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Communique
PBS Ombud Agrees With FAIR on Shultz Tribute: Says funding gives series a 'credibility problem'
7/20/10

In response to hundreds of letters from FAIR activists, PBS ombud Michael Getler (7/16/10) agreed with FAIR's criticism (Action Alert, 7/12/10) of the 3-hour PBS documentary Turmoil and Triumph, a tribute to former Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz funded in part by institutions and individuals with close ties to Shultz.

Getler found Turmoil to be "over-the-top, in my view, with praise, but with relatively little critical appraisal of some of the more controversial actions of Shultz's tenure." He wrote:



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  • Posted by Peter Hart on 07/28/10 at 9:44 am
    For those of you not following right-wing non-stories, there is a mini-scandal brewing over something called JournoList, a now defunct private email list started by a liberal blogger named Ezra Klein. It came to include something like 400 members, many of whom were other liberal bloggers, academics and pundits. Someone leaked many of the emails on the [...] Read more»
  • Posted by Peter Hart on 07/27/10 at 3:37 pm
    Fresh from her comments slamming Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings for reporting things the military wouldn't like, CBS reporter Lara Logan weighed in on the WikiLeaks story on last night's CBS Evening News, where she argued that reporters should do more to stress the Taliban's record of killing civilians:

    KATIE COURIC: Also mentioned in these documents is the number of Afghan civilians who have been killed. How do you think this will damage the war effort?

    LARA LOGAN: Well, the issue of civilian casualties is a major one. And the U.S. has taken a lot of criticism because of this. However, what's interesting to note is that according to the documents, 195 Afghan civilians have been killed. But also according to the documents, 2,000 Afghan civilians have been killed by the Taliban, which is more than 10 times the number said to be killed by U.S. and NATO forces. And very little is being made of that. If the coverage would indicate that it's more of an issue for the U.S. to kill Afghan civilians than it is for the Taliban to do so.

    It would be absurd to suggest that only 195 Afghan civilians have been killed in the war. That tally from the WikiLeaks data is incomplete, as the Guardian reported:

    At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

    Afghan human rights advocate Erica Gaston points out (Huffington Post, 7/27/10), the WikiLeaks database on civilian casualties is by no means definitive--many well-known incidents are missing.  A summary of estimates of U.S./coalition-caused civilian deaths provided by Wikipedia suggests that the number Logan seemed to think was credible is off by a factor of at least 28.
    [...] Read more»

  • Posted by Peter Hart on 07/27/10 at 11:00 am
    The stories in today's Washington Post tell you everything you need to know about the media establishment's reaction to the Wikileaks Afghanistan documents:

    WikiLeaks Disclosures Unlikely to Change Course of Afghanistan War

    By Greg Jaffe and Peter Finn

    ...The documents' release could compel President Obama to explain more forcefully the war's importance, military analysts said....

    Senior White House officials said the classified accounts bolstered Obama's decision in December to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration....

    In the near term, the Obama administration seems intent on casting the voluminous leak as old news and ignoring it.....The same dismissive attitude dominated the national security think tanks in Washington where analysts closely follow the war. By Monday afternoon, most of these experts had given up on searching through the huge WikiLeaks database for new information....

    [...] Read more»

  • Posted by Jim Naureckas on 07/27/10 at 10:55 am
    Former special ops squad leader/current think tank fellow Andrew Exum noisily yawns at the WikiLeaks Afghan document release on the New York Times op-ed page today (7/27/10):

    The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the fractured country. Often what appears to be a two-way conflict between the government and an insurgency is better described as intertribal rivalry. And often that intertribal rivalry is worsened or overshadowed by the violent trade in drugs.

    As it happens, Extra! (12/09) devoted an entire article to the question of how U.S. media have examined the role of interethnic conflict in the Afghan War, and the answer is that by and large they've done a terrible job: Acknowledging that the conflict is largely a civil war between Pashtuns and other ethnic groups does not help the U.S. military sell the war, and so U.S. journalists, following the lead of their Pentagon handlers, barely ever describe it that way. [...] Read more»

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