America’s Ministry Of Propaganda

Wesley J. Smith, a noted writer on life issues, catalogues a recent case of anti-life propaganda pushed by America’s premier newspaper Pravda… er, I mean the New York Times:

"Today’s Times has a front page story on Woo-Suk Hwang’s ethical lapses in obtaining eggs for therapeutic cloning, which I blogged on yesterday. Toward the end of the article, the story shifts from describing his bad ethics to defending therapeutic cloning. While the story mentions cloning embryos when describing the egg issue, it leaves that fact out entirely when actually describing the process of ‘therapeutic cloning,’ which, readers are told, consists merely of ‘converting one of a patient’s adult cells into an embryonic cell, and then converting that cell into new adult cells to replace any damaged tissue.’

"This description omits the crucial point: In somatic cell nuclear transfer, the nucleus of the adult cell is fused with the egg to create a new human embryo through asexual means — the act of human cloning. The embryo is developed for about a week and then destroyed to obtain its stem cells. This is not merely reverting an adult cell to a stem cell. It is creating a new human organism, a human life, for the purpose of destroying and harvesting it.

"The point of the inaccurate reporting is to conveniently skip past the part that causes people to be wary of the therapeutic cloning enterprise. This is bad journalism and an example of bias-by-omission for which the New York Times is becoming infamous."

GET THE POST.

This must be why God created bloggers.

Bless His Heart

Down in Texas, and elsewhere in the South, we have a saying: "Bless his heart" (or, in the feminine, "Bless her heart"). This phrase is used to signal affection for someone, frequently just before or just after noting one of their shortcomings.

The amazing thing about this phrase is that you can couple it with the most withering critique, but the phrase "makes that okay."

F’rinstance: "Bless his heart, Lester never did have the sense to come in out of the rain" or "Bless her heart, Betty Jo’s entry into this year’s apple pie contest tasted like it had been made with persimmons."

"Bless his heart" is like of like putting a smiley face after an insult on the web.

Well it seems that the MSM has an equivalent to this. Witness:

At the end of a day of meetings with Chinese President Hu Jintao and other Chinese officials, Bush held a session with a small group of U.S. reporters and spoke at length about issues like religious freedom, Iraq and the Chinese currency.

The final reporter he called on critiqued Bush’s performance earlier in the day when he stood next to Hu in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square to deliver a statement.

"Respectfully, sir — you know we’re always respectful — in your statement this morning with President Hu, you seemed a little off your game, you seemed to hurry through your statement. There was a lack of enthusiasm. Was something bothering you?" he asked [SOURCE].

It appears that "Respectfully, sir" is the MSM equivalent of "Bless his heart." It’s a phrase to "make okay" whatever outrage is about to pass the reporter’s lips.

Only it’s darker than "Bless his heart," because there can be (and usually is) genuine affection expressed with the latter phrase.

There isn’t any of that in the reporter’s "Respectfully, sir" and certainly not in the patently false "you know we’re always respectful."

This question was anything but respectful, and calling it that didn’t make it so. It only called attention to the fundamental rudeness of the question, which can only be described as an ill-willed, nitpicky, and petty effort at "gotcha" journalism.

The question was asked purely to embarrass the president. It certainly was not a serious attempt to elicit information that would be valuable for the public to know. I mean, if there was a urgent global crisis that the president was aware of and that was what was what was on his mind, he could scarcely be expected to tell that to the reporter.

The question also has the appearance of trying to stir up ill will between the president and his Chinese hosts by overtly suggesting that he wasn’t enthusiastic about relations with them. Trying to stir up trouble between the U.S. and China in a diplomatic situation like this isn’t just asinine, it’s positively unpatriotic.

No president should be asked such a blatantly insulting question in such a diplomatic situation. Not Bush. Not Clinton. Not anybody.

Oh, and think what a sterling example of the free press the reporter set for the Chinese. Yes, that’ll make Beijing want to loosen control of reporters in China. "My asinine behavior is what y’all have to look forward to if you free the press, guys!" is what this guy telegraphed to the Chinese leadership.

Despite the fact that the reporter was acting like an arrogant, nitpicking, petty little man bent on troublemaking, the president had a good comeback:

"Have you ever heard of jet lag?" Bush responded. "Well, good. That answers your question."

