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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
EJ
Published Letters: 486 Editor's Choice: 1
CHENEY: Of course, just toppling the Twin Towers will never be enough. No one would give us the war mandate we need if we just blow up the Towers. Clearly, we also need to shoot a missile at a small corner of the Pentagon to create a mightily underpublicized additional symbol of international terrorism -- and then, obviously, we need to fake a plane crash in the middle of fucking nowhere somewhere in rural Pennsylvania.
RUMSFELD: Yeah, it goes without saying that the level of public outrage will not be sufficient without that crash in the middle of fucking nowhere.
CHENEY: And the Pentagon crash -- we'll have to do it in broad daylight and say it was a plane, even though it'll really be a cruise missile.
BUSH: Wait, why do we have to use a missile?
CHENEY: Because it's much easier to shoot a missile and say it was a plane. It's not easy to steer a real passenger plane into the Pentagon. Planes are hard to come by.
BUSH: But aren't we using two planes for the Twin Towers?
CHENEY: Mr. President, you're missing the point. With the Pentagon, we use a missile, and say it was a plane.
BUSH: Right, but I'm saying, why don't we just use a plane and say it was a plane? We'll be doing that with the Twin Towers, right?
CHENEY: Right, but in this case, we use a missile. (Throws hands up in frustration) Don, can you help me out here?...
I ♥ Matt Taibbi.
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/42181/?page=entire
Congratulations on your award and Happy Birthday!
You'll be happy to know that many journalists are very concerned about anonymity as it pertains to credibility, trust and good journalism...
Newspapers highly discourage anonymous remarks, for instance, and editors are more likely than readers to want that principle applied to reader comments online, according to the Online Journalism Credibility Study released Tuesday by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.
Some 70% of editors surveyed said requiring commenters to disclose their identities would support good journalism, while only 45% of the public did.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/2008-04-08-online-media-credibility_N.htm?csp=15
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We are at an odd and contradictory time in journalism ethics when the credibility of our journalism has been harmed by journalists’ overuse and abuse of confidential sources. And yet anonymity is common and expected in many online exchanges, and we want to build online audience, so we explore what is the right balance between transparent identification and complete anonymity. As with many decisions, this is a matter of trade-offs. Anonymity brings more participation, and perhaps more traffic. But it also brings more objectionable content and more unsupported statements, which can harm your credibility and turn some users off.
http://www.notrain-nogain.org/train/Res/Ethics/8user.asp
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Many news Web sites now permit readers to post comments on blogs and news stories or to share their thoughts in message forums. Often, readers may do so without having to give their names. Defenders of anonymity say it fosters more candid discussion, but critics charge that it damages trust and encourages incivility.
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/7/1/8/6/p271866_index.html
When the Post Banned Anonymous Sources
More than 30 years ago, shortly before Watergate, the Washington Post tried to do something about them. Ben Bradlee, then the paper's executive editor, decided that the Post would no longer publish information from unnamed sources. Bradlee was a high-energy competitor who hated to be beaten on a story. But he was also an innovator.
The experiment was understandable. It came during the Nixon administration, a turbulent era that witnessed all the pitfalls of namelessness, including high officials flimflamming the news media. Henry Kissinger, at the time Nixon's chief foreign policy adviser, was adept at giving one group of reporters an "inside tip" on an anonymous basis; an hour later, in his oracular voice, enhanced by his carefully preserved Germanic accent, he would say something entirely different to a favored reporter. When it came to the Post, other Nixon officials often made life difficult for the paper's reporters, sometimes hiding behind the label "an unnamed source" when releasing a statement of dubious truth.
Finally, Bradlee had had enough. He announced the "no more unnamed sources" policy to the newsroom. From now on, when an official said, "This briefing is for background only," meaning the information couldn't be attributed to a named source, Post reporters were to walk out. Or if a Cabinet officer said, "This will have to be off the record" – meaning it couldn't be used at all – Post reporters were to say politely that they were not allowed to listen....
Murrey Marder, one of our diplomatic correspondents, told me recently that during the noble experiment a fellow diplomatic reporter announced at a background briefing that he couldn't take anything from an unnamed source. He walked out of the room. But nobody followed him. Post reporters felt hamstrung by the policy and made their feelings known....
The experiment ended after two days.
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=3946
Journalists won't do it, but it would be a simple thing for the Obama administration to stop this.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that Obama had issued a memorandum essentially nullifying Bush’s signing statements by telling agencies not to rely on them without consulting with the Justice Department....
“This president will use signing statements in order to go back to what has previously been done — that is to enumerate constitutional problems that either the Justice Department or legislative counsel here see as potential problems with their reading — but not ask that laws be disallowed simply by executive fiat.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19795.html
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
