Wednesday, September 22, 2004

More links

IOWAHAWK David Burge offers excerpts from "the new Inspector Dan Rather Mystery," My Teleprompter Is Deadly. You want hard-boiled? How about this: "My name is Rather. And I’m a dick."

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz: "CBS, Sitting Between Fiasco And Fallout."

The Weekly Standard's Noemie Emerie has some questions for Dan Rather that he can't answer.

Writing in next week's Time magazine,
Andrew Sullivan, "A member of the blogging class tells why they deserve your thanks."

And Newsday columnist
James P. Pinkerton suggests that "the story of the fake documents aired on '60 Minutes' is deeper than just one man's fall. It is the story of technology's transition - and that's a tale that will never end."

Perhaps more ominous for CBS--and for NBC and ABC as well--is the inevitability of their increasing irrelevance. Washington Post columnist
Anne Applebaum explains.

Stephen Humphries of the The Christian Science Monitor reports that "Blogs look burly after kicking sand on CBS."

Slate's
Bryan Curtis offers an interesting defense for Rather--it's not that he's liberal; it's that he's nuts.

Chicago Tribune columnist
John Kass warns that "The real story in Rather ruckus remains untold." Well, it certainly remains untold by Rather.

CBS is a subsidiary of the huge media conglomerate Viacom. New York Sun reporter
Josh Gerstein reports that the Viacom board of directors is comprised primarily of liberal Democrats. So it should be interesting to watch how it resolves Rathergate.

New York Observer columnist
Bruce Feirstein ("New Yorker's Diary") is an interesting guy. Today he offers tongue-in-cheek advice to CBS, starting with this title: "Memo to Rather: Out-Fox the Critics—Go Left, Old Man!"

Veteran New York Times columnist
William Safire also supplies CBS with some sound advice: "First, Find the Forger."

Gadfly columnist
Jonah Goldberg
sees it as a good news/bad news kind of thing: "The good news is that Kerry is finally offering some ideas. The bad news - for him - is that they're the wrong ones. But hey, at least they're ideas."

New York Daily News columnist
Zev Chafets doesn't think much of Kerry's new tack: "For reasons known only to himself, Kerry has chosen to stake out a position as the new George McGovern, a can't-do standard-bearer of American defeat and retreat. That leaves Bush just where he wants to be - the candidate of national resolve and optimism."

Astute political consultant/columnist
Dick Morris does not think much of "Kerry's Confused Campaign." Washington Times columnist Tony Blankley agrees with him about "The Massachusetts Drifter."

According to the Israeli ex-spook website, the notorious DEBKA (usually accurate, but inaccurate often enough to generate suspicion), Zarqawi is beheading civilians because he wants to these two women: "Dr. Rihab Taha, a microbiologist known as Dr. Germ, and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, head of his anthrax project and member of the Baath ruling command council."

The Volokh Conspiracy blogger
Eugene Volokh has proof that we're getting skewed reporting from Iraq and throughout the Middle East--when was the last time you saw that an Arab terrorist was characterized as a "terrorist"?--due to systematic intimidation of the media.

Satirical online weekly The Onion reports that "Organizers Fear Terrorist Attacks on Upcoming Al-Qaeda Convention."