Washington Post on The Huffington Post

Washington Post Forced To Correct Report That Public Enemy Called 9/11 A Joke

2009-12-04T17:10:49Z

ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper offers up, via Twitter, a Washington Post correction that addresses what Tapper terms an example of "unreal idiocy."

Let's take a look:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Oh, yeah! That's some unreal idiocy all right! Especially considering the article in question was about Public Enemy, the band, and their work in outreach to the homeless. Such an article demands that the reporter have a least some passing knowledge of the subject.

The important distinction between "911" and "9/11" could have been made a number of different ways -- by either listening to the song, or reading the title of the song or simply noting that the song "911 Is A Joke" was on an album released on May 26, 1990.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Washington Post : Ben Bernanke Has Earned Second Term

2009-12-04T02:22:07Z

Facing a Senate confirmation vote on a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke finds himself under attack from both ends of the political spectrum. Libertarian Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), abetted by a number of liberal Democrats, has made Mr. Bernanke's alleged failures a principal argument for his bill to subject the Fed to intrusive congressional auditing. Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-described democratic socialist, has announced that he will put a "hold" on Mr. Bernanke's renomination, forcing the Senate to come up with 60 votes to proceed to a vote. The wrong-headedness of this left-right pincer emphasizes the moderate wisdom of President Obama's decision to offer Mr. Bernanke another term.

Battle Between David Broder And Harry Reid Heats Up: Broder Comments 'Mind-Boggling'

2009-11-25T17:19:43Z

David Broder simply doesn't understand the way that today's Senate operates, Jim Manley concluded on Wednesday. Manley, the senior communications adviser for Majority Leader Harry Reid, said that the longtime Washington Post columnist's charge that Reid pales in comparison to former Senate leaders misunderstands the way the contemporary Senate works.

"It's all fine and dandy to pine for the golden days of yesteryear, when politics was practiced differently, but that's not the reality we're dealing with," Manley told HuffPost. "What David fails to understand is that Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate are being pulled along by the so-called birthers, the Tea Party movement and other far right fringe groups that are completely at odds with the views David claims to hold."

Manley said that Broder's failure to see the GOP for what it is today is common among Washington-based pundits.

"David might be one of the worst examples, but he highlights a myopic, inside-the-belt phenomenon that is at odds with the views of many Americans," said Manley. There's even a term for such thinking: Broderism.

The Broder-Reid spat broke into the open on Saturday night when Reid dismissed him as "a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while." (Broder has taken a buy-out from the Post but continues to write two columns a week on a contract basis.) Reid was peeved at a column Broder had written accusing the Senate bill of not cutting costs adequately.

It may seem petty, but the Reid-Broder battle is a proxy fight between two competing approaches to politics. Reid, by attacking Broder, puts himself on the side of those attacking the Washington politico-media establishment.

"Maybe I have an idealized view of what a Senate leader ought to be," Broder told Politico Wednesday for a story headlined: "David Broder: Harry Reid's no Mike Mansfield." "But I've seen the Senate when a leader could lift it to those heights...I wish it had that kind of leadership now."

That's not possible, said Manley, because Mansfield and Lyndon Johnson, revered Senate leaders, had a Republican Party willing to work across the aisle.

"LBJ had Robert Taft [R-Ohio], William Knowland [R-Calif.] and Everett Dirksen [R-Ill.]. Mike Mansfield had Dirksen and Hugh Scott [R-Pa.]. What David fails to acknowledge is that the current Repub leadership is betting on the president to fail," said Manley.

"Why he can't understand that is mind-boggling."

"That's an interesting argument and certainly there are differences between the people now and the people then and the environment that was there," Broder told HuffPost. "But if that's their effort to explain why Senator Reid has chosen the tactics that he's chosen, that doesn't strike me as an adequate explanation."

Broder disputed Manley's contention that the GOP blocks everything. "It is not a fact that the Republicans have refused everything. At least we don't have much evidence of that so far. If he's talking about a specific reaction to the pieces of the Obama agenda that have come up so far, then he's in effect saying Obama is so frustrated that he's about to abandon everything. I don't suspect it's the case. When the first measure relating to Afghanistan comes to the floor that generalization will collapse."

Broder is probably right that the GOP will back Obama in his effort to expand the war in Afghanistan, but Manley was arguing more on the domestic policy front.

He references the fight to pass an unemployment insurance extension, which the GOP eventually supported but slowed down for several weeks.

"How David can make this kind of comment after UI bill is beyond me. It took more than four weeks to pass a bill in the senate that it took the House an hour to pass on the suspension calendar," said Manley.

Broder acknowledged the unemployment point. "It's a good argument as it implies to the unemployment extension. There have been many occasions where I have been very critical of the Republican stance."

"It is a different Senate now and if I were writing on that topic -- Mansfield, Baker, LBJ and so on -- we might very well agree. But that was not the subject of that column and in my mind, that is not a particularly powerful or relevant rebuttal to the subject I was talking about, which is whether or not the potential savings everybody knows are needed are there in the bill Senator Reid brought to the Senate floor."

Manley had specific gripes about Broder's health care column, in which he cited deficit hawks to make the case that the Democratic Senate bill might not reduce costs.

Manley said that Broder's column was discussed by "puzzled" Democrats in the Senate cloakroom. "No one could understand it," said Manley. "We had the self-described gold standard of analysis - the CBO - highlighting that the bill reduces the deficit. And David utterly failed to acknowledge that was the case."

Broder often refers to the Congressional Budget Office with the highest praise, but relied mostly in his column on "experts" who proclaim themselves "bipartisan" but whose goals are to dismantle Social Security, Medicare and other vestiges of the New Deal.

Broder's argument was dismissed by his colleague at the Post, Ezra Klein. Broder, however, said he didn't have to look far to find people who agreed with him - which is, in fact, one of the biggest problems the blogosphere has with his type of writing and thinking. "It was hardly a unique viewpoint," Broder said accurately.

If Broder thinks that the GOP is genuinely willing to work with Democrats, the only centrist position between he and Reid might be in agreeing to disagree. "We have a Republic leadership betting on the president to fail," said Manley. "David's problem is he thinks this is all on the up and up."

Washington Post To Close LA Bureau

2009-11-24T22:07:49Z

LOS ANGELES — The Washington Post will close its remaining U.S. bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago at the end of the year to save money and will focus news efforts on covering the nation's capital.

Six correspondents are being offered jobs in Washington, while three news aides will be let go Dec. 31.

Washington Post To Close New York, Chicago, LA Bureaus

2009-11-24T17:25:00Z

WASHINGTON — The Washington Post will close its remaining U.S. bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago at the end of the year to save money and will focus news efforts on covering the nation's capital.

Six correspondents are being offered jobs in Washington, while three news aides will be let go Dec. 31.

Blacks Suffer From 'Depression-Level' Joblessness

2009-11-24T13:23:08Z

Joblessness for 16-to-24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions -- 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population. And last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment in the District, home to many young black men, rose to 11.9 percent from 11.4 percent, even as it stayed relatively stable in Virginia and Maryland.

