Hit the Road, Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi, it is time for you to go, you weak whimpering feckless piece of antiquity. Here you are on  Trump: It’s the fault of the press, not of a Democratic party that couldn’t organize its own memorial service.

From an interview with Politico:

"What of Hollywood’s role in making Donald Trump a reality TV star? Do you blame the industry for the current state of U.S. politics as it relates to Trump?”

 “Well, let me say I’ve never seen his reality show, so I don’t know if it was any good or what. I do think that he was assisted by the communications industry, not just Hollywood, but the press as well, because all they do is enable him, and that is really a sad thing.  “I’ve said to many of my friends in the press, ‘You’re accomplices, whether you want to be or not,’ [and they say,] ‘If he’s saying it, then it’s news.’ I don’t think it’s news, but it monopolizes the airwaves. So there is a lot of responsibility to go around in terms of the creation of whatever that is in the White House.

“But he has a tactic, one that is used by autocrats, which is, ‘Just as long as they’re talking about me, no matter if it’s bad, then you’re not talking about my opponent.’ When [the press was] talking about him, they weren’t saying what Hillary was going to do about health care, to make our economy fair.”

As Col. Potter would have said, “Horse hockey!”

A couple of points, old lady:

1) Anything a president says is news. Period. Because if it isn’t, you and your Democratic minions would have no idea a) what is going on or b) what you can complain about. 

2) The press, by reporting what he says, should be an agent for change, but most people don’t want to act on the facts so why don’t you just say what you  mean – “the public is too stupid and hateful to do the right thing.”

3) The press WAS reporting what Hillary (oh only a woman can demean her by using her first name?) said on health care. But nobody fucking cared!!! And I dare anyone now to state succinctly what her plan WAS. Even if you can, what was and is needed is a short nasty memorable slogan and the gumption to fight dirty. Michelle Obama was dead wrong about “going higher.”

4) By declaring that the press didn’t explain what Clinton was doing “to make our economy fair,” you load the issue with the false trope of fairness. That was Clinton’s job, not that of the press!

5)  You handed Trump a campaign victory by agreeing to a trade deal, which, whether good for the country or not, will give him an accomplishment that will further energize his base and peel off Democrats.

I know people will say “look at what she did for women in politics, in regaining a House majority, and standing up to Trump.” All that is old-school machine politics at best, and at worst gaining power only for the purpose of exercising it, not for any larger vision. She has now cravenly adopted the autocrat’s real mantra: Blame the messenger.

Bye, Bye, Bernie

I did not support Bernie Sanders last time, and will not again, even though I might positively check most of his policy boxes. 

I gave him another chance while watching his CNN “town hall” but had to leave after a few minutes when I realized what a horrible candidate he is. He is unlistenable-to with a whiny Brooklyn accent; lengthy explications when a bumper-sticker-answer might convince, God forbid, excite someone; condescension and utter lack of genuineness. He is the most unlikeable politician I have ever encountered.

Today, I read this, and now believe he is a useless, horrible, specimen of a human being, as well -- Trumpian, by way of despising a free press and possessing not an ounce of humility or humor. He is a nightmare because, like Trump, he attracts politically brainless political neophytes. But unlike Trump, his voters have demonstrated they would rather lose the presidency than exhibit any common sense.

Since it is unlikely that either the House or Senate would become Democratic Socialist after a Sanders victory, try to imagine him managing the daily push-and-pull of events. 

I cannot.

Muting the Mawkish

The “mute” button will be my favorite and most used device of the day because TV today, especially the football portion of the schedule, will be dripping with inappropriate, if not fake, patriotic gestures staged by this generation’s Joseph Goebbelses -- reborn as Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.

I do plan to watch football and check the news at the appointed hours to see if there is anything I need to know.

What I don’t need to know is what a zillion talking heads think about 9/11 or what the anniversary means. What I did need to know, I got early in the day from a documentary run on all the History Channels, consisting of raw footage of that morning 10 years ago. No narration, just an assemblage of contemporaneously live home video, with a minimum of TV news blather.

The universal instantaneous reaction seemed to be that no one knew what was happening. They seemed to know why (Arab terrorism) but not what” -- which is the normal human reaction to the incomprehensible. Yet 10 years later the United States still does not know what to do. The morning paper carries the impossible-to-believe news that the Obama administration is about to sign a pact with Turkey for the basing of American drones – the purpose being for the Turks to crush the Kurdish minority, who a few short years ago we were defending from the predations of Saddam Hussein.

We still think Pakistan is our friend, and we still think we can make Afghanistan a democracy. On foreign policy and national security issues, a president of color with a Muslim name is no better than the playboy prince he succeeded.

The aforementioned morning newspaper sports section carried a full page (thus, expensive) ad from the devil himself, Redskins owner Dan Snyder, depicting a Redskin charging across the national Mall carrying an American flag like the upraised sword of a crusader. The page tells us that the Redskins “thank and salute our heroes” and that the Redskins “will always remember.” Did I mention that it also says “God Bless America?”

One more reason I hope the Redskins lose every game they every play under the ownership of this monstrous height-challenged ninny who, it was reported elsewhere in the section, was under the influence of alcohol when he decided to hire the current coach.

We each have our own remembrance of and meaning for 9/11/01, and no one’s is any more valid than another’s. One thing that is a lie, however, is that “nothing would ever be the same.”

It won’t be the same for families and friends of the dead, but for the rest of us, life (except for airport security) is pretty much the same as ever. Football on Sundays (Mondays and Thursdays as well as Friday nights and Saturday afternoons), a warlike national mentality guided by a foreign policy that dooms this country to slow demise and the unwillingness of enough young people to enlist and carry it out.

The only area of national life that has changed was that George W. Bush’s prosecution of two misconceived wars, George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and George W. Bush’s stewardship of the mortgage bust made this generation and the next one poorer than the ones that preceded it.

Watching the raw footage of what happened 10 years ago today can certainly inspire hatred and wishes for revenge, and I am as hateful and vengeance-minded as the next

American. But those twin towers of viscera should be directed at Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and every other Islamic government that harbors terrorists. We know who they are, and so do they.

