All Blog Posts from Public Eye

I’ve often thought that great minds think alike. I just never thought my mind would process and conjure up the same things as the mind behind “Xanadu.”

A little less than two years ago, when the FCC started publicly considering/lofting-trial-balloons about possibly adopting an a la carte cable pricing strategy – where you could pick and choose the exact channels you wanted to subscribe to – I, in my previous existence as a think tank-er, was interviewed by Networking on the topic:

"Couldn't this continue the overly personalized media world -- with conservatives opting to not pay for MSNBC or CNN?" Matthew T. Felling, media director at the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a think tank in Washington D.C., told Networking.

Left-leaning consumers, meantime, might permanently tune out Fox News and conservative shows like "The O'Reilly Factor" and not just change the channel in angst.

Yesterday afternoon, Broadcasting & Cable reported that Robert Greenwald -- who directed “Xanadu” before he became a progressive documentary filmmaker – had uploaded a video online and started an Internet campaign pushing a la carte for that very outcome.

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In this week's installment of "From The Vault," we bring you the Walter Cronkite-hosted special "Robert F. Kennedy: 1925-1968." It aired on June 6, 1968. Click on the video box to watch.

The Skinny Today: Cyber Monday was not really the biggest online shopping day of the year. Again. Plus, drama for the Episcopal Church, pharma news and welcome to the Pentagon, Robert Gates. The Skinny is Hillary Profita's take on the top of the news and the best of the Web.

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A compendium of the week's finest quotations, from the nation's newspapers and beyond.

"I hope we don't treat this like a fruit salad and say, 'I like this, but I don't like that.'"

--James Baker, co-chair, Iraq Study Group, to the Senate Armed Services Committee, regarding how he would like the panel's report to be received.

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"The U.S. effectively sent a bull in to liberate a china shop, and the Study Group now called upon the U.S. to threaten to remove the bull if the shop doesn't fix the china."

--Oft-quoted Military Analyst Anthony Cordesman, on the Iraq Study Group's strategy.

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"No, Sir."

--Incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, responding to Sen. Carl Levin's question of whether we are winning in Iraq.

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The Skinny today: Secretary of Defense nominee Robert Gates wows the media by saying the U.S. isn't winning the war in Iraq. Plus, New York City commences the War on trans fats, Congressmen are forced to put in a five-day work week (kind of) and a Web site outlines the 300 ways you can get sued this Christmas. The Skinny is Hillary Profita's take on the top news of the day and the best of the Web. Check out today's edition here.

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The Skinny, Hillary Profita's take on the top of the news and the best of the Web, appears daily here on Public Eye and on the "Evening News" page at CBSNews.com.

Here's a shocker for you: The government is disorganized. I kid you not. The Washington Post has obtained a leaked copy of a report from a consulting group hired by the
Department of Homeland Security that sought to "determine whether [DHS] was following federal contracting laws and internal policies." Well, the consultants "could not locate 33 of the 72 contract files it had selected for the review."

And the ones they did find? Those "often lacked basic documentation required under federal rules, such as evidence that the department negotiated the best prices for taxpayers."

The consultants wrote in their report: "The inability to locate files and inconsistent file organization puts the government at risk in ensuring the contractor is fulfilling its contractual obligations and the government is meeting its contract administration responsibilities." Oops.

In what might just be the most damning assessment of the situation possible, one expert who teaches at the University of Baltimore School of Law told the Post: "This strongly suggests that we're buying the wrong stuff, the wrong way, possibly from the wrong contractors, and failing to check before, during or after."

Fortunately, a DHS spokesperson has informed the Post that officials are following the consultants' recommendations on fixing the situation: "We've acted upon each one of their findings. It was an internal look. We are going to bring them in again to make sure we are following up," he said.

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The Skinny, Hillary Profita's take on the top of the news and the best of the Web, appears daily here on Public Eye and on the "Evening News" page at CBSNews.com.

With the departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the nomination of Robert Gates, former CIA director under Bush 41, the suggestion of a “Father Knows Best” theme is not lost on the nation’s newsweeklies.

