Media

All whistleblowers are not altruistic. “It is widely believed at ABC News that the e-mails were leaked by a former employee who has a vendetta against Green.” The ABC producer has apologized to the White House (which made him puke) and Madeleine Albright (who has “Jew shame” and besides, well, he didn’t like her). Nonetheless, he’s given a month without pay to think it over.

On the other hand, I’d prefer the transparency of free & open speech. I suspect we might more easily talk out problems & reach solutions if the bullshit factor were a bit lower.

Last year I discussed how the newspaper industry in general and the New York Times specifically were losing customers at an alarming rate. Now a blog dedicated to discussing business matters takes a look at the financial health of that august news organization. He even has a graph!

Summary: Things don’t look good.

(Since this is a “go look” post where I didn’t add anything of substance, the comments are closed. Please click on over and let Tom know what you think. He is smarter than I am about this stuff, anyway.)

Today’s Strategypage.com has an interesting post by Harold Hutchinson. (Post dated March 7, 2006.) The post discusses a recent decision by a Federal judge which forced the release of the names of more than 500 detainees currently being held at Gitmo. The court case was brought by the Associated Press in order to force the DoD to comply with a Freedom of Information request that they had filed.

Hutchinson says that the decision is a great victory for our terrorist enemy in the Global War on Terror, and compares it to the Axis powers in WWII learning that their codes had been broken by the Allies.

I don’t know enough about the intelligence gathered through interrogations at Gitmo to know if Hutchinson’s assessment of the damage to our efforts is hyperbole or not, but it is certain that one point he made in his short essay is correct. The release of this information will put the lives of those who cooperated in the capture of the detainees at risk. Not only that but, knowing something about the feud mentality of most terrorists, the lives of their families will also be in jeopardy.

Let’s be very clear about this. Innocent people will probably die.

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It is not so much the major media’s biases that bother me as it is their sheer incompetence. The New York Times story, “U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review” by Scott Shane is laced with both.

The lead graph:

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

and later:

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department’s history series, “Foreign Relations of the United States.”The stuff they pulled should never have been removed,” he said. “Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous.”

Gosh, how weird, why reclassify stuff that is already publicly available? I’m sure our intrepid reported will soon tell us.

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Last week I received a curious Email from the Canadian magazine The Western Standard. The publisher, Ezra Levant, was asking for my personal help by sending out a form letter in a mass Emailing.

And what was troubling TWS? It seems that Mr. Levant published the Danish cartoons that have offended so many Muslims of late, and retailers across Canada were refusing to stock the magazine. Not only that, but a “Calgary Muslim leader” (as Mr. Levant puts it) reported the magazine to the police and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, accusing Mr. Levant of hate crimes.

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