Letters to the Editor
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ABC News rules Drudge's world
Drudge's sub last night made sure to quote this ABC news report in order to stoke the fires against Iraq.
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typo?
Great muckraking, Glenn, as always -- but I had trouble comprehending this:
(1) How can ABC News just let these Saddam-anthrax reports -- as false as they were consequential -- remain uncorrected and unexplained, even though today?
Did you mean to write "through today" or was something omitted? Anyway, thanks for reminding me why my kids will never get to visit Disneyland (not with their daddy with them, anyway) -- no way I'm financing that fascist rodent, Mickey!
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I should not voice an opinion and wait till I read better and try to graduate.
You do manage to help un-confuse matters. Wisdom is a edifice, solid and entire that confounds the base-'t'-stinkers. You deserve a Hallmark birth-day suit for showing 'um naked. Yuck.
Side-track, vagrant-gutter 'stuff,' and if someone would please 'fluff' Johnson Baby powder on their "bottom-line's?" Good grief is right. O, how they T-arse pound their flabby mild-fatty breast! Tell them they are not Tarzan for me?
ABC defghijko-i gotta go. And eiei,O!
Where is my bow-legged barred-rock rooster crown that got a frost-burned this winter? It's yours. I want a bowleggedbullwinklewinkie award!
And one day I hope to get a mug-shot and a Salon mug with gold-dung finger-prints to sip on good brew also? I have NO constructive ideas to contribute here anymore...I can barely self-contain pure disgust. 'They' vex me so much I whisper softly into their bee-wax-sway-dirty mindset of full-'stuffed' ears, of brown-'crapping hoot, "shad-up."
'They' ruin a world. 'They' are ruin.
I want to learn how to speak in disconnected sentences with backward causes, clauses, and learn to properly apply coma's at home. Those paid free-flying-maniac's kooks want to watch people die in mental wards? O, boy these dank-drunks need to voluntarily commit 'um-self in Lobotomy Class. Next they will un-leash real live Pitt-bull mutts toward us?
To speak with real Conservatives is a treat, but THIS era seems to be back-tracking on a fast-path to hell! What else can a sane-class of people in a world do? None of 'um-neocons are conservative. The ilk kill truth and still have a brain or a fatty-rotten-liver. ?!? They have less aptitude than a ____. Vile.
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On Burning Lying Sources
The Libby trial brought to light a number of interesting ways in which Beltway media fail to follow the rules of journalism they claim to follow. For example, both Matt Cooper and Tim Russert made it very clear that the default state for a conversation with a source is off the record. The phone conversation where Rove gave Cooper Plame's identity as a NOC was originally intended to give Rove a heads-up on a story Coooper was working on. Cooper wanted to give Rove time to prepare a quote. Note how this works. Conversations are off the record, and quotations are negotiated, from content to sourcing.
Cooper was quoted in a New Yorker article as saying he didn't want to use the Plame material because he thought it was an unfair attack. He didn't find it newsworthy to report that such attacks were taking place, only that he felt that he was being used.
This is so far removed from the intrepid reporter bravely seeking out the truth from multiple sources with careful fact-checking as to beggar the imagination. But it puts scenes like those of David Gregory shaking his booty beside Karl Rove into proper perspective. These guys are all on the same team.
They'll never burn their lying sources; all their sources lie to them, and they know it. They see their jobs not as reporting accurate information, but rather as supplying the public with narratives. Their narrative sources are the people in power. Without their lying talking points, they'd have to come up with a story themselves--and we might actually see different versions if the did so.
I'll never forget the week following TPM definitively breaking the US Attorneys scandal. Every single Beltway pundit--I counted 15--in print and on television peddled the Republican talking points of "overreach" and "everybody does it." And I still have not read reporting that discusses how the Patriot act got amended to permit unconfirmed appointments without the knowledge of the Senators who voted for it.
A story about setting up US Attorneys to rig elections in purple states by circumventing the confirmation profit--not so interesting, nor newsworthy.
Good night and good luck.
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OOPS: IRAN, not Iraq
as I referenced Drudge's sub quoting Brian Ross' IRAN report.
ah, that one letter.........
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question
Given the harm caused by those who planted these lies and by the news organization that reported them as facts, I find myself wondering why there is no legal recourse. Was all of this perfectly legal? Should there be legislation to prevent it happening in the future?
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Wonderful work Glenn
Your continued, researched hammering on the members of the press who act as propagandists is a big part of what we have to do to save democracy.
Can you get this stupid Salon system to publish comments like a proper blog so we don't have to refresh endlessly to read them? The page system effectively makes your correspondents unreadable, silencing us.
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Electron Microscopy and Spore Comparison
They wouldn't use EM to make definitive comparisons between strains of Anthrax, they would- as far as I know- use DNA markers.
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To Answer Your Question
Why are they refusing to correct the story, which would require burning their sources?
Obviously, because at least one of those sources has enormous retaliatory power.
Four? That's easy: Tenet, Rumsfeld, Rice and ... drum roll please ... Darth Cheney.
No reporter has burned Cheney yet, despite non-stop lying, and none ever will.
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Brina Ross' sources
Glenn,
This is an excellent post, and I fully agree with the main thrust of your argument. However, I think that the issue of Brian Ross' sources might be a little more complicated than you present. I think it is possible, and perhaps even likely, that the sources themselves had been lied to. In other words, the sources themselves may not have fabricated the story but were (knowingly or not) passing along a falsehood. In this case, the source of the falsehood should be identified, but that source might not be known to Ross. This, of course, does not excuse their failure to issue a correction and apology.
One other thing, just for the sake of accuracy. You dismiss the claim of the diagnostic value of the presence of bentonite in the anthrax spores by noting the widespread availability of bentonite. However, my reading of the reporting is that bentonite is supposedly diagnostic not because it is rare or available only in Iraq, but because its use in weaponizing antrhrax was unusual (and perhaps unique to Iraq).
That bentonite is used for other purposes does not mean that it is useful as an additive to anthrax. In fact, one could imagine that bentonite would cause antrax spores to clump and therefore make them less rather than more dangerous. It seems to me that in order to refute the claim that the presence of bentonite was diagnostic you need to demonstrate either that other countries commonly added this to anthrax, or that Iraq was not known to use bentonite. Apparently, bentonite wasn't actually present in the spores. However, the question here is whether it was diagnostic if (as Ross presumably honestly believed) it was, in fact, present.
Again, these are minor points and don't challenge the basic thrust of your argument (which I agree with), but I think they are worth considering.