Newsweek and US News employ the same headline on the matter, actually (“The Rescue Squad,”) while Time puts it in a slightly different package, but the message is still the same: “Led by former CIA Director Gates and former Secretary of State James Baker, who co-heads a commission on Iraq, Dad's former aides will present the son with a plan for saving his presidency and, with it, some remnant of the family's brand name.”

One magazine, however, took a completely different route, as John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal noted in Washington Wire: “The November issue of Texas Monthly features a cover photo of Robert Gates. The article calls him an ‘Agent of Change’ and declares ‘Robert Gates to the Rescue.’

The only problem: the article concerns Gates’ leadership of Texas A&M University, not his selection as Rumsfeld's replacement. Which explains the main cover headline: ‘Can This Guy Save the Aggies?’

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Murray Waas has a nice piece in the National Journal on what he suggest is a "double standard" when it comes to leak probes. He points out that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, who praised the CIA for firing Mary McCarthy for allegedly sharing classified intelligence with reporters, himself disclosed intel that four former senior intelligence officers say "impaired efforts to capture Saddam Hussein and potentially threatened the lives of Iraqis who were spying for the United States." (McCarthy, its worth noting, alleges that she didn't leak any classified information.)

Writes Waas:

The former intelligence officials said in interviews that Roberts was never held accountable for his comments, which bore directly on the issue of intelligence-gathering sources and methods, and revealed that Iraqis close to Hussein were probably talking to the United States. These former officials contrasted the Roberts case with last week's firing of CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy, as examples of how rank and file intelligence professionals now have much to fear from legitimate and even inadvertent contacts with journalists, while senior executive branch officials and members of Congress are almost never held accountable when they seriously breach national security through leaks of information.

Keep in mind that Waas is citing anonymous sources, and as we've often pointed out, anonymous sources almost always have agendas. But Roberts is on the record here, having publicly disclosed in a 2003 speech what the CIA believed to be the then-location of Saddam Hussein, in addition to other sensitive secrets.

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This week, the Army announced that it would open a new investigation into a possible cover-up in the death of former pro football player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. The embarrassing announcement comes after other instances in which the military has come under fire for misleading or withholding information from the press and public, most notably in the cases of the rescue of Jessica Lynch and allegations of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. I spoke to reporters and military analysts about what kind of impact these revelations have had on the relationship between the military and the press, and how each party views the other.

"There's an irony here, because when you had embedding, there was a sense that the reporting was better than ever," says Dan Goure, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute. "But since the end of major combat operations, the relationship has really gone to hell. There is a strongly held perception in the military – particularly the Army – that the media is doing the enemy's work. You guys are seen as the Jane Fondas of the Iraq war. And so the military attitude is, 'why should we level with you, because you're going to screw us.'"

That attitude apparently goes all the way to the top: Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that "the steady stream of errors [by the media] all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq."

Goure says the relationship between the press and military has been bad since the time of the Vietnam War. In World War II and the Korean War, he says, the military had a sense that the press was on their side. But today, he argues, "both the military and the media have unrealistic expectations of each other," as they have for the past 40 years. "The military expects the media to be a kind of public affairs arm, and the media expects the military to move faster and more agilely on these kinds of issues than they can. When the military is dealing with a problem, it has to go through the chain of command, there are reviews – it's a very laborious process."

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CNN today announced that current CBS White House Correspondent John Roberts will be joining the cable news network as a Senior National Correspondent on February 20th. In a letter to CBS friends and colleagues this morning, Roberts wrote:

For nearly 14 years at the network, and two years at our Miami station, I have been a part of CBS News, and it a huge part of me. Ultimately, though, all relationships must come to an end, and regrettably, it is time to end my relationship here.



When I was a wide-eyed kid, learning the ropes at a 5 thousand watt radio station in the middle of nowhere, never in my most elaborate dreams did I imagine I would become a member of the CBS family. Just to have played a modest part in the history of this grand institution is an incredible reward.



The best part about it has been the fine people who populate this place. Whether it was war zones, natural disasters or the grind of global presidential travel, you demonstrated time and time again an unswerving commitment to excellence. Oppressive schedules and deadlines only seemed to spark a sense of drive and determination that sometimes appeared superhuman. Unending days and nights in the field or in the studio, covering some of this generation's most important stories brought out the best in all of you.

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