Friday, February 24

Brit Hume ♥ Lewis Libby

A summary of Today's Grapevine:

Brit Hume opens, today, by noting that Iran's leadership is being very disingenuous in suggesting to its people that the U.S. government and Israel were responsible for the bombing that destroyed a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra. Hume then goes on to compare Iran's false claims of U.S. involvement in the Samarran mosque explosion with the Bush administration's false claims of Iraqi involvement in 9/11... Psyyyyyych! Ha, ha! Gotcha there for a second, didn't I? Yeah, I made that second part up.

Next on The Grapevine, Hume goes into obfuscatory mode shilling for indicted perjurer Lewis "Scooter" Libby":

Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is balking at producing evidence to support his claim that former CIA operative Valerie Plame's job status was classified when administration official staffers mentioned her name to reporters in 2003.

The claim that Plame's job was classified was made in the indictment of former Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby. But Fitzgerald says that information doesn't relate to the perjury charges against Libby and therefore defense lawyers have no right to documents that would support it.

What's more, Fitzgerald won't say whether Plame's outing damaged national security and denies ever claiming any damage was done at all.

But as Byron York of National Review points out, Fitzgerald told reporters in presenting his charges against Libby, "Damage ... was done to all of us."

Valerie (Plame) Wilson's covert status has been well established, and there is no real doubt on this matter outside conservative spin circles. Not only has Robert Novak himself aknowledged that CIA sources asked that he not publish Wilson's name, but facts reported in the media have made it amply clear that Wilson was Covert (indeed, we know that she had participated in covert operations overseas with the CIA front company Brewster-Jennings as recently as 2001, 2002 and 2003).

Also significant is the fact that Libby is not even under indictment for exposing Plame. He is under indictment for lying to prosecutors about his contacts with the press. Libby is being charged with Perjury, not with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. So Libby's request for materials relating to Wilson's status at the CIA is, indeed, immaterial to the defense, as Fitzgerald has pointed out. So why are Libby's lawyers asking for the materials, and why is Fitzgerald refusing to release them, and why is Brit Hume pressing the issue on Fox News? The answer is simple: Libby's lawyers are trying to pursue a strategy of forcing the government to release secret documents that might prove damaging to national securty (and counter proliferation operations overseas) or drop the case against Libby altogether. I don't want to exaggerate things, but basically the defense strategy boils down to nuclear blackmail against the U.S.: either you's drop the case against our boy, or release documents that will scuttle counter-proliferation efforts around the globe. It's your choice, buddy! And the best part is that our own favorite Fox anchor is a willing participant in the scheme. Atta boy, Brit!

The last two segments are less interesting. In the first, Hume fantasizes about Conservatives out-birthing Liberals in America and leading to a demographic takeover of the country (because, you know, kids never have political leanings different from mommy and daddy). In the second Hume looks briefly at a pair of hate speech prosecutions in Europe.

Thursday, February 23

Brit Hume ♥ The Press

A summary of today's Grapevine:

Would you believe it? Brit Hume just loves the L.A. Times and the Washington Post! Seems both those papers are running editorials poo pooing the fuss over Dear Leader's misunderstood and unfairly maligned U.A.E. port deal. Go Times! Go Post! Rah, rah, rah!

In China, meanwhile, government officials are totally pissed at Google! You might think that it was wrong for Google to collaborate with Chinese officials in censoring the internet and stamping out Democratic reforms before they can even begin to take root. You'd be so totally wrong! If Chinese officials had their way, Google would be spamming Chinese citizens' mailboxes with billions of offers for hot, sexy, uncensored copies of Mao's Little Red Book. But Google's like.. no way, man! We believe in Freedom!

Also, it appears that a Dean at Harvard has written a letter apologizing for offending Muslims... Didja hear that? A friggin dean, man! At friggin, Harvard!

Finally, it seems that a geography teacher somewhere in Colorado doesn't very much like George W. Bush, and has told his students as much. Aren't we lucky to have a national television newscaster of Brit Hume's stature and prominence bringing us news of this dire, homegrown Coloradoan threat to the republic? Baaaad, teacher... baaaad.... now, don't do that again, you hear me?!

