A Rather photoshop flashback:

A reminder to conservatives: “Swift-Boating” does not equal smearing.

Swift-Boating means exposing hard truths about corrupt Democrats.

By using “Swift-Boating” in the context of the John McCain/NYT story, you are doing a grave disservice to the Swift Boat Veterans who courageously told the untold truths about John Kerry that the mainstream media wanted buried.

This is a no-no–made all the more surprising by the fact that the conservative quoted in the article spearheaded communications for the Swift Boat Vets:

Greg Mueller, a veteran Republican strategist, said conservatives would side with McCain against the paper they love to hate.

“The New York Times is trying to swift-boat McCain,” Mueller said. “This is the first real salvo of the general election. Certainly, the Times cannot complain about a negative general election campaign since they fired the first shot.

“It was a poor and revealing attempt by The New York Times to try and smear McCain at a time when he is starting to define Obama as a inexperienced liberal, so The New York Time takes up for Obama’s defense. If anything, this helps energize conservatives to come to McCain’s aide in beating back attacks by The New York Times and other liberal MSM outlets.”

I hope this was a misquote.

***

Make sure you order a copy of To Set The Record Straight. Send one to your local newspaper editor–or to the next commentator or political operative whom you spot distorting the Swift Boat Veterans’ legacy.

He’s quoted in yesterday’s Boston Herald warning about the dangers bloggers pose. He speaks from experience:

“When it comes to blogging and some things on the Web, there’s little or no accountability,” said Rather, who covered his first presidential race in 1952. “This is the new American political coverage media. It’s a wilderness, and when you go into the wilderness, there’s always some danger.”

Wonder if Helen “Blame the bloggers” Thomas is filing an amicus brief in his case?

Update: Via TVNewser, CBS responds… “These complaints are old news and this lawsuit is without merit.” Rather will dredge up his bygones on the Larry King Live show tomorrow.

Charles at LGF takes you down animated memory lane. Let’s see that on CNN.

***
Yes, my friends, Gunga Dan is suing Viacom and CBS for $70 million over the loss of his network career after the Rathergate debacle:

Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a $70 million lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors.

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.” As plaintiffs, the suit names CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its executive chairman, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.

In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”

He also continues to take vehement issue with the appointment by CBS of Richard Thornburgh, an attorney general in the administration of the elder President Bush, as one of the two outside panelists given the job of reviewing how the disputed broadcast had been prepared.

That’s right. He’s still battling the thorough investigative review by the Thornburgh panel. Hey, thanks for bringing it up again, Dan. It’s well worth re-reading the whole, damning indictment.

Hat tip – Lawhawk , who offers some free professional advice:

Here’s a memo for Dan Rather. When you produce a story based on bogus documents and then use nonexistent sources to verify said bogus documents, don’t expect your employer to give you choice assignments or air time. Indeed, count your blessings that you’ve got a job at all.

You should have been resigned to the ash heap of history for your stunt to manipulate the outcome of the US Presidential elections with just days to go, but instead, you still manage to get air time.

Going back to the Thornburgh report, I remind you of two telling, key phrases: “Myopic zeal.” “Rigid and blind.”

And a refresher on the top 10 news-gathering and news-vetting failures identified by the panel:

1. The failure to obtain clear authentication of any of the Killian documents from any document examiner;

2. The false statement in the September 8 Segment that an expert had authenticated the Killian documents when all he had done was authenticate one signature from one document used in the Segment;

3. The failure of 60 Minutes Wednesday management to scrutinize the publicly available, and at times controversial, background of the source of the documents, retired Texas Army National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett;

4. The failure to find and interview the individual who was understood at the outset to be Lieutenant Colonel Burkett’s source of the Killian documents, and thus to establish the chain of custody;

5. The failure to establish a basis for the statement in the Segment that the documents “were taken from Colonel Killian’s personal files”;