So spare me the crock of “heroes” and “unity” and “God.” No “hero” sacrificed his or her life to protect my freedom. If God had truly blessed America, it means He has damned everyone else. We have not been this disunited as a nation since the Civil War. Because of 9/11, I have less freedom today than I did 10 years because while we were weakened as a nation, it was more a result of our own government’s reaction to it than by the precipitating act itself.

The Chicago Code

When my public affairs career at FDA came to an abrupt end, I blamed the Chicago machine politics of Barack Obama for putting in place incompetent kids who had no clue as to media relations, personnel management or general qualities of being human.

More evidence comes from this account earlier this week by a reputable suburban Chicago newspaper of new Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s press secretary. The Rahm administration was inaugurated just as the one TV drama that captured Chicago corruption so well ("The Chicago Code") was canceled, even though it was on Fox.

It is no longer clear to me whether Emanuel was a creation of Obama or vice versa. In any event, here is one more example of Obamachine contempt for transparency -- and here is one less Democratic vote for president.

The questions that Emanuel's press secretary won't answer
By CHUCK GOUDIE
Once Rahm Emanuel takes the oath and becomes Chicago' s mayor today, you will be hearing and seeing a lot more of a young woman named Tarrah Cooper. She is beginning the job of a lifetime, even though she doesn't have much life time behind her.

Ms. Cooper (who pronounces her first name as Tair-uh, not Tahr-uh) is going to be the “face” of the Chicago mayor's office, as Mr. Emanuel's newly anointed press secretary. At the tender age of 25, she is certainly a fresh face.

Never having heard of Cooper before Emanuel returned to the Chicago political scene last fall, I was curious to find out about this person who would be responsible for espousing the positions and platforms of Chicago's first new administration in two decades; would be the go-to contact for information about important daily news stories; or, heaven forbid, be the public source in the office if there was a calamity of some kind.

Never having heard of Cooper before Emanuel returned to the Chicago political scene last fall, I was curious to find out about this person who would be responsible for espousing the positions and platforms of Chicago's first new administration in two decades; would be the go-to contact for information about important daily news stories; or, heaven forbid, be the public source in the office if there was a calamity of some kind.

Last month, after learning that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had issued a scathing report against Mr. Emanuel's school superintendent to-be, I contacted Ms. Cooper for a response. The EEOC in Rochester, N.Y., where Jean-Claude Brizard had been running the public schools, determined that he had an age, race and gender bias when firing a top administrator.

I asked Cooper whether this had been known to Rahm Emanuel and why he nevertheless selected Brizard? Had Emanuel not known? Was Brizard's job offer being revoked?

In our very first conversation, rather than simply answer the questions, Ms. Cooper stated that she wished to speak “off the record.” I informed her that I wouldn't have such a conversation, especially not with someone who is in the business of providing public information. Seemingly frustrated by that, she said that she'd have to call back.

During a series of subsequent calls and emails, Ms. Cooper waged a relentless, several-hour campaign to convince me that such a finding by a federal panel against their choice to run the Chicago schools was not a news story. Sounding like a robocall, she persisted in the theme that “this isn't a story.”

As we prepared the report for broadcast, Cooper also sent two emails containing misleading and false information. First she stated that “an independent investigation found that Mr. Brizard did nothing wrong.” But that report was prepared by a firm hired by Brizard's school board and hardly independent.

Next she wrote that “a court of law has proved that he did not do anything wrong.”

That was completely false. A civil suit is still in the early stages. Ms. Cooper, who did not respond to several requests for comment on this column, just graduated from the famous University of Missouri journalism school in 2008, so what she learned should still be fresh.

She worked as a reporter on Mizzou's TV station and interned at MTV in New York.

Before joining the Emanuel for Mayor campaign, she worked at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C., where her bio states “she helped to manage the Department's messaging, priorities and actions for numerous national incidents including the H1N1 epidemic, the December 25th and Times Square attempted bombings, the Haitian earthquake and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.” Based on DHS alerts, it seems she spent considerable time processing forms submitted by reporters to attend agency events.

At city hall, she succeeds longtime mayoral press secretary Jackie Heard, who was paid a salary of nearly $180,000 per year. On April 23, I sent Ms. Cooper a number of questions for this column. They included:

• Is there a set of written guidelines or protocols that you are working from in dealing with reporters and news organizations?
• How involved is Mr. Emanuel in setting the tone for dealing with the press and in what manner? Does each story inquiry get run by him?
• Which of these best describes your view as press secretary in dealing with Chicago's major newspapers and TV and why: Tools for getting out message as we see it; aimed at embarrassing or uncovering negative aspects of the administration; a necessary evil that has to be controlled.
• How will your cooperation with news organizations be based on the nature and tone of their day-to-day coverage?
• Does your youthfulness and lack of experience symbolize what seems to be administration focused on hiring managers under 35?
• What qualifies you to be press secretary for the mayor of the third-largest city?
• How much will you be paid?
• What are your career aspirations?

In more than three weeks she has yet to answer any of the questions. After asking a few times to meet me “off the record,” which I declined, Tarrah Cooper has stopped replying.
It is interesting that the mayor's new press secretary felt no inhibition about displaying hundreds of personal photos on her public Facebook page, showing her partying with friends, in beach attire and at a slot machine.

When you are 25, apparently some things are OK to be put on the record.

Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ ChuckGoudie.

SEO: The Epitaph for Journalism

Looking for suitable employment in my area of expertise, communicating important information to the public, I feel defeated – defeated by the evolution of journalism from almost a priestly calling to a puerile exercise in “search engine optimization.’"

Much criticism of the “mainstream media” centers on the notion of “media elites” deciding what is important and then propagating a presumed progressive agenda that “real Americans” are too stupid to figure out. Actually, I don’t have a problem with that at all. I’m not Ivy League, but I always thought I was smarter than the readers I was writing for and was doing them a favor by both reporting concisely and understandably about important government actions and presenting newsworthy material in a way that either explained the unexplainable or even offered a smile or two.
People who entered journalism over the past hundred years or so were actually spawn of the lower classes, had dirt under their fingernails, had an outlook on life representative of the commoner and had a passion for the underdog. Journalists knew what the people wanted because they were of the people. (A common aphorism that is still partially true today was that the definition of news is “what happened to the editor today.”)

