I won’t quibble the coverage. This is too horrible. Today’s terrorism, in which children were the targets, speaks with such clarity about who we are and who they are, the media cannot obfuscate.

They kill children, a crime so horrific its presence in literature almost always accompanies religious doubt — questions of how God could exist in such a world.

They kill kids. They do it on purpose. They do it in the name of God.

Read here, here, and here.

A note of encouragement: Chrenkoff Today, every day on PostWatch, or get the whole biweekly round-up straight from the source.

UPDATE: Mudville Gazette has a must-read on this story (via the Corner).

Ladies and gentlemen, the New York Times Editorial Board:

In the first ring, the Contortionist!

Far be it for us to denounce leaks.

But it is something else entirely when officials peddle disinformation for propaganda purposes or to harm a political adversary.

Now direct your attention to the center ring, where Jo-Jo the Clown will perform his routine,

Washington Post reporter Jim VandeHei has an incredible scoop:

Republicans mounted an aggressive and coordinated defense of Karl Rove yesterday, contending that the White House’s top political adviser did nothing improper or illegal when he discussed a covert CIA official with a reporter.

Jacob Weisberg argues in Slate that Time and the New York Times should disclose everything they know to their readers. Weisberg provides numerous examples of reporters who decided that their duty to report on the actions of their sources outweighed their duty to keep those sources confidential (Oliver North and Linda Tripp make appearances).

Weisberg saves the best for last:

The argument against ever outing sources is instrumental. Insiders won’t leak to the press if they can’t rely on a reporter’s pledge of confidentiality, the argument goes, and so the public’s interest in discovering wrongdoing ultimately won’t be served. This is mostly humbug. As most modern presidents have discovered, leakers are a hardy breed. They act from various motives, of which unalloyed public-spiritedness is probably the rarest. Outing the Plame leakers wouldn’t undermine the use of confidential sources. It would merely put leakers on notice that their right to lie and manipulate the press is not absolute and not sacred.

Right now I’m watching Rep. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Tucker Carlson scream at each other on “The Situation” about whether Karl Rove should resign over the outing of CIA “agent” Valerie Plame.

CIA “officers” are not the same as CIA “agents”, but surprisingly few in the media get the terminology right.

A CIA “officer” or “analyst” is an American who works for the CIA.

A CIA “agent” is a foreign citizen who is spying for the CIA.

Former CIA counterintelligence chief Jim Olson, when I took his class, told me that CIA officials hate it when media people get this wrong, so I thought I’d pass it on.

I

Rich represents everything that

Read Byron York’s interview with Rove attorney Robert Luskin. Check out how Time twisted Rove’s “double super secret background can’t triple stamp a double stamp” attempts to keep Time from buying Wilson’s lies into a White House smear campaign:

According to Luskin, Cooper originally called Rove

Media Blog reader Steven J. Scibelli catches the BBC in a double standard:

First, the BBC calls the terrorists who bombed London “misguided criminals.” Then, courtesy of Drudge, we see that the BBC edited the word “terrorist” out of its recent coverage of the London bombings:

The BBC’s guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the “careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments”.
Consequently, “the word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding” and its use should be “avoided”, the guidelines say.

But, apparently the BBC has no qualms about using words which carry “emotional or value judgments” in other contexts. Here are two examples:

Football hooligans who terrorised Cardiff city centre on the opening day of the season used the Internet to organise the violent clashes.

and:

Hooligans who terrorise local residents could be more likely to face action as Humberside Police review the use of new powers to crack down on yobs.

So, according to the BBC, soccer hooligans are terrorists, but Islamic jihadists are “misguided criminals.”

The Washington Post, Jim Romenesko and Kevin Drum can’t conceal their glee at the fact that so far, the two ombudsman hired at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting haven’t reported on bias at NPR or PBS. Here’s the Post’s Paul Farhi:

[W]hat kind of slanted reporting have Ken Bode and William Schulz uncovered since they began work three months ago? As it turns out, not much. Actually, as it turns out, none at all.

So says CJR Daily, anyway (

Andrew Sullivan, Mediacrity, and HonestReporting among others have remarked on the BBC’s cowardly decision to remove the word “terrorist” from its early coverage of the London attacks. Sullivan links to this article by Tom Gross:

The world’s premier broadcast network appeared to throw away its own ridiculous “BBC Producer’s Guidelines.” BBC online reports, for example, had headlines such as “Terror of passengers stuck on tube” and “London Rocked by Terror Attacks.”