6. The failure to develop adequate corroboration to support the statements in the Killian documents and to carefully compare the Killian documents to official TexANG records, which would have identified, at a minimum, notable inconsistencies in content and format;

7. The failure to interview a range of former National Guardsmen who served with Lieutenant Colonel Killian and who had different perspectives about the documents;

8. The misleading impression conveyed in the Segment that Lieutenant Strong had authenticated the content of the documents when he did not have the personal knowledge to do so;

9. The failure to have a vetting process capable of dealing effectively with the production speed, significance and sensitivity of the Segment; and

10. The telephone call prior to the Segment’s airing by the producer of the Segment to a senior campaign official of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry – a clear conflict of interest – that created the appearance of a political bias.

Myopic zeal. Rigid and blind.

The more things change, the more Dan Rather stays the same.

After “60 Minutes” used fake documents to accuse President Bush of avoiding war service, how could CBS News possibly stoop lower? By hiring a longtime Clinton crony to rescue its evening news show.

Consider this quote, dating from a few months after Bill Clinton first took office: “If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we’d take it right now and walk away winners.”

Those are not the words of a campaign operative or grass roots fundraiser, but of then-CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather, speaking on behalf of himself and co-anchor Connie Chung via satellite to President Clinton during a May, 1993, CBS affiliates meeting.

Rather added, “tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we’re pulling for her.”

With Rather’s retirement last year, CBS Evening News lost its big Clinton fan to sit in front of the cameras. With former first lady Hillary now running for president, however, the network has decided to place one behind the cameras instead as executive producer.

Rick Kaplan, who calls Dan Rather “the gold standard journalists today have struggled to live up to,” has been a close friend and political adviser of the Clintons all the way back to the 1970s, when the future president was Arkansas attorney general and Kaplan was producing Walter Cronkite.

During the 1992 campaign, while he was executive producer of ABC News’ “Nightline,” Kaplan repeatedly advised Clinton on how to handle the revelation of the then-Arkansas governor’s affair with Gennifer Flowers.

A Newsweek report found Kaplan, while he was CNN president, apparently assisting Al Gore during a debate rehearsal for the 2000 presidential campaign.

Golf with Bill, overnights in the Lincoln Bedroom, a personal two-and-a-half-hour tour of the White House by the president for his 21-year-old daughter are among the perks Kaplan has enjoyed. His response to press questions about the conflict of interest: “It’s nobody’s business…”

See B.S.

***

Update: Katie’s not happy.

Milblogger Greyhawk takes on the Times’ Ed Wong and his reporting in Hurriya. Greyhawk zeroes in on this paragraph:

From morning until afternoon, at least four mosques were attacked in Hurriya, a mixed neighborhood in the capital. Two were destroyed, and at least 5 Sunnis were killed and 10 wounded, an Interior Ministry official said. A hard-line Sunni Arab group, the Muslim Scholars Association, said 18 people had been killed when one of the mosques burned down.

Apparently a separate incident from the “6 Sunnis burned alive” claim – and one with no quotes from neighbors to support or dispute it, something admittedly within Ed’s ability to deliver. As I’ve noted before, 18 is more than 6, and a “burned down” mosque is relatively easy enough to verify. Given Ed’s passion for balanced reporting, it’s unfortunate he failed to at least note the well known connection between the Association of Muslim Scholars and al Qaeda – opting instead for the ambiguous “hard line” descriptor. And yes, this is the same group that claimed 184 Sunni mosques had been attacked within hours of the Shrine bombing (and that now appears to be rupturing after their leader fled Iraq)…

…if the NY Times is serious about accurate reporting from Iraq, they might want to start examining the work of their own man on the scene, who’s never met an unsubstantiated rumor of atrocity he found unfit to print.

Recall, as Curt at Flopping Aces noted, that the military refuted the mosque-burning stories on Nov. 25:

Contrary to recent media reporting that four mosques were burned in Hurriya, an Iraqi Army patrol investigating the area found only one mosque had been burned in the neighborhood.

