Needlenose

Matt Yglesias caught this bit of double-talk about the Rod Blagojevich indictments coming from the Washington Post’s Shailagh Murray in an online chat yesterday:

There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road.

Seeing Murray’s eagerness to tolerate phony claims of corruption in the hopes they will prove “useful” in reporting on a hoped-for presidential scandal later, I immediately flashed back to her comments in the summer of 2007, reacting to the actual corruption of a President commuting the sentence of a criminal in his own administration:

Yaawwn. That’s my view of the Libby flap. What on earth did people expect Bush to do?

Apparently her enthusiasm for White House scandal depends greatly on which party is occupying the White House.

Via Think Progress, Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio.com reports on a conversation with perversely influential moron Bill Kristol (whose career arc has taken him from being the “brains behind Dan Quayle” to the impressive dual misadventure of helping bring America both the Iraq war and Sarah Palin):

I asked Kristol about the rumors that he might be leaving the New York Times op-ed page after his contract expires next month. Did he expect to have it renewed?

“I don’t think I’ve had that conversation yet,” he told me.

You don’t think you’ve “had that conversation yet”?  You’d think a lifelong neoconservative would be a more convincing liar.  Bercovici continues:

Okay — but would he like to have it renewed? “I’m ambivalent. It’s been fun. It’s a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on. But I haven’t really focused on it.”

Yep, he’s toast.  Assuming this firing non-renewal comes to pass, though, it would constitute an event so unlikely many observers considered it physically impossible — a conservative actually being held responsible for failure.

From Howard Kurtz’s Monday column for the Washington Post:

Fox News is expected to announce today the hiring of a new contributor, a veteran national security correspondent who has shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Her name is Judith Miller, and she is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller’s conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor’s note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had “become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.”

Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox’s Web site. “She has a very impressive résumé,” says Senior Vice President John Moody. “We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped. It’s certainly something she’s going to be associated with for all time, and there’s not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. . . . She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for.”

Given her background in ideologically motivated snipe hunts, Miller seems like a perfect fit to join Fox News’ round-the-clock coverage of ACORN’s alleged vote-fraud activities.

Some real journalism coming out of AP.

See what happens when Ron Fournier is out getting drunk at the post-Palin-speech bashes.

If you thought AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier would be a bit chastened by the reaction to his laughably biased criticism of Barack Obama’s VP pick the other day — you know, the article that launched letter-writing protest campaigns by MoveOn.org and Firedoglake — you’d better guess again.

Here he is tonight, spitting reflecting on Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention:

Clinton had to somehow convince people that she honestly thought Obama was ready for the presidency. But something stood in her way: Her words.

– Dec. 3, 2007: “So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One … or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate.”

– March 2008. “I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.“

I know, I know — you’re shocked that a now-famed McCainiac like Fournier found a way to work some out-of-context “praise” for John McCain in reporting on a speech that focused on all the things Clinton and Barack Obama are for, but McCain is against (as Hillary herself repeatedly pointed out during the primaries, even as she competed against Obama). For example, Clinton said:

We need to elect Barack Obama because we need a President who understands that America can’t compete in a global economy by padding the pockets of energy speculators, while ignoring the workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas. We need a President who understands that we can’t solve the problems of global warming by giving windfall profits to the oil companies while ignoring opportunities to invest in new technologies that will build a green economy.

But those weren’t the words Ron Fournier was interested in — he cared much more about stray remarks from six or eight months ago. Not once in his article, in fact, does Fournier concede that Obama and Clinton favor many of the same policies… in other words, that she might back Obama not merely because he defeated her but because they both sought to achieve the same goals for this country.

Because what Clinton and Obama actually believe isn’t important to Fournier, any more than he gave a flying fig about Clinton’s actual speech last night. His intention is to distract readers from what she said, to disrupt what Clinton and Obama are seeking to achieve by imposing his previously-formed opinions on the event.

In a “news” story. For the once-famously objective Associated Press.

But if Fournier has to take them down, too, along the way, he will. After all, he’s got a candidate to get elected.

(”Ron Fournier’s Notebook” image above by yours truly. Thanks to Ego-Box for the hand-drawn hearts.)

Congratulations to ace reporter Dan Balz and his editors for prying out this scoop in today’s Washington Post story on the presidential race:

. . . McCain advisers think their candidate matches up well against those potential vulnerabilities in Obama. “This guy’s . . . weaknesses are all John’s strengths,” said one McCain adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly about strategy.