LA Times Twitter Guidelines Announced

2009-11-23T17:31:42Z

Los Angeles Times staffers have been warned: the Twitterverse isn't safe. Editor Russ Stanton and assistant managing editor Henry Fuhrmann have issued new guidelines governing the use of social media like Twitter and Facebook. They include:

• Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.

• Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.

• Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.

• Just as political bumper stickers and lawn signs are to be avoided in the offline world, so too are partisan expressions online.

The LAT is the latest in a string of publications to have issued guidelines to staff governing the use of social media. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have also published new rules, which, like the LAT's, were designed to protect the paper's objectivity in the eyes of its readers -- drawing the ire of bloggers and members of staff who saw them as overly restrictive. Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz vowed "to now hold forth only on the weather and dessert recipes."

Emily Miller: Jack Abramoff Scandal Still Hurts

2009-11-23T11:09:42Z

She claims to be well past the events that turned her into a pawn in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, but as she talks about each twist and turn, the words pouring out in torrents, it is clear that the wounds remain raw.

Hayes Permar: Clashes in the Capital: Sports Lap Politics for Feuds of the Week

2009-11-20T12:35:09Z

White House vs. Fox News is so last month. The final health care throw-down in the Senate hasn't quite arrived. But not since the Bob McDonnell-Creigh Deeds beatdown last month have we had a fresh, juicy political feud for the average Metro rider to talk about and take sides. Fortunately, the D.C. sports scene has been abnormally feisty this week, ripe with guy-code breakers, wars waged on the airwaves (and transcribed into the blogosphere--thanks, Dan!), and blood-drawing fisticuffs. Here's the lowdown on what went down in the District this week, as folks inside the beltway continued to prove you don't necessarily have to have winning sports teams to have interesting sports teams.

Capitals' Matt Bradley vs. Rangers' Aaron Voros

Sure, it's not Pelosi-Cheney on the name recognition scale, but what it lacks in hype it more than makes up for in delivery, as Bradley finished just behind Miguel Cotto in the "person whose face I'd want to feel like the least" challenge this week. These guys have mixed it up a time or two before, so it's no surprise that they dropped the gloves when Voros and the Rangers visited Obamaville on Tuesday.

Though Bradley does get a great punch in early (and a tip of the hat to the announcer who transitions seamlessly from calling a hockey game to calling a fight, as it should be), you've got to pass the belt to Voros after what he did to Bradley's mug. Bradley and the Capitals got the win, though, and Washington got her favorite sports son, Ovi, back on the ice the same night, so it wasn't a total wash for the home team.

ESPN 980's Tony Kornheiser vs. 106.7 The Fan's Mike Wise

Ok, so he may be better known as Pardon The Interruption's Tony Kornheiser, or, depending on who you're reading/listening to The King of the Multi-Platform or "a bad guy with a dark heart" , but since the most recent flare-up in this rivalry took place on the dial, we're calling it a radio war, replete with the classic "callers calling in sports radio to talk about the sports radio spat" phenomenon (again, who needs good teams?!). DC Sports Bog best brings you up to speed here and here , but basically this round started on Monday with Kornheiser taking a run on his radio show at Wise for a column he had written about the Redskins. Wise countered with a calm, but measured reply, and Kornheiser basically defused the tension (for now) by teasing a comeback, but ultimately moving on. As for my take, I am completely biased in that every time I watch Pardon The Interruption (daily), I switch from thinking Kornheiser is the best talking head in sports and Wilbon is number two, to putting Wilbon one and Kornheiser two, and back and forth. I have almost no opinion of Mike Wise other than that I would guess if they replaced Kornheiser with him on PTI, I'd be furious. That being said, while he may still dominate the national sports scene, it seems like Kornheiser may have lost a little ground on his home turf. He works for the station owned by The Man (Redskins owner Dan Snyder), and even if that doesn't influence a word that comes out of his mouth it affects how he's viewed here, and for a guy who likes to give local shout-outs on PTI, that's got to wound him a little. (side note: we can't all afford to eat at 1789, Tony--maybe give some love to Ben's Chili Bowl). Reading some of this stuff unfold really does start to make Kornheiser look like a guy who holds grudges (sometimes self-fabricated ones). I've often heard him say he doesn't read any of the stuff written about him. This is probably a win-win for everyone, except maybe sports talk radio listeners.

Shaq vs. Gilbert Arenas

This one takes a little reading between the lines, as Shaq was never actually in Washington this week. But his team was--and that's where things start to get interesting. Last week, HuffPo Sports (in addition to NBC and other outlets) blogged about rumors that the reason Shaq's wife Shaunie O'Neal recently filed for seperation is that Shaq has been sleeping with Gilbert Arenas' fiancée Laura Govan (really want to TMZ it up? Govan is pregnant. Can you imagine the daytime television ratings that would be shattered if Shaq, Arenas, Shaunie O'Neal, and Laura Govan all went on the next "paternity test" episode of Maury Povich?). I imagine many people's response to this story is similar to that of my buddy McInnis who said, "Yeah, but don't you think stuff like this goes on all the time in pro sports?" Good point. But when you're talking about two potential All-Stars (jokes about Arenas' start to the season aside, pre-knee injury he was arguably a top 10 NBA player), one of them is Shaq, so I say this qualifies as a potentially serious beef.

So what happens to Shaq a few days before his Cavaliers' only road game in D.C.? O'Neal winds up on the injury report with a strained shoulder--mutliple stories refer to it as a "mysterious shoulder injury"--and takes a few games off. Cleveland coach Mike Brown all but admits that Shaq isn't technically injured, and the "we're resting him because it's early in the season" company line plays on the surface because Shaq's old. (Look at him, he's old....you can't take his house...he's too old...). But as I mentioned, Shaq no-showed in D.C. on Wednesday. I know this town likes dress stains for verification, but for me hacked emails plus mysterious injuries is enough to draw some decent conclusions. David Stern should figure out how to make sure these teams meet in the playoffs (Cavs as the 2-seed, Wiz in the 7-spot? I'm just saying). And give Maury Povich a whistle.

The Fan vs. The Man
Chalk one up for the good guys. Redskins fans had gotten used to sound and fury offseasons that typically signified nothing once the regular season began. Head-scratching coaching decision and inconsistent quarterback play have become as regular as the leaves changing color each fall. But Redskins' owner Dan Snyder twisted the knife this season--seemingly in a move to prevent fans from complaining about the team, its ownership, coaches being pulled out of retirment homes (literally!)--by banning signs from being displayed in the stadium. Even signs intended to, say, honor the memory of late Redskins safety Sean Taylor fell under the ban.
Well, in a moment of inspired lucidity, Skins management did an about face and last Sunday announced allowed signs (one that were in "good taste" of course) and banners into the stadium. So inspired, the Redskins went out and beat a division leader for their third win of the season! Now if we could only make getting to the stadium less of a nightmare. Maybe someone can sneak something in as part of the health care bill?

