Thursday, June 03, 2004

Judith Miller update Irony is not dead 10:39:27 PM    comment []

Who said it? I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference. . . . I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral levels, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. With a bit of spiffing up for gender-pronoun correctness, it is just barely possible to imagine such a speech being delivered today by Senator Kerry. Could the same be said of President Bush? That's the stakes, folks: a secular nation with freedom of religion--or from religion--for all, or the path of self-styled religious poobahs practicing bigotry, fostering religious strife, and all the while sticking their hand in the government till... Go treat yourself and read the whole article 9:23:38 PM    comment []

Well, I didn't have to wait long... Here is Michael Massing's latest on the media's culpability for the current mess in Iraq, entitled Unfit to Print Why "unfit to print" you ask? This tidbit may answer the question: A survey of the [NY Times]'s recent coverage of Iraq suggests that something deeper is at work. For months, the Times has seemed slow to recognize important news developments out of Iraq and to give them the attention they deserve. Aside from the Abu Ghraib scandal, which has lately taken over the Times's coverage, the paper has seemed intent on keeping bad news off the front page, especially when it reflects poorly on the Bush administration.... Massing takes on how the U.S. media has adopted an "embedded" mindset despite the availability of news resources readily available from Europe and the Arab world. In the current climate, of course, any use of Arab or European material —no matter how thoroughly edited and checked—could elicit charges of liberalism and anti-Americanism. The question for American journalists is whether they really want to know what the Iraqis themselves, in all their complexity, are thinking and feeling. What do you think the answer is? After all, this is not your grandfather's journalists, these are the celebrity journalists of today who get to hobnob with the pretty and powerful. 8:57:32 PM    comment []