Roundup: Media's Take

Thor Halvorssen: Bolivar Would've Hated Chavez

[Thor Halvorssen is a film producer and president of the Human Rights Foundation.] ...If you can imagine Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln rolled into one, you can appreciate Bolívar's historical power in much of Latin America, and why a "Bolivarian " revolution is infinitely more legitimizing than a "Chávez" revolution. Chávez's aggressive appropriation of Bolívar -- first politically and now physically -- is especially meaningful because it is an attem

Jay Rosen: A Brief History of News Leaks

[Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at NYU.] ...Few people realize how important leaking has been to the rise of the political press since the mid-18th century. Leaks were actually “present at the creation” of political reporting. I’m moving quickly this morning, so I only have time for a capsule version. Those with a richer knowledge of the British Parliament’s history can confirm or correct this outline. Once upon a time, Parliament’s debates were off limits to newspapers. But

Michael Singh: Iranian Re-Revolution

[Michael Singh is the Ira Weiner fellow of The Washington Institute and former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council (NSC).] On June 10, when the Iranian opposition movement cancelled its planned commemoration of the anniversary of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection, commentators assumed that the Green Movement was finally finished. For months, it had been criticized as lacking strong leadership and for being unable to seriously challenge Ir

Ross Douthat: The Right and the Climate

[Ross Douthat is a columnist for the NYT.] ...Cap-and-trade’s backers are correct to point the finger rightward. If their bill is dead, it was the American conservative movement that ultimately killed it. Climate legislation wasn’t like health care, with Democrats voting “yes” in lockstep. There was no way to get a bill through without some support from conservative lawmakers. And in the global warming debate, there’s a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the conservative movement a

James Fallows: Does WikiLeaks Prove the War Can't Be Won?

[James Fallows is a National Correspondent for The Atlantic.] I have just started to look at some of these documents; more on the substance later. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder and Alexis Madrigal have immediate reactions on the military and the media-ecology implications of this development. The interaction between "traditional" and "new" media is the most immediately arresting "process" aspect of this event. It's structurally similar in o

Joshua Kurlantzick: When Lobbyists Work for Authoritarian Nations

[With R. M. Schneiderman in New York. Kurlantzick is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.] Once the province of a few fringe players operating on the margins of Washington, lobbying for foreign countries has become big business for the most prestigious firms in D.C. According to data from the Department of Justice, the number of registrants—forms submitted by people registered to represent foreign countries—grew from about 1,800 in the first half of 2005 to 1,900 in the fir

Rashmee Roshan Lall: Lawrence Of Eurabia?

[Rashmee Roshan Lall, editor of the Sunday Times of India.] Spain voted against banning the burqa just five days ago in poignant illustration of the appalled fascination, dilemma and doubt traditionally suffered by Europeans faced with the Muslim. Back in the early 1900s, Lawrence of Arabia would depict Muslim Arabs as stereotypical "Semites...they had a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation...(they had) no half-tones in their register

Henry Porter: Labour must come clean about Iraq and spurn its Blairite legacy

[Henry Porter writes commentary for the Observer.] Being Tony Blair is not so hard. This time last year I had the enlightening experience of playing him for an hour while helping a friend prepare for an interview with him on stage in New York. We assembled a list of questions after reading and watching every available interview with him, but we needed to know how they would work live and so filmed a dummy run with me taking the part of Tony Blair. When Blair did the int

Jim Webb: Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege

[Mr. Webb, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from Virginia.] Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease t

Peggy Noonan: The Power of Redemption

[Peggy Noonan is a columnist for the WSJ.] She was smeared by right-wing media, condemned by the NAACP, and canned by the Obama administration. It wasn't pretty, what was done this week to Shirley Sherrod. And maybe something good can come of it. The thought occurred to me after reading her now-famous speech, which is about the power of grace and the possibility of redemption.... And this is what she said. Forty-five years before, to the day, her father's f

