They weren’t just “blasts“. It’s becoming clear that this was not an accident or a malfunction. London was attacked again. Sure, the attackers did a pretty bad job. But everywhere I look in the press, it’s “blasts” this and “explosions” that.

These were attacks. We don’t know for sure who was behind them, but I think we know at least enough to say they didn’t happen on their own.

UPDATE: 12:58 p.m.: At the police press conference, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair just said, “The intention was to kill,” but that “the intentions of the terrorists have not been fulfilled.” Last week Blair predicted more attacks

UPDATE II: 3:45 p.m.: Financial Times has a good round-up of reporting and blog reactions. (via Media Blog reader John W.)

Media Blog reader Barton S. pointed out yesterday that Gwen Ifill also reported on the hard-left group Iraq Body Count without identifying them as anti-war or demonstrating any skepticism about their claim that insurgents have only caused 9.5 percent of civilian deaths. Swaim wrote:

Gwen Iffil stated the Iraq Body Count thing as fact last night, and even provided a nice graphic to break down the percentages, noting keenly that the “insurgents” had killed far fewer civilians than the military (37% to 9.5% or something outrageously improbable). But never mind — I think I’m one of about five or six people nationwide who still watches the NewsHour (except when Lowry is on, of course, when I’m sure ratings fly upwards).

A private group reported today nearly 25,000 civilians, police and army recruits have been killed in Iraq since the war began. More than 42,000 have been wounded. The U.S.-British organization Iraq Body Count reported that today. It said U.S.-led forces killed just over one-third of the victims, and criminal gangs killed a similar number. Insurgents were blamed for about 10 percent of the deaths. The findings were based on analyzing news reports.

Howard Kurtz writes today that the media were “spun silly” by anonymous sources hinting that Edith Clement would be the nominee. As Rich Lowry pointed out on the Corner yesterday, the incorrect information “worked out ‘perfectly.’ It embedded the idea that Bush had seriously considered a woman; it helped raise the level of interest and speculation all day long; and it wrong-footed the press.”

Now, Kurtz reports that reporters are angry about it, but they can’t hold anyone accountable because they promised their sources anonymity. Oh boo hoo. When are journalists going to wake up to the fact that anonymity just allows government officials to spin them, use them, and laugh when they get it wrong? And now they want a national shield law to protect this farce?

Here’s a suggestion to all those angry reporters who are “ticked” and “feeling misled”: Burn your sources. Send a message. We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

Feeling misled. Boo hoo hoo.

Media Blog reader RPC writes, “The Boston Globe today described Diane Fienstein as a moderate”:

No senator has publicly declared opposition to Roberts, and several moderate Democrats, such as Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, seemed to think Roberts’s prospects for confirmation are good

Media Blog reader Steve Morris spotted a sad story in the Seattle Times:

In an effort to make sure people don

The Scrutinator has the story on the radical leftists whose report on civilian casualties is the elite media’s cause of the day. Key points from his post:

Their list of media sources is long, but it

Media Blog reader Eli Rachlin spots an AP story that illustrates how the media keep score in the Mideast:

I almost went ballistic when I saw this story in Sunday’s paper (The Bergen Record — the story is AP, and I have never seen a more OBVIOUSLY biased sentence than the first one of this article).

Israeli airstrikes kill six militants

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – A Mideast truce was in tatters as Israel killed six Hamas militants in a series of airstrikes Friday and early today after Palestinian fighters unleashed a deadly barrage of rockets and mortars.

That’s right, Israel KILLED people (the headline and thrust); coincidentally that happened after Palestinians unleashed something deadly.

Bias count: (1) Headline only identifies Israel (2) Terrorists are called militants (not THAT bad) (3) Palestinian action was coincidentally prior to Israel’s actions yet Palestinian action did not shatter the truce (4) Palestinian terrorists are called fighters (not THAT bad) (5) Palestinians didn’t kill anyone, they only unleashed something deadly, as though their act of killing was only indirect. (The object of the sentence about the Palestinians is “barrage”, not “civilians”.)

Could anyone imagine the sentence, “A Mideast truce was in tatters as Palestinian terrorists killed Israeli civilians with a deadly barrage of rockets and mortars. Israel reacted by unleashing helicoptor-based rockets, which were deadly.” Pinch me, I’m dreaming.

Speaking to the Corriere Della Sera newspaper, [Hamas leader Mahmoud] al-Zahar said Hamas would “definitely not” be prepared for coexistence with Israel should the IDF retreat to its 1967 borders.

“It can be a temporary solution, for a maximum of 5 to 10 years. But in the end Palestine must return to become Muslim, and in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the earth.”

Hamas threatened revenge for the airstrikes, which appeared to signal Israel’s resumption of targeted killings of the militant group’s leaders — something it agreed not to do when signing the February truce accord.