Blame it on Watergate, which was broken by guys of no particularly great educational or social standing. After that, there was money and fame to be had. By the time I got to the White House in 1983, the rising stars in print and television came from money and New England schools and identified with the pain of high taxes, the importance of private schools for their kids and who got to play tennis or go to dinner with their presumed equals in governments.

A Brief History of Slime
Television news had already been sold down the river of greed when networks realized they could actually make a profit on it instead of using news as a loss leader. Print journalism had begun becoming professionalized. We student journalists, and later as paid journalists, began calling ourselves professionals. That was always a self-serving myth because there is no specialized training, board exam or licensing requirement. We were, in reality, people having the times of their lives snooping around and making life difficult for those in government, or out, who were unfairly taking advantage of people who did not have our access to information.

So many things have changed that I cannot now bear to watch more than the first five minutes of any newscast, local, network or cable. There is the matter of broadcast outlets hiring people who cannot write and cannot read. How often have you seen the “crawl” at the bottom of the screen, or the chyron describing what you are seeing and notice basic words and names being misspelled? How many times have you heard a ponderous anchor read something and jerk your head up and say, “huh?” How much longer must NBC employ the queen of nonsense, Janet Shamlian, who never fails to impress listeners with her vacuity – and sometimes her bent for the absurd, such as when she said, “A heat wave has a chokehold on the nation’s midsection?”


Why should I or anyone care about a two-bit bank robbery hundreds of miles away? Or a car chase on the other coast? Or a granny slamming a robber with her purse? A tire fire in West Virginia? The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the vids. Matters of real importance are ignored unless they appeared in one of three newspapers that morning. And then the TV thieves pass off the information as their own, with no context whatsoever. Despite a multiplicity of broadcast and internet venues, all news comes from a handful of sources: the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. If local news is big enough to go national, you might add the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

To my further dismay, what is written about or broadcast in most outlets is picked up from and credited to competing organizations. There is no attempt to independently verify much less even cover someone else’s story. The “news” you read on line on portals such as AOL, Yahoo, Huffpo -- and even some of the more prestigious online outlets – is frequently repurposed or merely linked to someone else’s report of a report. This use of someone else’s enterprise used to be a journalistic sin of the first order.

Competition from the Internet has rendered irrelevant even such a venerated organ as the Washington Post, which is so thin you can literally tear the non-ad portion of the Sunday paper in half. The daily version would blow away on your lawn if it weren’t tied up in plastic.

It is an old axiom in newsrooms that sex, violence, children and animals do automatically qualify as news. But, it also had to be local or of some national significance. Nowadays, every commercial television news program wallows in violence, fire and prurience that happens anywhere in the world – so long as video of it exists. Many stories are broadcast as “breaking news” for as long as two days after the event happened.

Online and on the air, there is zero quality control over news judgment. No one asks questions.

Scott Brown and Lara Logan
Sen. Scott Brown pitches a revelation (for his own pecuniary and political interests) that he was sexually molested by a camp counselor although it was never “consummated, so to speak” and although he will not protect other victims by actually prosecuting the offender.

I have never seen Lara Logan’s reporting to know whether it is good or bad, but I sure have heard of her, because this former swimsuit model has a penchant for becoming the story both within journalism and in the bedrooms of other journalists. Yet she becomes a national tragedy for, according to CBS, having been brutally sexually assaulted in Cairo.

Without minimizing the terror and injustice of it all, it appears from other accounts that she was stripped, hit with flagpoles and pinched. This is abominable, but if true, this – along with the headlines generated by former Cosmo nude model Scott Brown – falls short of the disgusting images that were intentionally meant to titillate us.

To whatever degrees Scott Brown and Lara Logan were defiled, why on earth is it any of our business? Because they are both in the business of selling themselves, the media are in the business of selling depravity and we consumers are in the business of lapping it up.

Wheat and Chaff
I, for one, want people smarter and possessing a broader knowledge of the world than I telling me not what I should think but what I should know. That used to be the foundation of any education. It used to be the true value of a newspaper or magazine – the placement of information you would never have thought to look for amid the funnies, sports and lingerie ads.

Not anymore. As I look over media jobs that are available, the requirements do include an ability to multitask at a reasonable level of proficiency with the language, but the prime attributes that news organizations are seeking are (as described in a recent ad for a reporting position with USA Today) experience with “SEO, audience metrics, promoting audience interaction.” On more than one job-listing site, journalism positions are to be found under the category “Industry: e-commerce.”

I am not naïve. Journalism has always been about money – publishers having all of it and reporters having too little of it to live on. But there was always the pretense of providing the public with an honest service and, for the most part, free from the publishers’ rapacious capitalist biases.

Today, with the advent of interactive Web sites and sophisticated metrics, editors and producers are capable of selecting as “news” only what people tell them they want. The old saw is truer than ever: editors separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

Yes, I believe – as do all politicians – that the public is stupid and self-destructive beyond measurement and that better-educated and fair-minded people ought to tell us what is important -- which is exactly what happens when we hire hire lawyers, accountants and plumbers.

The following is a letter I have sent to the president of the Society of Professional Journalists regarding the "retirement" of the organization's Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award.

I have just learned, with dismay, of the SPJ Board’s decision to “retire” the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award. No matter how much this baby was split, the decision is, nevertheless, a repudiation of the person for whom it is named and whose lifetime achievement is considerably greater than the sum of that attained by the entire board.

It was said the “controversy” over the award would diminish the honor for any future recipient. While Ms. Thomas’ recently expressed views that are controversial and repugnant to many, including myself, it is her journalism that was being honored, and there is no hint of anything but excellence, professionalism and courage in her 57 years with United Press International, where I was privileged to work alongside her.

Until I heard of this “controversy,” I was not aware there was any actual controversy, other than that raised by certain board members themselves in response to outside pressure.

I hope the irony is not lost that a majority of the board, as listed on the SPJ Web site, is composed of women, each and every one of whom owes a portion of her success to pioneers like Helen Thomas. I hope they went back and looked at some of the publicly expressed views of SPJ icons Eugene Pulliam and James J. Kilpatrick before making their decision.

I was honored to have been “tapped” for SPJ’s predecessor, Sigma Delta Chi, as a college student in 1967, back when it was truly an honorary organization. When my renewal notice arrives in the mail, I will have to reconsider the definition of honor.