Nice comeback.

Still, that reporter needs a trip to the woodshed.

Bless his heart.

Yesterday’s News

The NYT has announced that it’s cutting 500 jobs from its different operations (which are more diverse than just the paper you think of). This amounts to 4% of its overall labor force.

Why?

Because they have fewer readers and fewer profits and so can sustain fewer workers.

Over at Powerline John Hinderaker offers this:

As life-long newspaper junkies, we take no pleasure in the
industry’s current crisis. Apart from anything else, we web-based
commenators need newspapers to produce the raw material for our
commentary. But my sympathy for the Times, the Globe, the Chronicle, et
al. is tempered by the knowledge that there is a path to solvency,
which I think would likely succeed, but that they would never consider:
stop being so liberal. Wouldn’t you think that with newspapers nearly
everywhere sliding inexorably downhill, just one might consider whether
its readers–or former readers–were trying to tell it something? Like,
we’re not interested in supporting far-left nonsense?

But no. They would rather go broke than abandon their reason for
being, which is, with only a handful of exceptions, promoting the
Democratic Party.

Would moderating their hard-left politics help stop the financial
bleeding? It’s hard to say for sure. But don’t you think that if they
were motivated mainly be economics, just one of our major liberal
papers might try it? [SOURCE.]

I agree that stopping being so liberal would help the situation of the major newspapers, and that they’d try it if they were motivated by purely economic considerations, but I don’t think it would fix the situation.

Why?

‘Cause I think newspapers are losing their market for reasons independent of the fact that their political ideology is driving readers away.

Personally, I have no interest in reading newspapers. None. I don’t need any more paper piling up around my house, thankyew. I don’t need burglars knowing that I’m not at home because my sloppy, distracted paperboy keeps throwing papers when I’m out of town. I don’t need anything that the papers have to offer.

Not when I can get it all online.

I can get my news online, read comics online, print coupons online, check movie times online, go to eBay instead of the classifieds. Anything! I can get all of my newspaper-type business done online far faster, cheaper, and more conveniently.

It’s the same reason I don’t watch TV news (except for rare exceptions for major national events like after 9/11 or a presidential election).

If I can get my standard information needs fulfilled online–for free–anytime I want them, then why should I even bother with television, much less something as klunky as a newspaper.

As more people are brought up in the fourth age of human communications, it will be harder and harder for newspapers to have a go of it.

I suspect that they will always exist. There will be a few big ones, probably on the model of USA Today, and there will be lots of little, tiny, local papers, like the weeklies that exist principally to run classified ads and that do a few stories on the side.

But I suspect that within a generation the middle level of papers will simply be gone.

They’ll be yesterday’s news.

What will emerge in their places, I’m not sure. Blogs will be a big part of the picture, but not all of it. Probably the broadcast media will have web sites that provide news, on the model of FOXnews.com or CNN.com.

I’m dubious, though, whether anybody will be able to put together a for-pay online newspaper, not when you have newsgatherers like the broadcast networks wanting to involve people with their web sites so that they can involve them with their TV channels.

The quality of news coverage may suffer, at least for a while.

Ultimately, though, the Internet will serve as a net knowledge gain for society, not a net knowledge loss.

That’s what the fourth age is all about.

AP Makes “Slight” Correction

TEXT OF CORRECTION:

ROME – In a May 26 story about Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to a Rome
basilica, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Catholics
believe the Eucharist represents the body and blood of Christ. Instead,
Catholics believe the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ.

SOURCE.

Oops!

Guess they started hearing from folks.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

AP Makes "Slight" Correction

TEXT OF CORRECTION:

ROME – In a May 26 story about Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to a Rome

basilica, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Catholics

believe the Eucharist represents the body and blood of Christ. Instead,

Catholics believe the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ.

SOURCE.

Oops!

Guess they started hearing from folks.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

Newsweek Lied, People Died

You may have encountered the recent story–floated by Newsweek–that interrogators down at Gitmo have been desecrating the Qur’an and, in one case, flushing it in order to get cooperation from interogees.

Doesn’t sound very plausible, does it? Not the kind of tactic a seasoned interrogator would want to use.