Presumably hoping that no one would notice, the BBC subtly and retroactively altered its initial texts about the bombs on both its British and international Web sites. Unfortunately for the BBC, however, previous versions of its webpages remained easily accessible to all on Google, and enterprising British bloggers, long-fed up with the BBC’s bias, recorded the changes.

Early on Friday morning another BBC webpage headlined “Testing the underground mood,” spoke of “the worst terrorist atrocity Britain has seen.” But at 12:08 GMT, while the rest of the article was left untouched, those words were replaced by “the worst peacetime bomb attacks Britain has seen.”

CBS News has announced that Vaughn Ververs will step down as editor of The Hotline, National Journal’s indispensible political round-up, to become the new ombudsman for CBS News.

Word to the Media Blog is that Ververs is a solid guy and a good choice for conservatives. He’s worked at CBS before, so he’s familiar with the organizational culture. He also worked for Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign, but he’s good about keeping his politics out of his writing. Here’s wishing him the best and hoping he can get things cleaned up over there. No network needs a good public editor in its news division like CBS does right now.

ALSO: The Hotline is subscription only, but you should check it out today if you can to see what they have to say about Ververs’ departure.

Last night MSNBC

The New York Times fronts today with a 2,000-worder about Karl Rove with several pointless anonymous sources and all the important stuff buried at the bottom. It

It’s a good question. I’m not sure I believe this theory, but Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media does raise some interesting points:

Speculation is mounting that Miller is protecting herself ─ that Miller was herself a source of information about Plame that made it to several Bush administration officials and was then recycled to columnist Robert Novak.

[snip]

Wilson had written a column for the Times bashing the administration’s Iraq policy and it would have been natural for Miller to write something when Novak’s column was published. But Miller didn’t write anything. Why? Defenders of the Times have used this fact to allege that the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, is out of control and that free-press rights are in danger. But there could be another explanation of Miller’s behavior and why Fitzgerald wants her testimony. She could be the key to exonerating Bush administration officials of possible violations of the law against knowingly disclosing the identities of covert intelligence agents. If they were simply passing along information from Miller or some other journalist about Joseph Wilson’s wife, then they can’t be accused of deliberately disclosing classified information about Plame’s identity.

Sources close to the investigation say there is evidence in some instances that some reporters may have told government officials — not the other way around — that Wilson was married to Plame, a CIA employee.

No surprise:

More than two-thirds of the news stories on ABC, NBC and CBS covering the first 100 days of Mr. Bush’s second term were negative, according to an analysis released today by the District-based Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA).

It’s actually a slight improvement: During the first 100 days of his initial term in office, the coverage was 71 percent negative, according to a similar CMPA study conducted in 2001.

In comparison, President Clinton’s first-term news coverage was 59 percent negative in 1993.

You’re never going to believe this, but someone remembered that Nancy Pelosi got caught violating travel disclosure rules. Washington Times reporter Charles Hurt:

Democrats have released a series of new political ads highlighting a new issue that Democrats see as a winner — accusing House Republicans of ethical lapses.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Campaign for America’s Future are running print and radio ads accusing several Republicans — including Majority Leader Tom DeLay — of running afoul of House ethics rules regarding travel paid for by outside organizations, as well as other charges.

The new ads come as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, filed with the House clerk three new corrections on her own travel disclosure forms.

[snip]

But top Democrats are taking some fire of their own. Mrs. Pelosi filed three delinquent disclosure forms for three trips she took more than five years ago.

A December 1999 trip she took to Taipei, Taiwan, cost $8,040 and was paid for by the Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce.

She also filed delinquent reports for a February 1998 trip to New York to appear on “Meet the Press” and a November 1999 trip to deliver a speech in Florida. NBC paid the $200 cost of the New York journey, according to the report, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee picked up the $340 tab for the Florida trip.

Pelosi Watch I

Frank Rich is the worst columnist in America, but his latest effort indicates that his Bush-hatred has left him bereft of the ability to reason. I would like to inaugurate a contest to find an example of a less coherent column than this one, his third column out of the last five to compare Bush and his presidency to Nixon and Watergate.

Rich starts with this venomous attack on Time

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran this story about the editor of a Cleveland newspaper who spiked two stories because they were based on illegally leaked documents and might have sparked an investigation:

The editor, Doug Clifton, said lawyers for The Plain Dealer had concluded that the newspaper, Ohio’s largest daily, would probably be found culpable if the authorities were to investigate the leaks and that reporters might be forced to identify confidential sources to a grand jury or go to jail.

“Basically, we have come by material leaked to us that would be problematical for the person who leaked it,” Mr. Clifton said in a telephone interview. “The material was under seal or something along those lines.”