definition of what the Minutemen claim as their purpose.

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It’s been two weeks now since General Petraeus offered his assessment of the success of the “surge” in Iraq. And have we been discussing his testimony? Ehhhhh, not so much. Well, maybe a little, but with nowhere near the volume or depth that we’ve discussed that MoveOn ad. In this writer’s eyes, the story/debate/controversy hit its pinnacle when President Bush assailed
assailed the ad in his Thursday press conference, conflating the ad’s message with insulting America’s soldiers on the ground in Iraq, saying “"I felt like the ad was an attack, not only on Gen. Petraeus, but on the U.S. military.”

And yesterday the New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt came out with a stinging rebuke of the Times accepting the MoveOn ad – as well as the discounted rate the interest group received:

For nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq.

But I think the ad violated The Times’s own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to…
By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”

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You remember those Bugs Bunny cartoons where he'd stick a cork or something in Elmer Fudd's rifle and it would backfire into Fudd's face? We've seen the political version of that in Washington, DC this week.

In the three days since they originally took out a full-page ad in the New York Times deriding General David "Betray Us?" Petraeus, MoveOn.org is still the big media story of the week, nearly eclipsing the General's testimony. (Simply while writing this post, it's been covered on two of the three cable nets.)

It's a textbook case of media blowback, with the ad having given supporters of the "surge" a certain amount of rhetorical cover, or at least an opportunity to shift the focus of the discussion from the streets of Baghdad to the well-known activist group and bugaboo of the right.

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In the current issue of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh has an explosive profile of Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who was responsible for the investigation into the affairs of Abu Ghraib. While it’s usually wise to read Hersh’s work with a skepticism meter up higher than usual, as his stories frequently rely in part on unnamed sources, his piece on Taguba is entirely on-the-record with the now-retired soldier. The article goes chapter-and-verse into what Taguba says everyone knew, when they knew it, and how much obfuscation he believes surrounded the scandal.

Digging deeper into the story, I found that Chris Wallace of Fox News accomplished a journalistic coup when he interviewed Army General David Petraeus on yesterday’s “Fox News Sunday” for what Wallace billed as “his first appearance ever on a Sunday talk show.”

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