I mean, if I saw somebody desecrating the Bible that way, would that make me want to cough up info for them, or would it make me more resolved not to give them info?

I think the latter.

Newsweek, on the heels of a hot story, though, couldn’t think things through this far (perhaps because Newsweek has no sense of what it’s like to be a religious person) and they published the story.

INSTANT RIOTING OVER YONDER IN THE MUSLIM WORLD!

I mean, everyone over in the Muslim world knows that us Americans are just eeevil, right? So why let reason get in the way of passion and stop a good riot?

Trouble is, folks get killed in riots.

EXCERPTS:

Reaction across the Islamic world has been strong, with daily demonstrations since the May 9 story came out. At least 15 people died in Afghanistan after protests broke out Tuesday following the report that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, placed Qurans in washrooms to unsettle suspects, and in one case "flushed a holy book down the toilet."

"The American soldiers are known for disrespect to other religions. They do not take care of the sanctity of other religions," Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the Pakistani chief of a coalition of radical Islamic groups, said Sunday

Ahmed’s comments came a day after Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, both allies of Washington, demanded an investigation and punishment for those behind the reported desecration of the Quran.

Newsweek apologized in an editor’s note for Monday’s edition and said they were re-examining the allegations.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker wrote.

Newsweek’s source later said he was unsure about the origin of the Quran allegation, and a top Pentagon spokesman told the magazine that the military "had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them ‘not credible.’"

A SECOND STORY CONFIRMING NEWSWEEK’S ERROR HERE.

Now, I dunno from my own experience that the charge is false. I could come up true, after all. So it’s a bit premature to say "Newsweek lied." In fact, I doubt very much that Newsweek did knowingly and deliberately print a falsehood with intent to deceive, so the title of this post is hyperbole in regard to the first part.

But not the second.

People died.

People died on account of what Newsweek irresponsibly printed. To be sure, the Yahoos who would be so foam-at-the-mouth nuts as to start a riot (rather than a peaceful demonstration) so violent that folks would get killed deserve a share of the blame.

But so does Newsweek.

Their irresponsible behavior has not only resulted in the deaths of particular individuals but also in a major international incident at a time of war against terrorists when the U.S. very much needs to improve its image in the Muslim world.

You don’t go to press with anything other than rock-solid verification with a claim like that at a time like this.

Newsweek, you’re despicable.

Dead-Tree Blogs

Something Thomas Sowell said in a recently quoted piece came back to me:

Even those who write editorials about how we need Mexicans to do work that Americans will not do would not be willing to write editorials for a fraction of what they are being paid. If Mexican editorial writers were coming across the border illegally and taking their jobs, maybe the issue would become clearer.

And I thought: "Wait a minute. Something like this is happening right now."

The folks undercutting the editorial market aren’t Mexicans for the most part, but new technology (the blog) has made it possible for a large number of people to editorialize, and they are doing so, and doing so for free. In fact, most of the successful ones pay something to have customized, attractive blogs, and I don’t know if the revenues from all those political T-shirt ads actually subsidize the costs of doing the blog. In any event, they’re severely cutting into the market for editorials.

Not convinced?

Well, newspaper circulation has been dwindling for decades as more folks started getting their news from radio and then television. Back in the first half of the 20th century, for example, each city used to would have multiple newspapers of competing ideologies. Not any more. Most cities have only one major daily paper. The market won’t sustain more than that. That’s why so many cities and regions have newspapers with hyphenated names like "Union-Tribune" or "Democrat-Gazette" or "Post-Dispatch." The old rivals merged when the market for papers shrank.

Now broadcast TV news is suffering due to defections to cable and the Internet. Meanwhile, newspaper circulation continues to decline:

Circulation at 814 of the nation’s largest daily newspapers declined 1.9 percent over the six months ended March 31 compared with the same period last year, an industry trade group reported yesterday.

The decline continued a 20-year trend in the newspaper industry as people increasingly turn to other media such as the Internet and 24-hour cable news networks for information [SOURCE].

It may well be a generational thing, too. Those who I know who read newspapers tend to be of the generation that grew up with them when they were stronger than they are now.

Personally, I never read newspapers (except when I’m travelling and a complimentary one is shoved under my door). Frankly, I don’t want to get a newspaper at home. I already have too many books in my house, and I Don’t Need Any More Paper, Thankyou. Having someone throw more paper at my door every day would just clutter the place up.

