Thanks to FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) for referring to this American Prospect critique of Evan Thomas’s profile of John Kerry in Newsweek. Rob Garver sees Thomas’s latest effort as not more than a re-write of his negative account of Al Gore four years ago. Amazing parallels.

Paul Krugman at the New York Times criticizes TV coverage of the Democratic convention and cites, as I did, that the greatest “makeover” of the convention may have been CNN’s.

One can only hope that President Bush isn’t allowed to get away with his PR push to appear to embrace the 9/11 commission’s recommendation on intelligence gathering.

Last night All Things Considered reported that he didn’t embrace “all the recommendations and that he was bowing to “political pressure.” The reporter also noted that he flip-flopped on establishing the Department of Homeland Security.

CBS last night last reported that the new intelligence czar would not have budgetary control and quotes an expert that without it, the holder of that office would be greatly handicapped. The CBS reporter also noted that Kerry was the first to embrace the commission’s recommendations.

NBC didn’t highlight the differences with the commission’s recommendations.

Fortunately, The Washington Post, despite a misleading headline and sub-head,
and the New York Times did. The Times had the best summary of the politics of Bush’s announcement.

…White House and Bush campaign officials have long said that the details matter far less than the pictures and sounds of Mr. Bush talking in any way about his campaign against terrorism, which polls show is still his strongest card against Mr. Kerry.

The Post editorialized on the announcement but again the Times editorial used more forceful language.

At a time when Americans need strong leadership and bold action, President Bush offered tired nostrums and bureaucratic half-measures yesterday. He wanted to appear to be embracing the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, but he actually rejected the panel’s most significant ideas, and thus missed a chance to confront the twin burdens he faces at this late point in his term: the need to get intelligence reform moving whether he’s re-elected or not, and the equally urgent need to repair the government’s credibility on national security.

The best summary is by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

In the end, it will be up to John Kerry to make the case that Bush’s prescriptions are pabulum. He must ridicule them as too little rather than just too late.

Addendum: Even better, Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum encapsulates it:

Bottom line: the new director heads no agency, doesn’t have cabinet rank, doesn’t work in the White House, has no budget authority, and apparently has no reporting authority. In other words, he’s just a figurehead.

It appears that at least one of the pundits on MSNBC with Chris Matthews during last week’s Democratic convention was as unimpressed with the host’s antics as I was. Newsweek journalist Howard Fineman, a ubiquitous presence in the world of pundocrity, complained about Matthews’s diarrhea of the mouth.

NY Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove claims is in “hot water.” Fineman, perhaps mindful of either his pundit pay or the ego rush he gets being on TV, is already apologizing to the blowhard.

“Sometimes when you are tired – when you’ve been yakking all week and racing from a convention hall to a political reception to an interview – you screw up, big time, as Dick Cheney would say.

“Well, I did that this morning by failing to defend the best political mind on TV, my loyal colleague and host Chris Matthews … Matthews is the best thing on political TV.”

“The best political mind on TV”? Perhaps. But Howard Fineman is a shoe-in for the best ass kisser on TV.

There’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth over Ralph Nader’s campaign, some of it biting Republicans for helping him collect the signatures needed to get on ballots.

Now we have this. Makes me wince. Thanks to Eschaton, I guess, for catching this. Dizzy from Spinning agrees with me.

As is often the case, the White House released bad news on a Friday, knowing that Saturday’s newspapers are the least read of the week. Post convention stories pushed this piece of particularly bad news on to page 2 of The Washington Post. But the more succinct and clearer story was by Reuters.

One in five Americans laid off from a long-term job in the last three years was still unemployed in January, and most who had found jobs were paid less than they were before, government data showed on Friday.

In a report that adds fuel to the debate over the quality of new jobs, the Labor Department said only 65 percent of the 5.3 million workers who were laid off from January 2001 to December 2003 were reemployed by January 2004.

Another 15 percent had left the labor force and were not counted as unemployed.

Of those who lost full-time wage and salary jobs and found new ones, 57 percent earned less than they had in the positions they lost — the worst result in 10 years.

“About one-third experienced earnings losses of 20 percent or more,” the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in the report.

…43 percent of workers cited plant or company closings or moves as the reason they were out of work. The report did not indicate whether the work had moved overseas or elsewhere in the United States.

“Nearly one-third of long-tenured displaced workers lost jobs in manufacturing,” the report said, a stark measure of how much pain the factory sector suffered in the 2001 recession and the subsequent slow recovery.