Soldiers from the 6th Iraqi Army Division conducted a patrol in Hurriya Friday afternoon in response to media reports that four mosques were being burned as retaliation for the VBIED attacks in Sadr City on Thursday.

The Soldiers set up a checkpoint near the Al Muhaimen mosque at approximately 2 p.m. and found the mosque intact with no evidence of any fire at the location.

While investigating the Al Meshaheda mosque, the patrol received small arms fire from unknown insurgents. The patrol returned fire, and the insurgents broke contact and fled the area. A subsequent check of the mosque found the mosque intact with no evidence of a fire.

At approximately 3:50 p.m., a local civilian reported to the patrol that armed insurgents had set the Al-Nidaa mosque on fire by throwing a gas container into the mosque. The patrol pursued the insurgents but lost contact with them.

The Soldiers called the fire department and set up a cordon around the mosque. Local fire trucks responded to the scene and extinguished the fire at approximately 4:00 p.m. The mosque sustained smoke and fire damage in the entry way but was not destroyed.

An alleged attack on a fourth mosque remains unconfirmed. The patrol was also unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. Neither Baghdad police nor Coalition forces have reports of any such incident.

Paging Tom Zeller…

Speaking of Zeller, Ace pointed out something strangely missing in his coverage of the six burning Sunnis story yesterday: Not a word about Jamil Hussein. Why?

Dan Riehl notes that neither Time magazine nor al Jazeera has been able to confirm AP’s report of the six burning Sunnis. We continue our coverage at Hot Air today here.

Curt at Flopping Aces summed up where things stand this way:

Unnamed witnesses. One fraudalent witness. One witness who recanted. No bodies. No family members of the victims found. No evidence of burned bodies on the street such as clothing. No outcry from local clerics and politicians…

But who are we to question the media[,] right?

Mark Tapscott at the Examiner calls for an investigation:

It’s time for AP to take the same sort of approach to resolve the Captain Jamil Hussein controversy. But there is one big difference between the present issue and the Dan Rather/”60 Minutes” ordeal – AP provides news to virtually every daily newspaper in America. AP is a cornerstone of the mainstream media. If AP’s credibiilty is harmed, every news organization that uses its products also suffers.

Thus, AP should ask the American Society of Newspaper Editors to oversee the appointment and conduct of an independent panel of respected journalists and outside evidentiary experts to determine the truth behind Captain Jamil Hussein and all other sources similarly in doubt.

To allow this controversy to continue to fester without taking decisive actions to resolve it to everybody’s satisfaction could be disastrous for journalists everywhere.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club contemplates blogs and the collection-analysis-dissemination cycle.

Jim Hoft notes that Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz Hakim addressed dubious media reporting at his meeting with President Bush.

Meanwhile, Brian Montopoli (to his credit) is blogging at the CBS News website. He writes:

In the end, where you stand on this one comes down to who you have faith in. Conservative bloggers tend to believe the military over a press corps that they feel is unworthy of their trust. Journalists, who are inherently distrustful of power, tend to trust their colleagues over the military. In an ideal world, both sides could put aside their prejudices and look objectively at the facts. Bloggers too often let their outrage cloud their judgment, and journalists can be too quick to dismiss criticism. The sooner both sides acknowledge as much, the better. But judging from how this one has played out, I’m not holding my breath.

Well, I’m not holding my breath that anyone at CBS News other than Montopoli will lift a finger to get to the truth.

Paging Katie Couric?

***
Previous:
The alleged war atrocity that the NYTimes can’t substantiate
Rumors and reporting in Iraq
Burning Sunnis, burning mosques, burning questions
Burning Six update: The AP responds (to USA Today); update: and now, a new AP account
Real news vs. fake news in Iraq
The media fog of war
The Associated (with terrorists) Press strikes again
Bilal Hussein’s congresswoman
AP runs to the Washington Post
AP stands for Advocacy Press
AP vs. the “so-called blogosphere”
Associated Press and the Bilal Hussein case
Where is Bilal Hussein?