In fact, I’m getting sick of having dead-tree books around. Given the volume of volumes in my library, I want everything to be space-savingly electronic (either readable or audio both), and I’m starting to become resistant to buying non-electronic books. Unfortunately, the publishers aren’t where I need them to be yet.

So I get all my news online or from cable and talk radio. I know that not everybody does that (or else newspapers would already be out of business entirely in dead tree form), but there are more and more folks who are getting their news from non-paper sources.

And the blogosphere has only intensified that shift.

You can spend hours a day (if you want to) reading commentary on any subject of your choosing. Fresh, new commentary! Churned out daily by the legions of pajamahadeen.

With all this commentary available for free on the Net, why would I want to pick up a newspaper to get my analysis?

Habit.

If I’m in the habit of doing so, if I’m not yet comfortable with the Internet, if I’m already attached to a commentator who’s not available online without an obnoxious registration requirement. In those cases, I might want to pick up a newspaper for commentary.

But I’m not in that habit. And neither are the new batch of kids being raised right now.

So what else might attract me to pick up a newspaper for commentary?

Quality.

Hypothetically, the newspapers could aggregate to themselves all the quality commentators and generate commentary of a markedly higher quality than what’s available in the blogosphere. But that ain’t gonna happen. It would mean chucking out the vast majority of the individuals publishing slop editorials today and recruting the most talented bloggers.

A little bit of that is actually happening (thus, for example the PowerLine guys occasionally write editorials for different papers, thus decreasing proportionately the amount of space devoted to non-blogger editorialists). But a full-scale, overnight housecleaning isn’t in the offing, and even if newspapers paid the best editorialists to stop blogging and write exclusively for them (which also won’t happen) then a new crop of bloggers would make the leap from Large Mammal to Higher Being in the TTLB Ecosystem and take their places as premier, for-free online editorialists.

So I don’t think it’s practically possible for newspapers to outperform the blogosphere in quality or price.

But if you can’t outperform someone in either quality or cost, that makes your survival precarious–as indeed the survival of major daily metropolitan newspapers now is.

Oh, sure, they’ll be around in some vastly shrunken form in the decades to come. And I’m sure that there will still be editorials in them. Editors, like everybody else, want to spout off about their opinions.

They want to have their own, daily dead-tree blogs.

But the market is changing. Dramatically. And fewer and fewer folks will be willing to pay for a daily dead-tree blog when they can get the same quality analysis online for free.

Now everybody can be an editor.

Something like Sowell’s hypothetical scenario is already happening.

The Script: EXPOSED!

Timespope Y’know how I’ve been writing about the templates that news organizations want to pour their stories into? A common one is the "conflict between two parties or points of view" template.

Theoretically, this is a balanced way of doing the news, but often it’s possible to tell the true biases of the folks doing the story.

LIKE IN THIS NYT-NOID STORY (QUOTING HANS KUNG NO LESS) WHICH CRITICIZES JOHN PAUL II AFTER HIS DEATH AND HAS THE LINE "NEED SOME QUOTE FROM SUPPORTER" AS A PLACEHOLDER THAT NEVER GOT DISPLACED.

They yanked the line from their web site, but quick!

Powerline comments:

There you have it. The Times’ criticisms are ready to go, a few good words for the Pope are an afterthought.

VIEW THE FULL SCREEN-GRAB OF THE NYT STORY.

(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who e-mailed!)

Media Appearance

FYI, I’m about to be on Hugh Hewitt. (Imminently.)Was just on Hugh Hewitt. Talked about the Lefebvrists and whether they’re in schism. The following is supporting documentation:

LINK TO ECCLESIA DEI.

EXCERPTS (John Paul II writing):

  • "Hence such disobedience [i.e., that committed by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre]- which implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy – constitutes a schismatic act" (section 3).
  • "To all those Catholic faithful who feel attached to some previous liturgical and disciplinary forms of the Latin tradition I wish to manifest my will to facilitate their ecclesial communion by means of the necessary measures to guarantee respect for their rightful aspirations. In this matter I ask for the support of the bishops and of all those engaged in the pastoral ministry in the Church" (section 5c).