funn with politics and telecom.

[lord dolf vader]

draw your own conclusions telling you mine would be distateful spitefull arogant inflamatory and in anycase pointless , but its important that is for shure.

from the communist news network.


http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/05/22/nyt.safire/index.html

comments?

[fd ski]

it's a reprint from new your times.

just fyi.

[Ripsnort]

Speaking of CNN and NYT losing all credibility. I know not everyone agrees with that but, I no longer see them as a functioning news source, more a tabloid.





quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barone: Hedges' Anti-American Views "Qualify"
Him for NYT Job

Given the "anti-American" rant against the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein delivered by New York Times reporter Chris Hedges during a Rockford College commencement address in Illinois on Saturday, Fortune magazine's Jeff Birnbaum suggested on Brit Hume's FNC show on Wednesday night that Hedges can write editorials, but "he should not be allowed anywhere near a war to cover it for the news pages." To which Micheal Barone of U.S. News retorted that with "the current management" of the Times those anti-American views "qualify him for that job."

In his May 17 remarks dedicated solely to denouncing U.S. foreign policy, Hedges charged, as recounted on the MRC's TimesWatch.org site: "We have forfeited the good will, the empathy the world felt for us after 9-11, we have folded in on ourselves. We have severely weakened the delicate international coalitions and alliances that are vital in maintaining and promoting peace."

Plus: "This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war now of liberation of Iraqis from American occupation."

And: "We are far less secure today than we were before we bumbled into Iraq. We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that those who will by and large pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we offered them."

During the panel segment on the May 21 Special Report with Brit Hume, Barone observed: "When you read the remarks, they're genuinely anti-American. He sets up the United States as the evil force in the world."
Jeff Birnbaum, Washington Bureau Chief for Fortune agreed, and added: "The New York Times is one of the great newspapers in America. I spent many years competing against it....And there's a problem allowing someone like Chris Hedges, who has the views, I think you well-described them, to allow him to continue to write news stories is a very bad mistake. That's a misjudgment if they allow him to do that. He should not be allowed anywhere near a war to cover it for the news pages. If he wants to write editorials, that's perfectly fine, but not otherwise. There should be an important distinction and a paper as good as the New York Times should make that distinction."
Barone then quipped: "I think in the current management, makes the decision that those views qualify him for that job."

For a picture of Birnbaum: http://www.fortune.com

For a picture of Barone: http://www.usnews.com

A CyberAlert Special on Wednesday afternoon featured a full rundown of Hedges' remarks as provided in a TimesWatch.org article by Clay Waters which included links to the Rockford Register Star stories, an mp3 audio file of Hedges' address and some other left- wing comments made this year by Hedges in other venues. The TimesWatch material is online at: http://www.timeswatch.org

So go there for more on Hedges or, if you missed the CyberAlert Special, check this space in the posted version of this CyberAlert to which I'll add in this item the text of the May 21 CyberAlert Special.





CNN Admits Legal "Assault Weapon" Fired
Into Ground, Not Target

Update on CNN's very distorted comparison of the firepower of a legal versus an illegal "assault weapon." In a Wednesday Miami Herald story, a CNN spokesman conceded that a sheriff's deputy fired the illegal weapon into cinder blocks, thus showing the firepower as chunks blew away, but when demonstrating a legal model, while CNN's camera showed the same cinder blocks being unscathed, the deputy was really firing into the ground, thus suggesting a difference in firepower when none existed.

First, some background. An excerpt from the May 20 CyberAlert:

Reeling from NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre charging CNN with fabricating and "deliberately faking" a story last Thursday to demonstrate how a banned "assault weapon" has much more dangerous firepower than a legal model, on Monday's Wolf Blitzer Reports, substitute anchor Miles O'Brien didn't go so far as to offer a retraction, but he did concede CNN's demonstration needed further amplification....

-- Thursday, May 15 Wolf Blitzer Reports, anchored by Kyra Phillips. John Zarrella traveled to the Broward County, Florida Sheriff's Office's outdoor shooting range where Sheriff Ken Jenne narrated what viewers were seeing as a deputy fired two "assault weapons."

