Dan Rather, Jane Mayer, and emptywheel, NYC, September 23

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rather.jpgA number of you have already gotten notice of this event. But I’m really looking forward to it, so I wanted to pitch it here.

The Nation presents a conversation on the future of news, featuring legendary newscaster Dan Rather, investigative reporter and best-selling author Jane Mayer, pioneering blogger Marcy Wheeler, and longtime editor and publisher–now publisher emeritus–of The Nation, Victor Navasky. Hosted by Katrina vanden Heuvel.

What will the media look like in five years? The discussion will explore the shape and consequences of fundamental shifts in the media landscape. There will also be ample time for audience questions. A cocktail reception with food will follow the discussion. Take this opportunity to hear from and meet some of the most influential journalists of our time.

All proceeds benefit The Nation. Admission includes the post-show reception, a one-year subscription to The Nation, and a signed copy of The Nation Guide.

Wed, Sep 23 at 7 pm
Leonard Nimoy Thalia
$200; Members $150; Day of Show $250

It’s a lot of scratch, but for those who are in NY and have some spare change to benefit the Nation, here’s a code that will save you 50% on the tickets: RAC102

Journalism Is Killing America

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Five years ago, the traditional media helped Bush pitch a war that got 4,337 service men and women killed in Iraq (to say nothing of the thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed).

Now, traditional media journalism is back to killing Americans, in this case by deliberately misrepresenting public views on health care reform. EJ Dionne describes how at least one network refused to cover civil, informative town halls.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television’s point of view "boring") encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

[snip]

Over the past week, I’ve spoken with Democratic House members, most from highly contested districts, about what happened in their town halls. None would deny polls showing that the health-reform cause lost ground last month, but little of the probing civility that characterized so many of their forums was ever seen on television.

[snip]

The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer for one of the television networks at a large town-hall meeting he held in Durham.

The stringer said he was one of 10 people around the country assigned to watch such encounters. Price said he was told flatly: "Your meeting doesn’t get covered unless it blows up." As it happens, the Durham audience was broadly sympathetic to reform efforts. No "news" there. [my emphasis]

But Dionne is conveniently blaming this on the "electronic" media and ignoring his own paper’s complicity. From OmbudAndy, we learn that 85% of the health care reform stories appearing in the WaPo’s A section have been about the horserace and the deathers.

In my examination of roughly 80 A-section stories on health-care reform since July 1, all but about a dozen focused on political maneuvering or protests. The Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism had a similar finding. Its recent month-long review of Post front pages found 72 percent of health-care stories were about politics, process or protests. 

And as a result, Americans are confused and politicians are backing off the reform they know is needed and legislation supported by a huge majority may not get passed.

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Politico’s “Media Criticism” Multiplies the Errors

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Like me and Glenn, the Politico has decided to cover that outrageous WaPo story on KSM on Saturday. Only they’ve apparently decided to multiply the damage of a really crappy story. There’s Ben Smith’s "Post story bolsters Cheney." And Michael Calderone’s "Torture critics question WaPo sources."

The structure of both is the same. They start with a first paragraph repeating–perhaps in even stronger terms, in the case of Smith–the WaPo conclusion that torture worked with KSM.

Smith:

The Washington Post leads today with an extraordinary story cutting against the conclusions of a series of recent government and media reports to cast as straight news — with a few hedges and qualifications —  that waterboarding and sleep deprivation worked like a charm to turn Kalid Sheik Mohammed from an enemy into an "asset."

Calderone:

Several prominent bloggers slammed the Washington Post this weekend following an explosive story about how subjecting Khalid Sheik Mohammed to torture techniques appeared to be successful in gaining useful intelligence — that’s according to the paper’s anonymous sources.  

Smith includes the four lead paragraphs from the story itself, while Calderone–purportedly engaging in media criticism–includes links to me and Glenn and Sully, but includes a mere fraction of Glenn’s substantive argument and none of mine.

And (at least before Calderone’s update linking to Sully) they end on a high note, scoring this as a win for Cheney.

Smith:

Cheney biographer Stephen Hayes noted the story this morning on the blog of The Weekly Standard.

"Is the mainstream media coming around?" he asked.

Calderone:

Still, despite criticism from prominent voices on the left, the piece is getting a lot of play. 

