Roundup: Media's Take

April 9, 2004

Why the Pictures from Fallujah Shock

Charles Leroux, in the Chicago Tribune (April 4, 2004):The dead were four Americans working under Pentagon contracts who had been killed and mutilated by guerrillas in Fallujah, Iraq. On Tuesday, images of the atrocity landed in the laps of TV producers, Web masters, newspaper photo editors and their bosses almost like live grenad

April 8, 2004

The Gilmore Report ... Gilmore Report? What Gilmore Report?

Michael Moran, MSNBC News (April 2, 2004): In May of 2001, one of the very few public figures who genuinely raised a warning about the threat al-Qaida and other terrorist groups pose to America won an audience with the new vice president, Dick Cheney. The public figure was a Republican stalwart, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, head of an obscure commission that had just issued a report six months earlier, “

April 8, 2004

Daniel Yergin: Are We Running Out of Oil?

Daniel Yergin, in the NYT (April 4, 2004):[O]il is a finite resource, and fear of running out has always haunted the petroleum industry. In the 1880's, John Archbold, who would succeed John D. Rockefeller as head of the Standard Oil Trust, began to sell his shares in the company because engineers told him that America's days as an oil producer were numbered.

April 2, 2004

George Beres: This Easter We Ought to Remember the Power of Words to Prejudice Jews

George Beres is an Oregon writer with religious roots in the Greek Orthodox Church. He has been a member of the Oregon Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East.Observance of Easter Passion church services daily this week reminds me of the haunting seasonal music of the Greek Orthodox Church into which I was baptized. But a chance encounter a decade ago with the man responsible for translations in the Greek church reminded me that lyrics for so

April 2, 2004

The Buck Stops ... Where?

Michael Oreskes, in the NYT (March 28, 2004):It is one thing for a deputy at the National Security Council to accept blame on behalf of not one but several administrations, an act perched between admirable and presumptuous. But it is quite something else for a president of the United States to say he is sorry. In October 1983, terrorists in Lebanon drove a truckload of explosives into a building housing American marines, killing 241. That December, a De

April 2, 2004

Gays Gaining Acceptance, Polls Show

James Ricci and Patricia Ward Biederman, in the LAT (March 30, 2004):That gays are more widely accepted in American society is readily apparent in everything from television sitcoms to corporate anti-discrimination policies to recent U.S. Supreme Court opinions. Less apparent is why and how the shift in attitude occurred. Although some religious and soc

April 2, 2004

Communists Had Infilitrated the VVAW when John Kerry Was a Member

Marc Morano, in the Cybercast News Service (April 1, 2004):The 1970s anti-war group that included John Kerry was "heavily infiltrate[d]" by individuals dedicated to the teachings of Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-Tung and to the use of violence, if necessary to achieve their goals, according to a historian friendly to Kerry.

April 2, 2004

Marriage a Malleable Institution Throughout History

Mike Anton, in the LAT (March 31, 2004):Throughout most of human history, a man married a woman out of desire -- for her father's goats, perhaps. Marriage was a business arrangement. The bride was a commodity, her dowry a deal sweetener. And the groom was likely to be an unwitting pawn in an economic alliance between two families. A church may or may not have been involved. Government was out of the loop. There was no paperwork, no possibility of divorce

April 1, 2004

The Obligation of War Correspondents to Tell the Truth

British journalist Roy Greenslade, in the course of a lecture sponsored by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, which was established in memory of the Toronto Star's founding publisher, Joseph Atkinson (April 1, 2004): Back in the early 1970s, two New York Times journalists — Drew Middleton and Herbert Matthews —

April 1, 2004

The Roots of Hamas

From an interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation (March 2004): Magnus Ranstorp: ... I think if you ask any Hamas official, they would see themselves as part of a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that was created in 1928. The Muslim Brotherhood was one of the first forces that fought Israel in the war of independence in '48, '49. Hamas--or shal

April 1, 2004

Jimmy Breslin: Condi's Lying About Executive Privilege

Jimmy Breslin. in Newsday (March 30, 2004): I just made a professional appearance in Washington and as I am a working person, as differing from these Pekinese of the Press, I found Ms. Condoleezza Rice's contention shady that she cannot appear under oath and in public in front of the 9/11 committee because of precedent and separation of po

March 31, 2004

Is Condi Rice Breaking Precedent by Testifying Before the 9-11 Commission?

