Full Court Press
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May 26, 2009 04:35 PM
Kaiser Heads to Hillman Foundation
Here's a complete archive of his CJR columns
Charles Kaiser's Full Court Press column has moved to the Web site of the Sidney Hillman Foundation. This is a complete archive of the FCP columns that Kaiser wrote for CJR.
May 2009 05/22/09: Tortured Logic, “Dueling Speeches” Edition - Media overplay, under-analyze yesterday’s torture arguments
05/13/09: “Good Deeds, and Good Works” -...
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May 22, 2009 05:44 PM
Tortured Logic, “Dueling Speeches” Edition
Media overplay, under-analyze yesterday's torture arguments
“Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens fell silent. In other words we went off course.”
–President Barack Obama
“I want to say I was always on Darth Vader’s side.”
--Bill Kristol
“That’s kind of a weird thing to admit.”
--Jon Stewart
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Barack Obama’s speech about terrorists combined a ringing reaffirmation of American constitutional values with a... -
May 13, 2009 03:11 PM
“Good Deeds, and Good Works”
In memoriam: Eden Ross Lipson
Eden Ross Lipson, an author-editor-activist-journalist who had a huge, mostly-unseen impact on American literature and American life, died early yesterday morning at a hospice in Manhattan. Her death at 66 came thirty months after she was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer--and twenty-nine months after she nearly succumbed to septic shock during one of the first hospital visits she made in her...
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May 08, 2009 05:23 PM
Winners and Sinners
Kaiser on Ifill, Bumiller, Sulzberger, and more
Winners: New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt and President Barack Obama for a splendidly substantive interview in The New York Times Magazine about the democratization of finance, the future of education and health care, and what the economy might look like “on the other side of the so-called Great Recession.” FCP is always astonished by the unusual...
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May 07, 2009 06:05 PM
Above the Fold: The Pentagon Capers
The mainstream media are silent on the Pentagon’s repudiation of its own report
This week the Pentagon took the highly unusual step of withdrawing a report issued by its inspector general one week before President George W. Bush left office last January. The report was an attack on the superb New York Times stories, written by David Barstow, the first about how the Pentagon had recruited an army of seventy-five...
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April 28, 2009 01:22 PM
Above the Fold: Ross Report Revisited
Kaiser on Stelter, Ross, and the 2007 CIA waterboarding interview
Brian Stelter reports on page one of The New York Times today that newly disclosed torture memoranda show how an interview conducted at the end of 2007 by ABC News had unfairly tilted the debate about waterboarding.
Stelter’s piece, beginning with its first sentence, is a model of incomplete reporting. This is his lede: “In late 2007, there...
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April 23, 2009 06:25 PM
Winners & Sinners
Kaiser on Shane, Maddow, Kaplan, and more
Winner: The New York Times's Scott Shane. Just four months after remarks of F.B.I. director Robert Mueller were published on vanityfair.com, two days after FCP asked Shane’s editor why they had never been reported in the Times, and one day after FCP wrote about them for the third time, the intrepid Timesman finally picked up the...
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April 22, 2009 05:34 PM
Above the Fold: Know-Nothings at the NYT
Times waterboarding story reports, demonstrates ignorance of history
“There is no history of ethnic conflict in Iraq.” – former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, explaining to Congress in February, 2003, why Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s prediction that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq was ''wildly off the mark.''
It’s true, of course, as Paul Wolfowitz demonstrated so vividly, that no other...
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April 21, 2009 05:40 PM
Above the Fold: Waiting in the Lobby
The Obama administration needs to rethink its blanket "no lobbyists" policy
Although FCP doesn’t agree with everything the Obama administration has done, especially in its defense of state secrets, never has a senior member of that administration said something that strikes us as outright ridiculous.
That record of reasonableness was shattered this morning by the comments of two top Obama aides in an excellent, page-one The New York Times...
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April 17, 2009 06:58 PM
Above the Fold: Memos of (Mis)understanding
For the torture memos, too, sunlight is the best disinfectant
Barack Obama acted intelligently and courageously yesterday by making the Bush administration’s torture memos public, despite the strong objections of past and present CIA officials. None of the protests were very credible, partly because almost everything in these memos detailing American torture practices--except for the one that involved confining an entomophobia-afflicted detainee with an insect--had already been unearthed by great reporters...
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April 15, 2009 03:42 PM
Above the Fold: Beltway Journalism, “Swallowed by an Hourglass”
It's long past time to expand the spectrum of Sunday-show punditry
The more things change, the more Beltway punditry stays the same.
If only the voters could change the composition of the talking heads on television the same way they replace presidents and members of Congress, we might all get a better idea of how different Washington—and the nation—is becoming under the new administration we elected last November. But while...
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April 10, 2009 05:21 PM
Winners & Sinners
Kaiser on Danner, Poniewozik, Rove, Vanity Fair, and more
Winner: Mark Danner, for another brilliant piece about torture in the New York Review of Books: “Torture is at the heart of the deadly politics of national security." he writes.
The former vice-president, as able and ruthless a politician as the country has yet produced, appears convinced of this. For if torture really was a necessary evil...
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April 10, 2009 04:33 PM
Above the Fold: Our Financial Follies
Black and Born prove it yet again: we need to regulate the regulators
Last week, William Black, a former investigator of the Savings and Loan scandal, went on Bill Moyers Journal and repeated a charge which a growing number of experts agree with: the chief executives of many of America’s largest banks knowingly engaged in the fraud which has now brought the economy to the brink of catastrophe.
Black is...
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April 03, 2009 05:30 PM
Winners & Sinners
Kaiser on Vanity Fair, Ed Henry, and Colbert
Sinner: Vanity Fair, for running an article by Mark Bowden about Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. that was so filled with elementary factual errors that it managed to destroy the credibility of the magazine and of its newest contributing editor simultaneously. Bowden got several important facts just plain wrong, from the number of reporters at The New York Times (1,300,...
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