Obamanipulation

Every president since Kennedy has tried to manipulate the news media. It is what they are supposed to do. And it is the job of the news media to resist, however futilely, and to bring to public attention the attempts.

As many readers know, I used to cover the White House and was an active, sometimes abrasive, participant in the daily briefings by the press secretary. But as in the production of sausages and of legislation, the process by which news is created ought not to be viewed by the weak-stomached. When the daily interchange between journalists and the White House press secretary went on TV some years ago, things went to hell, and it diminishes everyone.

The function of the White House press is not to dig up dirt or investigate government programs. It is to report what the president and his administration are doing on a short-term basis and, most important, to hold the president accountable by asking and receiving on-the-record answers from his spokespeople.

President Obama, however, is taking news management to a new level by selecting reporters and advising them they will be called upon at a press conference, staging town meetings the way Richard Nixon did at the behest of media adviser Roger Ailes and even arranging for a particular question to be asked.

It is his right to do so and it may advance his policies, which I am generally in favor of. But thanks to my mentor Helen Thomas and CBS’ Chip Reid, the public now knows how this manipulation of public opinion is being conducted.

The following Is from the July 1 White House briefing:

Q At today's town hall meeting, questions coming in on YouTube
and Twitter and such -- who decides what questions will be asked?

MR. GIBBS: I think a group over at New Media is shuffling through
questions. I think if you go on -- I did not do this today, but I think if
you go on our Web site you'll see some of those questions. And I think,
Chip, at the end of the day, when you -- I think the questions that will be read
to the President -- obviously he'll take some questions from the audience there
-- I think will be a representative sample of the issues in this debate that
we're dealing with.

Q And the audience is all preselected, right?

MR. GIBBS: No, we usually just generally hand out tickets on a
first come, first serve basis.

Q Well, I think in this case, the people were invited either by the White House or by the university -- I mean, invited by this community college, as it was explained to us.
MR. GIBBS: Well, if the university is --

Q It just feels very tightly controlled. It feels -- I mean, the concept of a town hall I
think is to have a open public forum, and this sounds like a very tightly
controlled audience and a list of questions. Why do it that why? Why
not open it up to the public?

MR. GIBBS: How about we do this -- how about you can ask me that question tomorrow based on what questions were asked rather than preselecting your question based on something that may or may not come through.

Q But why pre-select? Why not just open it up for people and allow any question to come in?

MR. GIBBS: Well, Chip, I think if you get on your computer from your e-mail address
--
Q I have. I have.

MR. GIBBS: Have you sent in your question?

Q I think that would be inappropriate. This is for the public.

MR. GIBBS: I'm sorry, I'm confused -- are you not a member of the public?

Q Well, I think if you were going to allow questions from the press you'd have us in a
prominent position over there and allow us to ask questions -- you haven't done
that.

MR. GIBBS: Let's not get into the notion of where you'd be sitting -- (laughter) -- if I let you ask a question, but
--
Q Well out of shouting range.

MR. GIBBS: Well, but you could e-mail.

Q Would you put my question in there? I don't think so.

MR. GIBBS: Maybe. Have you e-mailed?

Q I mean, this is a town hall.

MR.

GIBBS: It's a little -- if you haven't e-mailed.

Q This is an open forum for the public to ask questions, but it's not really
open.

MR. GIBBS: I couldn't agree more. Q But it's not open.

MR. GIBBS: Based on what?

Q Based on the information that your staff gave us on how the audience and the questions are being selected.

MR. GIBBS: The questions are being selected by people that e-mail on Facebook and Twitter.

Q Well, they're not deciding what questions actually get in.

MR. GIBBS: Well, Chip, I appreciate, again --

Q It just feels completely controlled
--
MR. GIBBS: I appreciate, again --

Q -- in a way unlike his town meetings all the campaign and --

MR. GIBBS: I appreciate the pre-selected question on your part.

Q Will there be dissenting views --

Q Yes, how about that?

MR. GIBBS: I think that's a very safe bet. But, again, let's -- how about we do this? I promise we will interrupt the AP's tradition of asking the first question. I will let you ask me a question tomorrow as to whether you thought the questions at the town hall meeting that the President conducted at Annandale --

Q I'm perfectly happy to
--
Q That's not his point. The point is the control
--
Q Exactly.

Q -- we have never had that in the White House. And we have had some, but not
--
Q This White House.

MR. GIBBS: Yes, I was going to say, I'll let you amend her question.

Q I'm amazed -- I'm amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency and --

MR. GIBBS: Helen, you haven't even heard the questions.

Q It doesn't matter. It's the process.

Q You have left open --

Q Even if there's a tough question, it's a question coming from somebody who was invited or was screened, or the question was screened.

Q It's shocking. It's really shocking.

MR. GIBBS: Chip, let's have this discussion at the conclusion of the town hall meeting. How about that?

Q Okay.
MR. GIBBS: I think --

Q No, no, no, we're having it now --

MR. GIBBS: Well, I'd be happy to have it
now.

Q It's a pattern.

MR. GIBBS: Which question did you object to at the town hall meeting, Helen?

Q It's a pattern. It isn't the question --

MR. GIBBS: What's a pattern?

Q It's a pattern of controlling the press.

MR. GIBBS: How so? Is there any evidence currently going on that I'm
controlling the press -- poorly, I might add. (Laughter.)

Q Your formal engagements are pre-packaged.

MR. GIBBS: How so?

Q Well, and controlling the public --

Q How so? By calling reporters the night before to tell them they're going to be called on. That is shocking.

MR. GIBBS: We had this discussion ad nauseam and
--
Q Of course you would because you don't have any answers.
MR. GIBBS: Well, because I didn't know you were going to ask a
question, Helen. Go ahead.

Q Well, you should have.

Q Thank you for your support.
MR. GIBBS: That's good. Have you e-mailed your question today?

Q I don't have to e-mail it. I can tell you right now what I want to
ask. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: I don't doubt that at all, Helen. I don't doubt that at all.

Not Enough

It has always irked me to see general, nonspecific attacks on the failures of the "mainstream media." Not that the MSM is always a paragon of virtuous reporting, but were it not for them, what would the pajama-clad bloggers and wacko talk show hosts have to fulminate about if the MSM didn't bring attention to controversial issues in the first place?