Damn! You can tell a sizzling quote like that had to be kept off the record. No way the source could risk having his name tied to something like that.

Anyone remember the good old days when newspapers were supposedly adopting stricter guidelines on using anonymous sources? I guess it’s probably no surprise that it hasn’t had much effect.

I only mentioned it obliquely, but about a week ago the corporate media amused itself by willfully misinterpreting some of Barack Obama’s statements about Iraq — at the behest of the McCain campaign as it tried to establish the traditional “flip-flopper” narrative about a Democratic presidential candidate. Â Scolded for this, the press responded by taunting Obama, saying it was his fault he couldn’t stop them from lying:

Two days ago, Senator Barack Obama said he had not been clear enough in explaining his Iraq policy. Today, there was a different rationale.

The confusion was not his fault, Mr. Obama said, but rather the media’s for seizing on three words he uttered in Fargo, N.D., when he suggested he would be open to “refine my policies” on Iraq.

“I was surprised by how finely calibrated every single word was measured,” he said, speaking to reporters as he flew here from Montana.

. . . Aides later conceded that Mr. Obama knows the office he seeks – the Oval Office – comes with a job description of calibrating and measuring every single word.

This tilted playing field, where Obama’s words get twisted and the press blames him for it, even as they give a pass to McCain’s gaffes, is going to be an ongoing factor in the fall campaign. Â But what’s a candidate to do when reporters essentially rub their double standard in his face?

Obviously, holding another press conference isn’t going to do much good.  So Obama’s gone a different route — offering a lengthy, exclusive interview to CNN yesterday, publishing an op-ed on Iraq in the New York Times the same day, and now announcing a major speech on the subject for tomorrow.

It’s all an effort to avoid having his positions run through the journalistic meatgrinder before they get to the public, stating his policies so clearly and loudly in so many forums that it drowns out the chatter of reporters and Republicans trying to obscure them.

I’m sure Obama will have to do this any number of times between now and November. Â But it’s good that his campaign already understands that if Barack wants to get his message out clearly, he’ll have to do it himself.

Warmonger and Shrubya Lovah Christopher Hitchens decides, after 10 seconds of ‘treatment,’ that waterboarding is torture. I particularly liked the caption to this so-called ‘news’ article:

“Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens says it was difficult finding someone who would agree to waterboard a man of 60.”

He obviously didn’t try too hard - I’d be happy to waterboard him! Right after ‘boarding Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, ad nauseum. I guess the issue wasn’t finding somebody who would waterboard him though, but rather - somebody who would be willing to stop after only 10 seconds of what Limbaugh once termed ‘hazing.’

Does it strike you that Mr. Hitchens is in that twilight mode of any celebrity’s career, “struggling to stay relevant?”

Via ThinkProgress and Media Matters, it seems that Fox News was miffed enough at a New York Times story on its declining ratings to not only do a video segment attacking the NYT, but also alter photographs it showed of the reporters:

It doesn’t take much knowledge of history to guess at the inspiration for Fox News here. Just like old times, apparently.

Famed fossil establishment pundit David Broder wrote in the Washington Post last Sunday:

We are barely at the beginning of the long period in which most Americans will give their first serious scrutiny to the presidential candidates and decide whether Barack Obama or John McCain will get their vote.

. . . What may be crucial in the end is whether people become comfortable with the prospect of Obama as their president.

McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating.

As John Amato noticed, the Post’s Chris Cillizza (in his “The Fix” blog) quickly stepped up to amplify the message, reminding everyone that Broder is “required reading for anyone who calls himself a political junkie. The Dean of the political press corps, Broder has been setting conventional wisdom in campaigns for longer than The Fix has been on earth.”

Nevertheless, the Post seems to be worried about stragglers who were out of town and didn’t check the paper over the weekend. Â And so (via Brad at Sadly, No! — I don’t go looking for this crap on my own, y’now), columnist Richard Cohen picks up the theme today, explicitly endorsing the same double standard outlined by Broder that Obama’s “reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.”

Two major op-ed pieces in three days laying out the company line that McCain can lie and double-talk as much as he wants, but only Obama’s “character” will be scrutinized. Â Did WaPo editorial page honcho Fred Hiatt give marching orders, or what?