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McClatchy Scribe Hit ‘Hype’ On Iran’s Nukes a Month Ago
Five years after being one of the few reporters to repeatedly question White House claims of Iraqi WMD, Jonathan Landay was at it again in casting doubt on claims of an Iranian nuclear project.
Have I told you lately that I love McClatchy?

AP Headline Writers Make Iran NIE Say The Opposite of What It Says (by Spencer Ackerman at TPM Horse’s Mouth)
Like all other straight write-ups of the [National Intelligence Estimate] – [the AP’s Pamela] Hess’s story emphasizes that Iran shuttered its nuclear program in 2003 under international pressure. It further reports, faithfully following the NIE, that Iran is considered unlikely to have a nuclear weapon… So what did the AP use for its headline, as of 1:03 p.m.? “US Officials: Iran Has Nuke Capability”. Now, someone at the AP must have figured that headline was misleading… So what was AP’s new headline, at 1:43 p.m.? “US: Iran Still Able to Develop Nukes”. [M]illions of casual readers will come away with an impression of the Iranian nuclear weapons non-program that’s exactly the opposite of what the U.S. intelligence community says it is.

Debunking Iran’s Nuclear Program: Another ‘Intelligence Failure’ — On the Part of the Press? (by Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher)
Iraqi WMD redux: The release of the NIE throwing cold water on oft-repeated claims of a rampant Iranian nuclear weapons program has chastened public officials and policymakers who have promoted this line for years. But many in the media have made these same claims, often extravagantly.

Washington Post, Associated Press Let Bush Skate With Phony Claim That He Learned Iran Nuke Threat Was Bogus “Last Week” (by Greg Sargent at TPM Horse’s Mouth)
Bush said [yesterday] that all he knew about until last week was that there was “some new information” about Iran. He wasn’t told what it was. WaPo didn’t say anything to refute these claims. But here’s what WaPo itself reported just yesterday in its story on the NIE: “…  [National Security Advisor Stephen] Hadley said Bush first learned in August or September about intelligence indicating Iran had halted its weapons program and was advised it would take time to evaluate… The Associated Press, too, appears ready to let Bush skate on this.

Hersh: Bush Told Olmert Of NIE Two Days Before President Was Allegedly First Briefed On It
Yesterday, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters that President Bush was first briefed on the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusions on Wednesday, Nov. 28.But [Tuesday] in an interview with CNN, Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker’s Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist, revealed that Bush actually knew about the NIE at least two days earlier and had a “private discussion” about it with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before the Middle East peace summit in Annapolis, MD, last week.
Click through to watch the video.

Biden: Bush either not truthful or incompetent on Iran
“Are you telling me a president who is briefed every single morning, who is fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ’03?” [Sen. Joe] Biden said in a conference call with reporters. “That’s not believable,” Biden added. “I refuse to believe that. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in … modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

I Just Work Here (by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo)
Mike McConnell, comes in to the president and says, “Mr. President, we’ve got some important new information on the Iran nuclear front.” And the president apparently says, okay. And then he doesn’t ask him what the information was… In the president’s defense, I don’t think this happened. I think he’s lying. Of course, McConnell told him.
It’s like the poppycock he told us about the August 6, 2001 briefing that bin Laden was about to  attack the United States.  He told the guy who briefed him, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” He asked no questions and then went fishing.

The Roll-Out Goes Flat (by Scott Horton, Harper’s)
[O]ne highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after [Stephen] Hadley spoke answered my question this way: “This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment.” So what, I asked, if not an intelligence breakthrough, what caused the last-minute change and the sudden issuance of the summary of the NIE? My source had no idea. He speculated, however, that a hardening of attitudes within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence community, and in Israel against the plans for an air war in Iran had caused Cheney and his team to fold their cards. “But I’d leave that with a final note of caution,” the source added, “Cheney sometimes appears to give up, but he’s a tenacious son-of-a-bitch. He may very well be back at it tomorrow.”
How could they possibly recover?  Why, blame Bush haters, that’s how.  See below.