Jenne explained why he favors keeping the ban in place: "Because I think guns are the tools of hunters, but these weapons are really the tools to kill people and there's a major, major difference."

First, a deputy fired what Jenne described as "a AK-47, the Chinese version," which is "currently banned."

Viewers saw bullets fired into a pile of cinder blocks and chunks of the cinder block flying off, leaving a big hole in one block. Then, the deputy fired into a bullet-proof vest. Zarrella observed that the bullets "clearly fired right through" the vest.

Second, Jenne set up the next model to be tested: "This is an AK-47 also, but a civilian model. It has some differences and right now this only has a clip of 10 in the magazine -- or 10 rounds in the magazine. So this is a big difference than the 30 rounds in the previous magazine."

Viewers then saw the deputy fire four shots toward the cinder blocks, but nothing happened, not even a speck of the cinder block flew off, never mind any hole being created.

The very clear implication: The illegal model punches right through cinder block with devastating and deadly force, but the legal model can't even cause a speck to fall off.

Upon looking at the MRC videotape frame by frame, with the first rifle you could see a puff of smoke coming out of the end of the barrel as the deputy fired. But with the second gun, you could not see anything, as if no bullet were being fired. And if one was, the deputy either missed the target cinder blocks, or had good enough aim to be firing into the hole created by the first rifle.

Sheriff Jenne, Zarrella didn't bother to note, is a Democrat. From Jenne's bio on the Sheriff's office Web site: "Sheriff Jenne was elected to the Florida Senate in 1978 and retained that position for 18 of the next 20 years. He held all of the top committee chairmanships and was Senate Democratic Leader when Governor Chiles chose him to become Sheriff of Broward County in January 1998, replacing the late Ron Cochran." See: http://www.sheriff.org

END Excerpt from May 20 CyberAlert

For LaPierre's reaction and more on CNN's semi-clarification: http://www.mediaresearch.org

++ Video: Thanks to the MRC's Mez Djouadi and Rich Noyes, we've added, to the May 20 CyberAlert, a RealPlayer video clip of CNN's very misleading demonstration.

"NRA says Jenne way off target," read the headline over a May 21 Miami Herald story brought to my attention by the MRC's Liz Swasey. The subhead: "Gun lobby rips sheriff, CNN." An excerpt of the story by Daniel de Vise:

Gun-rights advocates are miffed at Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne and CNN over a recent TV segment that National Rifle Association officials characterize as a virtual political ad for extending a federal ban on some semi-automatic weapons.

Officials of both CNN and the sheriff's office contend they never intended to mislead viewers and say any flaws in the broadcast were accidental....

BSO [Broward Sheriff's Office] and CNN stepped into the fray Thursday with footage of an on-air demonstration purportedly designed to show the difference between banned weapons and their legal counterparts.

When a BSO employee fired a banned weapon, the camera showed bullets ripping through a cinderblock target. When a legal semi-automatic weapon was fired, the camera showed another cinderblock seemingly unharmed.

In fact, the bullets from the legal gun never hit the cinderblock. CNN spokesman Matthew Furman said the camera operator didn't realize the sheriff's employee had switched targets and was firing into the ground.

"When we learned that the demonstration was less than clear, we told our viewers that," Furman said.

The comparison seemed to imply the banned weapon packed more punch than its legal counterpart. In fact, the two are the same in terms of firepower.

NRA officials also protested the use of a fully automatic AK-47 in the piece and the reporter's claim that it was among the targets of the 1994 ban. Fully automatic weapons have been regulated since 1934 and aren't mentioned in the 1994 law.

Sheriff's spokesman Jim Leljedal said Jenne favors extending the 1994 ban but never meant to misinform the CNN audience by participating in the Thursday segment.

"There was never any intent to mislead," Leljedal said. "They wanted to talk about it, so we did, and on very short notice we got some guns out and we did some demonstrations for them."

Three years ago, Jenne backed an unsuccessful bill that would have made it a felony to own an assault weapon in Broward County. Hundreds of gun owners bearing American flags packed into a Broward legislative delegation hearing to oppose it....