Over at AmericaBlog, they’re clicking their heels in the air at this Bloomberg report, announcing that “It’s confirmed, Bush rushed Supreme Court pick to get attention off of Rove.” The relevent passage:

Bush originally had planned to announce a replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on July 26 or 27, just before his planned July 28 departure for a month-long vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, said two administration officials, who spoke on the condition they not be named.

The officials said those plans changed because Rove has become a focus of Fitzgerald’s interest and of news accounts about the matter.

UPDATE: I should clarify: I made a mistake in characterizing the Pew study referenced in the Bloomberg article as “dubious”. I should have said that the reporters cited the poll selectively to support their already preconceived hypothesis that Americans are intensely interested in the Rove controversy.

Forty-eight percent said they are paying either “very close” or “fairly close” attention to the story, the poll found. By comparison, only 29 percent of Americans said they were paying close attention to reports earlier this year that current House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had violated ethics rules by accepting travel from a lobbyist.

Media Blog reader George Clarke makes a great point:

Your analysis of Iraq “civilian” casualties from our “war” there makes it sound as if, at face value, the leftist report was bad news for either the US, conservatives, the military or NRO. I believe it is great news for all of these groups on the right, and bad news, even if spun their way, for the leftist fellow-travellers of the Islamo Fascisti.

Why? Here’s why. With the one year anniversary of the Iraq War, and even before, we heard the leftist cant that we killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians. I was skeptical, but since Hussein killed (by torture and starvation usually) on average 40,000 of his fellow-citizens (subjects) a year, I figured the math would catch up with us sooner or later as we brought justice and peace to that troubled region, and an initial loss of maybe 40,000 extra (many of them bad guys) seemed to me worth the cost.

Now it appears the number was not 100,000 a year (note that after the end of the second year this 100,000 number did not change) — now we find out the US military is killing “civilians” in an un-uniformed and foreign-fueled and led “insurgency” at a rate of 37% of 12,433 per year or 4,600 a year (half of whom we can call “bad guys” who want to bring Saddam back). Against Saddam’s 40,000 dead a year that means, even without assigning value to any dead Iraqi, we are saving 35,400 Iraqis a year from dire death, starvation and torture. Not bad, no?

The LA Times did a better job than CNN, Reuters and the BBC in applying skepticism to the Iraq Body Count report on civilian casualties in Iraq. The Times reporters consistently refer to the authors of the report as anti-war, and they at least attempt to answer the question: How did they define civilians?

Outside experts cautioned that because of the difficulty of gathering reliable information in Iraq and the inevitable political biases, the information was almost certainly incomplete. However, “the high casualty figures indicate the stubbornness of the anti-coalition forces,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

[snip]

The new report is particularly vulnerable to the criticism raised by Cordesman that it may have counted some people as civilians who in fact were allied with the insurgency. In a guerrilla war, it is often difficult to tell who is a fighter and who is a passerby.

“Making that judgment is one of the most intricate things we do,” said Hamit Dardagan, one of the study’s authors. “We made a judgment based on the context of each article we reviewed, and most of our uncertainty about the numbers is due to that,” he said.

Howard Kurtz is reporting that the Justice Department testified against a national shield law for reporters at a Senate hearing this morning (via Drudge):

WASHINGTON

The BBC just posted an article based on the Iraq Body Count report without mentioning the hard-left affliliations of the group. Here

Media Blog reader Sam wrote in to point out this story on CNN.com:

(CNN) — Nearly 25,000 civilians have been killed since the start of the Iraq war, according to a group that tracks the civilian death toll from the conflict.

The Iraq Body Count — a London-based group comprising academics and human rights and anti-war activists — said on Tuesday that 24,865 civilians had died between March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005.

Now I read the whole article and I am missing at least two seriously important pieces of information:

1. If you die while shooting at American troops from a mosque, are you counted as a civilian?

2. Any word on how many civilians casualties are are not Iraqis?

How can a respectatble news organization report this without asking those questions? Any doubt in your mind that the pacifist group would include any person not in uniform in the body count?

When we could not be sure that targets were occupation-related we classified the killers as

The World According to the New York Times

The New York Times
Supreme Court
Democratic President
Democratic Senate
Democratic House
Various leftish fads and causes: Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Augusta, al Qa Qaa, etc.

New York Times readers
New York Times Shareholders

We just don’t live in the Times’ world anymore (via Don Luskin).

The CBC joins the BBC and Reuters in their crusade to erase the stigma from acts of terrorism:

What follows is a memo distributed to CBC staff describing the CBC policy on use of the word ‘terrorism.’

’Terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’: Exercise extreme caution before using either word.

Avoid labelling any specific bombing or other assault as a “terrorist act” unless it’s attributed (in a TV or Radio clip, or in a direct quote on the Web). For instance, we should refer to the deadly blast at that nightclub in Bali in October 2002 as an “attack,” not as a “terrorist attack.” The same applies to the Madrid train attacks in March 2004, the London bombings in July 2005 and the attacks against the United States in 2001, which the CBC prefers to call “the Sept. 11 attacks” or some similar expression. (The BBC, Reuters and many others follow similar policies.)