WaPo's Cohen Suggests That Nidal Hasan Investigation Needs More McCarthyism

2009-11-19T12:30:03Z

As facts continue to emerge about alleged Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan, reasonable people should be able to agree that serious questions need to be asked regarding how he advanced in his career and why he was apathetically shuttled from assignment to assignment by a military bureaucracy that just didn't feel like confronting the fact that Hasan seemed to be a deeply disturbed individual.

Or, if you are the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, you could just suggest that what's needed is a recapturing of that old McCarthyist spirit:

Who promoted Peress? That was the question posed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the indefatigable red-hunter of the 1950s, regarding an obscure army dentist named Irving Peress who was promoted from captain to major despite having refused to answer questions regarding his loyalty. That right-wing rallying cry ought to be revived, only this time to pose a much more serious question: Who the hell promoted Nidal Malik Hasan?

Need I point out that Cohen's entire premise is psychotically confused? Irving Peress' crimes -- insofar as there was once a time when these could be considered "crimes" -- was to refuse to disclose his affiliations with the American Labor Party when he filled out a "loyalty-review form." On the other hand, Nidal Hasan is charged with thirteen counts of premeditated murder.

But more to the point, what the Fort Hood tragedy clearly calls for is a reasonable, case-specific inquiry into what steps could have been taken to prevent these murders, and who was ultimately responsible for failing to take them. But here we have Cohen, gratuitously invoking the need for some sort of frantic witch-hunt which, followed to its logical absurdity, would lead the inquiry far from the facts of the case, into the paranoid territory where people are persecuted for simply holding certain specific beliefs.

An ordinary columnist, capable of thinking clearly, could have written about the need to attend to the bureaucratic failures that could have saved lives without veering off into the phantom zone. But, to borrow from David Lowery: in the mind of Richard Cohen, wheels they turn and gears they grind, buildings collapse in slow motion, and trains collide.

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Jim Wallis: New Tools for Peace in Afghanistan

2009-11-16T10:24:25Z

When all you have is a hammer everything seems like a nail. No famous line more aptly applies to the president's current dilemma of seeking the best solution for Afghanistan. When it comes to foreign policy, if all you have is military options then every situation becomes an argument for a troop escalation. For Afghanistan, President Obama has been presented with four options -- all hammers -- ranging in size from 10,000 to 40,000 more troops. Gratefully, he has sent his advisors back to the drawing board to come up with some new options.

The Times of London reported that President Obama also spoke with Karl Eikenberry yesterday, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, who has raised concerns about increasing U.S. troop presence without clear progress from President Karzai in cleaning up corruption and mismanagement. Without a dependable and reliable partner in Afghanistan, our ambassador to the country is raising fundamental concerns about adding more forces. As a former general himself, Mr. Eikenberry is well aware of the military issues at stake in the country, having commanded the U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2006-2007. But that experience has also increased his concern that the U.S. is failing when it comes to a strategy vital to our success in that deeply battered country: development. The Washington Post reports:

Eikenberry also has expressed frustration with the relative paucity of funds set aside for spending on development and reconstruction this year in Afghanistan, a country wrecked by three decades of war. Earlier this summer, he asked for $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending for 2010, a 60 percent increase over what Obama had requested from Congress, but the request has languished even as the administration has debated spending billions of dollars on new troops.

The Japanese government, directly preceding President Obama's visit, has announced a 5 billion dollar investment in aid for Afghanistan over the next five years. This is part of Japan's "New Strategy to Counter the Threat of Terrorism." It recognizes the need for security forces but focuses primarily on humanitarian assistance and development aid:

...to improve Afghanistan's security, political measures will also be required. Among the insurgents, some moderate groups seem to be willing to put their arms down in exchange for security assurance and economic independence.

For the Government of Afghanistan to obtain confidence from its own people and to lay the grounds for long term political reconciliation, it is essential to stabilize people's lives and establish economic foundations. Tangible outcomes recognized by the people will be critical in areas of agriculture and rural development, infrastructure development, and education, health and other basic human needs.

The very candid and insightful statements by Ambassador Eikenberry are already changing the conversation here in Washington. And the clear signals from the president that he is unhappy with the narrow range of options he has been given clearly presents us with a real opportunity -- to offer a better way. I would call it a humanitarian and development surge in Afghanistan; we laid out the elements of it in a recent blog post. Since then, several leaders from both faith and development community organizations, some of whom are working on the ground in Afghanistan, have shown great interest in a new direction for Afghanistan and in offering some new options for the president.

Development and humanitarian assistance can no longer be an afterthought; they must be central to any strategy the U.S. government puts forward. It is time to stop arguing about the size of the hammer needed and begin looking at what other tools we might have in our belts.

In the meantime, pray for the president not to succumb to the logic of the hammers, but with patience and perseverance, to wait until we can find the better solutions we need for Afghanistan.

Jim Wallis is the author of The Great Awakening, Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners and blogs at www.godspolitics.com.

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Bella DePaulo: Pundit Contest Would Have Gone Down Better with a Spoonful of Psychology

2009-11-13T06:16:43Z

I've been following "America's Next Great Pundit Contest" over at the Washington Post. I love the idea. Once upon a time there were well-worn paths to the top of the press pile. The Post's contest, though, is based on the populist premise that smart, engaging, well-informed voices could come from just about anywhere.

I even like all the challenges the wannabe pundits have had to face. They've been required to write opinion pieces and blog posts, to name and begin a regular feature, and to engage with a topic that is beyond their comfort zone. Anyone can go to the Post website, read all the entries in each round, and vote for their favorite pundit. Bravo!

There's another part to the process. At the end of each round, before the voting is opened up to the public, a panel of Post reporters and bloggers critique the submissions of all of the candidates and announce their winner for the round. So what's wrong with that? (Continue reading here.)

Sarah Newman: Teens Need Kitchen Counter-Culture

2009-11-12T12:04:55Z

A recent New York Times Sunday Style section article reports on the increasingly prevalent cultural trend of cross-dressing amongst teenagers. While this isn't new in major metropolitan cities hugging the coasts, the article cited examples of the tensions that have arisen between students and school districts in what are typically more conservative bastions of our country, such as Mississippi and Texas. Whether they're emos, hippies, neo-1980s punks or straight edge kids, teens are craving for self-expression and identity, often through their appearance. Although there have been some legal hurdles, students are increasingly able to dress as they choose at school. What they're not choosing to use for self-exploration and definition is their food.

Whether they're cross-dressing, going punk or opting for LL Bean, kids are united in their food choices. They're filling their ravished, growing, pubescent stomachs is the same, uniform diet. It's like a buffet created by the Gap, offering corduroy or denim in a few cuts and colors. No wild Van Gogh splashes of colors or Pucci prints; just timeless, well-worn styles that fit multiple generations at once. Why are kids consuming the industrial monoculture foods?

An article in The Washington Post cites a recent study that demonstrates the impact of behavioral economics (aka freakanomics) on what kids are opting for in the lunch room. First, they don't like to be coerced into doing something. I don't know how much money was spent to figure out this rather logical conclusion about kids' eating behaviors, but at least there's now some data to back up this intuitive concept. Second, people prefer to feel a sense of empowerment in making their own choices. Applied to eating habits, this translates as the following: "when students think they are choosing to eat carrots, they like them better and are more likely to choose them outside the lunchroom as well."

