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Kicking things off today, the Carpetbagger Report is unhappy with Joshua Green’s assessment in The Atlantic that since House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid assumed leadership, “things have not gotten better for [the Democratic] party.” In response to Green’s piece, Carpetbagger responds with a list of accomplishments the two can take credit for.
As usual with this kind of back-and-forth, the truth likely rests somewhere in the middle. While Green’s piece was probably a little too pessimistic, the Carpetbagger appears to err too far on the side of optimism — in effect crediting the Democrats with victories in cases where Congressional Republicans screwed things up all by themselves. Either way you cut it, winning and losing in Congress is a much more complex issue than the black and whites Green and the Carpetbagger appear to see them as — but then again, “good” and “bad” make for flashy copy.
Over at Mediacitizen, Timothy Karr criticizes the New Millennium Research Council for releasing a study that claims, “It is a myth that U.S. media ownership is over concentrated today and that programming choices available to American consumers are shrinking or somehow have been impaired.”
Karr blasts Benjamin M. Compaine — the guy who wrote the study — for being funded by the very media companies he praises in his report. “One look at the money behind the study, and Compaine’s academic rigor comes off more as a Big Media lap dance.” Karr writes. “Lurking behind the facade of the NMRC is Issue Dynamics, Inc., a ‘public affairs consulting firm’ that fronts for their Big Media Johns: Comcast, Fleishman-Hillard, Qwest, Qualcomm, SBC Communications, Sprint and Verizon.”
Major conglomerates paying for good press? We’re shocked, yes, shocked and dismayed!
Eric Umansky does his US Weekly imitation with the bizarre tale of a love triangle that somehow found its way into the Abu Gharib prison torture case. It seems that the ringleader of the abuse, Spec. Charles Graner, who fathered the child of Spec. Lynndie England, has broken up with the leash-wielding siren, and is now reportedly married to another defendant in the Abu Ghraib case, Spc. Megan Ambuhl. It’s just like Brad and Jen and Angelina! Only with the backdrop of long prison sentences, violations of the Geneva Convention, and those drab prison uniform colors.
The English Peace Frog also takes a look at the “Cops”-worthy personal drama unfolding over the Lynndie England trial. The Frog sees the American people as having long since tired of the case, noting:
We’re now in the middle of the Michael Jackson trial and there was this really cool public quarrel between Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, so who cares? The new Star Wars movie is coming out! Don’t bore me with a real one! Just let this chick off light. They were just a bunch of Iraq Arabs (pronounced EYE-rack AAY-rabs), right? Sheeeit. They had it coming anyway, because of 9/11.
Jim Freeman takes a different tack in his assessment of the case. While lambasting Don Rumsfeld for shirking blame for Abu Gharib, he lauds Colonel James L. Pohl, chief judge of the Army Court Martial trying Lynndie England. Earlier this week, Pohl tossed out the plea agreement England reached after Pohl found that Graner’s statements contradicted England’s previous testimony. In comparing Rumsfeld to Pohl, Freeman concludes, “This whole matter comes down to comparisons between a man of extraordinary courage and a man of none at all.”
Sticking with a military theme, David Kiley’s post over at Brand New Day (one of Businessweek‘s blogs) relates the story of his father, an “embedded” reporter in Europe during WWII. His father, Charles Kiley, was a Stars and Stripes newspaper reporter, who “had the distinction of being the only reporter in Reims, France in May 1945 to cover the negotiations between the German command and the Allies led by Dwight Eisenhower. He then covered the actual surrender, and then went off to Berlin to cover the separate surrender by the Germans to the Russians.”
Quite a scoop, and as this weekend marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, it’s worthwhile to click through the link he provides to his dad’s original reporting.
–Paul McLeary
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