Free market think tank types want in on the action, too. They are actually holding a contest to vote for the “most beautiful policy people.” I link, you decide.

Dan Riehl and Jim Treacher sharpen their Photoshop tools on Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Rosie O.

No need to try it on me. Bryan Preston worked his magic and added 50 pounds to my frame last month. Feel the bloat.

***update: Rush audio here and CNN vid of Charles Johnson***

Reuters is burning. Just in:

Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah.

Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi called the measure precautionary but said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been manipulated undermined trust in his entire body of work.

“There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image,” Szlukovenyi said in a statement.

“Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy.”

The news and information agency announced the decision in an advisory note to its photo service subscribers. The note also said Reuters had tightened editing procedures for photographs from the conflict and apologised for the case.

Removing the images from the Reuters database excludes them from future sale.

Reuters ended its relationship with Hajj on Sunday after it found that a photograph he had taken of the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on suburban Beirut had been manipulated using Photoshop software to show more and darker smoke rising from buildings.

An immediate enquiry began into Hajj’s other work.

It established on Monday that a photograph of an Israeli F-16 fighter over Nabatiyeh, southern Lebanon and dated Aug 2, had also been doctored to increase the number of flares dropped by the plane from one to three.

Bryan Preston jibes: “Now if they’d just withdraw all the pro-jihadi crap they’ve dressed up as news reporting over the last 5 years…”

My opinion:

If Reuters had half a brain, it would post all of Hajj’s photos on a separate site and welcome continued blogger analysis that uncovered this debacle in the first place. Withdrawing the photos to cover their tracks is a dumb idea.

If they are interested in the truth, they will harness the power of the Internet’s distributed intelligence network–not cut it off.

***

More coverage: E&P and YNetNews.

***

Allah invokes a famous pop culture moment in the annals of fake journalism:

I think we’re at the part in “Shattered Glass” now where Peter Sarsgaard’s rifling through back issues of the New Republic while Hayden Christensen sobs gently behind him.

“Chuck? Are you mad at me, Chuck?”

***

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, gave a highly-praised speech in March about the interaction between blogs and Old Media. A few passages stuck out:

Glocer: “What we are seeing on-line now is almost a continuous talent show, with media-savvy consumers using digital technology to express themselves and stand out as individuals in their virtual communities…

…The 2004 U.S. Presidential Election was the first White House race in which blogging played an influential role. According to a Pew report released after the election, 9% of Internet users said they read political blogs “frequently” or “sometimes” during the campaign.

And by breaking stories or pushing issues – like the Swiftboat veterans – blog sites extended their influence beyond their readership base to the national media. In effect, bloggers became the story…

…We need to promote open standards and interoperability to allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate content types. We must enable our content to be at the Crossroads of our audiences’ consumption – and realize that no one fully “owns” audience anymore….

***

Jeff Jarvis: “We can’t be a chokehold in a desparate effort to close the digital pipe,” Glocer says, arguing that media companies must not try to protect what they have by restricting those who come next.

Were those just empty words? Or will Glocer practices what he preaches?

How about a blogger review panel to independently examine Adnan Hajj’s work? Here are your talented online panelists, Mr. Glocer, for starters:

Charles Johnson
Rusty Shackleford
Ace of Spades
Jeff Harrell
Allah Pundit
Dan Riehl
Beth at My VWRC
EU Referendum
The Dissident Frogman
Jeff Goldstein
Thomas Lifson
Left and Right

One last bit from Glocer’s speech:

So the role of companies like ours is to edit and filter – to provide open tools and to seed the clouds with content that encourages contributions. And then the skill to spot the gold in the pan of water and dirt. Because what looks niche now has the potential to gain mass appeal and eventually go mainstream.

The good stuff will float to the on-line surface.