Back over at The New York Times, editorial writer Verlyn Klinkenborg recently wrote about the plethora of apples at the turn of the 20th century (about 6,500 types) but most have disappeared from our kitchens. In our industrial food system, it's the equivalent today of visiting a Jelly Belly factory with exorbitant amount of colors and flavors, ranging from grass to dirt to boring cinnamon, that are carefully crafted by Jelly Belly food engineers.

However, like the rest of our food system, we're opting for monoculture. We have limited food choices, and they tend to be dull cogs of our industrialized food system that are serving us increasingly unhealthy, corn-laden, processed, uniform foods that are making us fatter. This is especially true in schools where cafeterias are serving up the same pre-cooked, uniform, un-nutritious foods nationwide. It's ironic that teens today are correctly pushing the social agenda in their schools to allow a diversity of identities to be expressed but are consuming foods that have little nutritional value and are uniform.

Food author and activist Michael Pollan wrote about the origins of apples in his book, The Botany of Desire, diversity has dwindled to just a few hundred spoke recently about food sustainability. He noted that, "the science of ecology is that the best way to achieve resilience, in any system, is by diversity: biodiversity and intellectual diversity." This applies to the food we eat, the way we dress, our ideas and beliefs. Diversity makes things sustainable. He continued, "a sustainable system is one that can go on indefinitely, without destroying the conditions on which it depends -- or without depending on conditions it can't depend on."

Diversity creates sustainable societies and helps them to survive. Teens, through their efforts to protect their self-identity at school, are helping to enabling sustainable, diverse cultures. We need to translate this same approach to our food systems by helping to foster a kitchen counter culture that celebrates and encourages diversity, sustainability and health in our foods. Teens, as cultural trailblazers, can help to lead this movement. There are thousands of apple varieties which should make any punk, prep, jock or transvestite a creative, healthy, educated eater.

Sarah's Social Action Snapshot originally appeared on Takepart.com

Five Eliminated In WaPo's Important Pundit Contest

2009-11-10T12:56:27Z

The Washington Post is searching for America's Next Top Cheaply-Bought Purveyor Of Online Opinion, and yesterday, the paper made its first round of cruel cuts, eliminating five of the ten contestants.

The eliminated include:

Burton Richter: Richter is a Nobel Prize winning scientist, which is awesome. Unfortunately, he's writing for an editorial page run by Fred Hiatt, who's way into misleading his readers and making up his own statistics. Richter, saints preserve him, went right at one of Hiatt's bugaboos, climate change science -- a topic Hiatt is fond of lying about. In the judges' estimation, Richter didn't stretch enough. Judge Marissa Katz said, "I'm not going to argue with an opportunity to learn from our Nobel-laureate contestant. But it's worth noting that he wasn't trying to impress us with his range." Voters didn't cotton to Richter's post either. Pearls before swine, I'm afraid.

Darryl Jackson: Jackson served in the Bush administration, and I liked his chances, because with the Democrats in power, WHO WILL GIVE THE GOP A VOICE IF NOT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST! These poor fellows are barely making it anymore... in the media. Jackson was only able to deliver the most standard-issue conservative cant, however, bitching about the Obama administration's complaints that he "inherited" a complete cock-up, and the 90,465th column about Sarah Palin's exciting "second act." Voters gave Jackson a resounding DO NOT WANT, and Hiatt called the effort a "rehash." And again, let's remember that Hiatt already has a stable full of writers who are willing to deliver this sort of crap on a regular basis.

Lydia Khalil: Khalil is "a specialist on the Middle East and international security at the Council on Foreign Relations," but she hung her November 3rd column on Afghanistan on one of the most hoary of all journalist cliches: "Stuff The Cab Drivers Told Me." WORST! This should be taught, in J-School: unless your cab driver is handing you the Pentagon Papers or the corpse of the Lindbergh baby, NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT IT. Hiatt, naturally, seemed to like the whole cab driver frame (which really tells you something), calling the fact that cab drivers do not express monolithic political thought "a surprising twist" (?!?) but complaining, "because the cabbies ultimately don't give us a good policy answer, their part of the column should have been shorter." You know what? Cab drivers really are coming up short these days, in their delivery of public policy prescriptions! Anyway, voters were appropriately "Meh," and Katz knows the score, saying, "Article submissions about the politics of D.C. cab drivers land in the in-boxes of Washington publications almost as often as submissions about 'what jury duty taught me.'"

Mara Gay: Gay introduces herself as a lover of "storytelling" and an Atlantic Media fellow, and then proceeded to cook up an epic bowl of thought salad about Michelle Obama and every other powerful woman in politics, organic gardening, the Democratic primaries, her love of nearly everything and everyone, her dislike of "partisan attacks" and sentences with no real meaning whatsoever. "Women continue to prove that they aren't leaving American politics anytime soon," Gay says, emphasizing a point that no one anywhere was disputing. Marissa Katz (clearly by now you see that she was the most astute of the first-round judges), basically took a look and said: Yeah, all of this was great when Rebecca Traister wrote this, months ago, only more coherently.

Mark Esper: Esper, the editor of a hyper-local in Colorado, swung for the fences by directing his concerns far afield and deep into the past, writing a column about how a premature victory over the Taliban was declared and enshrined as truth, except that in reality, no such victory has occurred. The media has demonstrated utter amnesia over the parade of statesmen who bragged about how America defeated the Taliban, and it's great that Esper used this forum to cut against this. Unfortunately, Fred Hiatt is just the sort of person to hand out reality roofies on this issue, and it probably didn't help Esper that he pointedly criticized WaPo favorite Charles Krauthammer. Voters, however, didn't exactly flock to support the piece.

The remaining five contestants will be moving on to the next challenge and bloggin' away this week. Their assignment: "write something about 1) politics, 2) life/culture and 3) one of the knotty issues of the moment: the economy or health care." And they also have a daily assignment as well:

For Tuesday: come up with something that could become a regular feature -- like Chris Cillizza's "Most Important Number" or Ezra Klein's "Lunch Break."

In other words: Please come up with some ideas... that we can steal!

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
This Day In Newspapers And Their Pointless Journalistic Endeavors
Comedians Mock WaPo Pundit Contest

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Susan Moeller: Media Literacy 101: The Doritos Challenge

2009-11-09T01:13:37Z

Today's your last chance to win a million bucks. The clock is ticking.

Don't throw your money away on a lottery ticket. Instead just write, shoot and submit a Super Bowl XLIV commercial for Doritos by midnight central time today (Monday, November 9th.)

If you make it as one of the six finalists, you'll win $25,000. If you are voted into the top 3, your ad will air during the Super Bowl. And if your ad makes it to first place on the USA Today Ad Meter, you'll win the cool million.

Oh, but you're not a Madison Avenue wannabe?

The Faces of Hunger in America film contest: Voting is going on now. Full disclosure: my 15-year-old son has entered an animated film. Check out his and the other entries here.