END of Excerpt

For the story in its entirety: http://www.miami.com

Cont. next post

[Ripsnort]

Cont. from previous post...

ABC Obsesses Over Bush's Claim that "Al-Qaeda's
on the Run"

President Bush has repeatedly said the war on terror is far from over, and even if al Qaeda pulls off a domestic terrorist attack that does not mean their capabilities have not been significantly diminished, but every day this week ABC's Good Morning America has played this clip of Bush as if the bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, and threats to the U.S., prove him wrong: "Al-Qaeda's on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated."

MRC analyst Jessica Anderson noticed the pattern and passed along these quotes:

-- Monday, May 19. Brian Ross intoned in a story on the weekend bombings in Morocco and Saudi Arabia: "And it's clear now the al-Qaeda attacks are a huge embarrassment for President Bush, who just last week seemed to be claiming victory in the war on terror."
Bush: "I figure we've destroyed about one-half of al-Qaeda."
Magnus Ranstorp, St. Andrews University: "Al-Qaeda, despite claims by the Bush administration and despite claims by the FBI, is very much alive and kicking."

-- Tuesday, May 20. Charles Gibson to White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: "I want to go back to some of the situations in the world I mentioned a moment ago. On May 5, the President something interesting about al-Qaeda. I want to play that."
Bush: "Al-Qaeda's on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated."
Gibson: "In the days since he said that, we've had the attacks in Morocco, we've had the attacks in Saudi Arabia, and we just mentioned in the news there's a lot of chatter now, which may indicate that there's further al-Qaeda activity. You take it back? Does the President take it back?"

Fleischer pointed out: "Well, you, you could also show the clip of what the President said on the Abraham Lincoln when he warned the American people that, in his words, al-Qaeda is diminished but not destroyed. They are on the run. They no longer have the havens they once had from which they could do their planning, but they are a determined group, and they are trying to regroup. They are diminished, but they are dangerous, and that's why this is an ongoing war against terror, as the President has put it."

-- Wednesday, May 21. Diane Sawyer to FBI Director Mueller during a live, two-hour broadcast from the FBI training academy at Quantico: "Critics have now begun to talk a lot, and I want to address two things if I can. First of all, President Bush said some things to the American public, which I think reassured a lot of people. I want to play them -- they were said within five days of each other in early May, and I'll play them now."
Bush: "Al-Qaeda's on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated."
Bush: "We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide."
Sawyer: "So the President has said that al-Qaeda is now 'on the run' and 'slowly, but surely they will be decimated.' Are they being decimated and is that the right headline, that they're 'on the run'?"
Mueller: "Well, I think yes, they are on the run. I mean, we have taken away their sanctuary in Afghanistan. We have detained and arrested, with the help of our counterparts overseas, a number of their important leaders....That does not mean that we have all the leaders -- we do not -- and consequently, the war goes on. Every time we say we're making progress, and we have made progress, we also in the same sentence say that the war is not over, so there's still a great deal of work to do."

If a terrorist attack does come to the U.S., maybe it will have less to do with President Bush's words than how ABC News tied up a lot of the FBI so ABC could have a May sweeps gimmick of Charlie Gibson at the FBI firing range and Diane Sawyer on the FBI's driving track.

[GtoRA2]

Where did you get the story on CNN faking the gun thing?

[GtoRA2]

Never mind! found it.

[Dune]

Author Accuses Media of Intentional Bias Against Guns
By Jeff Johnson
CNSNews.com Congressional Bureau Chief
May 20, 2003

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - The author of the most comprehensive and controversial research on civilian use of firearms against criminals defended his latest work in Washington on Monday.

Dr. John Lott is an economist and former Yale University School of Law researcher best known for his book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. In that book, he detailed research arguing "allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes, without increasing accidental deaths." (See related story.)

Lott - now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank - said Monday that he understands why some negative stories about the use of guns get more coverage than stories about people using guns to stop crimes.

"Suppose you're the director of a news bureau, and you have two stories. In one case, there's a dead body on the ground, a sympathetic person, a victim," Lott began. "In the other case, let's say, a woman has brandished a gun, the would-be attacker has run away, no shots are fired, no dead body on the ground, no crime actually committed.

