Media's "Credibility-Damaging Kinship With Soldiers" in Iraq?
 

     Critic Ned Martel's review of "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception," left-wing media critic Danny Schechter's anti-war documentary, calls it an "uneven, unpolished" film with "thinly supported" conspiracy theories. Yet Martel sides with some of Schechter's arguments, seeing a danger in reporters feeling "kinship" with soldiers they cover in Iraq.

     "A nostalgic insider turned outsider can still offer insights, however, and the most useful is that cable news outlets were ludicrously rah-rah during the invasion of Iraq and that embedded reporters felt a credibility-damaging kinship with soldiers. The film reruns some old scenes of retired generals acting out John Madden fantasies while tracing anticipated troop movements across electronic screens. In another snippet, Fox's David Asman gets so intimate with the troops that he calls for a limited demonstration of how one soldier manages to defecate in the desert. After his embedded stint, the Fox News correspondent Greg Kelly says, 'We got to know these soldiers and we wanted them to be successful.' After her own tour in Iraq, Gwendolen Cates of People magazine recalls her in-the-field anxieties: 'How will I be able to handle it if one of my soldiers dies?' Not all journalists are so malleable, and most are anxious about drawing the attention of satirists like Jon Stewart and town criers like Jim Romenesko."

Read the rest of Martel's review here:

Do Bush's Social Security Figures Add Up? Let's Ask Kerry's Economist
 

     Reporter David Rosenbaum's short story is almost wholly devoted to two economists who alleged to refute Bush's Social Security numbers -- Two economists who just happened to work in the past for either John Kerry or Bill Clinton.

     In Friday's "Refiguring Social Security Plan: Economists Add Their Numbers," Rosenbaum insists: "Morning-after scrutiny of the bold Social Security plan President Bush outlined in his State of the Union address on Wednesday night turned up details that were not immediately apparent. The president said that in 2018 the system would begin paying out more in benefits than it was receiving in taxes. By 2027, he said, the shortfall would be $200 billion. By 2033, he said, it would be $300 billion. Here is what he did not say, according to calculations by Jason Furman, an economist who worked on Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign: Under Mr. Bush's plan, Social Security benefits would begin to exceed tax revenue six years earlier, in 2012. That is because some tax money would go not into Social Security, but into workers' individual investment accounts."

     At the end, Rosenbaum summarizes the views of Clinton administration economist Peter Orszag, while a "senior administration official" is given a single paragraph sandwiched between the two critics with Democratic ties.

For the rest of Rosenbaum, click here:

A Left-Wing "Civil Liberties Group"
 

     Eric Lipton's Thursday story on the hearings of Michael Chertoff to head Homeland Security argues: "Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said after the hearing that he was impressed with Judge Chertoff's willingness to acknowledge that mistakes were made, but that he still had some questions about whether the judge knew about the abuse of terrorism suspects detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Several civil liberties groups went further, saying that Judge Chertoff's testimony was both incomplete and misleading. 'He made no apology to the hundreds of innocent people and their families who were jailed simply because they were Arabs or Muslims,' said Kate Martin, a lawyer from the Center for National Security Studies, which sued the federal government over the arrests after Sept. 11."

     Lipton could have applied a much less flattering label than "civil liberties group" to the left-wing Center for National Security Studies, given that it's a spinoff of the hard-left Institute for Policy Studies, last heard whining about the successful election in Iraq: "This election does not mean that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is legitimate -- democracy cannot be imposed at the point of a gun. The election, held under military occupation and not meeting international criteria, including those of the Carter Center, remains illegitimate; legitimacy is not determined by the number of people voting."

For the rest of Lipton's take on the Chertoff hearings, click here:

Saudi Arabia: Bush Can't Win
 

     Reporters like David Sanger have long tweaked Bush for the administration's refusal to condemn undemocratic practices in Saudi Arabia and among other Middle East allies. Now in Friday's edition, reporter Hassan Fattah is blaming Bush for actually speaking out against Saudi Arabia in his State of the Union.

     Fattah files a short story, "Arabs Bristle at Bush's Agenda for Region," including this cold opening: "Saudi and Egyptian reformers bristled Thursday at President Bush's call in his State of the Union address for greater reform in their countries, dismissing the speech as patronizing and unproductive. 'The government of Saudi Arabia can demonstrate its leadership in the region by expanding the role of its people in determining their future,' President Bush said."

     Bush is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't: "Reformers in Saudi Arabia planning for the country's first elections said his statements would undermine their credibility. 'This kind of talk is always frustrating,' said a Saudi commentator, Khalid al-Farm, head of the Arab Media Association and an independent observer for next week's elections. 'In essence he's saying the same thing we are, but all he's doing is putting the government and the reformers in a tight position.'"

For the rest of Fattah's story, click here:

Boston Liberals Don’t Like Bush's Social Security Vision
 

     Kate Zernike interviews some young workers in the liberal stronghold of Boston. She finds, shockingly enough, that they don't approve of Bush's Social Security plan.

     In Friday's "Private Accounts Are Risky, Many Young Workers Say," she asserts: "President Bush called his plan to shift Social Security into personal investment accounts 'a better deal' for younger workers. But those he was claiming to help did not necessarily agree. About 15 workers in their 20's and 30's interviewed here on Thursday said they had not counted on Social Security for anything more than a little extra cushion by the time they retire in three or four decades. But they worried that the stock market was too unreliable, or that people were too unschooled in managing money for Mr. Bush's plan to work….Only one person interviewed approved of private accounts. Aaron Kotok, 28, a law student at Harvard who voted for President Bush, called private accounts 'a no-brainer.'" (For balance, the Times did feature a photo of Kotok along with the story.)

Read the full Zernike here: