Last Straw

One­good­move has a clip of (ahem) Hardball’s Chris Mat­thews inter­view­ing Norm Cole­man (the schmuck Sen­ator who thought it might be a good idea to slander Gor­geous George), who then has Gal­lo­way respond. As Nor­man Jen­son of one­good­move puts it, “once again Gal­lo­way hands him his ass.” Or as one of Norman’s Amer­ican read­ers writes, “Why can’t the Demo­crats talk like this?”

John Nich­ols, a well known Amer­ican writer, offers his ana­lysis:

The prob­lem for Cole­man is that Gal­lo­way is not a standard-issue Amer­ican politi­cian — the kind who has noth­ing to say and says it poorly. He is a vet­eran of the rough-and-tumble polit­ics of Glas­gow and the equally rough-and-tumble polit­ics of the Brit­ish Par­lia­ment. In other words, Gal­lo­way comes from places where voters and politi­cians do not suf­fer fools. And any­one who has ever fol­lowed Brit­ish polit­ics knows that George Gal­lo­way has beaten every polit­ical chal­lenge he has faced — even those posed by Brit­ish Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair.

I agree with his ana­lysis of Gal­lo­way, but when, accord­ing to the Nurem­berg Tribunal, your Prime Min­is­ter com­mits the “supreme war crime,” and you re-elect him, I’d say there’re a few voters in Bri­tain will­ing to suf­fer fools.

To ini­ti­ate a war of aggres­sion is not only an inter­na­tional crime; it is the supreme inter­na­tional crime dif­fer­ing only from other war crimes in that it con­tains within itself the accu­mu­lated evil of the whole.
—Nuremberg Trial Pro­ceed­ings, 30^th Septem­ber 1946

And back to weasle world, Greg Palast, recently awar­ded the George Orwell Prize for Courage-in-Journalism, hands out his own Cow­ardice in Journ­al­ism Award to New­s­week and a Goebbels Award to Con­dolleezza Rice for their efforts in cas­trat­ing New­s­week after one of Newsweek’s journ­al­ists did some­thing highly incon­veni­ent, and repor­ted news crit­ical of the U.S. gov­ern­ment! Well, it’s hardly news, alleg­a­tions of Quran abuse have repeatedly been made by former Guantanamo pris­on­ers (Wash­ing­ton Post, 3/26/03; Lon­don Guard­ian, 12/3/03; Daily Mir­ror, 3/12/04; Cen­ter for Con­sti­tu­tional Rights, 8/4/04; La Gaz­ette du Maroc, 4/12/05; New York Times, 5/1/05; BBC, 5/2/05; cites com­piled by Antiwar.com, 5/16/05). It appears, how­ever, that this story broke the camel’s back, cul­min­at­ing in deadly anti-American riots in Afgh­anistan, now called the “The New­s­week Riots” by spine­less Amer­ican media out­lets. Palast concludes:

New­s­week has now pub­licly com­mit­ted to hav­ing its reports vet­ted by Rumsfeld’s Defense Depart­ment before pub­lic­a­tion. Why not just print Rumsfeld’s press releases and elim­in­ate the middleman?

FAIR (Fair­ness & Accur­acy In Report­ing) offers this angle:

Newsweek’s retrac­tion of the Quran story, con­tras­ted with the lack of any cor­rec­tion of its “green mush­room” claim and other sim­il­arly erro­neous WMD cov­er­age, is quite illus­trat­ive of the actual rules—quite dif­fer­ent from the ostens­ible rules that are taught in journ­al­ism school—that gov­ern con­tem­por­ary journalism:

Anonym­ous sources are fine, as long as they are pro­mot­ing rather than chal­len­ging offi­cial gov­ern­ment policy.

It’s all right for your report­ing to be com­pletely wrong, as long as your errors are in the ser­vice of power.

The human cost of bad report­ing need only be coun­ted when people who mat­ter are doing the counting.