In 2007, 64 journalists have died in the pursuit of news gathering, the most since 1994. I wonder how many bloggers and radio talk show hosts have sacrificed anything while doing their jobs.

D.C. Droppings -- IX

Shame on ABC News

I just started making “World News Tonight” my main source of evening network news, and I am sorry. There was a piece May 3 that was the height of sensationalist, lazy reporting.

Based on an AP story, based on a press release from a veteran’s group angry about not getting enough medical attention, ABC sneered at the bonuses paid to Veteran’s Affairs department executives. The "hook" was that the bonuses came at a time the agency was alleged to be mistreating Iraq War victims and when it had an “embarrassing” $1 billion budget shortfall because it did not foresee increased casualties.

Without taking a position on the merits of the bonuses, I am outraged at ABC’s distortion through omission. The Veteran Administration runs the very best health system in America – provably so – and is the model for what any politician ought to propose for the rest of us. (Don’t say anything, but it is “socialized medicine” and it works). It was the U.S. Army that failed outpatient brain-damaged GIs, not the VA.

The VA is a Cabinet agency. As such, it is run by the president. Its budget is approved, if not written, by the Office of Management and Budget, which is the president’s budgetary fiscal butcher. Since the liar-in-chief swore that the mission had been accomplished, of course the VA could not anticipate an influx of wounded.

To the extent that the VA did fail the returning veterans, ABC should have done its own reporting and not used file footage of Walter Reed, which is the U.S. Army’s problem, not the VA’s.

Freedom of the Press?

Doesn’t it just send shivers of patriotism up your spine when you hear the president of the United States defend the premier paragraph in the Bill of Rights like this?

"(F)reedom of the press is … just something that we've all got to live with … "

Still, I am uncomfortable, as a member of the Society for Professional Journalists, with an organization that lobbies Congress to enact laws affecting freedom of the press. The First Amendment states rather clearly: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of … the press…”

When journalists pressure Congress to enact shield laws, allowing them in certain circumstances to withhold the names of sources from prosecutors, they are asking Congress to make a law.

And when Congress has the journalism profession’s seal of approval on making laws – and all laws necessarily abridge something – then Congress can make other laws far more insidious.

Ten Least Wanted

I just finished watching the 10 officially declared Republican candidates “debate” at the Reagan Museum (I would call it a library but would not want to insult libraries by associating them with Mr. Ignorant.) The exercise was pretty much an act of political necrophilia, with everyone trying to get into bed with the man who once said “facts are stupid things.”

I do have a connection to the site, however, having flown maybe 50 times on the Air Force One that hung over the audience.

It was the least comfortable way to travel to a presidential appearance, with four reporters crammed around a tiny table with no leg room, Air Force food and a telephone. If it weren’t for the honor, I would just as soon as walked. Seriously, the souvenirs were topnotch.

A few thoughts on the Ten Least Wanted Men in America:

o Sam Brownback is scary.

o Mitt Romney looks and sounds like someone you could deal with if you had to.

o Rudy Giuliani’s popularity will start falling when Republicans realize he is a New Yorker whose only claim to fame was putting the city’s emergency response center inside the World Trade Center.

o Jim Gilmore was a terrible governor of Virginia, so bad that the 12 years following him will have seen a Democrat running one of the redder states. He is almost as brainless as his namesake, Happy Gilmore.

o Tommy Thompson was a lousy Cabinet officer, has terrible hair and no apparent first name. If you like the Bush Administration’s health care and medical research policies, you will love Thompson.

o Mike Huckabee is probably the best qualified, most likeable, most honest.

Tom Tancredo, the racist yahoo who would make Lou Dobbs chief of the immigration Gestapo, did impress me when he promised, “No more platitudes.” Maybe the Coloradan meant “no more altitudes.” Or “no more plateaus.”

o Ron Paul has been in Congress for decades, is a Libertarian and not a Republican, is crazy as a loon but said more things I agree with than anyone else: 1) free speech and no restrictions at all on the Internet and 2) respect for habeas corpus.

o John McCain is too old. Period. And thinks Joe Lieberman is someone to admire. He is also the most conservative of all the major candidates, though the political press would have you believe otherwise.

o Duncan Hunter is running because he has nothing better to do now that he is no longer chairman of the the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee. As soon as he drops out, he will become a lobbyist for the people he was supposed to be overseeing.

Is this a great country or what!

Turn Off Your TV to Avoid Massacre News -- and Rosie

I am gobsmacked by the news that Rosie O’Donnell has joined the right wing crackpots who somehow find the news media despicable for broadcasting the Virginia Tech mass murderer’s tapes.

There are a number of definitions of news, including: that which affects an editor; that which “advances” the story; and what I prefer – that which is accurate and affects a lot of people. Now, you might say the murderer affected only 32 people, but we know this story is bigger than that.

As for television constantly repeating the ugly images of this maggot, you have only yourself to blame if you keep watching it. Cable news, in particular, has 24 hours of time to fill. When something important is going on, producers have to assume someone is tuning in for the first time. Not to trivialize too much, but if your team is losing 32-0, should the sportscaster refuse to give the score in order to pacify the fans?

If you don’t like it, don’t watch! Some viewer wrote NBC that as a result of the coverage, she will never watch or read news again. Tell me – who does that harm?

When you read a newspaper, you usually take from it what you want and then throw it out, though you may wish to re-read a particularly good piece, or magnetize it to your fridge. Do the same thing with television, for God’s sakes. Don’t tell me you are disgusted by repetitive coverage if you are gonna keep watching it. And if you are personally affected by the deaths of loved ones or friends, you have more serious concerns than the news media reporting the news.

In my 40 years in or around the news business, for every family member who resents media coverage of their personal tragedy, there is at least one who is grateful for it.

Now, as for any commercial interest that the media might accrue – forget it. They don’t operate that way. It probably is costing most mainstream media more to cover the event than it will profit. Yet, we have the sick spectacle of a Major League baseball team wearing Virginia Tech caps, Nascar putting the Tech logo on its race cars for the next three weeks and sports paraphernalia companies meeting a national demand for Tech hats, sweaters, pants, shirts and ribbons of sorrow. I have no idea who or what is being supported by this outpouring of treacle.

