Media bias is the most rampant it's ever been

Right now McCain is trailing Obama in the polls by a small margin, and that is actually quite remarkable, considering the fact that Obama is outspending McCain on advertisements by 3 to 1, and that Newspapers, News outlets, and the entertainment are heavily biased towards Obama. In short, McCain is fighting a huge uphill battle against the mass media. Considering his age, and what he's up against, he's actually making quite a heroic effort.

What's amazing to me, is how many people think the American media are objective here. Some of them actually claim that they are biased toward McCain!

If you didn't already notice the obvious, there are now a couple of serious studies that back me up.

First the "news" media, according to the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan organization:

The good news for John McCain? He's now receiving as much attention from the national media as his Democratic rival. The bad news? It’s overwhelmingly negative.

Just 14 percent of the stories about John McCain, from the conventions through the final presidential debate, were positive in tone, according to a study released today, while nearly 60 percent were negative — the least favorable coverage of any of the four candidates on the two tickets.

Then, the entertainment industry, according to the AP:

From Sept. 1 through Friday, the Republicans were the target of 475 jokes by Jay Leno and David Letterman alone. The Democratic team of Obama and Joe Biden were the victim 69 times, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which has been tracking such data since 1988. That's nearly a 7-to-1 ratio.
In no other campaign over the last 20 years has one party's ticket been jabbed more than the other by even a 2-to-1 ratio, said Robert Lichter, a George Mason University professor and head of the center.
Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have a similar imbalance. The center doesn't even consider Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson and others — including the season's breakout comedy star, Tina Fey imitating Sarah Palin.

Of course, the irony is that they may put themselves out of a job. People like Stewart and Colbert have formed their entire success around George Bush's presidency. Who are they going to mock if the Republicans are no longer in control?

In a related and stunning article, a long-time writer and former PBS host, Michael S. Malone, explains why he's ashamed to be known as a journalist:

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist. [...]

But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current Presidential campaign. Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass - no, make that shameless support - they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press. [...]

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography. That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: his job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote McCain’s lawyer, haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer - when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Senator Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

The media will get the President that they deserve.



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A Guillotine on display at Obama rally

- with George Bush's severed head underneath. I really don't like having this photo on my site, which is why I made it so small. The full size version can be seen at El Marco's site here, along with several other disturbing pics of the political rally. Actually, his entire site is good stuff.

Remember this picture the next time someone warns you about the rather nebulous threats heard at McCain rallies.

I'm all for getting into the spirit of Halloween, but when you start encouraging and celebrating a specific person's death, this is just a bit too much, non? The 18th century France connotations not lost on me either - like how much some of these people would mirror Robespierre's reign of terror, if they ever had their way.

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US conducts attack in Syria?

"Iraq this Way!", a photo taken in Syria by Red Betty Black

Since I am now stationed in Korea, this is one incident that I have no inside knowledge of at all, so I feel much more free to discuss this raid (Sometimes I have to be extra-careful not to divulge any classified information):

Syria has protested angrily to both the US and Iraq after what it said was a US helicopter raid inside its territory that killed eight civilians.
Syria summoned US and Iraqi envoys to condemn the "aggressive act".
...
The US has neither confirmed nor denied the incident. It has previously accused Syria of allowing militants into Iraq.

Syria said the US helicopters attacked a farm in the Abu Kamal border area.

If confirmed, the raid would be the first known attack by US forces inside Syrian territory, says BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus.
...
Syria's official Sana news agency said that "four American helicopters violated Syrian airspace around 1645 local time [1345 GMT] on Sunday".

The government said the helicopters attacked the Sukkariyeh farm near Abu Kamal, eight kilometres (five miles) from the Iraqi border.

A building under construction was hit and four children and a married couple were among the dead, it said.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of reporting that is particularly infuriating:

Our correspondent says the timing of the incident is curious, coming right at the end of the Bush administration's period of office and at a moment when many of America's European allies - like Britain and France - are trying to broaden their ties with Damascus.

The US military is not political!! I've said it before, but I'll say it again: We are not George Bush's personal force. Why do even professional journalists seem to think this is so? The United States is not some third-world dictatorship; the military doesn't do raids for political purposes, and I have never, ever heard of anyone in the Bush administration asking them to. "Broadening ties" is also all well and good - except with terrorists.