That’s for sure, though Glocer might want to avoid “seed the cloud” analogies from now on.

A not-so-fond farewell to Connie Chung and Dan Rather–together again and, we hope, nevermore.

Susan Estrich is not happy.

Brent Bozell is.

The AP has earned quite a reputation of ignoring the positive reports out of Iraq and painting with a broad brush of negativity. They have sunk to a new low by writing a “news” article that is essentially a promotional advertisement for a book. It is just another way for the AP to get a “hit” against the Bush administration. The AP should stick to reporting the news – they have enough trouble with that.

Time magazine’s preview of Risen’s book is only slightly less unbalanced. Romesh Ratnesar concludes:

Risen’s reporting isn’t bulletproof. Like most intelligence reporters, he relies heavily on anonymous sources, and several anecdotes in State of War are attributed to a lone leaker. That makes some of the book’s claims difficult to verify, while leaving Risen open to charges that he is being used by partisan ax grinders. Risen, who is contesting a court order to reveal the identities of sources he quoted in a series of disputed articles about the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, admits that the book requires readers to make a “leap of faith” and accept the credibility of his sources. But the number of intelligence officials willing to risk their careers and come forward convinced Risen that their critiques have merit. “I got to these people at a good time,” he says. “The frustration over the way things have been going in the Bush Administration had built up within the government. There were a lot of people who were increasingly uncomfortable with what was going on.”

Risen gave his first TV book interview this morning to the Today Show’s Katie Couric (of course!). Channeling Chuck Schumer, Risen cast his anonymous sources as “whistleblowers” motivated “by the purest reasons.” How do we know that’s true? Because Risen says so.

Download video clip #1 (.wmv file).

Asked about the timing of the story, Risen says “it wasn’t my decision” and refuses to “discuss the internal deliberations.” Instead, he pats himself and the Gray Lady on the back for their “great public service” in publishing the story and reiterates his praise of his anonymous sources as “truly American patriots.”

Download video clip #2 (.wmv file).

I guess we’ll see if and how long Risen is willing to stay in jail for his patriotic illegal leakers.

***

Tim Graham at The Corner:

I do wish Couric and others would push harder on the anonymous-source question: how do we know these sources aren’t members of MoveOn.org? How do we know they aren’t die-hard Hillary Clinton fans, or long-time Bush haters? Just because they’re career government officials tells us nothing about their anonymous motivations.

***

ShrinkWrapped has an interesting post on the psychology of the Times.

Kobayashi Maru plumbs the MSM franchise, erosion, and backlash.

AJ Strata has a proposal.

So does Tigerhawk, who examines the ethics of journalism and asks: “When did journalists decide that their citizenship did not matter?”

Bulldogpundit at ABP suspects “that the moonbats are counting on Risen’s book to do for them what Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, “Fahrenheit 9/11″, the Bin Laden tape, “NYTrogate”, Halliburton contracts, the “Jersey Girls”, Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, Christopher Reeve and John Murtha couldn’t do – convince the American people to come around to their way of thinking. Sadly for them, but luckily for the country, this too shall fail.”

John H. at Power Line: The predictable distinction between us and them

10. Commentator Bill Press’s condemnation of bloggers as people “with no credentials, no sources, no rules, no editors and no accountability.” Press’s idea of good journalism can be found here and some of his shady financial backers can be found over at the Radio Equalizer.

9. NYTimes editorial writer Adam Cohen’s whine that bloggers post personal attacks without calling their targets first. Cohen himself would never do something so unprofessional. Yeah, right.

8. WSJ editorial writer Bret Stephens’, uh, meltdown over bloggers who shined the light on former CNN exec Eason Jordan’s unsubstantiated claim that American troops deliberately murdered journalists in Iraq.

7. New Republic editor Michael Crowley’s clueless diatribe arguing that conservative bloggers march in lockstep with the GOP leadership to “to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates.” Two months earlier, conservative bloggers helped bring down George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court.