Well, perhaps you want to become a WashPo pundit?

Around 4,800 people wrote a short opinion piece to enter that contest--it closed for entries on October 21. Two days before Thanksgiving, the final ten will have been whittled down to the winner. The prize? The glory of having a weekly Washington Post column for 13 weeks (at $200 per column for a grand total of $2600).

What's with all the contests? We think of the Web 2.0 world as enabling multi-directional conversations and collaborative interactivity. (Think of your wall on Facebook.) But as media scholar Henry Jenkins has noted, global 2.0 culture increasingly values not just dynamic social networking, but innovation and collaborative knowledge-building. In other words, the Web 2.0 is an environment just right to host contests that are more than beauty pageants. "Industry leaders," Jenkins has written, acknowledge "the importance of the role that ordinary consumers can play not just in accepting convergence, but actually in driving the process."

That's what the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has banked on with its News Challenge. There's still time to submit your entrepreneurial web idea to that one. If you want to change your community for the better, consider entering your idea for how to give people access to the news and information they need. The Knight Foundation will be giving as much as $5 million dollars to underwrite the best ideas that are submitted. "Since good new ideas can come from anyone, the Knight News Challenge just makes sense," said Eric Newton, vice president of Knight's journalism program. And "that's why there are at least two dozen other media innovation contests."

"It's so easy now to have a contest," agrees Leslie Walker, the Knight Visiting Professor in Digital Innovation at the University of Maryland. "In the old days, a contest was limited by the single bandwidth of the contest creator"--which usually meant print notices and lots of posters. "Now that bandwidth is augmented by websites and blogs that link and virally pass on word of an online contest."

Today's digital-media-enabled contests, perhaps even the most familiar reality-TV, American Idol-type kind, are popular because they promise a rags-to-riches success for at least one contestant--and a riveting drama for those watching. "Contests have become an important part of participatory media culture," admits Walker. But the value of Web 2.0 contests is "not only for the 10 percent of an audience that actually enters them" hoping for some monetary or other kind of reward, she notes. All of the rest of us are beneficiaries of the ideas and innovations that the contests encourage. Different voices are heard than otherwise would be, blue-sky ideas are floated, business models are invented.

Contests are the pop-culture equivalent of crowdsourcing. Contests are cheap and quick, yet they manage labor-intensive challenges: they do our talent searching and our R&D. They mash-up new technologies and broadcast ideals of social justice. They provide feedback and build ownership.

Take one last example: hunger in America. There's no shortcut way to manage the grassroots food pantries and other on-the-ground projects that actually get food into people's hands. But there are more efficient ways of getting the word out that hunger is a problem in the United States. Create a film contest. Publicize it. Get contestants. Then, once all the entries are in, convince someone like me to help publicize the videos. And then as people come to your site, watch your message repeat in places that you couldn't buy your way into--at least without more resources than you have. That's the beauty of a contest. A contest not only encourages entries, it provides entrée to engagement.

---

ps 1: Okay, so you didn't enter the Washington Post contest and you don't have time to get your Doritos ad together? But you want to be a player in at least one Web 2.0 contest? Well, you could always enter the weekly write-a-caption-to-a-New Yorker cartoon contest. The winning caption writer gets a signed print of the cartoon.

ps. 2: You want to learn a bit more about crowdsourcing? Take a look here at an article written (and widely reprinted) by Daren C. Brabham.

The War On Terror Book Club

2009-11-06T11:04:05Z

As our discussion veered from how the quest for filthy lucre overtook evading communist sensors as an overarching concern for some Chinese filmmakers, to a lament for the folkways that get lost in the name of economic progress in countries around the world, I was again reminded why I love, love, love my Sojourner's Book Club.

Robert Naiman: WaPo Slants Afghan News with Biased News Header

2009-11-05T15:55:20Z

On October 27, the Washington Post reported on the resignation of Matthew Hoh, a top U.S. official in Afghanistan, in protest of the U.S. war, noting that Hoh had come to believe that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was simply fueling the insurgency.

But the editors of the Washington Post are still slanting their news coverage in a way that promotes the assumption that the United States is "combating extremism," rather than fueling extremism.

Stories on the Washington Post website about what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan - including the story on Hoh's resignation - are introduced by a "header" that says:

"The AfPak War

Combating Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan"

In using this header on news articles about U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Washington Post editors are skewing the news, reinforcing an assumption that Matthew Hoh and other critics of the war are trying to challenge, that U.S. policy is combating extremism.

Not only does the Post's "combating extremism" header reinforce the assumption that the U.S. is "combating extremism," the "AfPak War" designation also reinforces the assumption that Afghanistan and Pakistan are "one theater" of conflict. In particular, it promotes the assumption that the war in Afghanistan is justified on the basis of promoting stability in Pakistan. Many Afghans and Pakistanis, as well as critics of the Afghanistan war, see this assumption as false, counterproductive and even offensive.

Fortunately, the Washington Post has an ombudsman. And one of the jobs of the ombudsman is to take complaints from Washington Post readers and the general public about editorial bias in the news section. It would probably take just a few keystrokes to retire the Washington Post's biased news header from introducing its coverage of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

You can write to the Washington Post ombudsman here.

WaPo 's Gene Weingarten On Fisticuff-Spawning Passions: "Hooray!"

2009-11-04T17:24:48Z

Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten took the time at the end of his "Chatalogical Humor" chat yesterday to weigh in on the recent newsroom dust-up between Henry Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia. The big takeaway? Gene Weingarten is awesome, for reals:

The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. (Obligatory mature qualification: I of course decry any breakdown in comity and collegiality and civil discourse in the workplace, and urge all young people to maintain decorum and respect others, to be tolerant of opposing viewpoints, to seek compromise, and to not punch each other out in spit-flying scrums.)

Still, hooray. Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions -- a situation thought of as "creative tension" and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss. In the face of potential ruin, journalists have been forced to reach accommodations with themselves: New strictures, new styles, new protocols, new limitations on what is possible are now meekly swallowed. In the frantic scramble for new "revenue streams," ethical boundaries are more likely to be pushed than is the proverbial envelope. Some of all this has leached out into the product. We all feel it. You do, too.

Weingarten goes on at length to praise both pugilists, especially Allen, who Weingarten suspects "doesn't like me very much, I think," but for whom he nevertheless feels "pure hero worship." Then he picks up his critique of the news industry again:

I don't know the ultimate precipitating factor in what led to blows between these two guys on Friday -- for all I know, Manuel strangled Henry's cat. But I do know what I read, that the proximate cause was the quality of written word -- what we put in the paper. It doesn't surprise me. "What we put in the paper," used to be a sacred term in most newsrooms, back before things began to change and some mediocre stuff began to appear with regularity. Back then, the meaning of "the paper" was completely different, too.

The news about the news, for the most part, has stunk for some time: There's been cowardly and crappy decision-making in scary times; ethics, at times, have been mislaid; lousy things have found their way into print, and worthy things -- killed for unworthy reasons -- have not. I am not shocked that tempers boiled over, nor am I shocked that they boiled over between two people who know what has been happening, and care.