Wednesday, February 22

Brit Hume Plays the Race Card

In today's Grapevine Brit Hume plays the race card in trying to back up the Bush adminsitration's much lambasted decision to allow a company owned by the United Arab Emirates to exercise control over U.S. por security.. Quoting pollster John Zogby, Hume notes:

Arab Americans are blaming the uproar over an Arab company assuming control over U.S. ports not on security concerns, but on bigotry. Arab American Institute president James Zogby says, "I find some of the rhetoric being used against this deal shameful and irresponsible."

He adds that politicians who oppose the deal are merely exploiting post-9/11 fears, saying, "The slogan is, if it's Arab, it's bad. Hammer away." And a spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations says, "The perception in the Arab-American community is that this is related to anti-Arab sentiment."

It's too bad that Hume's spent the last couple of weeks terrifying his viewers with scary stories about violent A-rabs marching in the streets, burning everything in their path, and coming up with newfangled names for Danish pastries in response to the controversial Mohammed cartoons of Jyllands Posten. Kinda makes his newfound concern for our Arab brothers seem a little less than genuine, don't you think?

Monday, February 20

It's been a few days. Time to get back to blogging.

Since I last updated Brithumewatch, Brit Hume got his interview with Dick Cheney. There's a decent commentary of it by David Eddlestein here. One of the things that's interesting about the interview, as Eddlestein notes, is how at the beginning of the interview Cheney describes Harry Whittington as a "good friend" and then seconds later, in response to a question by Hume, refers to him as a mere "acquaintance."

Q: How did you feel when you heard about that?

A: Well, it's a great relief. But I won't be, obviously, totally at ease until he's home. He's going to be in the hospital, apparently, for a few more days, and the problem, obviously, is that there's always the possibility of complications in somebody who is 78-79 years old. But he's a great man, he's in great shape, good friend, and our thoughts and prayers go out to he and his family.

Q: How long have you known him?

A: I first met him in Vail, Colorado, when I worked for Jerry Ford about 30 years ago, and it was the first time I'd ever hunted with him.

Q: Would you describe him as a close friend, friendly acquaintance, what?

A: No, an acquaintance.

Emphasis mine.

Of course, Hume didn't follow up on this or any other discrepancy in the Vice President's account. When Cheney explained that he didn't follow Whittington to the hospital because there wasn't enough room on the ambulance, Hume changed the subject rather than ask why it was Cheney could not have followed in another car.

Q: What did you do then? Did you get up and did you go with him, or did you go to the hospital?

A: No, I had told my physician's assistant to go with him, but the ambulance is crowded and they didn't need another body in there. And so we loaded up and went back to ranch headquarters, basically. By then, it's about 7:00 p.m. at night.

Q: Did you have a sense then of how he was doing?

Hume is a very intelligent questioner, and very quick on his feet. If he failed to ask an obvious question of the V.P. it wasn't a simple oversight. It was simple deference. By and large, during the interview, Hume asked the questions that had to be asked, but didn't probe them any further. He, for instance, accepted Cheney's story that he had drunk "one beer" at lunch, and quickly moved on to other subjects.

Q: Was anybody drinking in this party?

A: No. You don't hunt with people who drink. That's not a good idea. We had ...

Q: So he wasn't, and you weren't?

A: Correct. We'd taken a break at lunch — go down under an old — ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at lunch. After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters. Then we took about an hourlong tour of ranch, with a ranch hand driving the vehicle, looking at game. We didn't go back into the field to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m. The five of us who were in that party were together all afternoon. Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence.

Q: Now, what thought did you give, then, to how — you must have known that this was — whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news. What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be transmitted?

Hume didn't ask how much anyone else (including Mr. Whittington) had drunk, nor whether other alcoholic beverages besides beer had been served. In addition, as others have noted, Fox News has not even released the video clip of Cheney admitting that he had a beer for lunch, taking time to excise that portion of the interview from the segments that were broadcast.

I'm not going to say that the interview was scripted (though we know that this Whitehouse, does often script this sort of thing). In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that it probably wasn't scripted. But, let's face it. It didn't really need to be. After all, this is Fox News, and this is Brit Hume we're talking about. All you really need to know about the legitimacy of this interview is that it came about after the National Review Online suggested that Cheney do an interview with Hume to get the whole Whittington incident behind him:

Cheney himself should make a public appearance on the matter, and the sooner the better. He should get himself with a respected national anchor — perhaps Brit Hume of Fox News — as soon as this evening to express his regret and explain in his own words what happened.