But I know the vicious vacuous right wing – getting pasted in the polls and finding its only answer to domestic and world issues is ideology – couldn’t figure out how to turn the massacre to its advantage until NBC ran the killer’s tapes.

It is failing that, too, because if you give even two seconds of thought to it, what would you rather have – news coverage decided by news people or by state police chiefs, craven politicians and Fox “News.” Thomas Jefferson addressed this quite well a couple of centuries ago.

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Imus Pays Too High a Price

L'affaire Imus est morte.

The penalty for his transgression was way too severe, and I was saddened to read the headline this morning "Don Ho Is Dead."

The New Black List

When you earn a terminal academic degree, say a Ph.D., or a J.D., you are entitled to be called “Dr.” and append “Esq.” to the end of your name.

There is no rule about how long you can do that, but if you call yourself “doctor” or “esquire” for one year past attaining the degree, you are considered by peers as a preening, inconsequential, foolish fraud whose actual accomplishments are zero.

Such is the case with a woman whose existence became known to me today in the aftermath of the Imus lynching. She is self-identified as “Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.,” and her bio reveals her to be a lifelong activist who has not held a serious job in her life. Which makes her the female equivalent of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, except they have better hair.

Williams heads the National Congress of Black Women, whose mission seems to be to institutionalize victimhood. On Friday, it announced it will lead a “a national coordinated effort to make it unpleasant and unprofitable to denigrate women through the use of racist, sexist comments” in the news and entertainment media.

In other words, a thought pogrom.

Let’s parse her press release action statement. She will make it “unpleasant.” What could that mean? That we will have to hear her voice every time someone says something she finds to be “racist” or “sexist?” Or does it mean she will lead boycotts? Or does it mean she will slander people? Or does it mean she will threaten them with physical harm? You do recall that to some unreconstructed white racists, the Civil War was referred to as the “unpleasantness.” Calling people out for “racist” or “sexist” comments is one thing in the work place, but she is specifically trying to impose her definition of unauthorized words upon the news media and the arts.

Calling her a bitch would be an example of improper language, but she said nothing about common profanity, so my reaction to her statement is “Fuck that shit!” She is just another in a long line of self-appointed cultural censors like Anita Bryant and Tipper Gore.

On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Williams was asked what her new coalition of otherwise respectable black and women’s groups would be looking at. “We will be monitoring everything,” she replied. “Who knows where the racism, bigotry and sexism is coming from?”

Indeed, who knows who might say an evil thing?

She will have to have her minority minions watching and listening to everything being said – like some black National Security Agency. Like the neo-fascist “liberals” at the blog site “Media Matters” whose mission of countering right-wing misinformation is a cover for attacking the mainstream news media – the only institutions with the capability and interest in investigating frauds. (It is a crying shame that a once-admirable National Association of Black Journalists is now in the business of ferreting out thoughts and language it doesn’t like.)

What in the name of Lena Horne and Paul Robeson is this poseur and snake oil sales clerk on her high horse about?

By her press conference, her interviews and her need to validate a resume thin as owl shit on slate, Williams seems intent on re-creating “Red Channels,” the 1940s publication by right-wing racists and nativists that listed supposed “communists” in the arts and news media. It is sadly ironic that the generic name for such career-wrecking smear jobs was “the black list.” One of the most willing career executioners was then, as now, CBS.

In gaining all her degrees, it must have escaped Williams’ notice that the main victims of the first black list were Jews, blacks and those who supported civil rights. Here are some of the people whose careers were targeted by the witch-hunters that she has now joined in spirit:

Lena Horne
Paul Robeson
Langston Hughes
Leonard
Bernstein
Lee J. Cobb
Aaron Copland
José Ferrer
John Garfield
Will Geer (Grandpa Walton)
Jack Gilford, actor
Judy Holliday
Gypsy Rose Lee
Burgess Meredith
Arthur Miller (author of “The
Crucible”)
Dorothy Parker
Edward G. Robinson
Artie Shaw
Howard
K. Smith
Orson Welles
Richard Attenborough
Barbara Bel Geddes
Charlie Chaplin
Charles Collingwood

Now she has created a “white list,” and the first victim was Don Imus. Maybe she will go after hip-hop lyrics, but that is no more justified than going after E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, the composer of “Over the Rainbow,” who made the first blacklist.

Song lyrics, humor (no matter how pathetic) and screenplays don’t kill people. Race rabble-rousers and riot-inciters, like George Wallace and Al Sharpton, do. Wallace has the blood of four little girls in Birmingham on his cold dead hands. Sharpton has on his hands the blood of eight people – and counting.

As for “Dr.” E. Faye Williams, “Esq.” she should shut up before she does any more damage than she is already does as head of a company that hornswoggles black people by selling them unproven, unscientific, potentially harmful “natural health” products, including peanut potions to relieve the pain of arthritis, gout, diabetic neuropathy and stress -- and to straighten nappy hair.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, she lists herself as “Former Counsel to the US Congress.” Needless to say, there is no such position, although there are hundreds of such people who serve at any given time as a counsel to the “U.S. Congress Committee on (such and such)” and do not claim to be the counsel to Congress. Her real congressional job was a staff aide to a long-retired member. It is hard to tell whether that was before or after she was chief of staff to the race-baiting, paranoid, tax-evading, crack-smoking, serial husband Marion Barry.

She was, however, given “Distributor of the Year Award” in 2003 by Unither Pharma, a company who that same year signed a consent degree with the Federal Trade Commission to stop deceptive advertising for a food bar it claimed, falsely, would prevent heart disease.

This piece of work, “Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.,” is expert in only one thing -- false advertising, -- and she is on the loose again.

Time Marches Backward

Ten years ago Don Imus was on the cover of Time Magazine as one of the nation’s 25 most influential people. Today he is on the cover as one of the least. Make up your mind, Time! He hasn’t changed. You and the rest of the corporate media have panicked in the face of extortion by the process-headed Al Sharpton.

There is a long history of radio personalities getting suspended or fired for outrageous remarks. Corporate cowardice is evinced by the fact that there is no instance I can recall, as an informed observer of the industry, where management took action on its own, absent a complaint or threat.

And then there is my hero, Keith Olbermann, who along with Imus vaulted MSNBC into public consciousness and who is the best thing to happen to broadcast commentary since, well, Imus in his better days.

