Apophis

What do the people at the head of an organization do? What is the job of the editor of a major newspaper, other than to provide direction and information on what stories they want to cover? I would be absolutely SHOCKED if it is true that no other news network has functioning editors working within the organization in the senior levels of management.

I would also assume that the producers of Outfoxed would publish the very worst memos they could find, rather than rather passive ones. Any idea why they would have held back and didn't include ones that were a little more, well, condemning? These require a LOT of interpretation and speculation to turn them into spin.

We've seen examples of memos that could exist at FNC. I need to search to see if there is any information from any other source that states these memos are authentic. I'm not doing this to be a pain in the ass, but as i've said a bunch of times. I'm not going to jump on a bandwagon and be a lemming unless I understand all sides of the issue. In reality, I could make something that looked like that on my PC in about 5 minutes and claim they are genuine. I know FOX released a report after that program was produced, if they don't refute that the memos are genuine, I'll take that as an admission on their part that they are.

IMO, this is still no where near anything as condemning as the Killian documents. I'd love to see something of that caliber if it exists. It doesn't require a bunch of "politically charged spin" to turn it into "politically charged spin".

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

leejo

Do you think CNN tells its on-air talent "y'all just go out there and say any damn thing that pops into your head"?

ABC's Sr VP in the news department sends an email talking about how much he hates Bush, but that means nothing.

NY Times ombudsman publishes a statement about how his paper is clearly left-leaning, but that means nothing.

etc., etc., etc.

A veep at Fox suggests that we remember hostages while discussing Abu Ghraib and they're shills for the President.

I think you guys are being silly.

leejo

As condemning as the Killian documents is their complete lack of interest in the veracity of the Swiftboat Vets' claims. Poor poor John Kerry, to have landed in the snakes' nest conservative unit in Vietnam!

Furthermore, when it came out that a reporter covering the Kerry campaign for the Boston Globe happened to edit Kerry and Edwards's "Plan For America" the campaign and publishing companied hastily removed his name from their sites and from the book. I saw this with my own eyes. The reporter continued to lead the Globe's coverage.

Here's what Mediamatters has to say about that: http://mediamatters.org/items/200408100001

This is a lie. I saw with my own eyes Michael Kranish's forward in that book online before the respective sites removed it.

But no, there's no bias floating around out there. Just the occasional blatent lie.

Incedentally, despite his assurance that his organization would release his service records, to this day John Kerry, potential 2008 candidate for President, has not released those records, and no-one, NO-ONE is giving him a hard time about it.

AMosely

I forget what we're debating here - it seems to me that there's not much to debate.

All media outlets are biased, just like people (who make up and run the outlets) are biased to their personal beliefs. These are human characteristics. The only unbiased news outlet would be one run by robots (that may require programming by other non-biased robots).

Fox tends to be singled out because they tend to flaunt their bias and blur the lines of editorial vs. objective journalism. Again - they are not the first and certainly not the only media outlet to do this - they just seem to do it with such flag-waving pride that it tends to provoke a reaction.

This is nothing new. Edward R. Murrow caught onto it over 50 years ago at CBS. The circuitous relationship between politics and private/corporate interest is painfully apparent in broadcast journalism.

Beatnik

Nobody's engaging in this conversation to be a pain in the ass. Except leejo. He's engaging to be a pain in the ass.

As far as the docs, like I said they were produced at your request for corroborating evidence that they existed. So there's 3 citations from differing sources of their existence. Regardless of their authenticity or not, it appears that you guys don't even agree that "The So-Called 9/11 Commission" (contained in one of the memos) is clearly an attempt to spin and play down the importance of a bipartisan commission investigating the attack of 9/11. Additionally, it's a directive that blatantly transcends the role of editor into shaping the message of the day. That's fine, clearly this memo point is moot and I'm happy to ignore it.