Weingarten adds, "I hope Henry is invited and welcomed back to the newsroom; if anyone deserves a little slack, it's him. I hope he and Manuel bury the hatchet. I hope neither of them loses one ounce of passion and I hope each of them remains privately convinced he was right."

Oh! And then you get to the part where he challenges Sally Quinn to fisticuffs, sort of, over The Worst Style Story of All Time. Like I said, Gene Weingarten is awesome.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

WaPo Vet Involved In Newsroom Punch-Up Surprised By Attention

2009-11-03T10:15:26Z

Yesterday, we got news of a newsroom dust-up at the Washington Post, where Henry Allen, veteran features editor, criticized a "charticle" for its lack of quality and for his trouble got called a "cocksucker" by his colleague, Manuel Roig-Franzia, who had worked on said "charticle." Allen clocked Roig-Franzia, because what sort of world do you live in where you say that to a 68-year-old ex-Marine and not expect to get decked?

Allen, for his part, was apparently a little surprised by the way the story took off, telling Politico's Michael Calderone, "Back when I got into journalism, the idea that a fistfight in a newsroom would turn into a news story was unthinkable."

Times have changed, though! The sort of passion and experience that Henry Allen brings to the newsroom is getting downsized and bought out and banished -- in favor of dudes who assign charticles! So one can't help but see this punch-up as a microcosm of the ongoing softening of journalism as a whole. Allen's punch should be seen as a larger, more symbolic gesture. Maybe it's a surprising news story, but it tugs at something that's deeply felt.

Which doesn't mean the takeaway should be: "More journalists should punch each other, daily." Rather, I'd endorse the lesson that Spencer Ackerman distills from this story.

Now, I don't mean to act like some tough guy, and I get that continued gawking at Allen, especially with the glee that I evince, is part of the problem that Allen diagnoses. No argument there. But we in journalism have lost a passion and a no-bitch-ass-ness attitude that Allen possesses, and I think is more blessing than curse to the trade. And this is a trade -- not a profession. It's a mission, not a career.

I'm not saying that we should go around acting like pugilists. That's just its own brand of preening, soft pretension, as the farcical life of Norman Mailer demonstrated. But I am saying that we need to return to the crusading, no-nonsense, fact-never-fiction, unafraid-to-give-offense first principles that ultimately protects democracy. Verbal pugilism, not literal pugilism. Get back to rapping; we're T-Paining too much.

All this made me think about last week, when Representative Alan Grayson caught all that flack for referring to some lobbyist as a "K Street whore." This sort of proves the extreme limitations of maintaining a certain amount of that substance called "electability": you tell the truth a little too hard, and suddenly you're facing into a gale force gust swept up by the windmilling effect of everyone clutching their pearls at once.

Well, I've been paying attention to the way the health care sector has been lobbying away the potential good of health care reform, and I'll tell it to you straight: Those people are, in fact, whores. And there's no force on earth that will compel me to apologize for saying so. But you'll note that no one in the world even bothered to examine if there was anything important at the root of Grayson's reaction/remark. That's too bad, because that's where the health care reform story is, that's where the environmental legislation story is, and that's where the Wall Street regulation/derivatives reform/consumer protection/are-we-going-to-let-the-world-get-refracked again story is and shall be.

But the journalists we got are mainly delicate simps who fetishize wealth and turn the news cycle into one long paean to their popped garters whenever anyone says something mean about power. Their light's gone out, their fight's gone out, and when you see a flash of it, it makes you wonder where it went.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Washington Post Employees Now Just Beating Each Other Up At Work

2009-11-02T12:20:30Z

Seems like only yesterday that the folks over at the Washington Post were going to get rich by tapping the insatiable need of politicians and lobbyists to eat fondue at Katharine Weymouth's house as a revenue stream, bringing glory days and special favors for ever and ever. Now, much has changed, as executive editor Marcus Brauchli is having to break up the vicious fights between Post staffers, who are all just hitting each other, in the face, at all times. Harry Jaffe has more at the Washingtonian's Capital Comment blog.

Apparently, this whole folderol began when, in the wake of the accidental disclosure of a confidential House ethics committee report, Monica Hesse and Manuel Roig-Franzia were assigned to prepare this "charticle" of accidental disclosures throughout history.

Veteran Style section editor Henry Allen found it unsatisfactory and began "ranting about the number of mistakes he had found," Jaffe reports. From there, that "charticle" tore the fragile newsroom apart in a melee of employee-on-employee punchings.

Allen, according to sources, said: "This is total crap. It's the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years."

Roig-Franzia then wandered into the newsroom. A veteran foreign correspondent, he has been turning out political features for Style. He heard Allen's rant and stopped by his desk.

"Oh, Henry," he supposedly said, "don't be such a cocks-----."

Allen lunged at Roig-Franzia, threw him to the newsroom floor, and started throwing punches. Roig-Franzia tried to fend him off. Brauchli and others pulled the two apart.

We've emailed Allen in an attempt to find out what story was the worst Allen had read in 43 years, because aren't you curious about that?

RELATED:
Fists Fly After Post Editor Tells Writer, "It's the Second Worst Story I Have Seen in Style in 43 Years" [Washingtonian]
Fact or Fiction? Punches Thrown in WaPo Newsroom! [FishbowlDC]

Barrett Brown: Charles Krauthammer Forgets His Place

2009-10-30T18:45:20Z

It is quite understandable for Der Spiegel to have chosen Charles Krauthammer to put forth the conservative take on the Obama Administration thus far; with the recent departure of so many intellectuals from the Republican Party, the columnist's own articulateness relative to others who still speak for the movement has thereby increased.

Among other things, Krauthammer derides Obama as a wide-eyed amateur who lacks the columnist's own grounding in reality:

I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

Oh, snap! Each time in the past decade that there has arisen a chance to be wrong about America's foreign undertakings, Krauthammer has taken it. He's a real go-getter. As I noted a few months ago:

When NATO sought to derail another potential Balkan genocide by way of its 1999 air bombing campaign against Serbia, Krauthammer denounced the move as mere wide-eyed liberal amateurism on the part of Clinton, arguing that air strikes would be insufficient to force Milosevic out of Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he tried to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, "we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground." But the columnist leaves out the rest of Clark's answer, in which it is explained that "the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic" and that the purpose of the air campaign was to force him to do just that. For good measure, Krauthammer also criticizes Clinton for playing golf in the midst of conflict ("The stresses of war, no doubt"); he seems to have changed his mind on the propriety of such stress-relief measures around 2002 or so.

Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, Krauthammer remained ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in 1999 that NATO involvement "would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries." When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that "the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion," making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a "quagmire." The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO and the European Union.

