Ick – Pro-Bush People in West Virginia
 

     White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller tracked Bush to Wheeling, West Virginia, where Bush was embraced by one of those pro-Bush crowds Bumiller so dislikes.

     She sniffs: “Mr. Bush took questions from the crowd, but they were a lot softer than the sharp queries he got on Monday from the City Club of Cleveland, a nonpartisan group. West Virginia voters supported Mr. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. One boy asked Mr. Bush if he liked living in the White House. Mr. Bush responded, yes, because he had a 45-second commute, the food was good, and the job was an honor.”

     John O’Neil’s Wednesday afternoon online filing is more substantive, actually quoting one of Bush’s supporters (Gayle Taylor) who said things were going better in Iraq than the media would have people believe.

     “The questions were overwhelmingly friendly, and the crowd gave two questioners standing ovations. One was for a man with two sons in the military who declared, ‘I thank God you are their commander in chief.’ The other was for a woman married to an Army officer who had returned from a tour of duty in Iraq with a DVD showing reconstruction work that she wished she could have broadcast by the major networks. ‘If the American people could see it, there would never be another negative word about this conflict,’ she said, to cheers.”

     But even O’Neil’s report left out Ms. Taylor’s criticism of the media that triggered the standing ovation: “It seems that our major media networks don't want to portray the good.”

For the full Bumiller report from West Virginia, click here.

Questioning Hillary Foe’s “Military-Related Experiences”
 

     Hillary-hailing reporter Raymond Hernandez makes the front page of Thursday’s Metro section with a story that isn’t about Hillary but nonetheless helps Sen. Clinton reelection campaign -- an expose of her Republican opponent K.T. McFarland (“Questions Arise About Resume Of Challenger To Clinton”).

     “When Kathleen Troia McFarland stepped forward as a Republican challenger to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, she was a relatively obscure figure with two intriguing claims to fame: She had worked on President Ronald Reagan's ‘Star Wars’ speech and had been the highest-ranking woman at the Reagan Pentagon.”

     “But interviews with former Reagan administration officials and a review of documents show her claims were not entirely accurate. Though she helped write the ‘Star Wars’ speech, its most famous passage -- the one that announced the anti-ballistic missile program -- was actually written by the president himself and his top national security advisers, according to two senior advisers to Mr. Reagan and a review of the literature and news articles of the period.

     “And while Ms. McFarland, who is known as K. T., was a close confidante of Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, serving as his speechwriter and spokeswoman for several years, there were two women with higher ranks in the Pentagon during virtually her entire time there, according to information provided by the Pentagon and the McFarland campaign.”

     Times Watch isn’t sure the challenges to McFarland’s resume are as dire as the paper would have us think.

     In any case, this next paragraph should sound some ironic notes among Republicans: “In many ways, Ms. McFarland's assertions are typical of the résumé polishing of many politicians at election time. But her campaign has sought to use her military-related experiences -- in the Pentagon and on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee -- as cornerstones of her qualifications for the Senate.”

     Funny, but when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth investigated John Kerry’s “military-related experiences” in Vietnam, which at times seemed to be the sole “cornerstone” of his run presidential run, the Times didn’t investigate the charges but instead rushed to Kerry’s defense time and again, declaring the Swifties allegations “unsubstantiated” no less than 20 times in campaign coverage.

For more on the controversy over McFarland’s claims, click here.

Pentagon “Lies” in Iraq Propaganda?
 

     Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker’s story from Wednesday, “No Breach Is Seen in Planting U.S. Propaganda in Iraq Media,” updates the controversy over the Lincoln Group, under fire from the liberal media for paying Iraqi newspapers to broadcast positive articles.

     “Across the Bush administration, officials are wrestling with how to counter radical anti-American messages that resonate throughout huge parts of the world. With the pace of technology, and against the backdrop of American counterterrorism efforts around the world, the role of information has been given greater prominence in Pentagon planning.

     “The question for the Pentagon is its proper role in shaping perceptions abroad. Particularly in a modern world connected by satellite television and the Internet, misleading information and lies could easily migrate into American news outlets, as could the perception that false information is being spread by the Pentagon.”

     As Stephen Spruiell at National Review Online reminds us, “The NYT insinuates that the firm, the Lincoln Group, was paying Iraqi newspapers to print false information. This itself is false. The LA Times, which originally broke the story back in November, reported that the articles were ‘basically factual,’ albeit one-sided.”

For more from Shanker on Pentagon propaganda programs in Iraq, click here.

Blood Money from Sudan?
 

     Ongoing slavery and genocide in the Sudan have grabbed the moral attention of the Times editorial page and peripatetic columnist Nicholas Kristof, but it hasn’t stopped the newspaper from taking that lawless government’s ad money.

     Lloyd Grove reported in Tuesday’s New York Daily News that “Human-rights activists are scorching The New York Times for taking almost a million dollars in advertising from the blood-soaked country of Sudan, whose leaders -- according to the paper's own news and editorial pages, as well as its Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof -- promote slavery and genocide on a grand scale. ‘I practically fell off my seat on the subway this morning. I could not believe it,’ Human Rights Watch program director Iain Levine told me about the eight-page adver¬tising supplement, for which The Times charged the Sudanese an estimated $929,000 for yesterday's New York-area editions.”

     Felix Salmon has more background on Summit Communications, which produced the campaign for Sudan, as well as many other countries in need of positive PR in the Times.