If you can come up with a better explanation for the consistent usages of talking points in the following clips (all of which were cited previously in this thread), I'm happy to entertain the possibility. And I'm happy to dig around for some more montages of Fox reporters/hosts/analysts using the same language to spin the issues. As far as these edited clips coming from advocacy groups (and The Daily Show), yes they were edited by them, but the words weren't inserted into their mouths in the editing process...

http://www.tacticalsites.com/~beatnik/tds051606.wmv

http://streaming.americanprogress.or...0.240.mov.html

http://images1.americanprogress.org/...aq.320.240.mov

FWIW, I'm not trying to be a pain in the arse either, but it genuinely confounds me that FN is considered anywhere near "Fair and Balanced" or "objective" by people. These are far more blatant and obvious attempts to spin a message than any allegations of being 'politically correct' or 'favoring democrats'. Call a spade a spade, say they're providing an opposing viewpoint to balance out the liberal slant of the media, and I have no issue.

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leejo

No, I'm an engaging pain in the ass.

H-Hour

I think this is an excellent example of a situation where we can say it is certainly possible that Mediamatters or Drudge or Leejo have it right, but all three of you are "reporting" it absolutely wrong.

Leejo claims that Mediamatters is lying because he saw Kranish's forward. But Mediamatters explicitly says that Kranish did "sign on" to write a forward. It doesn't say whether the forward was written, but it's certainly possible that a publisher was not totally on top of things well enough to get a website to remove a forward as soon as they knew that Kranish had pulled out of the project.

It is also certainly possible that Kranish was intending to contribute the forward, and that only after exposure was a backstory put in place for Kranish's removal from the project.

But do we have verifiable dates of Kranish's departure from the project? Or of testimony/verifiable evidence of Kranish's intention to contribute the forward after the project was made "official"?

Leejo, your accusation that they're liars because you once saw a foreward online doesn't float. I wouldn't criticize you for believing that Kranish fully intended to write the forward until it was exposed. I think I am inclined to believe this too.

What really irks me is that it really seems to me that it is somehow considered unacceptable for the media to suggest that Kerry/Kranish leaned on the publisher and possibly Amazon/Barnes&Noble to distort the perception of history and therefore mislead the American people, because this would be an "incendiary" charge. At the same time, it is somehow acceptable for Mediamatters to call Drudge a liar for unearthing a story and then claim that Drudge is ignoring "the truth" when a healthy dose of skepticism - in the absence of hard data - could lead one to believe that there was manipulation.

In my ideal world, the media would occasionally say, "This is all the data we've got. We don't have an answer, but we have suspicions."

leejo

I saw his forward and I saw him credited on the websites. Then those references were removed and this media watchdog sneered at Drudge.

Upon reading the Boston Globe's "explanation" and dismissal of the Drudge report, I googled the book and Kranish, then selected "cached". BOING. Before...after...before...after.

leejo

Believe it or not, I'm the guy who broke this story for Drudge. Seriously. I read the Boston Globe article, did the "chached" trick, and sent Drudge the info. 15 minutes later the story was up.

Anyhoo, here's a screenie: http://instapundit.com/images/kranisham.gif or how it was then.

And here it is after the edits: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/158...lance&n=283155

Here's the cached version of the book on the publisher's site: http://roscoe.typepad.com/roscoeblog...nd_edwards.htm

And here's the current version: http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/pu...ook=1586483145

It was amazing how fast Kranish's association with that book disappeared, and how little anyone said about it.

Of course nobody in the media gives a rat's ass about this sort of thing.

H-Hour

I think you missed my point Leejo. No one denied that Kranish was once involved with the book project. They claim that once the book became "officially" supported by the Kerry/Edwards campaign, Kranish pulled out. Just because an online book listing source was still listing Kranish as the author after it became "official" is no proof that Kranish hadn't already pulled out.

I agree with you it's fishy.

CingularDuality

Funny, I took it as an indication that it was acceptable to refer to The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States as "The 9/11 Commission" as it caught on with Congress later...

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