In all the excitement over CNOOC

…because I’ll be on a flight to Dallas. My friend Willie Nelson is throwing me a bachelor party this weekend. I’ll be back on later this evening for your weekly dose of Underreported News.

Also, if you see any false or slanderous stories about me and my friends in the news this weekend, remember: The media are horribly biased against conservatives.

Michelle Malkin has the goods on Brian Williams

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, home of anti-war columnist Susan Paynter, might be going out of business as the result of a court ruling (via LGF):

OLYMPIA, Wash. – The state Supreme Court on Thursday dealt The Seattle Times a major victory in its efforts to end a joint operating agreement with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The New York Post reported today that NBC plans to consolidate all of its news operations:

June 30, 2005

In response to the Judith Miller/Matt Cooper/Valerie Plame imbroglio, Reason editor Nick Gillespie argues against a national shield law for reporters:

But why not champion a new federal shield law and more state-level ones? As my Reason colleague Matt Welch, who generally supports such legislation, has pointed out, all sorts of non-journalistic types are shielded, too, including doctors, lawyers, spouses, and more.

But there’s the rub: Shield laws, in the end, confer on government the effective right to license the press

The Army exceeded its recruiting goals for June by 507 soldiers. The Washington Post and the New York Times ran stories acknowledging this good news, even though they reminded readers that the Army is still facing a shortfall in annual recruiting totals.

The Boston Globe, on the other hand, printed the following story today:

As Bush calls for more to sign up, military recruitment lags

Army behind quota for the year

WASHINGTON

Greta Van Susteren

Marv Essary has a guest column over at Accuracy in Media about the liberal Sacremento Bee columnist who got caught inventing people in her columns:

The liberal Sacramento Bee reported on Sunday, June 26, that its investigation of columnist Diana Griego Erwin’s politically correct, three-times-a-week, human-interest columns reveal that they have been peppered with people, places, and events whose existence cannot be authenticated.

[snip]

Readers now suspect that the columnist could have been inventing people and stories

In keeping with the Google Earth craze (right now the top searched-for item on Technorati), check out this interactive map from the Newseum. It allows you to drag your cursor over any major city in the world and see the front page of the local paper. Clicking on the city will enlarge the front page and provide links to the Web site.

This is not a comprehensive study, but from watching the various cable nets react to President Bush

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), a member of the

Associated Press reporter Asif Shahzad reporting:

17 former Guantanamo inmates freed in Pakistan; 6 claim Qur’an was desecrated

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) – Pakistanis freed from Guantanamo Bay claimed Monday they saw American interrogators throw, tear and stand on copies of Islam’s holy book, and one former detainee said naked women sat on prisoners’ chests during questioning.

Tahir Ashrafi, a religious affairs adviser for Punjab province, said the 17 men had been cleared by Pakistani intelligence agencies after thorough interrogation and “have not been found to be involved in any kind of terrorist activity.”

He said all the men signed statements saying they wouldn’t join any anti-state activity.

However, one of the freed men, Khalil-ur Rahman, 21, from the eastern town of Gujrat, said he wouldn’t hesitate to fight again. “If I get a chance to fight jihad again, I will definitely go. I will not miss it,” he said.

Detainee Freed From Guantanamo Bay Vows to Kill Again

UPDATE: Shahzad contributed to this sob story about the poor dears back in March.

UPDATE II: Read the story from Update I, then remind me why we’re letting these people go.

UPDATE III: The Washington Post picks up the story and snips off the bottom, making this nothing more than a story about Koran abuse based on the unsubstantiated allegations of six men who acknowledge having gone to Afghanistan to kill Americans.

UPDATE IV: The LA Times does it too.

UPDATE V: The Boston Globe does it too.

UPDATE VI: I was starting to wonder if the prevalence of stories that left out the part about the freed detainee vowing to kill more Americans meant that some alternate version of the story had gone out on the wires, but here’s a version in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that includes that part.

UPDATE VII: The New York Times runs its own Koran desecration allegations, from a recently freed detainee who never actually witnessed any desecration himself. I should change the category heading on this post to Press Patterns.

If you haven

Overall, I

Not too long ago a Gallup Poll found that public trust in newspapers and TV news had hit an all-time low, with only 28 percent of the public having either a

For this week

The Agence France Presse issues forth this story today:

GENEVA (AFP) – Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.

“They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,” the Committee member told AFP.

“They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark.”

UPDATE: Patrick at Conspiracy Squirrels took a glance at the committee membership:

I just noticed the following name on the list of Committee Members:

Mr. Alexander M. YAKOVLEV – Russian Federation

Is that the same fellow that was just ’outed’ in the Oil for Food Scandal, and had to resign? If so, then I think I know where the leak came from!

Hoystory.com has the full analysis of the disparity between the New York Times coverage of Durbin