The re-employment rate for laid-off manufacturing workers was 60 percent, five percentage points below the overall success rate. Factory workers were also paid less in their new jobs, with 64 percent reporting lower earnings.

It’s not just manufacturing jobs but many white collar ones workers are losing and then regaining but with less income. With rising health insurance premiums, property taxes, prescription medicine and gasoline, Dems can make the case that we’re not better off than we were four years ago.

And in a campaign that has freely borrowed slogans from the past and each other, I see no reason the Dems shouldn’t ask Ronald Reagan’s question.

The Washington Post doesn’t seem too enthralled with John Kerry after a Democratic convention that most observers view as successful for its ability to herd the Democratic cats. In addition to its “Missed Opportunity” editorial the day after the convention, David Broder’s column Sunday was titled “A Speech Without Wings.” And Jim Hoagland called the speech “fair to middling” and that Kerry was oblivious to the fact that Bush has built a coalition to fight the Iraq war.

But it was Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who misrepresented Kerry’s speech. He suggests that Kerry’s exhortation that we return to the policy of fighting wars only when we “had to” was based on a fogged view of history and a dangerous doctrine.

The United States has sent forces into combat dozens of times over the past century and a half, and only twice, in World War II and in Afghanistan, has it arguably done so because it “had to.” It certainly did not “have to” go to war against Spain in 1898 (or Mexico in 1846.) It did not “have to” send the Marines to Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Nicaragua in the first three decades of the 20th century, nor fight a lengthy war against insurgents in the Philippines. The necessity of Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in World War I remains a hot topic for debate among historians.

And what about the war Kerry himself fought in? Kerry cannot believe the Vietnam War was part of his alleged “time-honored tradition,” or he would not have thrown his ribbons away. But America’s other Cold War interventions in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are also problematic. Most opponents of the Vietnam War, like Kerry, believed it was symptomatic of a larger failure of U.S. foreign policy stemming from what Jimmy Carter memorably called Americans’ “inordinate fear of communism.” The other Cold War interventions were premised on the same “misguided” anti-communism and the concomitant democratic idealism, that pulled Kerry’s hero, John F. Kennedy, into Vietnam. The United States, by this reckoning, did not “have to” go to war in Korea in 1950. Nor could a post-Vietnam Kerry have considered Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic necessary. Or has Kerry now retroactively accepted the Cold War justification for these interventions that he once rejected?

Then there were the wars of the post-Cold War 1990s. The United States did not “have to” go to war to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. No one knows that better than Kerry, who voted against the Persian Gulf War, despite its unanimous approval by the U.N. Security Council. Nor could anyone plausibly deny that the Clinton administration’s interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were wars of choice. President Bill Clinton made the right choice in all three cases, but it was a choice.

Why is Kerry invoking an American “tradition” that does not exist?

Kagan then goes on to suggest that Kerry is advocating isolationism.

If Kerry has revealed himself in an unusual moment of honesty, it’s time everyone took an equally honest look at where he would lead the country if elected. Kerry’s “doctrine of necessity,” if seriously intended, would entail a pacifism and an isolationism more thorough than any attempted by a U.S. government since the 1930s. It would rule out all wars fought for humanitarian ends, all interventions to prevent genocide, to defend democracy or even, as in the case of the Persian Gulf War, to uphold international law against aggression. For those are all wars of choice.

Kagan’s argument is based on the false premise that “we had to” means choice. There is nothing in Kerry’s record to suggest that he doesn’t understand that threats may provoke the U.S. to attack first, or that we must lose 3,000 lives before we attack. Kagan confuses choice with imperatives that may include moral ones.

Iraq, as I have often said, was the right war at the wrong time. Kerry may feel the same and agree that we should use force to end genocide. Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime in another time might be justification for an attack. But with our poor record in the Middle East and the latent hostilities even among moderate Arabs and Muslims regarding our Israeli-Palestinian policy, March 2003 was not the time to attack. We first must prove to the Muslim world that the U.S. is not on a “crusade.”

“We had to” might well mean that there exists a moral imperative to end suffering. One would hope that a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment would understand that and resist simplistic interpretations.

I’ve posted before about newspapers’ corrections policies. They’re reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s excuse re Iran Contra: Mistakes were made. Newspapers rarely say “we” made a mistake or editor or reporter so and so made a mistake.

