According to FAIR, this is what Tom Brokaw said Sept. 24 (correction) on NBC News.

The Republican National Committee now has acknowledged sending mass mailings to two states that say liberals want to ban the Bible. Republican Party officials say the mailings in Arkansas and West Virginia are aimed at mobilizing Christian voters for President Bush. Some Christian commentators say liberal support for same-sex marriage could lead to laws that punish sermons denouncing homosexuality as sinful.

The FAIR alert doesn’t say so precisely but leaves the impression that this is the entirety of Brokaw’s story. I believe that’s correct.

This is a perfect example of how the mainstream media’s reporting of a charge that is clearly a lie helps give that lie legs.

But I sometimes don’t think mainstream reporters are intentionally trying to perpetuate the lie. In fact, sometimes I think they report such outlandish charges in a straight laced fashion because they think everyone will see, as they do, that this is outlandish. In other words, it’s delivered with a wink and a nod that these people are crazy.

But many in their audience don’t see it that way. If there is irony in the delivery or the script, they miss it. What they here, and I think FAIR rightly charges, is an accusation that is bolstered by the right, in this case the “Christian commentators” – a neutral term for right wing nuts. Meanwhile no one on the left is allowed to refute the charges.

Update: Sure enough, NBC News tried to claim that the FAIR transcript of the story was “incomplete” and left out a line in which a representative of a progressive religious group condemned the claim that liberals sought
to outlaw the Bible.

But then the NBC aide admitted that the line might have been in the script at one time but was edited out before airing.

This makes the story even more egregious. NBC apparently recognized the need for balance (if not the imperative to ignore the story altogether) but chose to disregard it.

The email address for NBC was no longer in service, as I found out when I sent my email. FAIR now has a new one for NBC. The second FAIR alert is in the extended portion of this post.

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Buhs’s hometown newspaper endorses John Kerry. Don’t you love it?”

Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding Iraq.

A little paper with a circulation of 425 describes succinctly the reasons to kick Bush out of office.

Don’t bet on it.

Funny thing is, he still believes it.

…Bill O’Reilly of Fox News … asked Bush whether he would still do the carrier landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln beneath the “Mission Accomplished” banner. At the time, 16 months ago, Bush referred to Iraq as a “victory” and declared an end to major combat there.

“Absolutely,” the president replied in the interview, to air on Monday’s “O’Reilly Factor.” O’Reilly, apparently surprised, replied, “You would?” “Of course,” Bush continued. “I’m saying to the troops, on this carrier and elsewhere, ‘Thanks for serving America.’ Absolutely. And by the way, those sailors and airmen loved seeing the commander in chief. . . . You bet I’d do it again.”

Even Colin Powell admits the situation in Iraq is getting worse. And more are re-thinking what we must willing to accept to get out of there.

The one thing Americans agree on is that terrorism remains a real threat. The reason so many still support our present action in Iraq may be as simple as this: There’s no other anti-terrorist activity in play. This leads to a sort of willful illogic: We must support what’s happening in Iraq, even though we believe it isn’t helping and may even be making us more vulnerable to terrorist attack, because otherwise we’d be doing nothing about terrorism.

We need to change the conversation. First, our goals for Iraq itself must be scaled back. No more insistence on Western-style secular democracy. We must acknowledge the unlikelihood of a politically stable Iraq in which Islamic clergy don’t play a major role. It may be all we can hope for just to forestall civil war.

And even that modest goal can’t be met by our reliance on military might. Our very presence in Iraq — militarily and commercially — is provocative. The most dangerous thing for an Iraqi these days is to be seen as cooperating with us. The new conversation must be about how to achieve stability, not how we can forcibly pacify the place. This suggests more reliance on international diplomacy than the Bush administration seems comfortable with, and it might even suggest the possibility of conversations between Western and Iraqi clergy.

Columnist Bill Raspberry thinks Daniel Yankelovich has the right approach.

Yankelovich, co-founder and chairman of Public Agenda, said a half-century of observing social and political movements has led him to believe that all successful movements have three pillars of support: (1) a small group of committed militants, (2) a large group of moderates who deplore the militants’ tactics but share their grievance and (3) a convenient scapegoat.

“You can’t argue with [al Qaeda militants and their allies],” he said. “They are determined to kill us. We have to deal with them through force and force alone.

“But to address the other two legs, we need an enlightened long-term political strategy to divide the moderates from the jihadists and to remove ourselves from the role of scapegoat.”

And how can Bush win re-election given this piece of news?

…there is this tantalizing bit in a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. Though respondents favored Bush by a slight margin, 58 percent said they hoped for “major changes” in a second Bush term, compared with only 9 percent who say they’d like to see a second term that looked like the first one.

Kerry needs to tap into that fear that a second Bush term will be more of the same. If he hammers on this theme, Bush will eventually be asked how his second term would be different and what he thinks were the mistakes of the first term. Could make an interesting question for the debate panelists.

Update: Kevin Drum has another piece of bad news getting worse in Iraq.

I don’t know how anyone can back this guy with the two-faced bullshit he spews.

I’m not sure that the six-point plan is detailed enough or different enough from Bush’s (except Bush only mouths the words and couldn’t get bears to follow him if his ass was covered in honey), but why did it take so long to say this?

John F. Kerry detailed his plan for combating terrorism Friday and insisted that the nation is no safer after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because President Bush took his “eye off the ball.”

In a harsh assessment of his rival’s policies, Kerry told an audience at Temple University that Iraq has become a haven for terrorists, and he drew a sharp distinction between the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq to differentiate his policies from those of the president.

“The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy — al Qaeda,” Kerry said. “The president’s misjudgment, miscalculation and mismanagement . . . all make the war on terror harder to win. George Bush made Saddam Hussein the priority. I would have made Osama bin Laden the priority.”

Yeah it’s the Saturday paper, but this story was front page three columns above the fold with a two column photo in The Post. The Bush response was with the jump on A8. (Hey, sometimes we win one.)

Thanks to Josh Marshall for noticing this one.
Click for larger image.

In Time magazine’s latest poll, it’s almost universally bad news for Bush.

Ah, for the days when people whose salaries we pay wouldn’t hide behind the Bush.

New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent is among those crusading for “senior officials” to come out from behind their cloak of anonymity. He has used his twice-monthly column in the Times to call on top newspaper editors to insist their reporters boycott background briefings, calling them “an affront to journalistic integrity and an insult to the citizenry.”

“At a time when news organizations have real credibility problems, to invite more by taking part in this charade is intellectually dishonest and cowardly,” Okrent said Tuesday.

He believes that if the AP and the “big five” newspapers in Washington – USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — walk out of anonymous briefings, their use would diminish.

Slate’s media columnist Jack Shafer this week asked reporters who agree with Okrent to do something about it: “Drop me an e-mail every time an under-sub-deputy-director of flimflam convenes a background briefing,” Shafer wrote. “I’ll provide the creative destruction by publishing anonymice’s names in this column, thereby putting the briefings on the record.”