But neither of these posts engages on the merits of the article itself. Calderone chooses to focus on Glenn’s critique of the WaPo’s use of anonymous sources, and not his demonstration that the documents cited by WaPo refute its claims. And he cites only my "immoral and irresponsible" comment, and not my description of the huge detail WaPo ignored (the rapport-based interrogation that directly preceded his cooperation) nor my focus on the dishonest chronology the WaPo presents in the story. 

In other words, half of Glenn’s critique and all of mine have to do with evidentiary problems in the story, not an argument based on our opposition to torture itself (though half of Glenn’s might be characterized as such). 

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Cheney’s Sophistry on Torture Investigations

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It will not surprise you to learn that PapaDick parsed wildly about what Obama has said about torture in Cheney’s defense of torture today. Five times today, Cheney claimed that Obama is "going back on his word," "his promise," that "his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel."

President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel.

[snip]

We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn’t be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration. Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they’re reversing course on that. 

The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the administration. He’s now saying, well, this isn’t anything that he’s got anything to do with. He’s up on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and his attorney general is going back and doing something that the president said some months ago he wouldn’t do. 

[snip]

Instead, they’re out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions, threatening contrary to what the president originally said. They’re going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations. I just think it’s an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say. 

[snip]

I think if you look at the Constitution, the president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land. The attorney general’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the cabinet. The president’s the one who bears this responsibility. And for him to say, gee, I didn’t have anything to do with it, especially after he sat in the Oval Office and said this wouldn’t happen, then Holder decides he’s going to do it.

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Your Daily WaPo Torture Apology Debunking

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I will say this for today’s daily installment of the WaPo torture apology. The WaPo’s two spook reporters, Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick, at least note–in paragraph 10–that having Buzzy Krongard speak for everyone at CIA might not be logically valid.

It is impossible to extrapolate from the small sample contacted by Washington Post reporters about the effect the varied inquiries are having on the thousands of agency employees, more than one-third of whom are spread around the world. But among the dozens of officials who were part of the program and either remain active or have retired, feelings run high about how the White House and the Justice Department have handled the issue. 

But they never get around to challenging Buzzy and their other sources themselves. They never point out that a lot of the whining their sources do is either transparently bogus or just plain whining. And they present numerous sources from the CIA itself debunking the cries of low morale from the torture apologists, yet still let the torture apologists dictate Pincus and Warrick’s conclusion that the torture investigation has and will devastate CIA morale.

Take the claimed worries about whether the legal advice from one Administration carries over to another one.

A much-discussed question is whether the legal reassurances of one administration carry over to its successor. "When a previous administration says something was legal, and the next says it doesn’t matter, the result is hesitancy to take on cutting-edge missions," the former senior official warned. 

I can’t count the number of times that Obama Administration officials have stated that no one who followed John Yoo’s transparently bad legal advice will be prosecuted, but here’s how Eric Holder reiterated that point in his announcement of the investigation.

Further, [the men and women in our intelligence community] need to be protected from legal jeopardy when they act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance. That is why I have made it clear in the past that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees. I want to reiterate that point today, and to underscore the fact that this preliminary review will not focus on those individuals.

Yet Pincus and Warrick simply print that complaint, without pointing out the entire premise of it is wrong.

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The WaPo Declares Itself Unable to Find the Truth

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The WaPo wants you to know that it–one of the most storied newspapers in American history–is absolutely incapable of sorting through the facts about whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torture turned him into a helpful college professor of terror.

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result.

So, throwing up its institutional hands and declaring itself unable to find the truth, let’s look at what it does instead.

First, in a 1,400 word article written with the assistance of both of WaPo’s spook reporters, they neglect to mention that, after KSM’s most intense torture ended, the CIA started to use rapport-based interrogation with him. I guess they didn’t think that little detail–that the treatment of KSM immediately preceding the time when he was so cooperative and helpful actually adopted a different approach to interrogation–was worthy of mention.

And that is particularly remarkable considering the most detailed story of that rapport-based interrogation also includes the details about KSM’s helpful lecturing that–the WaPo now claims–have previously not been publicized. Call me crazy, but I’m betting the same CIA sources that told the NYT about how successful rapport was with KSM are among those boasting to WaPo about KSM’s little lecture circuit. But I guess the WaPo, faced with this "irresolvable" problem, doesn’t want to muddy its confusion by mentioning, even once, the use of rapport-based interrogation with KSM.