NeoCons Go Ballistic on Iran NIE (by Larry Johnson at No Quarter)
“How can you trust the intelligence community to get it right on Iran? They got Iraq wrong in 2002 and now this?” The “this” is the NIE on Iran and its search for nukes. That in a nutshell is one of the prevalent reactions of neocons and Bush true believers. But wait, there is more. John Bolton told Wolf Blitzer that the NIE was the handiwork of exiled State Department officials hell bent on undermining Bush and this country.
And Bolton told Fox News that Congress should investigate those traitors.

Hardball: Biden Repeats His Threat To Bush – Invade Iran And You’ll Be Impeached (by Logan Murphy at Crooks and Liars)
On Tuesday’s Hardball, Senator Joe Biden appeared with Chris Matthews and talked about the new NIE report that showed Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Biden said last week that if the president chose to bypass Congress and invade Iran he would immediately call for his impeachment. Biden stood behind those comments today, saying they were a warning to President Bush and that he has no constitutional authority to take us to war without congressional approval.
Thank you, Sen. Biden.  Without this kind of threat, Bush-Cheney will do whatever the hell they want to do.  Click through to watch the video.

Mainstream Media Critics Start Pressuring Big News Orgs To Tell Their Readers The Truth (by Greg Sargent at TPM Horse’s Mouth)
The in-house media critics at the major papers are finally beginning to ratchet up the pressure on their own papers’ editors and reporters to start getting much more aggressive in scrutinizing the claims of candidates… [T]he only way aggressive fact-checking will make a real difference is if the big news orgs make a regular habit of it and start calling out falsehoods and lies for what they are again and again and again. The point here is that the reason someone like Karl Rove keeps lying about what happened in the runup to the Iraq War is precisely because he knows that big news orgs won’t call him out on it often enough for there to be any serious downside to doing it. But if they did do this regularly, the cost of telling this lie would begin to outweigh the benefit and Rove would stop doing it.

Have GOP bloggers stopped whining yet? (by Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for America)
It’s all part of the bloggers’ attempt to create a parallel universe of sorts, where their own facts don’t have to collide with harsh reality. It’s a world where inquisitive Democrats who submit video questions to candidates are denounced as “plants,” part of an elaborate media scheme to derail Republicans. How, you ask? By posing legitimate, factual questions about the pressing issues of the day. That’s what produced last week’s shrieking, the-sky-is-falling hysteria across the right-wing blogosphere.

New Republic Disavows Iraq Diarist’s Reports (by Howard Kurtz)
After nearly five months of mounting criticism, the New Republic yesterday disavowed reports about petty wartime cruelty in Iraq, saying the magazine had lost faith in the Army private who wrote them… The magazine’s admission came as National Review Online acknowledged that two postings it carried from Lebanon by W. Thomas Smith Jr., a former Marine, were “misleading.”
Notice which publication got the headline.  The nominally liberal one, not the right-wing-crazy one.

Sherri Shepard: Nothing Pre-Dates Christians (By Manila Ryce at The Largest Majority)
[The View’s] Sherri Shepard (of flat earth fame) decided to out do her fellow fundamentalists who think the world is only 6,000-years-old by knocking 4,000 years off their total. I’ve always suspected that BC was a fictional era created by secular progressives to destroy the sacrament of marriage with fictional, yet irresistibly sexy tales of Greco-Roman man love. Get out of my head Russell Crowe!
How many hundreds of thousands a year does that woman make from being on The View?  While those of us who try to bring you truthful reporting can’t scrape together but a few pennies?

Ben Bernanke, Who Missed the Housing Bubble (by Dean Baker)
I hate to be rude, but when discussing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s assessment of the economy’s prospects wouldn’t it be appropriate to point out that Mr. Bernanke completely missed the housing bubble. He insisted that there was no bubble right through the run-up (he may still). Furthermore, until this summer he trivialized the risk of any financial problems resulting from bad mortgage debt.

