In a previous post "showing Fox News' tendency to mislabel badly behaving Republicans as Democrats," one of Canadian blogger Joey deVilla's commenters has pointed out "this map of the Middle East shown on a Fox News in segment where Neil Cavuto interviewed John Bolton."

Noting a problem with the country marked "Egypt"--"that’s not Egypt, that's Iraq!"--deVilla provides (Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, 7/28/09) a helpfully "real map of the Middle East," and puts it pretty mildly when stating that "you'd think that with their obsessions with terror, Muslims and safeguarding the nation, not to mention the presence of a former representative to the U.N. present, they'd know where Iraq was."

Writing under the pen name Jami Tarn (CounterPunch, 3/27/09), one San Francisco lawyer is rallying against "a hate-filled column in the San Francisco Chronicle." Chronicle commentator Debra J. Saunders "insinuated that Tristan Anderson, still lingering in a coma in Tel Aviv after taking an Israeli tear gas canister to the face, costing him part of his frontal lobe and possibly his right eye, deserves this comeuppance for daring to join Palestinians in protest against Israel’s illegal Apartheid wall." Saunders, Tarn wrote, reduced such suffering to the snarky "love-it-or-leave-it Amer'kuh" line that Anderson now has "found out in the worst way that political protest outside the Bay Area isn't all energy bars and catch-and-release."

Tarn notes that, to Saunders, even "a temporary traffic-snarling protest is 'menacing and violence-tinged'; everything the police say is credible":

Saunders lamented, "The problem is…when an officer's skull is fractured--as happened to SFPD's Peter Shields during an anti-World Trade Organization protest in 2005--there are no angry marches closing down Market Street." As one of the lawyers who represented independent journalist Josh Wolf, jailed for eight months for contempt for refusing on principle to turn over his video from that incident to the FBI (which did not show the attack on Shields, but did show Shields' partner, Officer Michael Wolf, choking a completely non-threatening protester half to death), I know something about the events--a protest against the G8 Summit, not the WTO. It began when Officer Shields sped down a dark street in his patrol car, dangerously scattering protesters like chickens, then jumped out wildly swinging his baton. According to his own account, he was in the midst of striking a protester in the arms and legs when someone hit him over the head.

As "the American foreign policy community worked itself into something resembling a frenzy over the appointment of Charles W. 'Chas' Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council"--because "at stake was, if not a direct policy battle of huge consequence, a real struggle over the range of viewpoints that will be permitted in an official government position"--Greg Marx says (CJR.org, 3/13/09) that "if you get your news from the New York Times, you were totally oblivious to this story as it unfolded":

To recap: On February 19, Laura Rozen reported on Foreign Policy's website that Freeman, who is known for his realist foreign policy views and colorful character, had been appointed by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to head the NIC. Within hours, Steve Rosen, formerly of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, had sounded the alarm on the grounds that Freeman is too sympathetic to Saudi Arabia and too hostile to Israel. Over the next two-and-a-half weeks, Freeman's critics pressed their case, adding to the complaints about his views on the Middle East allegations that he is unduly accommodating to China's leadership. Along the way, an inspector general began an investigation of Freeman's financial ties to foreign governments, and Freeman's supporters launched a counteroffensive. And, on Tuesday, as the campaign against him was gaining traction on Capitol Hill, Freeman withdrew from the position, blasting the "Israel Lobby" on his way out the door.

That's a lot of information, almost all of it from blogs or other Web publications. The Times did not address the controversy once until after Freeman withdrew, publishing a brief article by Mark Mazzetti in Wednesday's paper, and a front-page follow-up by Mazzetti and Helene Cooper on Thursday. The reticence of major newspapers--and especially the Times--about the story while it was unfolding was noticed, and criticized, by both pro- and anti-Freeman advocates.

Marx additionally notes that the Washington Post, being "the Times's big legacy-media competition on foreign policy stories, was also slow to cover the story, though it jumped in a day earlier than the Times--i.e., before Freeman withdrew."