"I think virtually anybody who would look at that would find the first news story to be considered a lot more newsworthy than the second," he continued.

The research Lott conducted appears to support this thesis. In an examination of New York Times stories from 2001, Lott found 104 articles related to the use of guns by criminals, totaling 50,745 words. He excluded court case coverage, crimes committed with bb or pellet guns, guns recovered at crime scenes but not used in the crime under investigation, wrongful shootings by police and the illegal transportation or sale of guns.

By contrast, the national "newspaper of record" wrote 163 words about the defensive use of a gun by a citizen in only one story. The results were similar for USA Today, which reported 5,660 words on criminal use of guns but no reporting on the use of guns to stop crimes, and the Washington Post, which devoted 46,884 words to the criminal use of firearms and 953 words to their defensive use by law-abiding citizens.

Paul Waldman, associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said there is "no question there is a bias in media coverage of issues relating to crime and guns," but he argued that the bias is toward newsworthiness, not against guns.

"It has a bias for the event over the non-event, the thing that actually happened as opposed to the thing that never happened, for the violent over the placid, for the dramatic over the mundane," Waldman said.

"That, I think, is the most important reason why there's so much more news about things like murders, when guns are actually used, than when they are not used or when they are used in a way that doesn't actually result in anyone's death or injury," he said.

Lack of newsworthiness apparently not the deciding factor

But in his latest book, The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong, Lott asserts that supposed lack of newsworthiness does not explain why the establishment media fail to report when already noteworthy crimes-in-progress are stopped by armed citizens.

"My guess is, for example, few people would realize, and understandably so, that about a third of the public school shootings were stopped by citizens with guns well before the police were able to arrive," Lott said Monday.

"If you go through and do news searches on those cases, you'll find that only about 1 percent or fewer of the stories on those specific cases will mention that a gun was used to stop the attack," he said. "That particular part of the story seems to be systematically left out of the coverage."

Lott pointed to a January 2003 attack at Virginia's Appalachian Law School in which Peter Odighizuwa, a disgruntled student, allegedly shot and killed the school's dean, a professor and a fellow student on campus before being subdued by two armed students. (See related story.)

Upon hearing gunfire, students Mikael Gross and Tracy Bridges ran to their vehicles, retrieved their handguns, returned and pointed them at Odighizuwa. They then ordered the attacker to drop his gun, which he did, and students then tackled the disarmed gunman and, after a short scuffle, restrained him until police arrived several minutes later.

"If you do a ... computerized search of news stories around the country, you'll find in the one week after the attack well over 200 separate stories about the incident," Lott said. "However, only four mention the students having a gun in any way, and only two of those four mention that the students actually used their guns to stop the attack."

The Washington Post, for example, wrote that: "students pounced on the gunman and held him until help arrived." New York's Newsday explained that: "The attacker was restrained by the students." Other accounts erroneously reported that: "students tackled the man while he was still armed."

"Given that something is already newsworthy, why is it that this one particular aspect of the event is left out?" Lott asked.

"I think it's hard to explain it on the basis of newsworthiness. I would guess that saying students 'subdued' an attacker, or 'restrained' him, or 'pounced on' the attacker," he argued, "is probably going to be less gripping to readers than if you were to say that they used a gun to do it."

False impression from reporting on children killed with guns

Lott also argues that reporting on children accidentally killed with firearms is also misleading.

"The impression that we would get ... is that surely we're talking about young kids who die from accidental gunshots in the home, and that we're talking about something that is essentially at epidemic type rates," Lott said. "[But] in 1999, the last year for which data was available when I did the book, there were 31 accidental gun deaths in the United States involving kids under age 10.

"If you break down these 31 cases, there were actually six cases in the United States in that year where a child under 10 either accidentally shot themselves to death or another child," he added.

Again, Waldman acknowledged the apparent bias but attributed it to the desire to grab an audience's attention, not a bias against guns.

"Kids are used by journalists as kind of an easy device to lend emotion and drama to their news," he said.