If, and I emphasize if - US Special Forces attacked a farm on the Syrian side of the border, it was because they had strong intelligence of foreign fighters gathering there. Guaranteed. Such a raid would have had to have been approved at a very high level, and nobody would want to risk the blowback of attacking innocents, particularly outside of Iraqi borders. Commanders are not stupid, and they know the press would report this, and that Syria and other networks would deliberately distort it.

The report of "children" being attacked is almost a given, and the traditional way to cover your own guilt. If this were so, why not tell us whom, or show photos? Soldiers are human beings, and 99.99% would never attack children unless their lives were genuinely threatened.

But it's not just Syria. Of course, at certain nutjob web sites, they are already condemning the United States before all the facts are even in. A tad impatient for November, maybe?

Keep in mind that this was not too far from the town of Qaim, which has been a hotbed of Al-Qaeda for a long time.

Allahpundit makes a good observation:

Exit question: If they were targeting an AQI safehouse, why put men on the ground to “storm a building,” as the BBC report puts it? Why not just send a missile down the chimney, Waziristan style? Clearly they were looking for someone.

Update: The only two people I can think of who might justify an operation in Syria are al-Masri, the leader of AQI, and Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who’s long been rumored to be hiding out there. Roggio will have other guesses, certainly. A snatch and grab operation of some high-ranking insurgent would explain why boots were on the ground and why they felt they had to act now, even with the election so near. Short of that, the only explanation I can come up with is that there was some sort of cargo in transit that simply had to be seized and secured, even at the risk of casualties.

That is a very good explanation and entirely plausible. There is one more possibility, however. If US forces were in "hot pursuit" and aerial reconnaissance observed enemy fighters crossing the border and stopping at that farm, then they would also follow it up. Either way, I'm sure we will get a full explanation in time.

Me: wishing I was there instead of here...



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More hatred (as if we need more)

Right on cue to my last article, I found this one (via Little Green Footballs).

From NY Daily News: "Who are left-wing haters to point fingers at John McCain?".

[NYT Columnist Frank] Rich's use of the term "Weimar-like rage," ironically in a column decrying Republican scare tactics, is but one example of the left's careless usage of Nazi allegories to describe people and policies they don't like. Since 9/11, major anti-war rallies have included people holding signs and puppets comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Leftist writer Naomi Wolf, who has expressed fears that the feds were monitoring her children's letters from summer camp, recently published a book titled, "The End of America," which likens the Bush administration to a fascist junta.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann spews over-the-top, hateful rhetoric in his "Special Comments" on a regular basis. He has said that the Bush administration threatens America with a "new type of fascism," referred to the GOP as the "leading terrorist group in this country" on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and has said that Fox News is "worse than Al Qaeda" and "as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was."

Have the journalists now bemoaning the low tactics of the McCain campaign and its supporters never set eyes upon the wildly popular Huffington Post? That Web site hosts countless angry rants, many examples of which are too vulgar to document in a family newspaper. In 2004, Nicholson Baker wrote a novel imagining the assassination of President Bush. Last week, Fox's "Family Guy" depicted Nazis donning McCain-Palin buttons.

Right-wing pundits are not blameless either, but fair is fair. Read the whole thing.

Related: Also via LGF, a non-partisan group concludes that the media's campaign coverage of John McCain has been overwhelmingly negative (no big surprise to me, but will be to some).

Also: A Republican campaign hq in Tennessee is vandalized with a large brick through the window.

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McCain supporters are engaged in negative campaigning?

The conventional wisdom seems to be that McCain/Palin and their supporters are running the negative campaign, and that Obama/Biden are being firm but fair. It comes out in national polls, and it comes out in conversation when I discuss politics with others.

Several times I have had to correct people on the false impression left by the media on the Republican nominees. Neither McCain or Palin have called Obama a Muslim - in fact, they have publicly corrected others who have claimed that. Neither McCain or Palin have called him a terrorist either (although they have claimed he associated with a terrorist - William Ayers). True, a lot of false charges have gone back and forth, and McCain isn't totally innocent here, but nothing he has done compares to this kind of intentional disinformation (and these all occurred just in the last few days):

The Guardian prints an article from a former Vietnamese guard at prison camp where McCain was held as a POW, who claims McCain was never tortured. They don't even seriously question his account.

Rolling Stone magazine runs a hit piece putting the worst spin possible on every facet of McCain's military career, including accusing John McCain of running and hiding in cowardice during a 1967 fire on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, which killed 134 navy personnel. They base this entire article on the word of one man (who, incidentally, supports Obama).