A letter in Saturday’s Washington Post highlights the absurdity of some corrections. One correction, five possible interpretations of what was wrong and who made the mistake. Was former diplomat Joe Wilson wrong or somebody else or The Post itself? As the letter writer says, it’s “maddening.”

An excerpt from the CJR Campaign Desk interview with Philip Gourevitch, staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote an in-depth profile of John Kerry.

I think it’s very interesting that in this election, the complaint from the press quite often is that Kerry has not made his story accessible to the public, he has not made himself familiar, that people don’t know who he is. Which is really interesting considering that the guy he’s running against has no story at all, and considering that we live in this age of the politician who must have the story, the anecdotal story. [Bush] is born to extraordinary privilege into an intensely insular, emotionally repressed, dynastic family. He grows up with extremely mediocre performances and seeming to have neither interests nor excellence in any field, except he’s a good partier in college and he seems to be able to collect people around him. He has some kind of power there in his ability to make connections with people. He drifts through his 20s. He becomes an alcoholic — and an ugly one. He failed serially at businesses. None of this is stuff [Bush] could ever mention again, nor is it ever mentioned except, supposedly, hostilely. In other words if you mention it, it’s considered hostile rather than a matter of fact and of record which all of it is. And then, the idea is, all of that is completely erased and redeemed through a conversion experience. It’s a very weird story. One doesn’t feel that one knows [Bush].

The Columbia Journalism Reviews Campaign Desk has an item today about CNN, which has often been portrayed by conservatives as a liberal network. In fact, conservatives describe any media that isn’t right-wing as liberal. In their lexicon, there’s no such thing as moderate or objective news reporting. If you’re not conservative, you’re liberal.

That’s bad enough when describing voters and politicians, but for a profession that’s supposed to be fair, balanced, accurate and objective, it’s an absurd dichotomy.

During the Democratic convention, I watched mostly CNN and MSNBC, with a little PBS and no Fox. After four nights, I could no longer tolerate Chris Matthews on MSNBC, a guy I had once turned off and then began watching occasionally. But his shouting and stepping on people’s comments revealed not just a conservative slant but a bore who bullies people, even his own guest pundits. His style was contagious during the convention, infecting Andrea Mitchell, Howard Fineman, Willie Brown and Joe Scarborough (himself a bruiser). They constantly talked over one another to the point that you couldn’t tell what was said half the time.

CNN with Wolf Blitzer, Judy Woodruff and Jeff Greenberg at least had a lower volume. But as the CJR piece points out, they, along with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and others, revealed if not a conservative tilt, an unprofessional refusal to challenge pundits on their talking points. I had pointed out two misrepresentations yesterday, and the CJR writer later in the day mentioned them on his post.

CNN also did something the other networks didn’t. Immediately after Edwards’s and Kerry’s speeches, CNN brought in representatives of the Bush campaign to counter the speech. Edwards drew Ralph Reed and Kerry’s antagonist was Ed Gillespie of the RNC. In both cases, Blitzer, who has never struck me as more than a not-so-pretty-face-but-a-perfectly-trimmed beard of an anchor, and Woodruff and Greenberg, for whom I have had respect, never challenged the GOP on their talking points.

But in all the coverage, the media’s obsession with the talking points dominates. Flip-flopping is one. IN a Lexis-Nexis search, I found more than 80 newspaper articles that mention the term over the past week. Forty-nine magazine articles used it over the past six months. And on the tube every major network – from Fox to NPR, CNN to PBS, MSNBC to CNBC repeated the charge.

One could argue that they should because people are thinking that way about Kerry. But the only reason they are is because the GOP has constantly promoted it. Even his most notorious flip – his not vote for $87 billion for the Iraq War was clearly at the time described as a vote of protest against the Bush administration’s refusal to curtail tax breaks to pay for the war. It was a fiscally responsible vote to take. Remember, Bush could have reduced the amount requested or reduced the tax cuts to address those issues. But he didn’t knowing most lawmakers wouldn’t oppose it because they were afraid of the exact charges the Bush campaign now makes. So instead of calling Bush on his political ploy, the media – and with relish CNN – constantly regurgitates the point.

This proves the thesis of many writers, including Eric Alterman, Joe Conason, Al Franken and others: The way to intimidate the media is to accuse it of being liberal. The defendant then will bend over backwards to prove you wrong – by being an attack dog for the right.