What a disappointment he turns out to be, telling a sports radio audience today that he was among those pressing internally to get Imus off the air. One of his guests the other night was Bill Maher, who was fired from ABC for his commentary after 9/11. Doesn't Olbermann get it? If he isn't the next to go, his name is sure near the top of the blacklist.

I don’t watch ABC’s The View, but I do read in AOL news, provided by Time, that there is a move to boycott advertisers to get back at Rosie O’Donnell for being un-American, whatever that is. The true racists on the right adopt Imus -- whose politics are really old-style liberal Republicanism -- and with his demise go after Rosie. Then the left is going to go after Rush. Over-the-air broadcasting is now a relic, and that's good. We will just have to pay to hear what we want.

Until then, a couple of questions:

If the MSNBC and CBS advertisers had stayed with Don Imus, would he have been removed from the network?

If MSNBC really believed its decision was motivated not by money but by the morality of the situation, why did it wait a week to decide what to do? Why did CBS wait even a day longer to become "revulsed." Could it be they were given shuffling orders from Al Sharpton?

Did you know that the CBS glamor girl Katie Couric read a personal commentary that was plagiarized from the Wall Street Journal -- and she still has a job.

Since there is real news going on the world, why was MSNBC alone among the cable news networks in devoting almost all its time covering the Imus affair? Could it be shameless, craven, pusillanimous self-promotion?

Do you know what Al Sharpton said about the Duke lacrosse players and whether he has apologized?

Why is Michael Savage allowed to be on radio? (Although, to be fair, MSNBC fired his ass in about week after he told a gay caller to die.)

I wonder if there are others like me who came to find Imus stale, crude and no longer worthy of our attention but who discovered MSNBC and its generally superior news coverage because we were tuned to “Imus in the Morning" in the first place.

Corporation-Approved Speech

With Imus going down in flames as MSNBC and the big boys of national advertising pulling out after being blackmailed by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, we are one step closer to having only official opinions. Just ask Bill Maher, one of the freshest, funniest and most provocative comics working today. He was fired from ABC for a remark he made after 9/11. The name of his show was “Politically Incorrect.”

“Imus in the Morning” is really cooked now that it will not appear on MSNBC, which is where most of official Washington gets the feed because of the poor reception from the program’s radio outlet.

General Motors Corp., GlaxoSmithKline, Ditech.com, Procter & Gamble Co. and Staples are certainly paragons of racial correctness, aren’t they? Why did it take a week for corporate America to decide Imus was toxic when he has been insulting innocent people for decades. It is their Bush-given right to advertise where they wish, but we know that they are cowards when it comes controversy. One good thing is that lost sponsors Ditech and Head On have the two most obnoxious commercials in history that will now be heard by fewer people.

The cure for bad speech, it is said, is better speech. But thought-assassins Sharpton and Jackson haven’t had a decent thing to offer public discourse in their entire lives. Up in Jackson’s “Hymietown,” Sharpton twice incited black mobs, once in Harlem where seven people died, and once in Crown Heights, denouncing “diamond merchants” before skittering away like a cockroach before his acolytes murdered a Jew.

I would rather have the choice to hear about “nappy headed hos” than be forced to hear silence. Thought-assassins Sharpton and Jackson have never had to answer for anything in their lives, and it is about time they were forced to.

White Men Can’t Jump – Too Far

This Imus controversy may be a moment for the nation to talk about race, but only up to a point. Because this isn’t about race. It may, in fact, be about how much we want to limit speech in search of civility.

It definitely isn’t about harming innocent 18- and 19-year old women.

This is about agendas. The Imus agenda is being able to continue what he has been doing better than almost anyone else for 35 years even though he is wealthy enough to retire and buy his own radio outlet. The victim community’s agenda is taking down a white man for the stupid phrase “nappy headed ho’” when it has no racial denotation per se, ignoring that “ho’” is a black invention.

The Sharpton agenda is Sharpton, nothing else. (My agenda is pointing out to those who don’t remember that this man is an exploitative, racist, anti-Semitic slug who poured lie upon lie in defense of the monstrous Tawana Brawley, instigated a riot that cost the life of a Jewish tourist and refused to pay a civil judgment for libeling a policeman as a rapist. He now pays cash for everything so the courts can’t attach any bank account.)

The advertisers’ agenda is getting the premium audience Imus delivers. The NBC and CBS agendas are making money.

Do you really think that the word ‘ho’ in this day and age is going to damage the most physically and emotionally strong women in America, those who play Division I basketball to the point she cannot cope? Is this language even close to other stuff he said that people laugh at? Do black comedians and athletes use white people as foils? Is Imus even 10 percent as obnoxious as the right wing radio racists? Is he even 5 percent as obnoxious as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson?

I watched the Rutgers women’s press conference, and I am sure the rest of the nation was teary-eyed at the pluck this coach and her players demonstrated. I looked some stuff up of interest.

The team’s freshman GPA was 3.0, which is supposed to demonstrate that these women are not there just for their basketball ability. But freshmen usually get good GPAs their first semester. What will it be after four years? What will it be after six years, which is what the NCAA uses as metric for determining graduation rates? The last time this was measured, Rutgers women had a 73 percent graduation rate. The average for the entire top tier of teams was 82 percent.

When they sign up to play at the highest level, and give interviews and personal information for puff pieces, they can no longer claim protection from slings and arrows – though the Imus remark was uncalled for.

This inspirational coach, Vivian Stringer, is such as fine woman that at the beginning of the season when the team had two wins and four losses, she called them the “worst ever” and locked them out of the locker room, taking away their athletic gear and uniforms for a month. This is a woman whose star player boasted before the championship game:

She can call you every possible name, insult you so much. But, it’s only to make you stronger, prepare you for what others might say or what you might go through in life.

Good, another name-calling coach. This Scarlet Knight is more like Bobby Knight!

And here is a quote about one teammate by freshman Epiphanny Prince, apparently one of the smarter players on the team. “Us freshmen, we call her ‘mom.’ Hearing this from her should make we all confident that she will get an A in English.

The Rutgers team, coach and school administration have decided to let inane comments from an over-the-hill shock jock make them victims. And with Sharpton inciting from the sidelines, this whole thing is an opportunity for the politically correct to crawl out from under their rocks and use Imus to shut everyone else up whom they disagree with.

