Daniel in Brookline

The media is an industry; but their business is not to report news. The industry needs a captive audience to beat the bottom line. The product is advertisement.

This is not a right or wrong. It's just a business concept for moving merchandise, and every profession or industry has one. Doctors, soldiers, preachers, lawyers, journalists: everyone needs to earn a living. Only a reclusive holy man might argue otherwise, but most holy men also expect alms.

Finding or generating news can be costly. A good businessperson buys cheap, sells high. These points are obvious, but less conspicuous is how the media squeezes news cheaply from Iraq.

However, we do not take sides, but only analyze the meaning of events from various viewpoints.

What have Americans lost due to the Bush administration in the last four years, and what will the world lose in the next four years? Verified facts, not opinions from any viewpoint, are laid forth in the special report in this issue.

This July 4th is Flag Burning Day!

[America-as-racist-colonialist-warmonger moonbattery omitted]

So on this Fourth of July we call on you to express your feelings on their “Independence Day” by burning a flag in a nationally coordinated action. Together we will show the elite that we are everywhere and that we completely reject the false principals [sic] this holiday is based on.

A public statement by Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley is reviving questions about the intentional targeting of journalists in Iraq by the U.S. armed forces.

At a May 13 meeting in St. Louis, Foley said: "Journalists, by the way, are not just being targeted verbally or politically. They are also being targeted for real in places like Iraq. What outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there's not more outrage about the number, and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq."

At the Communications Workers of America, Candice Johnson said she could not provide any evidence for Foley's revival of the Eason Jordan charges. Linda Foley refused requests for an interview.

Retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney, a Fox News military consultant, was "frankly astonished."

"It may be legitimate to investigate whether there may or may not have been an incident in which U.S. troops have targeted journalists, but there is no question at this point that major media figures are targeting the men and women of the United States military in Iraq, repeatedly and with no evidence," he said.

I plan to see Star Wars this week, because it’s the law.

To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country. I was to encounter people from practically all Arab lands, to listen in on a great debate about the possibility of freedom and liberty. I met Lebanese giddy with the Cedar Revolution that liberated their country from the Syrian prison that had seemed an unalterable curse. They were under no illusions about the change that had come their way. They knew that this new history was the gift of an American president who had put the Syrian rulers on notice. The speed with which Syria quit Lebanon was astonishing, a race to the border to forestall an American strike that the regime could not discount. I met Syrians in the know who admitted that the fear of American power, and the example of American forces flushing Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, now drive Syrian policy. They hang on George Bush's words in Damascus, I was told: the rulers wondering if Iraq was a crystal ball in which they could glimpse their future.

Pick up the Arabic papers today: They are curiously, and suddenly, readable. They describe the objective world; they give voice to recognition that the world has bypassed the Arabs. The doors have been thrown wide open, and the truth of that world laid bare.

Grant Mr. Bush his due: The revolutionary message he brought forth was the simple belief that there was no Arab and Muslim "exceptionalism" to the appeal of liberty. For a people mired in historical pessimism, the message of this outsider was a powerful antidote to the culture of tyranny. Hitherto, no one had bothered to tell the Palestinians that they can't have terror and statehood at the same time, that the patronage of the world is contingent on a renunciation of old ways. This was the condition Mr. Bush attached to his support for the Palestinians.

• killed anyone
• initiated a pregnancy, deliberately or otherwise
• eaten lobster or other arachnids (eww!)
• broken any major bones
• gotten seriously drunk or stoned
• been arrested
• jumped out of an airplane
• danced with the Devil by the pale moonlight (I just like the sound of that...)
• watched Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ
• visited Asia, or Africa, or South America, or Australia
  

• I've sent a friend to prison;
• I've kept a friend out of prison;
• I've fallen off a cliff;
• I've totalled a car (yes, it was mine, and yes, it was my fault);
• I've had sex in the shadow of a national Parliament building (always thought I should get a point off my Purity Test score for that one!);
• I've read Dr. Seuss in Latin;
• I've won regional awards for my singing (not, as my neighbors might claim, to reward me for not singing);
• I've had surgery on my big toes and my vocal chords, in addition to the surgical removal of all my optional equipment;
• I've ridden shotgun under radio silence, with a round chambered and the safety off;
• I've run with scissors, written bad checks, and returned Blockbuster videotapes without rewinding them. (Cue Bugs Bunny voice: "Ain't I a stinker?")
  

• "Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and [...] the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers."
• "You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations."
• "We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world - except for the Jews... Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."
  

Here Rich has it correct. The president would do well to instruct his acolytes to quit the mush-mouthed talk of respect for Islam and instead make the unequivocal statement that the United States will honor Islam the very second Muslims do.

From a report that aired on Al-Arabiya TV (one of the Arab world’s most popular satellite channels) on June 1, 2005, here’s a film clip that may turn your stomach—as children rehearse for a short life of murder and violence by playing martyrdom games.

Reporter: Abd Al-Sattar’s favorite game is “Jews and Arabs.”

Boy: The Arabs are in the street. The Jews stand over there and we shoot at them, and throw rocks and grenades at them.

Reporter: To win the game, the player must die.

I'm starting to think that unnamed sources who lie like this should be outed. No, this is not a call for journalists to break their promises. But maybe we should tell people who demand anonymity that they will be outed if it turns out they lied. This would undoubtedly lead to fewer stories based on unnamed sources, but it might also lead to more honorable journalism.

To date, reaction has divided along two lines. Newsweek has been hammered for being so flushed with anti-Bush anti-military fever that they breezily neglected the question of whether their story would generate a huge mound of corpses.

Which is true. On the other hand, there are those who point out it's hardly Newsweek's fault that some goofy foreigners are so bananas they'll riot and kill over one rumor of one disrespectful act to one copy of one book. Christians don't riot over ''Piss Christ'' and other provocations by incontinent ''artists.'' Jews take it in their stride when they're described as ''a virus resembling AIDS,'' which is what Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris said a week ago in his sermon on Palestinian state TV, funded by the European Union. Muslims can dish it out big-time, so why can't they take it, even the teensy-weensiest bit?

All of which is also true, but would be a better defense of Newsweek if the media hadn't spent the last 3-1/2 years bending over backwards to be super-sensitive to the, ah, touchiness of the Muslim world -- until the opportunity for a bit of lurid Bush-bashing proved too much to resist.

You’ve all been to movies that carry the disclaimer: “Contains material that some may find disturbing.” This lecture may require such a warning.

So please be advised of the following: “This lecture will contain material that some may consider to be complimentary toward the Bush administration. It may, therefore, strike some listeners as unsettling, naïve, partisan, propagandistic, chauvinistic, muddle-headed, or paid for by Karl Rove.”

At the end of it, [Dr. Condoleezza Rice] casually asked: “Could you spare a few minutes for the President?” I allowed as how maybe I could, and so she took me into the Oval Office where the President and the Vice President were waiting. I expected, at best, a handshake and photo op. But the President said: “Sit down. Loved your book. Tell me more about Bismarck.”

One bulldozer guarded by seven jeeps and 30 [...] officers entered the Sudania area on the coast of northern Gaza on Monday morning to crush the three homes, which were being built by a major, a lieutenant-colonel and a colonel on public land they illegally seized. The operation encountered no resistance.