Letters to the Editor
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Hesitant though I am to criticize Glenn Greenwald -- but there is Cat-shit in this story
For cr*ss@kes would you add the factoid that makes Jennings and ABC look really stupid --
There is absolutely nothing exotic about Bentonite, you can buy it in most grocery stores, just look for Kitty Litter!
Yes, biggest single US use for Bentonite, soaking up cat-shit and pee, followed by use as drillers mud, in oil wells. It also seems unlikley to be useful in weaponising any powder, since it would probably make it clump.
Bentonite is used by the ton for all sorts of inocuous purposes, The Bentonite used in this instance was probably Fullers' Earth.
Think of this, if these morons at ABC had even bothered to pull an Encyclopaedia Britanica off the shelf, or ask a chemist "hey what's Bentonite" and "where can I get some" they would not have bought a scam as obvious as the the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Message To Schneider
You reported that you had 4 sources for your anthrax claims. At most you retracted one source, the White House, although as Greenwald demonstrated you had been reporting their disagreement with your sources all along.
WHO WERE THESE FOUR SOURCES WHO BURNED YOU SO BADLY?
Why don't you reveal them instead of covering for them?
Also, if you all were truly journalists, you might just want to look into whether or not your getting burned by 4 sources is a story in itself. I mean how often do you get burned by 4 different sources on the same story? That has to be a pretty rare occurrence I would think. Were they working together? Was this an orchestrated disinofrmation campaign? Who was behind it?
Hahahahaha. Dude, you and the rest of the ABC media whores have just been totally punked by Glenn Greenwald. He has just spanked you in a way that would embarrass anyone but an arrogant media whore.
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American News Is LAUGHABLE
Last night, watching tv, I realized we hit a new low (and I'm sure we'll slide much farther in the years to come).
The two biggest stories:
"Nappy Headed Hos"
"Who's Anna's Baby-Daddy?!"
We've eliminated the need for Jon Stewart.
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Hubris
This is another factor that could have been neatly tucked into Kamiya's article on the failure of the media, and seems to be out in full force here.
Pride, both on a personal and patriotic scale, was a huge part of the emotional reaction to 9/11, and justifiably so. We were attacked? Of course we will band together and fight the enemy! And not just the enemy that attacked us, but the larger threat of terrorism! We will protect the world from such villains! But when pride bloats into hubris, when you start to see the world in Manichaean terms of good and evil, when you no longer can honestly look at yourself, your country, your government, then you are truly doing your enemy's work.
Your first posts concerning ABCnews and their anthrax reporting certainly got me riled, but their lame assertions that they've always been in the right (even through claiming admissions of being incorrect) are frankly appalling. Ross/Schneider, take a step back and look at yourselves and how you've acted in this matter. Seriously. And then consider if you haven't let hubris get the better of you.
Shout out to Glenn Greenwald for the great reporting.
-c
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MacK
Hesitant though I am to criticize Glenn Greenwald -- but there is Cat-shit in this story
For cr*ss@kes would you add the factoid that makes Jennings and ABC look really stupid --
There is absolutely nothing exotic about Bentonite, you can buy it in most grocery stores, just look for Kitty Litter!
I wrote at length about how commonplace bentonite is in the first post I wrote on this topic. This post was confined to ABC's claim that they already corrected their story.
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Glenn:
Your larger point that a one-line correction (that was really more of a clarification) does not make up for 5 days of a questionable headliner is definitely an important one. I'll give Schneider the nit that the line he cites could be seen as a 'correction', contrary to your passing assertion that "they have never retracted, corrected or even explained their false reports." Even so, this line is still nothing close to 'journalistic integrity' as measured by what could be called the 'net signal amplitude over time' of the anthrax-Saddam link. There is no comparing the 5-day headlining of a tenuous evidenciary connection to the one-off, one-line, 'clarification'(of the truth of the situation which had originally been used as a throwaway qualifier) that Schneider cited as his only rebuttal. It will be interesting to hear his response to this latest post, illustrating that glaring difference of scale.
The most interesting part of this exchange, though, is my initial feeling of pity for Schneider that he's "Damned if you do, Damned if you don't". After reading on I quickly adjusted to the reality of the matter as you laid it out, but still I thought: "If he's got 'four well-placed and separate sources [that had] told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, [had] detected trace amounts of the chemical additives "bentonite and silica.', but the White House is denying it - wouldn't 'journalistic principles' compel them to question the WH's denial?" I mean, one of the main points of your vigilant criticism of MSM reporting, as I understand it, is that they should not simply 'go along with everything the White House feeds to them', and that is precisely what they did in this situation. That seemed a compelling contradiction, until I considered the following: Who exactly were the seperate sources? Were they 'well-placed' within the administration? If so, doesn't that nullify the 'journalistic skepticism' of their ignoring the White House? If not, certainly a major retraction/correction was required, including a treatment of the seperate sources, why they were trusted above the word of the WH, and what ABC's reflections on those sources being wrong is?
It seems that your original assertion, that ABC got played, stands firm in the face of all the evidence. That the administration used the cunning tactic of simultaneously disseminating misinformation through back-channels and deploying 'counter-misinformation' through official channels may mitigate their folly, but it does not excuse it- and it certainly does not excuse their continued denial that mistakes were made at the expense of journalistic integrity. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_Misinformation_Team )