Neil A. Lewis, in the NYT (March 31, 2004), writing about the history of executive privilege: A study published in 2002 by the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress, cited 20 instances since World War II in which presidents, waiving the privilege, had allowed senior White House aides to testify before Congressional committees. In the case of Ms.

March 30, 2004

Daniel Ellsberg: Nowadays People Leak Earlier (And that's a Good Thing)

Matthew Stannard, in the San Francisco Chronicle (March 29, 2004): When famous whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg boarded a plane to Cincinnati earlier this week, he took along a little light reading: a stack of articles about former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who has stirred controversy with allegations in his book and testimony before a special panel tha

March 30, 2004

Robert Scheer: Worse than Watergate

Robert Scheer, in the LAT (March 30, 2004): "Worse Than Watergate," the title of a new book by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, is a depressingly accurate measure of the chicanery of the Bush/Cheney cabal. According to Dean, who began his political life at the age of 29 as the Republican counsel on the House Judiciary Committee

March 29, 2004

Kerry's Record Rings a Bell

William G. Mayer, writing for the Washington Post (March 28, 2004)Is Sen. John F. Kerry a liberal? As the presidential campaign unfolds over the next seven months, the parties will no doubt spend a lot of time debating this question, with Republicans insisting that he is and Democrats just as vehemently denying it. The question of how to measure a senator's or representative's ideology is one that political scientists regularly need t

March 29, 2004

Fault Lines; Where Does the Buck Stop? Not With the President.

Michael Oreskes, writing for the NYT (March 28, 2004)ACCEPTING responsibility is an essential part of everyday life, something every parent and child, every boss and worker, every friend and colleague wrestle with, or know they should. But for a president it is quite rare, and at least in the view of some historians and government experts, getting rarer, as a national culture of shifting blame permeates American politics.So it was last wee

March 26, 2004

911 Commission: Needed: the Truth, the Whole ...

James P. Pinkerton, writing for Newsday (March 26, 2004)There was enough in the 9/11 hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday to make partisans on all sides unhappy. Partisans for the truth, however, have some ground for optimism.If one were a Bill Clinton partisan, one would not be happy about the portrayal of the 42nd president and his anti-terror record. It appears

March 26, 2004

The Exhumation of Joe McCarthy

Johann Hari, writing for the Independent (London) (March 26, 2004)The grave of Senator Joe McCarthy has been pillaged. In the think tanks of the Republican right, in the broadcasts of Fox News, and in the pages of some of the most popular books in America, he lives again. From the mid-1950s until 2001, there was a consensus in America that McCarthyism was a brief period of political psychosis. The Senator's drunken belief that the demo

March 24, 2004

North Korea's Experiments on Human Beings Smack of Nazism

Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, in the Straits Times (March 22, 2004):THE brutality of the 20th century has given George Santayana's observation that 'those who forget history are condemned to repeat it' the standing of an absolute truth. Less noted but equally true is that dictators study history in order to repeat it. Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were students of political history, including the works of Machiavelli.

March 23, 2004

Throughout History Governments Have Made Mistakes Due to Excessive Secrecy

John D. Podesta and Judd C. Legum, in Salon (March 22, 2004): Every time our nation faces a threat to national security there is a powerful tension between the need to keep the people informed and the need to keep the enemy in the dark.... On July 20, 1916, a group of German saboteurs blew up a large munitions dump on the New York Harbor, creating what the New York Times later described as