Not surprisingly, other media figures have commented on the distance that Cheney has placed between himself and legitimate news reporters. CNN's Jack Cafferty, for instance, noted that Cheney's "running over there to the Fox network"... "didn't exactly represent a profile in courage."

In response, in Thursday Feb 16th edition of The Grapevine, Hume takes a swipe at Cafferty noting:

And someone named Jack Cafferty said, "It didn't exactly represent a profile in courage for the vice president to wander over there to the F-word network,” calling the interview, "a little bit like Bonnie interviewing Clyde."

Translation: I'm Brit Hume, beyatch! Who are you? As usual, whenever Fox News comes in for criticism, the nework's apoligists fall back on their ratings leads over other networks, as if ratings had anything to do with integrity or professionalism. A look at circulation figures for the National Enquirer over the past few decades should put that notion to rest.

Wednesday, February 15th

Tool

It's been a pretty ho hum couple of days over at the "Grapevine." Basically just Brit Hume being Brit Hume... that is... a tool for the Republian party. Today's Grapevine provides an example as Hume decides to use his program to run interference for the Vice President's office:

As if taking a cue from the White House press corps, Senate Democrats came out in full swing Tuesday attacking the administration for its delay in releasing information on Vice President Cheney's hunting accident. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called the Bush administration the most secretive in modern history and compared the hunting incident to the Valerie Plame leak investigation and the White House response to Hurricane Katrina.

He also called on the vice president to appear publicly to talk about what happened. New York Senator Hillary Clinton chimed in that the administration has a tendency to withhold information from the public and resists legitimate requests for information.

I think it's pretty illustrative of Hume's paranoia that he now seems to think that, not only is the mainstream press a Marxist fifth column threatening the values of this great nation, but that the Democratic party is in fact little more than the media's bitch. Democrats aren't actually criticizing the Whitehouse because it is, in fact "the most secretive in modern history"... no... rather, they're doing so because their handlers at the New York Times, The Washington Post and The L.A. Times got together over the weekend, in some smoky room and decided this was a good time for the party to go on the attack. I exaggerate, of course, but Hume is certainly taking a page out of the Republican party playbook and insinuating that there's a nefarious and incestuous relationship between the Democratic party and the mainstream press.

And for his troubles what does Fox News' bestest propagandist get? It appears that Hume has scored an exclusive interview with the V.P.. Way to go, Brit 'ol boy! You worked hard fo it. You deserve it!

February 13, 2006

Six Degrees of Propaganda

Today we examine Brit Hume's most recent Grapevine segment (Friday, Feb 10) and find that it's even more tawdry than your typical Hume entry. Miffed by a Dove Soap / Girlscouts campaign to make girls feel better about themselves, Hume takes on the Campaign For Real Beauty writing:

As part of a national campaign to promote self-esteem among young girls, the makers of Dove soap have provided teens with information on everything from politics to sex, but some of the content may raise

The Campaign for Real Beauty Web site suggests that readers report offensive ads and messages to media watchdogs such as Media Watch and Adbusters. But those organizations' Web sites contain links to articles attacking the Bush administration, offers for online dating sites specifically aimed at liberal Democrats and numerous references to pornography. One online forum even contains solicitation for free kiddie porn.

Ceratinly it's an odd non-sequitor that follows the word "but" in that second paragraph. So what if those organization contain links to articles critical of the Bush administration? I'm not sure how that is supposed to undermine the Campaign for Real Beauty. Nor does Hume attempt, in any way, to justify the apparent negative implication of the disjunction. Apparently, in Hume's world, it's enough to link to a webiste that itself links to criticisms of the Bush Amdinistration to render your campaign suspect.

More dishonest are the warnings that follow. Apparently these webistes also feature: "offers for online dating sites specifically aimed at liberal Democrats" (Watch out, parents, if your daughter visits one of those sites she might start dating a... gasp... liberal Democrat!) "and numerous references to pornography" (While I couldn't find any of these "numerous refernces to pornography when I followed the links in question, it's worth noting that Hume's Grapevine segment itself contains "numerous references ot pronography"). Most odious, of course, is Brit Hume's claim that "One online forum even contains solicitation for free kiddie porn." What online forum? When? Was it a paid advertisement, or mere spam that got through a filter on an otherwise unmoderated discussion forum? Hume doesn't say. I ran a blog search to see if I could track down what it was Hume was referring to, but all I could find were legions of blogs praising the Campaign for Real Beauty and a recent "Superbowl" commercial sponsored by Dove.

