Sure it’s juvenile, but it’s still funny. In retribution for the Photoshop hit job by Fixed News on a couple of NYT journalist, the folks over at Vanity Fair decided to try their hands at a little Photoshoping fun, too. Take a look at some of the results:
Wow, this is brazen! Without bounds nor respect for decency. And yet they still dare call the crap they produce news!? Self respecting journalists should be outraged, and finally expose Fixed News, er, Fox News for the propaganda sham that it is.
From Media Matters:
During a segment in which Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe “attack dogs,” Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered — the journalists’ teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe’s hair moved further back on his head.
See the Fox & Friends video clip courtesy of Media Matters.
A lot has been written about Scott McClellan’s — the Bush loyalist and former White House spokesperson — tell all book. Of course, conservative apologists and Bush supporters are already gunning for their former colleague. Bush apologists don’t particular like this claim by the former White House spokesperson:
“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
Writing in The Corner, a blog from the conservative National Review magazine, Seth Leibsohn takes issue with McClellan’s claim:
The evidence I’ve seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn’t do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.
Conservatives have long labored to caricature the press as liberal — which has served conservatives well, as they use this now conventional wisdom as bludgeon against submissive journalists if they don’t parrot conservative memes and talking points. Therefore, conservatives are not about to concede that, if anything, during the run up to the war, the media did as they were expected: they unquestionably parroted the Bush administration’s talking points, and claims about the threat that Iraq posed to our national security.
David Kurtz, over at TPM media, will be taking Seth’s challenge. However, I here offer Judith Miller and the New York Times subsequen apology as exhibits A and B, in response to Seth.
It’s hard to pin down Thomas Friedman, if one is not paying attention. Yes, Mr. Friedman is a cheerleader of techno-prediterminism and an unapologetic free market fundamentalist; that, nonetheless, I read because his opinions seem blessed with Good Housekeeping’s seal of approval for “conventional wisdom,” that is often held by those in the top echelons of industry, government and similar elite circles. However, even though Mr. Friedman is often just a purveyor of conventional wisdom (i.e., the Iraq invasion was a good idea), now and then he writes a thing or two that surprises:
Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.
If Mr. Friedman is putting this in his column it can only mean that, in between cocktail parties at his “11,400-square-foot house,” he’s heard a similar line from one of his elite associates. And if this is the case, it means that there’s a new conventional wisdom bubbling up in these elite circles about nation building at home.
From his previous writings, and in between the lines of his latest column, it’s clear that Mr. Friedman expects free market fundamentalism to shape any domestic nation building programs; however, just the fact that this possibility is emerging as a domestic policy, it can only mean that Mr. Friedman and his elite colleagues are contemplating an expanded role for our federal government.
If after traveling through our country this is the conclusion that Mr. Friedman arrived at, that Americans are ready for nation building at home; then I suggest that Mr. Friedman should spend more time at home, observing Americans, just as he so famously spends time observing and chatting with taxi drivers abroad.
Arianna Huffington describes Tim Russert as a “conventional wisdom zombie,” and apparently Timmy Russert has taken offense:
It seems that Arianna Huffington has run up against the impenetrable wall that is Tim Russert’s ego. Huffington, who is currently on tour for her new book Right Is Wrong: How The Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, will be appearing on CNN, ABC, and CBS. She had been booked on Morning Joe and Countdown with Keith Olbermann as well, but those bookings were suddenly and inexplicably cancelled.
NBC confirmed that Huffington wouldn’t be booked on any NBC-affiliated show to promote her book, but refused to explain why. Huffington’s people say that this is Tim Russert’s doing, that Russert is out for revenge because Huffington called him a “conventional wisdom zombie” in her book and devoted seven pages to faulting Russert for allowing his Meet the Press guests to go unchallenged (not to mention HuffPo’s RussertWatch).