Media Matters for America headlines

Politico uncritically cited anonymous White House aides touting Bush “vindication” on stem cells, air traffic improvements

In Giuliani ad fact-check, Kurtz asserted “fierce dispute among economists” on tax cuts and revenues, but cited only one economist

Matthews objected to religious questions at GOP debate, but not colleague Russert’s religion question at Dem debate

In “Clinton Chapters” segment, Hannity omitted key points from journalist on whose reporting he based the segment

NPR reported on McCain’s criticism of Romney over waterboarding issue, but not his support for Mukasey

NY Times article quoted only Republicans in support of claim that Democrats “fear … sharing the ticket” with Clinton

Fox News’ Hill’s take on newspaper article: “[S]omething about what Sen. Clinton said just sort of drove [Eisenberg] over the edge”

Wash. Post media critic differs with editors and reporters on paper’s Obama madrassa story

Chicago Sun-Times ignored problems with Wash. Post’s reporting on Obama’s Hopefund

CNN’s Henry reported that Murtha said “surge is working,” ignored his continued call for Iraq withdrawal

Media Maneuvers: Why the Rush to Waive Cross-Ownership Ban?
FCC chairman seeks permanent waiver for new Tribune owner. Today’s progressives should fight this effort just as progressives did 60 years ago, writes Mark Lloyd.

FCC target of House panel’s investigation
WASHINGTON — Two key House lawmakers announced Monday that they were investigating the Federal Communications Commission, accusing its chairman of “possible abuse of power” and a failure to operate fairly and openly in handling proposed cable TV and media ownership regulations.

AFP takes stake in ‘citizen journalist’ platform
PARIS, Nov 28, 2007 (AFP) – Agence France-Presse (AFP) announced Wednesday that it had taken a 30 percent stake in a French company that runs a citizen journalism platform for films and photos. The Scooplive platform is to be renamed Citizenside following the new 30 percent stakes taken by AFP and another French firm, IAM. The rest of the shares will stay in the hands of the platform’s creators. The site was set up in 2006 to enable citizen journalists to sell video films and photos to media around the world.

Swisher: NYT editor’s wrong about bloggers and reporting
Kara Swisher says Bill Keller’s Hugo Young lecture “sounded suspiciously like the grumpy rants of Hollywood moguls of late, who don’t like this digital thing one little bit.” The Times editor’s claim that most of the blog world doesn’t even attempt to report “is simply not true going forward,” says Swisher. “There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.”

AP to change the way it files, edits and distributes stories
It’s opening at least four regional editing hubs as part of a plan it calls AP2.0. The news cooperative is also expanding its multimedia packages for entertainment, business and sports reports. Some employees wonder what these changes — particularly the new regional editing hubs — will mean for them. “People are definitely jittery,” says AP broadcast correspondent Tony Winton.

Waco Herald-Tribune’s page one strategy boosts circulation
The Cox-owned paper now devotes most of its front page to a single story. “[That] may smack of tabloidism to some, bringing to mind screaming headlines about the latest blood and gore,” writes John Morton. “The reality at the Tribune-Herald is vastly different.” The strategy is paying off: street sales went up almost 7% when the new front page debuted just over a year ago, and they continue to climb.

BIG PICTURE: Just what is entertainment worth? (by Patrick Goldstein, Los Angeles Times)
With much of Hollywood grinding to a halt and widespread pessimism about how long [the writers’] strike will last, everyone is asking why the two sides can’t find common ground… On the surface, the impasse revolves around how to divvy up future Internet media revenues. But the real problem is that nobody knows the value of anything anymore.

Nielsen to unveil Web piracy remedy: WSJ
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Nielsen is unveiling a new service aimed at ensuring that video distributed on the Internet is done only in ways sanctioned by its owners, the Wall Street Journal said in its online edition.

Nokia’s unlimited music offer turns market on head
FRANKFURT/AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Nokia’s plan to offer unlimited music downloads challenges the dominant pay-per-track sales model and is likely to upset carriers already worried that Nokia is poaching their customer relationships.

Saints on cellphones spark controversy in Italy
ROME (Reuters) – If you are a Catholic looking for a saint in heaven to protect you, you no longer have to carry a small “holy card.” You can get the image sent to your cellphone.
Next thing you know, the psychics will be promising that you can TALK to the dead on your cell phone.

Group cites growing video game violence
WASHINGTON – Graphic scenes of gunshot victims spurting blood and a man urinating into a prisoner’s cell are included among the 10 video games that a media watchdog group warns should be avoided by kids and teens under 17.