Via Pol:Spy this – “Columnist criticizes foreign correspondents’ coverage of “boy bomb’ story; they respond

Gentlemen of the press: Peter Dudzik of German television ARD, Dietmar Schuman of German television ZDF, Jorg Bremer of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, Gilles Paris of the French Le Monde, Patrick Saint-Paul of Le Figaro, our dear Charles Enderlin of France 2 television, Ms. Emma Hurd of Sky TV, Steve Farrell of the Times of London:
You are all respectable journalists who represent important news organizations. Colleagues.
Maybe one of you knows why, by Thursday morning, none of you had bothered to report to your millions of viewers or readers the story of the boy Abdullah Koran, 10 or 12, who was sent to carry an explosive charge through an IDF roadblock for five shekels by Palestinian “freedom fighters”? Is there no public interest in that story? Does it not have interesting details?
How is it, Ms. Hurd of Sky TV, that when the first missile fell on Gaza your network went into a ‘live” broadcast in prime time for about seven whole minutes (a television eternity), without having current footage (it showed Palestinian pedestrians), but passed over the story of the Palestinian child bomber? How do you explain the nearly complete disregard of the French media for that story? (I understand the Spaniards, who did report the story briefly; they had 200 terror victims to bury). The French news agency devoted a sentence and a half to it at the margins of something, while stressing it was a story whose credibility was problematic.
Well, gentlemen, it is not the credibility of the story that is problematic. It is your credibility that is problematic. The IDF roadblocks are a serious, distasteful reality. They should be covered and reported and so you do. As do we. Ask Gideon Levy. But the other side doesn’t have B’Tselem and Gideons. It has people who take a 10- year-old boy and send him with five shekels and a backpack full of explosives over to our side. To fully understand the roadblocks, from both sides, you have to report that. If you don’t report it, you are fooling your public and yourselves. If I had the authority here, you would all be on the plane on the way home. That might be the reason I do not have the authority here. Have a nice day.

Read the “responses”.

David Frum reviews the Clarke book causing this week’s furor.

Still, there are things that can be learned from the book. One is that for all the praise that Clarke pours on Bill Clinton personally, he presents an absolutely damning account of the terrorism record of the Clinton administration. Time and time again, he and his team agree that a course of action is vital – up to and including air raids against the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan (air raids not cruise missile raids – cruise missiles are slow and gave the Pakistanis time to tip off al Qaeda that the bombs were coming). And nothing happens. Either the bureaucracy refuses to carry out the order or the military drags its feets or (most typically) President Clinton rules out courses of action that carry any risk at all.

Ramblings Journal

For those of you who have been under a rock, Wachs and Von Haessler planned a segment mocking the so-called “war on decency” by recording porn actress Devinn Lane “talking dirty”, but then running it back in reverse, making the verbage unintelligible.
Someone in their infinite wisdom, however, left a mike on the air while the bit was being recorded, allowing very explicit depictions of sexual encounters to go out on the air. The descriptions could be clearly heard over a Honda Truck ad last Friday morning.

The Atlanta morning show hosts are still in the doghouse.

What did I tell you?
I watched CTV National News last night – Clarke’s testimony was presented in surgical out-takes, as though the commission members had remained silent and awe stricken as he spoke. No coverage of the Lehman challenges, no mention of the contradictions between his book, the testimony and his previous statements.
From their website:

Meanwhile, the White House has been fighting back against Clarke, even saying he was angling for a job should Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry win the Nov. 2 election.
“I will not accept any position in a Kerry administration should there be one. On the record, under oath,” was Clarke’s responses.

Problem is, that wasn’t the question to which he responded. And he wasn’t answering to the White House, but to the 911 Commission. The question:

“Until I started reading those press reports, and I said this can’t be the same Dick Clarke that testified before us, because all of the promotional material and all of the spin in the networks was that this is a rounding, devastating attack — this book — on President Bush.
That’s not what I heard in the interviews. And I hope you’re going to tell me, as you apologized to the families for all of us who were involved in national security, that this tremendous difference — and not just in nuance, but in the stories you choose to tell — is really the result of your editors and your promoters, rather than your studied judgment, because it is so different from the whole thrust of your testimony to us.
And similarly, when you add to it the inconsistency between what your promoters are putting out and what you yourself said as late as August ’05, you’ve got a real credibility problem.
And because of my real genuine long-term admiration for you, I hope you’ll resolve that credibility problem, because I’d hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book.”

I guess I’m not surprised – CTV’s war coverage and Alan Fryer’s Washington reporting have been abysmal for the past year – error ridden, one sided and poorly researched.
Early in the invasion of Iraq, there were priceless moments when news anchor Sandy Reynaldo would report with sober face that American forces were “bogged down” and suffering immense difficulties… only to turn the cameras over to Ret.Gen. MacKenzie who, complete with maps and pointers, would cheerfully explain how the US military was making military history with the success and speed of the campaign.
Belgravia Dispatch sees the same spin in the US media.