The only problem Imus has is that for the past week, there was no real news and that of all his provocative remarks, this one was not funny.

I made my choice, which is not to listen to his program, not patronize his advertisers and look askance at any politician who appears on his show.

Now, Imus needs to shut up, as do his attackers, lest they stir up a backlash they do not want to deal with – like the one that Sharpton created that resulted in the election of Republican Rudy Giuliani as mayor of New York. It looks as if Sharpton wants to elevate Guiliani to an even higher level. And that, of course, will help race relations.

Right, Yankel Rosenbaum?

Sticking It Up Imus' Gravitas

I listened to Don Imus and watched him on MSNBC faithfully for 10 years, feeling his show is what I would have aspired to do had I taken another fork and gone into radio. I promoted him to everyone I could, because his morning zoo kind of show was about books, politics, entertainment and intellectual pursuits – all under the overarching umbrella of comedy and satire. You laughed and you thought. And you got mad. Which, to me, is the purpose of a good communicator and entertainer.

But I stopped cold more than a year go after he mentioned something positive my old colleague Helen Thomas had done or said and added a bunch of gratuitous insults that had nothing to do with the substance of whatever she had said. About the same time, I got tired of his and his trophy wife’s ill-informed rants about autism, his use of the show to promote his and his wife’s pet books and causes and his constant bragging about a son who is likely to end up in therapy as a result.

Now, the rest of the world is catching up to the fact Imus and his band of ugly-spirited sidekicks are tres passe and that making fun of minorities does not need to include random racial name-calling. To me, funny is funny no matter who is hurt by it. But Imus commits, and condones by his cohorts, ad hominem attacks based on what people look like, not what they say or do. Not funny.

The mere fact that Al Sharpton, the guy who gives pestilence a bad name, wants him fired make me want to support Imus even more. For one thing, Imus is not what is wrong with talk radio. His occasional lapses of taste are at least done in the name of humor. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck, to name a few, are the really dangerous ones because they either believe the garbage they spew or, worse, don't believe it.

Look, if you make money for your employer by being edgy, then you will fall off the edge a few times. The question here is how many times are you allowed to do it.

Imus' reputation for penetrating and newsworthy interviews of the biggest name politicians is offset by all the apologies he has had to make over the years for being offensive.

The problem is not with him or his fans. There should be the free-est marketplace of thought with the penalty for excess being loss of listeners, as it is with me.

The problem is that Imus gets the fame, power and ability to be racist because of the roster of big name politicians from both parties and big name journalists, starting with the suckup king of the world, Tim Russert, who appear on his show and give him gravitas. They should stop appearing or suffer the slings and arrows of their employers, who sometimes are the same people who employ Imus – CBS and NBC among them.

Shove It the Long Way, Mr. President.

Politics and music have gone together ever since the Song of Solomon, if not before.

No suprise, then, that the lovely Dixie Chicks won all five Grammy Awards they were nominated for now. They make great music, but these awards vindicated the trio and demonstrated that the public has repudiated Bushitler and the America-hating rednecks who, with the Clear Channel music corpofascists, tried to derail their career.

Song of the year "Not Ready to Make Nice," and the coveted album of the year, "Taking the Long Way," are melodic ways of telling Bushitler to take this war and shove it the long way.

Nice touch that introducing them to perform "Not Ready to Make Nice" was Joan Baez.

And a nicer touch that lead Chick Natalie Maines' first words in accepting song of the year were, "To quote the great Simpsons: heh-heh."

Is this really a political win? It is, in the sense that the academy doesn't reward cash register bombs. Somebody is buying their records, and tomorrow, even more will.

Leaks Happen

An immutable rule in Washington – as it should be elsewhere – is "never put anything in print you don't want to see on the front page tomorrow morning."

With that in mind, I would like to explain some realities, with the help of the newspaper to those who hear that the "liberal media" jeopardize national security, cost the lives of soldiers and commit treason when they publish leaked documents. In New York Observer recent months, leaked documents have told of secret CIA prisons across Europe and secret illegal wiretapping, made public an official U.S. assessment that the current puppet prime minister of Iraq is incompetent and exposed Donald Rumsfeld's real views that the war is not going well. Note that four years ago, leaks were supportive of the administration's bogus claim of weapons of mass destruction.

This is not about a perfidious press. It is about someone in power and with access to documents doesn't like a policy and wants to stir up public pressure to change it, needs to cover his ass to show he was right all along, or wants to send a message that for diplomatic reasons he can't say in public. It is not a case of
reporters, or even officials, stealing "government documents" – a logical impossibility given that all government documents are public by nature.

Yet from Watergate forward, whenever there is a really good leak, the administration in power screams in outrage, subjects bureaucrats to lie detectors, sets up FBI investigations to find the disloyal rat who is serving the interest of the enemy, and beats the press for purposes of winning elections.

The dirty little secret, however, is that in more cases than not, the leak is official; that is, a high government official purposely is giving the Washington Post or New York Times the goods, knowing that even upon pain of jail, reporters will not rat them out.

Presidents, themselves, leak. Sometimes the leak even makes the leaker look a little bad, in order to give the resulting news story a veneer of credibility. (The best advice in crisis public relations is to give up a little bad news to prevent the public from finding out the really bad news.)

Jimmy Carter, however, could not leak straight. At a private White House dinner in 1980, when faced with a primary election challenge from Ted Kennedy, he boasted to some Democratic lawmakers, "I'll whip his ass" if he decides to run. That would be a good headline any day. But out of loyalty, the politicos kept silent. Finally, a White House spokesman had to leak to the press what Carter had said privately for public consumption. He was trying to send a message that could have been conveyed by dialing 202-224-3121, the Capitol.

And in recent weeks, the reptilian George Will tried to shock the nation by reporting that Sen.-elect James Webb was rude to the president at a White House event after Bush asked how his son was doing while in combat in Iraq. You can be sure that the leak of a private conversation at a private event did not come from Webb. It came from the Bushies. I wish Webb would have responded by asking Bush how his daughters were doing while partying in Argentina instead of serving their country.

Anyway, by way of explanation about how the news media operate hand-in-brass-knuckled fist with government, remember this: Unlike shit, leaks don't just happen.