6. Far-left cartoonist/columnist Ted Rall’s sneering, elitist attack on Ed Morrissey, whom Rall regards as unqualified to engage in journalism. A few weeks later, Morrissey published documents that led to the collapse of the Canadian government.

5. The late LATimes media critic David Shaw’s critique of blogs, including his now-famous claim that Times articles are vetted by at “least four experienced Times editors,” who check for “accuracy, fairness, grammar, taste and libel.” We all know how well that works.

4. Forbes magazine’s front-cover hit piece on blogs, which suggested that Eason Jordan and Dan Rather were unfairly “hounded” out of their jobs by Powerline and other conservative blogs. An excerpt:

“Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective….[Blogs] are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns….”

3. Columbia Journalism Review editor Steve Lovelady’s description of bloggers who helped bring down Eason Jordan as “salivating morons who make up the lynch mob.”

2. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker’s description of bloggers as “creepy” wired squatters who are “untempered by restraint and accountability” and “insidious enemies of decency, humanity and civility – the angry offspring of narcissism’s quickie marriage to instant gratification.” MSM outlets, by contrast, “are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.” You know, those poor, truth-telling, underpaid ink-stained wretches like Jayson Blair, Mitch Albom, Stephen Glass, Eric Slater, Janet Cooke, Barbara Stewart, Patricia Smith, Mike Barnicle, and Jack Kelley.

1. Former CBS News producer Mary Mapes’ attack on conservative bloggers as “far right,” “hard-core, politically angry, hyper-conservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS” who anonymously slime “anyone and everyone who raised questions about the president.”

Judging from the thoroughly unhinged tone of the old media, I’d say bloggers had a fabulous year.

Cheers!

Cindy Sheehan
Harry Reid
Mary Mapes
George Clooney
Sean Penn
Howard Dean
Ward Churchill
Dan Rather
Chris Matthews
Nancy Pelosi
Noam Chomsky
Kofi Annan
Ramsey Clark

Send LGF any other names you think should be on the list.

Here’s mine:

For its reckless endangerment of national security, unapologetic distortions of our troops’ commitment to the mission in Iraq, trashing of 9/11 families who refused to capitulate to political correctness at Ground Zero, routine insipidity and unaccountability, laughable hypocrisy, protectionism for Democrats and liberal pet projects, dishonest Bush-bashing, anti-war pandering, cluelessness by the barrel, narcissism, and skyscraping editorial arrogance and snobbery, I nominate…

The New York Times.

Rather to sub on Larry King Live

***
Previous:

Gunga Dan weeps, and other spectacles
Whither Dan Rather?
So long, farewell, adieu, adieu, adieu
“Evaporated:” The Dan and Dave Show

-Dan Rather has a crocodile tear-shedding, lip-quivering meltdown. Dry-eyed comments from Penraker, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Roger L. Simon, and Steve J.

-Robert Spencer on The Hijab That Wasn’t.

-FEC sues the Club for Growth. FEC statement here. Club for Growth response here. RedState, BizzyBlog, and Jack Lewis sound the alarm.

-More ungrateful critics of the Red Cross say it’s too white.

- David Lombino at The New York Sun has a story on former Air America exec David Goodfriend, who’s gone public over the Gloria Wise loan scandal. My investigative blog partner Brian Maloney takes a look. We’ve got more coming. Stay tuned.

-For bloggers who have been following the aftermath of the Kelo decision, don’t miss the webcast of today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing at 10am EDT:
“The Kelo Decision: Investigating Takings of Homes and other Private Property.”

-And here’s your latest FEMA waste story: Truckloads of ice to be stored in Portland. Excerpt:

Rick Benn, who had been shepherding his load of ice from Indianapolis for two weeks, said he’s worked disaster relief before but this was the worst. He couldn’t understand why he trucked a load of ice all the way to the Deep South, waited for a week in Alabama, then hauled it to Northern New England.