Then there’s the WaPo’s chronological muddying. It treats several different kinds of sources–the IG Report, the Pre-Eminent Source document written in the wake of and almost certainly as a response to the IG Report, and the human sources boasting of KSM’s lecture series–as if there were no temporal or reliability distinction between the them. Which means they use events that happened in 2005 and 2006, the lecture series, to reinforce claims made by a propagandistic document produced on July 13, 2004. Both of which, of course, happened long after KSM’s torture. But that doesn’t stop the WaPo from implying a causal effect between the torture and the cooperation that happened years later.

This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques. 

And, while we’re on chronological muddying, it bears mentioning that the WaPo doesn’t note that KSM went from capture to torture in a matter of weeks, so any claim that he was uncooperative–weighed against two years of rapport-based interrogation–is completely  bogus.

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Marc Ambinder’s Cave

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platos_allegory_of_the_cave.thumbnail.jpgI was going to leave well enough alone–to take Marc Ambinder’s limited apology for labeling DFHs who believed the threat level system to be politicized as "gut haters," accept that he is at least thinking about these things, and move on.

But there are a couple of passages from his post that really embody the things that–as I said before-make his take on the threat levels an excellent example of what I think is wrong with Village journalism–and why. Ambinder has been describing his thought process for assessing the threat levels (both then as now) as akin to someone in Plato’s cave whose entire reality consists solely of the shadows he sees on the wall of the cave.

For example, take his revised assertion that it was correct to distrust the DFHs belief that the threat levels were politicized.

I still think that some journalists were right to be skeptical of the doubters at the time. I think that some journalists were correct to question how they arrived at the beliefs they arrived at.

I was trying to make this point in my earlier post, but thankfully Ambinder gives me a chance to do it again. Ambinder describes himself as assessing the threat levels by understanding what the different "sides" in the debate were saying, assessing their credibility, and then deciding which was right based (I guess) on each side’s credibility. He suggests that he was right to dismiss the DFHs’ claims–and therefore the assertion that the threat levels were politicized–based on the DFHs themselves. In neither Ambinder’s original column nor in his follow-up does Ambinder accept that there was an abundance of evidence that a journalist might use to assess the threat levels himself, to assess the claims the DFHs were making independently of their credibility or lack thereof. So to use the cave analogy, Ambinder was satisfied that–having identified that the shadow he was seeing on his cave wall came from we DFHs, he had no need to turn around and look at the thing itself, to assess it of his own accord.

Then there’s Ambinder actually weighing whether he can, now, conclude that the threat levels were politicized. In his follow-up post he weighs Ridge’s statement in the context of his squabbles with Rummy and Ashcroft.

Reading the excerpts from Tom Ridge’s book, it is not clear to me that he is actually arguing against interest, or that he is correct. Read more →

Rick Scott Aspires to Do as al Qaeda Did

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bush-clearing-brush.thumbnail.jpgIn 2001, terrorists capitalized on George Bush’s inattention and extended vacation to strike at America. Now, Rich Scott’s Conservatives for Patients’ Rights believes it can adopt al Qaeda’s tactics by attacking our country while the President is on vacation. "Even on vacation, the President will get no quarter on the public option from Conservatives for Patients’ Rights." And they’re running an ad that somewhat bizarrely tries to mock Obama’s vacation.

There are obvious problems with this strategy. First, regardless of what you think of the White House strategy on health care, mocking Obama for taking the first week of vacation he has had all year will only invite comparisons with Bush, who spent 977 days at either Camp David or Crawford during his presidency–well over a year on the pig farm where he twiddled as New Orleans drowned and blew off warnings about an imminent al Qaeda by dismissing briefers for "covering their ass." Conservatives for PR may be trying to mock Obama by suggesting he’s traveling to an effete location with no brush to clear. But at least this President hasn’t spent significant portions of his term AWOL during crises, like Bush did.

The big question is whether our press corps will step up to the challenge. 

Already, they have enabled groups like Conservatives for PR to use terrorist tactics–the staging of scary public spectacles–to hijack the debate on health care. The media has magnified fake fear-mongering stunts rather than calming the fear by cutting through the misinformation. And perhaps predictably, the usual suspects are out pitching Conservatives for PR’s nonsensical ad for them. Apparently, Joe Scarborough and Mike Allen don’t understand that treating this ad seriously–reporting this ad without, at the same time, highlighting the irony of attacking Obama on an area in which he exposes Bush’s failures by comparison–only proves that they have been captured by the fear-mongerers hoping to put profits above Americans’ lives.