And based on this story, many blogs even run with the rumor that McCain started the fire himself!

And Sarah Palin? It just keeps getting better. The UK's Daily Telegraph gave us this quote about polar bears from the Alaskan governor:

"magnificent, cuddly white bears are doing just fine and don't need our protection. If the ice melts, they'll adapt to living on the land."

Only problem is, she didn't say that. The literally just made it up out of whole cloth. The Telegraph has since altered the page and removed the quote (without an explanation or apology), but you can still see the angry reactions to the fake quote in the comments section.

Meanwhile, the NYT wrote a gossip hit-piece on Cindy McCain which was so over the top with sleaze that even Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, who hates McCain, condemned it. Meanwhile, a Times reporter even emailed the McCain's 16 year old daughter posing as a friend from facebook, in order to get dirt on her mother! A copy of that email can also be read at the above link.

This prompted Cindy's attorney, John Dowd, to make this astute remark:

"It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus, there is a terrific lack of balance here."

In the West, shots were fired at the McCain campaign bus, while one Maryland man's home and cars were vandalized with spray paint simply for supporting McCain. In Detroit, a pizza joint offers free pizzas for McCain/Palin signs (to encourage people to steal them).

Meanwhile, Jon Stewart showed a different side of himself by going into a rage about Gov. Palin.

But we are supposed to believe it's only McCain supporters who stoop to these levels.

In many ways, Obama is far above those that claim to support him. But unlike him, I'm not going to directly blame him for the actions of his supporters. Like this disturbed woman who decided to file a lawsuit against McCain and Palin for their campaign speeches. I am not joking. Some people really are that ridiculous.



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Profiles in Courage: Luis Soriano

Elections are mostly talk. And if you are like me, you've had enough this year. Some people in the world speak through their actions instead. It may seem minor in the big picture, but people like this do make a difference. I normally don't comment on human interest stories like this, but I'll make an exception this time. This goes hand in hand with the immigration debate. I love to hear about people trying to better their country instead of fleeing from it:

LA GLORIA, Colombia — In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.
...
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”

And in the meantime, he has braved weather, poverty, bandits, and threats of political retaliation. So why does he do it?

Once upon a time, very long ago, there were bookmobiles across the United States. Mobile libraries providing services to remote locations or to urban neighborhood children. Today, we have everything instantly on the Internet and that age seems a lifetime ago.

When I last left Iraq, Internet was still not available to ordinary people in their homes. They could either pay about $2200 for a satellite dish and other fees to get the service, or go to their local cyber cafe for about $3 an hour. Either method is cripplingly expensive in a country where someone is lucky if they make $500 a month. Free wireless is unheard of.

These anecdotes are just a reminder that not all of the world shares in the current information revolution. But they still have the same educational needs as everyone else.



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Korea

North Korea, as seen from an observatory on the south side of the border, at Odo mountain

I'm no longer in Germany - after many years, I am now doing a one-year tour away from my family in South Korea. This is the second time for me. In some ways, this is worse than Iraq! At least in Iraq, I feel like I can do my job with a purpose; Korea has been a stalemate for 50 years.

The above village is mainly for show, since North Koreas know that people can see it. But there is a permanent population that tills the fields by hand, as most people did in antiquity.

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Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama

I can't help thinking that race trumped ideology here. A career military man who is a self-described Republican passes over McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran, for Obama, the junior Senator from Illinois:

"I think he is a transformational figure," Powell said. "I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming onto the world stage and on the American stage. And for that reason, I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama."

He's "transformational". That's got to be about the stupidest reason I've ever heard anyone say anywhere.

He also claimed he had been going "back and forth" on who to support. Well, if your support for either is that lukewarm, why go on television, against your own party, and against a fellow vet? Why publicly endorse either one?

Even retired generals are entitled to make stupid decisions. But unless he's angling for a job in an Obama administration, I have a feeling his career in the Republican party has ground to a halt...

On another note, I finally have internet access here. Updates coming today.

One update: Even more cynically - notice how he didn't make any endorsement until after one side had a substantial lead?

Another side note: Michael Powell, Colin's son and former FCC chairman, endorsed John McCain.

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Still Alive

And still around. I'm currently on a military assignment in Korea, and my internet access is extremely limited for the moment. More to follow.

I'm probably the only blogger I know that has to continuously remind readers that he is still here. But I'm also one of the few that holds down a full time (or more than full time) job.

Updates soon.

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