Joan Walsh: The Civil Rights Heroism of Charles Sherrod

[Joan Walsh is the editor-in-chief of Salon.] People who care about civil rights and racial reconciliation may eventually thank Andrew Breitbart for bringing Shirley Sherrod the global attention she deserves. Really. Her message of racial healing, her insight that the forces of wealth and injustice have always pit "the haves and the have-nots" against each other, whatever their race, is exactly what's missing in today's Beltway debates about race. What's even more amazing,

Sohrab Ahmari: Burying Uncle Napoleon

[Sohrab Ahmari, a member of the American Islamic Congress’s New England Council, is a law student at Northeastern University. His commentary on Iran and democratic reform in the Middle East has previously appeared in the Boston Globe and PBS | Frontline’s Tehran Bureau.] For days, Iranian media have been celebrating the triumphant homecoming of “kidnapped” nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri. Now we learn that his story is to be adapted into an action movie, Islamic Republic–style.

Simon Kuper: Soccer Explains Nothing

[Simon Kuper is a Financial Times journalist and coauthor of Soccernomics.] ...[T]he World Cup used to be a festival of geopolitics. The tournament began in 1930, just as fascism was getting going. Then, after a decent interruption for World War II, the World Cup resumed in an era of hysterical nationalism. Postwar European countries still nursed resentments -- chiefly, against Germany -- that came out on the turf. Meanwhile, Latin American countries were often still experimenting w

John Gapper: BP and Libya – a special relationship?

[John Gapper is the FT's chief business commentator.] There was much talk of the special relationship between the UK and the US this week; both David Cameron, UK prime minister, and Barack Obama, the US president, kept mentioning it at the White House. But the more intriguing relationship is that between BP and Libya. There is no evidence that the oil company directly lobbied the British government for the release of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, but i

Ta-Nehisi Coates: On Lacking All Conviction

[Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.] Let's take a moment to understand what we've seen over the past several days. As of last week, the Tea Party was a movement whose leadership included a man who once called the first black president of the United States, "a welfare monkey[.]"... Yesterday,

Walter Williams: Prolonging the Pain

[Walter Williams is John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University.] Let’s think about President Obama’s failed economic stimulus program. Before getting to the nitty-gritty of why stimulus packages fail, let’s look at the failed stimulus program of Obama’s hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, wrote in his diary: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not wor

Terence Samuel: Shirley Sherrod and the Politics of Overreaction

I feel bad for Shirley Sherrod. Not just because she lost her job. Not just because it may be that she did not do what she is accused of doing. Not because her only crime may be the very postmodern transgression of being on video and out of context. (Hear her remarks in context here.) I feel bad for Shirley Sherrod because she is only the latest example of how difficult it is for us to get beyond our own racial race. I feel bad for her because I feel bad for all of us. We're stuck. Her firing an

Ewan Crawford: Megrahi release was compassionate, not political

[Ewan Crawford was private secretary to John Swinney, the former leader of the Scottish National party and is now a lecturer in journalism at the University of the West of Scotland.] When he released Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, the Scottish justice secretary made it clear he understood the pain his decision would cause the families of those killed in the Lockerbie atrocity. "Those who have been bereaved cannot be expected to forget, let alone fo

E. Wayne Merry: Are we overestimating China’s superpower strength?

[E. Wayne Merry, a former U.S. State Department and Pentagon official, is now a senior associate at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.] China is moving inevitably toward first place in global affairs, ending America’s role as top dog. Or so I am told in print and in person, sometimes by those who told me the same thing about Japan two decades ago. I recall a conversation in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse in which I was lectured that if the United

Ari Rabin-Havt : The Willie Hortonization of Barack Obama

[Ari has worked for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Al Gore, the Democratic National Committee and for numerous other progressive organizations and candidates. Currently he is the Vice President for Research and Communications at Media Matters.] A long line of inmates solemnly enters and exits a prison yard through a revolving door. As the lone black inmate reenters society, he peers into the camera with a menacing glance. He is the only inmate to do so. The ad descr