This image from a story in the Dallas-Forth Worth Star-Telegram kind of sums the whole thing up, doesn't it?

Two stage-managed anti-war protestors. Dozens of people standing behind them that seem to be made up primarily of spectators and newspeople, gazing upon them like animals in the zoo.

Pro-American protestor Gregg Garvey of Keystone, Fla., whose son Justin was killed in Iraq, may have described the fawning media attention of "Mother Sheehan" best:

"I just want to know whether they're going to crown her the homecoming queen."

Indeed. Perhap he should ask the caterers.

Be sure not to miss the road show when they go on tour.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:27 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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As if stealing money from Alzheimer's patients, underprivilidged kids, and teddy bear companies (just keep scrolling) wasn't enough to make Al Franken gag, Air America's ratings are in (courtesy BSC).

When your ratings bomb this bad, Kevlar becomes the new office dress code.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Look at many center-right blogs—Pardon My English, Blogs for Bush, Say Anything, Common Sense and Wonder, Captain's Quarters, Powerline, Michelle Malkin, and Instapundit among others—and you'll see a bunch of people very happy to report that the Army, Army Reserves,and National Guard are exceeding their recruiting goals virtually across the board, from new enlistments to re-enlistments. I, too, was thrilled to hear the news.

To listen to Ralph Peters of the New York Post, you would think things are great with U.S. Army recruiting efforts.

When the Army attempted to explain that enlistments are cyclical and numbers dip at certain times of the year, the media ignored it. All that mattered was the wonderful news that the Army couldn't find enough soldiers. We were warned, in oh-so-solemn tones, that our military was headed for a train wreck.

Now, as the fiscal year nears an end, the Army's numbers look great. Especially in combat units and Iraq, soldiers are re-enlisting at record levels. And you don't hear a whisper about it from the "mainstream media."

Let's look at the numbers, which offer a different picture of patriotism than the editorial pages do.

Every one of the Army's 10 divisions — its key combat organizations — has exceeded its re-enlistment goal for the year to date. Those with the most intense experience in Iraq have the best rates. The 1st Cavalry Division is at 136 percent of its target, the 3rd Infantry Division at 117 percent.

Among separate combat brigades, the figures are even more startling, with the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division at 178 percent of its goal and the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Mech right behind at 174 percent of its re-enlistment target.

This is unprecedented in wartime. Even in World War II, we needed the draft. Where are the headlines?

Here is a headline for you, Mr. Peters:

General: Army to Miss Recruiting Goals in '05

"We're gonna fall short of our recruiting goal this year. We know that,” Lovelace told FOX News. “We're putting in place mitigation plans to begin to address it in '06."

Military officials will not go into specifics about the numbers of new recruits signing up for Army duty.

...

The Army National Guard, which has been a key part of the the U.S. force in Iraq, missed its recruiting goal for at least the ninth straight month in June and is nearly 19,000 soldiers below its authorized strength, military officials said last month.

In total, the Army Guard has about 331,000 soldiers, 94.5 percent of its authorized strength of 350,000, officials said.

That isn't all. The Stars & Stripes is reporting that:

Although the Army met its July recruiting goal, it is short of its target for the year by about 7,200 recruits, or 13 percent, according to figures released by the Defense Department.

Update: Accordingto NRO,Peters seems to be the victim of "a bureaucratic mix-up." Yeah, like anyone would buy that...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:40 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I could not make this up.

The Dems are getting so pathetic they're accusing Mayberry of hosting a lynching, and we know Sheriff Taylor wouldn't stand for that. Seriously, this is more lame than the gay four-year old bit.

It has to stop.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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What happens when a newspaper editor (Melanie Sill) for a big daily (the News & Observer) gets caught in a compromising position, telling her audience she works by one set of rules, when four of her fellow editors say that the industry standard is another?

I have a feeling it won't be pretty, and you can follow the impending carnage at John in Carolina.

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A national radio network under investigation by the New York State Attorney General for allegedly funneling $800,000 of federal tax dollars from a charity into their own pockets, isn't national news.

One of the two largest newspapers in North Carolina is apparently unable to generate its own original reporting.

What an interesting carnival Melanie Sill runs at the News & Observer.

Sill is the executive editor and senior vice president for news at the Raleigh, NC News & Observer who made the ill-advised decision to try to bluff blogger John in Carolina about the Air America Radio/Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club scandal. John, as we see here, is polite, but doesn't suffer fools lightly.

The real interest in this story developed for me with this comment from the N&O's Sill yesterday about the Air America scandal:

"We've checked our news services in recent days and do not find this story... if a story is reported and distributed we will look at publishing it."

This was either an untruthful response, or executive editor and senior vice president for news Melanie Sill was grossly incompetent. As a response, a deluge of relevant links poured in from readers, citing sources such as the NY Sun, NY Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, The Oregonian, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and Investor's Business Daily, among other sources in mainstream media outlets across the country.

In addition to mainstream media outlets, weblog search site Technorati.com has no less than ten pages of results for "Air America scandal." Google News reports 288 stories (and growing) on "Air America," and the majority of recent posts are about the brewing scandal not the programming.

The story has progressed so far, in fact, that New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer started an enquiry into the scandal on August 6, and Melanie Sill's news sources "do not find the story?" It seems like the News and Observer should be considering a management shakeup in the news division if this is indeed the case.