Terrorism generally implies attacks against unarmed civilians for political, religious or some other ideological reason. But it’s a highly controversial term that can leave journalists taking sides in a conflict.

By restricting ourselves to neutral language, we aren’t faced with the problem of calling one incident a “terrorist act” (e.g., the destruction of the World Trade Center) while classifying another as, say, a mere “bombing” (e.g., the destruction of a crowded shopping mall in the Middle East).

They do speak English in some parts of Canada, right?

Use specific descriptions. Instead of reaching for a label (“terrorist” or “terrorism”) when news breaks, try describing what happened.

For example, “A suicide bomber blew up a bus full of unarmed civilians early Monday, killing at least two dozen people.” The details of these tragedies give our audience the information they need to form their own conclusions about what type of attack it was.

Actually, “operation” could be construed as controversial by someone… Hmm. What’s something that everyone likes? Aha! Ice cream! “A suicide bomber blew up a bunch of kids today, in what can only be described as an unexpected ice cream.”

Rather than calling assailants “terrorists,” we can refer to them as bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we’re sure no women were in the group), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun.

The guiding principle should be that we don’t judge specific acts as “terrorism” or people as “terrorists.” Such labels must be attributed.

As CBC News editor-in-chief Tony Burman has pointed out: “Our preference is to describe the act or individual, and let the viewer or listener or political representatives make their own judgment.”

Remember when the U.S. Army fell behind its recruiting goals and the MSM freaked and all of a sudden there was going to be a draft? Sure you do. Every national paper and news broadcast ran that story.

Well, it appears that although the Army is still behind its recruiting goals for the year, re-enlistment rates are well-ahead of the Army’s goals and helping to mitigate the shortfall. Apparently, nobody cares except for USA Today:

WASHINGTON

Media Blog readers know that last week Bloomberg put out a friendly press release on the truth-telling Joe Wilson. This week, Bloomberg follows up with a tour de force of anti-Rove spin and scandalmongering:

Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman said yesterday on “Meet the Press” that recent newspaper stories “have the effect of exonerating and vindicating Mr. Rove, not implicating him. That information says Karl Rove was not Bob Novak’s source, that Novak told Rove, not the other way around, and it says that Karl warned Matt Cooper about Joe Wilson.”

Others see difficulties in these arguments. They note the inherent contradiction between Rove’s testimony to the grand jury that he learned Plame’s name from Novak and his statement to Novak during the July 8 phone call that “I’ve heard that, too.”

This editorial in the NY Times today argues that “reporters cannot apply ideology when protecting their sources.” It’s not a matter of ideology. It’s a matter of judgment.

The Times writes:

Not all confidential sources are Deep Throat, or heroic corporate whistle-blowers. Sometimes they are government officials who are hoping to spread information that will embarrass their political opponents or promote a particular agenda.

The Times goes on:

But the hard truth is that no reporter can choose the circumstances for upholding a principle. It doesn’t matter whether we think a source is a good person or has good motivations. A reporter promises confidentiality, and the paper backs up the journalist because otherwise the public will not learn what it needs to know.

Journalists make a fetish of anonymous sources. They do so for reasons ethical, psychological, and anthropological, including genuine principle, the lure of heroism, and

Media Blog reader Joe wrote:

If this poll is a damning indictment of the mainstream media, does that really matter as long as the general public laps up what the mainstream media tells them with complete credulity? Isn’t this poll a damning indictment of the American people, and doesn’t it show that the power of the liberal press is as strong as it ever was? Doesn’t it indicate that this country is in serious trouble when the press can behave in such an blatantly one-sided, partisan fashion, and the vast majority of the American people are completely oblivious to this fact? Doesn’t this poll indicate that the “new” media’s actual influence is still miniscule when compared to that of the old media? Doesn’t this poll suggest that Republicans who are expecting electoral repercussions in 2006 for the Democrats’ shameful behavior may be most unpleasantly surprised?

Over at Tapped, Garance Franke-Ruta reports on a new ABC poll:

Just a quarter of Americans think the White House is fully cooperating in the federal investigation of the leak of a CIA operative’s identity, a number that’s declined sharply since the investigation began. And three-quarters say that if presidential adviser Karl Rove was responsible for leaking classified information, it should cost him his job.

Skepticism about the administration’s cooperation has jumped. As the initial investigation began in September 2003, nearly half the public, 47 percent, believed the White House was fully cooperating. That fell to 39 percent a few weeks later, and it’s lower still, 25 percent, in this new ABC News poll.

What does it say about the mainstream media that for two weeks they have given blanket coverage to this issue, yet 75 percent of the American public has been misinformed? I would say they’ve achieved their objective (via Kevin Drum).

UPDATE: The poll is online here.