Then, of course, came Afghanistan and Iraq. Plenty of people got both of these wrong, but Krauthammer managed to get it even, uh, wronger. More wrong. From the same article:

Like many others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer bumbled into our two more recent military adventures in a haze of amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. He ridiculed New York Times contributor R.W. "Johnny" Apple for writing one article warning that Afghanistan may develop into a "quagmire" and another proposing that coalition forces might have to contend with guerrilla fighters in Iraq. Krauthammer himself initially hailed the Iraq conflict as "the Three Week War"; when those guerrillas whose existence he had found so improbable actually materialized and U.S. reconstruction efforts were revealed to have been implemented largely by dipshit Liberty University grads, Krauthammer responded with studied sarcasm. "Every pundit, every ex-official and, of course, every Democrat knows exactly how it should have been done," he wrote, before going on to explain how it really should have been done. He concluded the 2003 column with the suggestion that, if "in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated." Two years later, Krauthammer followed up by admitting to his failures and acknowledging the predictive superiority of his opponents.

Just kidding.

There's more evidence of the Pulitzer-winner's magnificent incompetence at the above Vanity Fair. It doesn't even scratch the surface. I've got ten more pages of notes along these same lines, having recently read through all of Krauthammer's Washington Post columns dating back to 1999 in preparation for my next book. I've gone through the same routine with the work of Thomas Friedman and Richard Cohen, among other inexplicably respected folks. Whatever I make in royalties won't be enough.

Washington Post Reports 69% Jump In 3Q Profit

2009-10-30T09:42:40Z

NEW YORK — The Washington Post Co. increased its net income 69 percent in the third quarter, as the company cut costs to narrow losses at its newspapers and kept reaping profit from its cable TV and education divisions.

The company, which owns Newsweek magazine, Kaplan education services and television properties along with its namesake newspaper, said Friday it earned $17.1 million, or $1.81 per share. That compares with net income of $10.1 million, or $1.08 per share, in the same period a year earlier.

Michael Brune: How Trudie Styler Is Winning Hearts and Minds at ... Chevron?

2009-10-29T16:59:59Z

As Joe Berlinger's Crude continues to rack up favorable reviews, a captivating email back-and-forth has been revealed between Trudie Styler and executives at Chevron, the oil giant which has been facing increasing criticism for neglecting to clean up more than 1,000 contaminated sites in Ecuador.

Several weeks ago, Styler made an offer to buy tickets to Crude for all Chevron employees, saying that:

Many people will assume that you and I must be on different sides of the fence on this issue. But I don't believe that. I'm willing to bet that you and I, and all of your colleagues, agree that everyone has the fundamental right to the life-supporting elements of clean air and clean water.

Chevron struck back the following week, applauding Styler's "commitment to provide the Ecuadorian people with access to clean water and a better quality of life," before stating:

What is being missed, even by well-intentioned people like Ms. Styler, is that the responsibility for the lack of potable water, insufficient access to proper health care, and malnutrition now affecting the people of the Oriente lies squarely with the government of Ecuador, which has failed to properly address these serious challenges for nearly two decades.

Earlier this month, Styler wrote once again to Chevron's rank-and-file. Here's her letter in full:

Dear friends,

Thank you for your messages of support and for taking the time to watch the film Crude.

I am aware that you received an email from Chevron executives last week in response to my invitation. It's encouraging that the management of your company recognizes that the people of the Oriente in Ecuador are enduring severe assaults on their health. At the same time, I'm dismayed to read that management will not take any responsibility for the mess that has been left behind.

I understand that in the middle of a highly public and contentious lawsuit it can be difficult for Chevron's executives to speak candidly. However, last week's note was particularly disappointing, as your company's leadership passed on an opportunity for reconciliation. I continue to believe Chevron can do the right thing in Ecuador, but only when it acknowledges the mistakes the company inherited when it acquired Texaco.

Let me highlight three very simple points for your consideration:

• In last week's letter, Chevron's management wrote, "When Texaco left Ecuador nearly two decades ago, it did so only after having responsibly cleaned up its share of oil operations..." If you were to witness what I have seen, you would know this just isn't true. During its time in Ecuador, Texaco built more than 900 unlined waste pits throughout the Amazon region. In judicial inspections of 102 of these sites, 100% of them - each and every one - were found to be contaminated. In fact, the court expert found that even those sites that Chevron's management says were remediated are as contaminated as those that were never touched.

• As you know, when oil is extracted it has two components, the marketable crude and waste waters, which are often highly toxic. The common practice for decades has been to re-inject the toxic waste waters into underground wells, to avoid extensive contamination of the local water and soil. Texaco never did this in Ecuador, despite re-injecting waste waters at other operations around the world during the same time period and even owning a patent on the technology. Billions of gallons of these poisons were thus dumped into waterways over more than two decades. It is unethical to have one set of practices in countries with close environmental scrutiny, and an entirely different standard when no one is watching.

• Confronting the burden of years of contamination, Chevron's management asserted in its letter last week that, "There is no scientific or medical evidence to support claims of increased cancer risk in the region." Forgive me, but that is a bold and irresponsible statement. If Mr. O'Reilly ever visited families in the area, he'd have more evidence than he'd care to see. A team of technical professionals led by an independent expert appointed by the court has estimated 1401 cancer deaths have been caused by contamination and has confirmed a significant correlation between a series of other adverse health impacts and proximity to the contaminated areas. Other peer-reviewed scientific studies show elevated rates of sudden miscarriages, genetic disorders, and elevated instances of childhood leukemia linked to oil contamination regionally. You can view one of the peer-reviewed studies for yourself at: http://chevrontoxico.com/assets/docs/childhood-leukemia.pdf.

Here's why I am writing to you. I do not wish to engage in a he-said, she-said exchange with your company's executives, certainly not over email! However, it's important that you hear an independent account of what is really happening in Ecuador. I sincerely believe that Chevron could set a model for corporate responsibility for the entire world, but only if it takes a fresh look at a long-standing problem.

I understand your company has a new CEO, John Watson, coming on board next year. Perhaps this presents an historic opportunity to open up a new line of dialogue so we can work together to help alleviate the suffering of Ecuador's people. In the meantime, please continue to lend us your support. Thank you.

Trudie Styler

David Quigg: Basic Truths in Hoh Resignation Letter Were True When He Took His Job

2009-10-29T14:38:27Z

I'm pretty pissed off right now.

It makes less than zero sense to me that Matthew Hoh's resignation as "the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province" seems to be swaying sensible people from Christopher Buckley to Garrison Keillor to Andrew Sullivan. We all, naturally, have heard of Zabul province. We all, naturally, had heard of Matthew Hoh long before the Washington Post wrote up his resignation Tuesday. Our hopes for Afghanistan, our sense that the war there might be salvageable hinged mostly on the confidence we felt knowing that Hoh was there in Zabul province representing us. Right? Well, we're sure acting like it.

Am I pissed because I want this war, because I love this war? Absolutely not. As I wrote last November for the Huffington Post, I want a goddamn time machine. I want to go back to 9/12/01 and write and plead and shriek and march in the streets and hand out books about the fate of foreign armies in Afghanistan. I want to generally do whatever it would have taken to shake our shell-shocked nation from the delusion that an invasion and occupation would catch bin Laden and make us safer. But we don't get a time machine.