Sill started back-pedaling furiously on her N&O blog today:

Thanks for all the interest: sarcasm and barbs duly recorded. Let me clarify: I found the same stories on Air America that you all mention a couple days ago in Internet searches and by using Factiva, a paid service we use for research. I've asked the Associated Press to move a story and mentioned the interest among some local readers. So far this investigation has been reported as a local story in New York.

To publish stories from other publications, we must have rights to them through the news services to which we subscribe.

I don't feel overly defensive about this, so carry on. There are many, many stories in publications all over America that don't gain national distribution. The advantage of the Internet is that people can find these stories themselves, and of course point them out to us, which you all have.

Sill now claims that yesterday she "checked our news services in recent days and do not find this story," but today she says that, "I found the same stories on Air America that you all mention a couple days ago in Internet searches and by using Factiva, a paid service we use for research" [emphasis added].

The technical term for someone who says one thing, and knows that thing to be false escapes me at the moment, but I do think it has something to do with pants being on fire, doesn't it Editor Sill?

Sill then makes two related, weak, and weaseling attempts to justify that fact that they are not running the story.

First she claims:

So far this investigation has been reported as a local story in New York.

I'd like to introduce Melanie Sill to a site on the Word Wide Web called www.airamericaradio.com/. Cleverly hidden in the masthead is a message proclaiming "Air America Radio. 69 Stations Nationswide!"

Even if you knew nothing of them before (which I doubt) their readily accessible web site shows immediately that Air America is a national network, if a rather pathetic one. Even a cursory examination of the story presented so far shows that the important issue is that a national radio network obtained approximately $800,000 from a charity funded by your federal tax dollars. This story could not be much more national. A “local story?” You'll have to come up with a story of your own more credible than that, Mrs. Sill.

Her second excuse was even more anemic:

To publish stories from other publications, we must have rights to them through the news services to which we subscribe.

Madam, you are the executive editor and vice president of news for one of the two largest newspapers in North Carolina. If you are unable to conduct or direct original reporting with all the considerable news-gathering resources you have at your disposal, I think it is time for you to consider another line of work.

Note: John in Carolina, who broke this story, has his latest post online.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:11 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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UPDATE: When you're a blogger and you screw up, you need to own up to it. Guess what? I may have been wrong on the story below.

Eugene Volokh (yeah, that guy), was nice enough to let me know he saw the same headline on this story at the Las Vegas Sun earlier today. Interestingly enough, the Sun version of this story is quite a different version than the version of the Newsday article I worked from, which I present to you in this screen shot:

To further confuse the issue, the Newsday link below now goes to another article on this topic by yet another writer, Dan Sewell.

So what is going on? There is a slight chance that the accusations I made below are true. After all, Google News is proud to consider organisations that the State Department has labeled al Qaeda-friendly disinformation mills as valued news contributors.

But there is perhaps a greater possibility that AP posted the original headline "Ohio Families Fed Up With Loss of Marines," Google dutifully copied it, and then AP or Newsday, perhaps fearing a backlash (kinda like the one below) changed the headline of the NewsDay article to something less offensive, after the Google News link was already up.

I blew it by accusing Google News of faking headlines, and I apologize for making the mistake.

The original (and now debunked) article remains below as a warning to others.

***************************************************

Google News headlines: When the truth isn't bad enough

"Ohio Families Fed Up With Loss of Marines" screams the Google News headline, purporting to be from a Newsday article from Joe Danborn.

But if a reader clicks the link to read the story, a far more sedate "Ohio Families Mourn Troops Killed in Iraq" greets the reader as the story's real headline. While the loss and pain of the family interviewed is obvious, the tone of Google's headline is in no way reflected in the actual article.

But Google News wouldn't purposefully misrepresent headlinesÂ… would they? At the time I noticed the seemingly reworked headline of the Marine story, there were three other stories in close proximity on that page:

Google News, or Google Fiction?

Here is a comparison of the Google News-generated headlines in the screen capture above, compared to the headlines of the actual articles.

Google Headline: In Major Breakthrough, Scientists Clone World's First Dog
Real Headline: In Major Breakthrough, Scientists Clone World's First Dog

Google Headline: Ohio Families Fed Up With Loss of Marines
Real Headline: Ohio Families Mourn Troops Killed in Iraq

Google Headline: Q&A: The Impact of John Garang's Death
Real Headline: Q&A: The Impact of John Garang's Death

Google Headline: Extremists not helpful in confirmation process
Real Headline: Extremists not helpful in confirmation process

Three of the four headlines were not changed at all; and yet one appears heavily edited.

The Google headline, "Ohio Families Fed Up with Loss" implies that Ohio Marine families are at the end of their proverbial rope, and possibly ready to revolt. The image that headline conjures up is far different than the "Ohio Families Mourn Troops Killed in Iraq" headline of the real article, which speaks to the loss experienced by family members, but in no way implies an impending mutiny against the government.

Just reading the headline, one could almost think that Google News has a ghoulish interest in using American war dead as a weapon against the present Administration. You might even get the feeling they would stoop to blatant media bias to support the opposition in an anti-war propaganda campaign.

I wonder why.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:13 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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