No matter, though. The President may be headed off for his reasonable one week vacation. But the rest of us will remain vigilant: you and me, the 5,000 people who have given $300,000 in a matter of days to reward those who will stand up and defend real health care reform, and of course, the tireless Jane, who I hope takes a long week on a beach once we win this fight. Read more →

Ambinder: Sorry I Was So Stupid, But I Was Right To Be Stupid

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Mark Ambinder takes the opportunity of Ridge’s confirmation that the terror alerts were one big political game to claim he was justified in believing that we DFHers were wrong about the alerts–and in doing so, demonstrates what is so wrong with so much of Village journalism.

Journalists, including myself, were very skeptical when anti-Bush liberals insisted that what Ridge now says is true, was true. We were wrong.  Our skepticism about the activists’ conclusions was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence.  But journalists should have been even more skeptical about the administration’s pronouncements. And yet — we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt.  We can see, now, how pre-war intelligence was manipulated, how the entire Washington establishment (including Congressional Democrats(, including the media, was manipulated by a valid fear of the unknown — but a fear we now know was consciously, deliberately, inculcated. 

Note, first of all, the false binary that Ambinder the so-called journalist sets up:

Our skepticism about the activists’ conclusions was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence. 

Somehow, Ambinder read the minds of "activists" across the country and confirmed that "these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush." Apparently, you see, Ambinder can read the minds of activists, but not Ridge and Bush.

And so then, after reading those minds and/or simply making shit up about why and how "activists" concluded the terror alert system was bogus, Ambinder says that short of having the raw intelligence, journalists have no way of independently assessing whether the terror alerts were a big political game. Either you have gut hatred or you have raw intelligence–there are no other means to get to the truth.

God forbid a journalist use simple empiricism–retrospectively matching terror alerts with reports on which they were based–to assess the terror alerts. God forbid a journalist learn that we went to Code Orange because someone claimed terrorists were going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch, and from that learn to be skeptical of terror alerts going forwards. It’s not as if, after all, the election eve alert was a one-off, the only alert in which the hype was later shown to be over-hype. There was a pattern. Read more →

A Chebby In The National Driveway & Lesson In Healthcare Messaging

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24365333-d0ce332479a4cfa5f9580b59294330344a8c6481-scaled.thumbnail.jpgBarack Obama is bad and he’s nationwide. And he’s got a brand new ride. Check out the sled he has rolled up in the driveway of the South Portico of the White House (image by Mark Knoller). I guess when you own GM it ain’t that hard to get a Chevrolet.

Say what you will about NASCAR, they are the absolute masters of brilliant product placement, fan involvement and brand messaging. They never miss an opportunity, and always have the discipline, to be on message, be consistent, sell their ideology and run a forceful and effective PR ship. Today, that ruthless efficiency was brought to the White House and Barack Obama. From the LA Times:

Wednesday afternoon President Obama appeared live on the ESPN2 show "NASCAR Now." The show originated from the White House because three-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson was being honored for, well, being a NASCAR champion, on the South Lawn of the White House.

"NASCAR Now" host Nicole Manske and talented analyst Brad Daugherty grilled our president about who might win the Sprint Cup championship this year and what he thought about Johnson. We were rewarded with a penetrating answer to that question that included the quote: "He looks like a pretty young guy."

Like I said, brilliant. NASCAR got their champion driver, Jimmy Johnson, in the White House, rolled his #48 Rick Hendrick Lowe’s/Kobalt Tools Chevrolet Impala up for some glamor shots and prime video footage and they managed to get it all covered by ESPN for their proprietary NASCAR show, NASCAR Now.

Now that, folks, is how you sell your product. Were it only that the Barack Obama White House had a fraction of these skills in selling their national healthcare policy. Not so much. In fact, it has been an astoundingly flimsy and ill conceived pitch almost from the start, and we still don’t know what in the world Obama and the White House really stand for on the topic. As Adam Green at Open Left put it:

One could parse, and say Rahm’s quote could still include the possibility of bipartisanship, but still: there’s something called message discipline. The last four days have seen: statement, backtrack, statement, backtrack.
…
Seriously. Can someone describe for me some master plan that might be at play here? If not, White House communications team — WTF?

No kidding. As Adam noted, Jon Stewart sums it up beautifully:

Mr. Read more →