The New York Times enterprise story on how media networks have been exploited by military analysts currying favor with the government received, um, no attention from the media.
Well, okay, a analysis of media coverage found two mentions of the story, and both were during the April 24 edition of PBS' NewsHour.
So how come nobody has picked up what was arguably one of the biggest exposes of White House blunders? CONTINUED »
Based on the New York Times revelations that many military experts, stumping as television talking heads and newspaper guest op-ed columnists, are paid (with cash, trips, or access) agents of the Bush administration, producers and editors might begin taking a more cynical eye to booking these men in uniform. Because they were so apt to be neutral pundits in the first place. [E&P]
David Barstow’s penned a mammoth article this weekend on how White House and Pentagon officials deployed new networks’ “military analysts” to spread state-sponsored propaganda. And it’s pretty startling…
The report comes after the NY Times sued the Pentagon for access to over 8,000 pages of evidence proving a dangerous, frightening link between our government and media “surrogates. More than that, many of the analysts had direct business relations with military contractors and other corporations profiting from the war.
Again, the entire piece is ridiculously lengthy, but here are two telling snippets:
With a fierce presidential battle and governors' sex lives to worry about, the White House beat is actually quite boring. Normally the dog and pony shows given by press secretary Tony Fratto were, like his predecessors, an excuse for David Gregory to get some airtime on C-SPAN. But now he's got his own MSNBC show! So what's a D.C. reporter to do? Fewer and fewer reporters are attending the press conferences, and even Fratto admitted there wouldn't be any "new major announcements" in a speech from President Bush.
If talking points are uttered in an empty room and nobody's there to hear it, is Bush still a total tard?
Tony Snow left the White House, as press secretary, in August supposedly because the pay cut he took to leave Fox News for the new gig wouldn't cover the costs of supporting a family and cancer treatment. (He battled colon cancer, and is now fighting abdominal cancer.) Lucky him, then, that his old friends at Fox News are looking out for him: He's becoming the permanent fill-in host for Bill O'Reilly's radio show, Radio Factor. Today marks his first appearance with the new title, and the first of many paychecks that best government wages. [BOR]
DEMANDS MET That was fast. Just a few hours after the White House did not comment, but requested a change to the New York Times CIA story, the New York Times has changed the sub-hed online and will issue a correction in tomorrow's paper. [The Politico]
Demands The White House declines to comment on the New York Times A1 story on CIA torture tapes, but is "formally requesting that NYT correct the sub-headline of this story," which states that the "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said." Isn't requesting correction a passive aggressive comment? [MediaBistro]
Matthew Dowd, that Democrat who helped who helped Bush get elected (no, not Gore), has scored a deal with ABC News as an on-air contributor and blogger.
Dowd will be joining Karl Rove, ex-communications director Nicolle Wallace and former speech writers Michael Gerson and Matthew Scully as old Bushies who were able to score media jobs after leaving the White House.
With Ted Kennedy nabbing $8 million for his memoirs, the Rover getting something like $3 million, we’re starting to think politics would have been a more profitable foray into journalism than majoring in English.
The New York Times is considering doing away with traditional datelines – which tell readers when a reporter filed a story, even if it actually appears in print on a later date – and instead opting just to tell readers where the story was filed, so articles don't feel "stale" even if they've been sitting on the shelf for a few days.
Or three years. CONTINUED »
When seeking out a journalist to discuss race relations with, who else would Bush want but the guy who listened intently to Bill O’Reilly’s realization that black restaurant patrons were polite?
The White House offered a Bush interview with NPR’s senior correspondent and sometimes Fox News contributor, Juan Williams. NPR wasn’t interested in having Williams do the piece; Bush was only interested in speaking with Williams. So NPR, which never had an exclusive with Bush, let the piece pass.
Bush still got his Williams interview—on Fox news. Along with talking about race, Bush got to opine about the 2008 election and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
While Fox may play softball with the President, they threw a curveball at NPR. A Fox spokeswoman said, "NPR's lack of news judgment is astonishing, and their treatment of a respected journalist like Juan Williams is appalling."
Though to be fair, Fox’s sense of news judgment and idea of who is a respected journalist are insane.
Was it Sheryl Crow and Laurie David's tiff with Karl Rove that put Arthur Sulzberger & Co. over the edge? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But either way, after Frank Rich announced in his Sunday column that the Times would no longer attend the White House Correspondents dinner, the media bubble has entered analyzation mode.
Why is the Times choosing this year to cease its RSVPs? Was it that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was mostly focused on snapping a photo with Sanjaya? Or that the post-dinner debate has mostly focused on whether there was spitting involved in that Crow-David-Rove incident?
CONTINUED »
• The entertainment "really, really sucked" at Saturday night's White House Correspondents' Dinner.
• Anything that will "take lowbrow culture seriously and treat highbrow culture frivolously" is alright by us.
• YouTube is very, very sorry that it accidentally-on-purpose deleted this clip of presidential candidate John McCain singing the impromptu ditty, "Bomb Iran."