"You wonder why children getting shot gets more attention than other kinds of death," Waldman continued. "I think it's because it's tragic and violent and dramatic all at the same time, and these are all things that news is drawn to."

But Lott believes the unbalanced media coverage contributes to public acceptance of the false statistic created by anti-gun groups that "nine children are killed by guns every day."

According to data in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, achieving the "nine children a day" number would require including "children" as old as 24 years of age, depending on the year chosen for analysis. More than 50 percent of that nine per day are young adults who successfully attempt suicide.

Of the remaining shooting victims 17 to 24 years of age, 70 percent were actively involved in criminal activity at the time of their deaths.

The rate of true "children" dying from accidental gun deaths in law-abiding homes is "essentially zero," Lott argued, when only accidental shootings by and of children under 10 years of age are considered.

"You're talking about something that's akin to children in those homes dying from lightning strikes," Lott explained. "To the extent to which these rare [accidental shootings of children] occur, they overwhelmingly take place in ... households where someone with a criminal record, an adult, is accidentally firing the gun."

Statistics Lott gathered from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the causes of accidental deaths in children less than 10 years of age in 1999 (the latest year for which data were available when the book was being written) support his contention:

Motor vehicle crashes - 1260

Accidental residential fires - 484

Pedestrians killed by vehicles - 370

Drowning in bathtubs - 93

Bicycle accidents - 81

Accidental discharge of a firearm - 31

Accidental discharge of a firearm by a child under 10 years of age - 6

Looking at the data from 1995 through 1999, Lott discovered only five to nine cases per year in which a child shot him or herself or another child.

[Dune]

"Whether it's five or nine or six or 31, obviously it would be far better if it were zero, but I think some perspective is needed here," he argued. "You have to consider that there are some 90 million Americans who own guns, that you're talking about 40 million kids in this age group.

"It's pretty hard to think of virtually any other item that's as commonly owned in American homes that's anywhere near as remotely dangerous, that has as low of an accidental death rate," Lott said. "You have as many kids, or more, who literally die being caught up in combines on farms each year as you have children accidentally killing other kids."

Lott criticized for lack of peer review on latest research

Carlisle Moody, chairman of the economics department at the College of William and Mary, said research such as that Lott included in The Bias Against Guns should pass three tests.

"If an article actually passes the peer review test, it has been vetted in about the most careful way that science has found to do these sorts of things," he said.

Lott acknowledged that while some of the data included in The Bias Against Guns did come from previously published peer-reviewed journals, most did not. He said he did not submit his latest research for peer review because he has seen the process produce biased results in the past.

"I'm not sure I'm convinced that refereeing prevents political views and other things from kind of going in there and showing themselves in different places," Lott said.

He pointed to a recent paper that used subscription to the third-most popular gun magazine in the U.S. as a measure of gun ownership. When subscription rates for the most popular and second-most popular magazines were used instead, the findings of the research were altered dramatically.

"If I was a referee, I would ask, Why only look at one magazine here? Why not the largest or the fifth largest?" Lott said. "The fact that it had not would make me pretty suspicious and unlikely to go ahead and publish the paper."

That study was not only published, Lott explained, but has also won awards from academic organizations despite its obviously flawed pretext.

Lott 'way ahead of the competition' on other two factors

"The second question that you should ask is," Moody continued, "'Did the authors make the data available for other researchers to rummage around in?'"

"The third thing we should ask is ... 'Were the requisite controls used?'" Moody said, explaining that controls isolate the effect of, in the case of Lott's studies, the possession of concealed handguns by ordinary citizens on violent crime rates. Such controls would eliminate the effects of other factors, such as poverty or incarceration, on crime.

Moody criticized Lott for not submitting his latest work for peer review but said his compliance with the other two points more than compensates.

"On the other two criteria, he is way ahead of his competition," Moody said. "He makes the data available, which means he is probably not cheating. I've checked him out; he's not cheating, and he uses all the requisite controls. "He does it right, and so, I tend to believe the results that John has published in the back of the book.

"If you wish to be informed on the debate concerning guns and public policy," Moody concluded, "you must have read John's book."

The raw data for Lott's research is available online.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200305/NAT20030520b.html