“It’s the government. What do you expect?” he said.

Still, he’s being paid $800 a day. He would normally spend almost half that money on fuel but when he’s waiting instead of hauling, his operating expenses are minimal.

Reeves, who is from New York, said he’s gone from feeling upbeat about his disaster work, to feeling guilty.

“I thought I was doing some real good,” he said.

A lawsuit filed by an owner of radio stations claims that the transfer of ownership of the Air America radio network from Progress Media to Piquant LLC in May 2004 was a “sham” intended to maintain the network’s assets while deceiving its creditors, according to documents posted on a blog yesterday.

In the suit, which was filed in state Supreme Court at Manhattan in May, Multicultural Radio Broadcasting, a radio station owner with affiliates across the country, is seeking more than $255,000 it claims it is owed by the current owners of Air America, Piquant LLC. Multicultural’s complaint, as posted on the blog of Michelle Malkin, a conservative commentator, states that the station owner is trying to enforce a judgment in its favor last November, in which the court ordered Air America’s owners to pay it that amount.

Lombino notes that Air America declined to comment on Multicultural’s allegations.

***

Another interesting article appears in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer, where reporter Beth Gillin writes about bloggers’ role in pushing the Air America story into the MSM. She interviewed Brian Maloney, Macho Nachos, and me for the story. Here are the questions she asked me, along with my answers:

Why are you so relentlessly pursuing the Air America story?

Simple: It’s newsworthy and national journalists aren’t covering it. The hype about Air America upon its launch last year, from the New York Times on down, was overwhelming. But where are all the mainstream media cheerleaders now as reality caves in on the beleaguered liberal radio network? Political, financial, entertainment and media reporters should be all over this. But the silence is deafening. So, blogs are filling the void.

Why do you think the mainstream media isn’t picking up on it? I seem to recall that Hugh Hewitt thought one explanation might be that Air America is a network with so few listeners that it’s seen by the rest of the media as inconsequential.

I think it’s partly ideological bias, partly ego, partly turf protection. Liberal journalists touted Air America as the left-wing radio alternative that would bring down Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio. It was a pipe dream. They don’t want to see it fail. They don’t want to acknowledge they were wrong. And they sure as heck don’t want to be forced to admit that a bunch of rabble-rousing bloggers beat them to the story and shamed them into covering it.

Its clear blogs can create enough momentum to propel a story into the mainstream — as Atrios did with Trent Lott, as Powerline and others did with Dan Rather, for example. But those were big national stories. Is Al Franken worth going after, and if so, why?

Al Franken is not the target. It’s the past and current management at Air America Radio that’s under scrutiny.

With regard to the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club funny money business, of course it’s a worthy story. A mostly government-funded non-profit charity gets bilked out of some $900,000. No one knows where the money went. Air America’s current management knew about it up to a year ago and did nothing to report it. The charity still hasn’t received a penny back. Two government probes are underway. If a conservative radio network were in the middle of this mess, there’d be no question from the NYTimes’ front-page editor that the story belonged on A1–with terrorist attack-sized headline font.

Do you like/dislike the term blogswarm?

It’s useful shorthand, I guess, but it does carry the misleading connotation of a mob of pajama-clad people piling on. The reality is far from that. In this case, as in all the other major “blogswarms” recently (see also Easongate), you have many talented individuals contributing specialized knowledge, skills, and creativity to effect change and end MSM inertia. Brian Maloney is the radio industry veteran who sniffed out the story and set things in motion, prompting other bloggers, talk show hosts, and a few MSM rarities to pitch in with their own reporting, analysis, and lingering questions. It’s more of an online brainstorm and less of a “blogswarm,” but whatever you want to call it, it’s a highly effective way of holding the MSM’s feet to the fire.

Do you think pushing the MSM by gathering information and insisting they pay attention is part of the evolving role of blogs in journalism — at least so long as bloggers have the passion and energy and networks and newspapers have the brand identity?