I mention my piece from last November for reasons other than self-aggrandizement. Rather, the opposite: to remind you that it didn't take some genius with super-duper-secret info to notice just how serious a mess we've been facing in Afghanistan. And that may sum up why I'm so pissed. The basic grim truths that Hoh wrote about in his much-quoted resignation letter were all basically true when he took his job a few months ago.

The situation was awful. The situation had been awful. The situation is awful. Pure damned-if-we-stay-damned-if-we-go awfulness.

This is probably why Richard Holbrooke, the top U.S. envoy to the region, told the Post for that same Tuesday article that "I agreed with much of (Hoh's) analysis."

If you've been paying attention, Hoh's analysis should basically provoke a "Well, yeah. No shit. What are we supposed to do about it?"

Read through the excellent interviews that accompanied the recent PBS Frontline episode about Afghanistan. Read those and tell me there's some obvious path, some magic bullet, some means of unscathed escape. Don't have time to read all ten of the interviews? Fine. Just read the Andrew Bacevich interview and the Steve Coll interview.

As Andrew Exum wrote Tuesday, "I know about 50 really smart people on Afghanistan with lots of time on the ground there, and no two have the same opinion about what U.S. policy should be. Let's not turn one dude whose opinions on Afghanistan happen to line up with the zeitgeist into the flippin' Delphic oracle."

Lest anyone bristle at the "one dude" line, I should point out that Exum, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, also referred to Iraq vet Hoh as "talented and patriotic."

Getting out of Afghanistan seems clearly to have been the right thing for Hoh personally. I continue, though, to believe what I wrote earlier this month in my most recent HuffPost piece:

"It fundamentally harms the long-term cause of global peace if America permits itself to move through history in a remorseless, irresponsible cycle wherein a Bush-type leader launches reckless wars and an Obama-type leader yanks our troops out. No matter how much we want our troops home, it is immoral to throw a country into chaos and then walk away simply because we grow weary of that chaos."

Wordy, I know. But I hope you'll slog through those two sentences and think about the underlying ideas. I hope you will think about the ideas of people who've earned the right to have their opinions considered much more carefully than mine: Exum, Coll, Bacevich, Rory Stewart, Michael Semple, this Air Force officer stationed in Afghanistan.

And Hoh.

Yes Hoh.

Absolutely Hoh.

Hoh was right to go public with his profound misgivings. His conscience called him to do so. But our consciences call upon us to think hard about this. All of this. Maybe harder than we've ever thought about a decision faced by our government. Partly because this deserves our careful consideration. Partly because if we think about it long enough, we may at least dimly remember this mess of an occupation when -- inevitably -- terrorists strike again and some swaggering fool of a president tells us we need to conquer a troubled country to make ourselves safe.

Huffington Post blogger David Quigg lives in Seattle. This piece originally appeared on his personal blog. His Twitter feed is here.

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UPDATE (10/30/09)

Wednesday, during a Washington Post online chat that I didn't see until almost a full day after I wrote this post, a reader from D.C. asked Hoh about the same basic idea I put in my headline here. The exchange went like this:

Washington, D.C.: Shouldn't you have known before going to Afghanistan that the war was pretty intractable? I mean, the history of the country is clear. What new information did you learn that so completely changed your mind about U.S. involvement there?

Matthew Hoh: I did study quite a bit and I spoke to many friends and colleagues who had previously served in Afghanistan. I did have concerns about the endstate of our goals in Afghanistan, but also felt the need to contribute and to continue to serve. Upon arriving in Afghanistan and serving in both the East and the South (and particularly speaking with local Afghans), I found that the majority of those who were fighting us and the Afghan central government were fighting us because they felt occupied. This concurred with history I had read and with what colleagues had told me.

Now, I may be reading Hoh's words through a filter. But there's nothing in his response to the Post reader that makes me rethink what I asserted above: "Basic Truths in Hoh Resignation Letter Were True When He Took His Job."

Thomas Frank: Obama Is Right About Fox News

2009-10-28T13:11:27Z

Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution. There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source. And the Newseum in Washington, D.C., establishes the profession's legitimacy with a memorial to fallen scribes, thus drawing an implicit connection between the murdered abolitionist editors of long ago and the struggling outfit that gave you this morning's page-one story about cute pets in Halloween costumes.

But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.

As the Obama administration has discovered by now. A few weeks ago, after Fox had scored a number of points against administration figures and policies, administration spokesmen decided it was time to start fighting back. Communications Director Anita Dunn called the network "a wing of the Republican Party," while Obama himself reportedly dismissed it for following "a talk radio format."

The network's moaners swung instantly into self-pitying action, likening the administration's combative attitude to Richard Nixon's famous "enemies list."

They should remember that it wasn't just the keeping of a list that made Nixon's hostility to the media remarkable. Nearly every president--and probably just about every politician--has criticized the press at some point or other. What made the Nixon administration stand out is that it also sued the New York Times to keep that paper from publishing the Pentagon Papers. It schemed to ruin the Washington Post financially by challenging the broadcast licenses for the TV stations it owned. It bugged the office of Joseph Kraft, a prominent newspaper columnist. One of its most notorious henchmen was G. Gordon Liddy, who tells us in his autobiography that under certain conditions he was "willing to obey an order to kill [columnist] Jack Anderson."

It is interesting to note that Mr. Liddy, that friend of the First Amendment, appeared frequently in 2006 on none other than the Fox News network. In fact, the network sometimes seems like a grand electronic homage to the Nixonian spirit: Its constant attacks on the "elite media," for example, might well have been inspired by the famous pronouncements on TV news's liberal bias made by Mr. Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew.

And, of course, the network's chairman, Roger Ailes, was an adviser to Mr. Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign; his signature innovation back then was TV commercials in which Mr. Nixon answered questions from hand-picked citizens in a town-hall style setting.

Although they cry persecution today, the network and its leading lights have not really distinguished themselves on the issues surrounding clashes between the government and the press. When Mr. Ailes was on the other side of the politician/press divide, making ads for the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, the Washington Post once found out in advance where one of the commercials was going to be filmed. According to an article that appeared in that paper in 1988, Mr. Ailes was moved to comment thusly on the situation: "'These leakers!' he told an inquiring reporter the night before the planned event. 'I think they should all be executed and tortured.'"

Mr. Ailes was joking on that occasion. But faced with one of the biggest First Amendment cases of our own time--the New York Times's 2005 story on the George W. Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program--how did Fox News react? By impugning the motives of the Times, of course, with different Fox personalities speculating that the Times deliberately published the story when it did in order to dissuade the U. S. Senate from reauthorizing the Patriot Act.

To point out that this network is different, that it is intensely politicized, that it inhabits an alternate reality defined by an imaginary conflict between noble heartland patriots and devious liberals--to be aware of these things is not the act of a scheming dictatorial personality. It is the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody with eyes and ears.

Still, one wishes that the Obama administration had taken on Fox News with a little more skill. As cultural criticism goes, this was clumsy, plodding stuff. What the situation required was sarcasm, irony, a little humor. Simply feeding Fox a slice of raw denunciation was like dumping gasoline into a fire. It did nothing but furnish the network with a real-world validation of its long-running conspiracy theories--and a nice bump in its ratings.

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