• John Edwards takes heat for his $400 haircut. When asked whether this constituted extreme vanity, an Edwards rep sniped, 'Not everyone can carry off the low-maintenance pageboy lesbian look."
• Chinese furniture manufacturing companies are accidentally racist. Related: Don Imus rumored to have "large" ownership in Chinese furniture manufacturing company.
• "Abs architect David Zinczenko will bring his expertise on love and relationships to The Oprah Winfrey Show." So many punchlines, so little time.
Despite being recently voted off of American Idol, and having nothing whatsoever to do with journalism or politics, Sanjaya Malakar apparently caused a minor stir at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner.
And for those of you not keeping score, here's a quick tally of the White House Correspondents' Dinner invitations.
Jossip Editors: 0
Sanjaya Malakar's hair: 1.
Not that we're bitter or anything.
Okay, before I get to that, I want to address something else, because you and I had a conversation last week that got a whole lot of play in a lot of places where I used the term "partisan" in describing one of your questions. And I've thought a lot about that, and I was wrong. So I want to apologize and tell you I'm sorry for it. And the reason I do that is not only because it's the right thing to do, because I want people in this room and also people who watch these to understand that the relations in this room are professional and collegial. And if I expect you to do right by us, you have every right to expect that I'll do right by you.
So, in any event, I just want to say I'm sorry for that.
That's White House press secretary Tony Snow apologizing to NBC's David Gregory upon realizing that, ya know, a lot of Americans watch NBC's news broadcasts. More than any other network, in fact.
From today's New York Times:
But did they mean it this way:
.. or this way?:
Behind Bush's Address Lies a Deep History [Elisabeth Bumiller, NYT]
C-Span is 0wn1ng the rights to Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents Dinner speech, claiming the video clips posted on YouTube and ifilm.com are violating its copyright. Not to mention C-Span is now selling its own version of the clip on its website. (C-Span, we should remind you, is a not-for-profit television venture.)
Sound errily familiar? Of course it does.
It was just a few weeks ago that NBC demanded the video sharing sites take down its Saturday Night Live digital shorts featuring castmember Andy Samberg and Natalie Portman. Like those SNL clips, Colbert's popular diatribe against President Bush (2.7 million YouTube viewings in the first 48 hours) was the most buzzworthy event to come out of the public TV network — with Al Franken sparring with Bill O'Reilly on C-Span's Book TV being the only close rival. Now "corporate" is trying to control the best unintentional viral marketing gimmick to come out of that ignored section of the dial.
We haven't checked in with Colbert, so we can't gauge his reaction. But when we ran into Samberg last week at Marquee (he was hanging with Amy Poehler at at a Death Cab For Cutie video release party), we asked him about NBC's course of action against YouTube. "I was pissed," Samberg told us, but "they [NBC] had the legal right to do it." But as Kevin Federline showed us with music, just because you can doesn't mean you should.
(NB: In our dutiful research for this item, we tried loading the clip of Colbert on C-Span.org. It didn't work.)
A Comedian's Riff on Bush Prompts an E-Spat [Noam Cohen, NYT]
Related: Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents Dinner Assault
It's been much talked about. Widely mocked. Thoroughly dissected. And, in the end, pretty damn annoying. It's Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner, where many have pointed out he was able to turn President Bush into a quivering-lipped sourpuss. Our take: President Bush is a quivering-lipped sourpuss. But we want your take, so we're handing you copies of the entire speech so you can witness the comedic ups and downs of a Comedy Central vet taking the stage he'll never be invited back to.
The second part of the clip, after the jump.
CONTINUED »
Meet Tony Snow. You used to know him as a Fox News talking head. Now you know him as the White House's talking head. And it's a job he's well prepared for: He spins "news" like a pro. He asks the tough questions. He calls proud Mexicans "idiots." But most importantly, he makes Joe Scarborough's face look not as long.
Tony Snow truthiness record [YouTube]
Say goodbye to the double chin. Say goodbye to the on-the-cusp-of-sweating forehead. Say goodbye to the not-so-subtly snide remarks made to the press corp. We'll miss you, Scott McClellan — but not as much as NBC's drunk dialing David Gregory, who fondly refers to McClellan as a "jerk."
The real question, of course, is why this announcement wasn't made at 9pm on Friday.
Staff Overhaul Continues at White House [John O'Neil, NYT]
From Dick Cheney's first interview about "the worst day of his life," when he shot hunting partner Harry Whittington:
"Ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry," he said in a televised interview with the Fox News anchor Brit Hume in Washington.
Glad we got the chain of events linked up, in a manner that's uncomfortably close to a certain Passover sing-a-long, "Had Gadya":
A fire burned the heavy stick that beat the dog
that bit the cat
That ate the kid,
One little kid
My father bought for two zuzim.
Cheney Takes Full Responsibility for Shooting Hunter [Maria Newman, NYT]
Editorial Director