No question. Blog pressure and blog reporting are integral parts of the 21st Century information revolution. Better get used to it.

***

The New York Times responded to my question about the Department of Investigation transcript that Alan Feurer cited as the source of the incorrect Al Franken quote that appeared in this article. Senior editor Bill Borders e-mailed me:

Barney Calame has passed on your letter about the article we published on Friday about the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club. I certainly wish we had not erred in our quotation of Al Franken, but am glad we could at least correct it immediately. As for the transcript, we are not prepared to discuss our sources in that regard, but I am confident that no further correction of the article is necessary.

Unfortunately, this response raises more questions than it answers:

1) Borders isn’t prepared to discuss Feuer’s sources even though Feuer already identified his source as a Department of Investigation transcript. Maybe Feuer got the transcript from a DOI official who does not want to be identified, but if that’s the case why can’t Borders simply say that?

2) Borders is confident that no further correction is necessary. Presumably that means he’s standing by what Feuer wrote, i.e., that the botched quote came from a transcript provided by DOI. But DOI told me last week that “no official transcript exists” and that the New York Times would be running a correction. Perhaps, as Patterico suggests, DOI provided the Times with an unofficial transcript. If that’s the case, why can’t Borders say so? Alternatively, if DOI was less than fully forthcoming with me, why can’t Borders say that?

3) Finally, why would Feuer rely on a DOI transcript (if that is in fact what happened) rather than simply listen to the audio himself, as Brian Maloney did. Brian posted an accurate transcript on August 10, the day before Feuer’s article appeared.

***

The Bronx News, which was the first media outlet to break the Air America connection to the Gloria Wise loan scandal, has a follow-up on reporter Michael Horowitz’s role in uncovering the mismanagement of charity funds. Check it out here.

***

Part II of the Maloney-Malkin investigative series will appear later today on The Radio Equalizer. Don’t miss it.

***

Bulldogpundit at ABP:

Reading it from a legal point of view, I’d say that if facts pleaded are true, then Piquant LLC (Air America’s ownership entity) is in deep trouble. In short, Air America’s prior owners are accused of fraudulently transferring all assets – but not the debts – to Piquant LLC in order to avoid paying judgment creditors.

I’ve done some work for corporate clients and banks in Bankruptcy Court where this kind of conduct was alleged. The good part about these types of cases is that there’s usually always a “paper trail” that will eventually tell the tale. Further, the if either the Piquant or the former owners ever want to file for bankruptcy they will likely not be able to discharge the debts. Further, I had one case where a guy got convicted for this type of conduct. And in these cases the court does have the ability to “unwind” the conveyance and take the assets from the new “owner” to pay the creditor what is owed.

Leon H. at Macho Nachos tries to figure out the legal entanglements between Air America and Multicultural Radio.

Captain Ed on the NYTimes’ woeful coverage: “Do you think Bill Keller will ever feel embarrassed by this?”

Cox News Service tries to catch up, and simply regurgitates Air America’s spin. An example of stenography, not journalism.

***
Previous:

Inside Air America: An investigative blog report
Air Enron: Al Franken needs help
Air Enron updates
Air Enron: The dam bursts
Air Enron: NYTimes corrects
Air Enron: MSM errs and lags
Air Enron: The NYTimes speaks! (or rather, whispers)
Air Enron: Heads roll, victims shafted
Air Enron: No letting up
Air Enron: Franken speaks again
Air Enron: Elite media blackout contd.
Air Enron: quotes of the day
Air Enron: Spitzer steps in
Air Enron: questions, questions
Air Enron: the blame game
Air Enron: thumb-twiddling MSM
Silence of the race hustlers
Air Enron: Al Franken speaks
Air Deadbeat: the saga continues
The Air America loophole
Air America is scrambling
Air America: Don’t blame us
Air America: Stealing from poor kids?!