In the end, what Hume has done here is implement one of the simplest and most dishonest tricks in the dirty political pool playbook. You take an organization's website and follow the links, then follow the links from the webistes it links to, and so on and so forth until you reach an unsavory webiste. You play "six degrees of internet separation" and announce that your political opponent's website links to a website that itself links to a website that links to a website that includes a "solicitation for kiddie porn." The fact that Brit Hume had to fall back on a link on an unnamed "online forum" shows just how desperate the Fox News anchor is to dig up some dirt on the campaign. After all, online forums are notoriously difficult to regulate, and a popular tactic of internet spammers is to radomly post advertisements in umoderated online forums to drive up web traffic.

Is this journalism?

Update: I've found what I think is Hume's Source for this piece. It appears to be this editorial by a right-wing columnist in the conservative PittsburgLive website. The offending web forum appears to have been on Adbusters. The offensive post is no longer available, but from the description was clearly a spam message that has been deleted by forum moderators. Of course, you'd never know that by reading "The Grapevine" As for the "numerous references to pornography," they are from a Yes Magazine interview with Chris Hedges titled Love and Resistance in Wartime. This is what Hedges says:

In a wartime society, the moral order is flipped upside down; prostitution, rape, and abuse all rise as the levels of violence rises. That happened in every conflict I was in. In Serbia, for instance, as the violence proliferated you also had a proliferation of pornography and snuff films. It always goes hand in hand, because what you are destroying is the humanity of the other; you are turning the other into an object, which is precisely what torture or pornography does.

Not exactly the promotion of pornography that Brit Hume seems to be implying in his segment.

February 10, 2006

Ho, hum

Pretty typical day for The Grapevine. Hume leads with a story about how a Fox News poll shows that Republicans are going to romp all over the Democrats in 2008 (apparently, McCain is back in favor at Fox News now that he represents the party's best hope at surviving 8 uninterrupted years of scandals, mismanagement and corruption).

I'd also like to modify something I wrote about yesterday a bit. In yesterday's entry I noted that Hume's "The Grapevine" segment reads like a right-wing blog without hyperlinks. This isn't strictly true. The printed, online version of "The Grapevine" does include hyperlinks. It's just that the hyperlinks themselves are basically worthless. That's because they don't link to the sources that Hume is using for his stories (as a normal blog would) but rather, they mostly link to the Fox News search engine. So that when you click the hyperlink to a story on a newspaper that refused to run some ads by a Pro-life activist group, you aren't linked to a broader story about the incident, nor are you linked to that paper. Rather, what you get is a series of search resuls, the first one of which points straight back to "The Grapevine" and the second which points to a story on a Mastodon find in Illinois. What's that all about?

Lastly, while this is a blog about Brit Hume, I'd like to take a minute to note about Gretta Van Susteren. Whenever Fox News is criticized for being the Republican propaganda outlet that it is, the nework's defenders always reply that there are plenty of liberals working at Fox, including Alan Colmes and Gretta Van Susteren. Now, I won't get into Colmes, as there's been plenty already written about how he was chosen by Sean Hannity to act as a dim-witted, non-threatening foil for Hannity's over-the-top right-wing histrionics. As for Susteren, I'll note that, although she first made her name as a legal analyst and defender of President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she's spent most of her time at Fox News reporting on trashy celebrity scandal stuff; Laci Petterson, runaway brides, pretty, doe-eyed, missing college students, etc. Looks like last-night's show was no exception. In the midst of Republican scandals about illegal wiretapping, Jack Abramoff-linked corruption, and a meltdown in the Middle-east, what was Fox News' resident "liberal" reporting on? Why, a weeks old story about a honey-mooner murdered on a cruise liner. Gee, thanks for keeping the faith there, Gretta!

February 9, 2006

One of the most annoying things about Brit Hume's "grapevine" segment, is that his stories are so poorly documented that often times you've got to spend serious time running google searches before you can find the source for whatever the heck it is he's talking about. And half the time Hume's source turns out to be some far-right blog, or a right-wing propagandist webiste such as Newsmax. In fact, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that Hume's "grapevine" segment is nothing more than a televised digest of right-wing blogs but without the hyperlinks, meaning that his claims are both disingenuous and difficult to verify. Today's Grapevine is a good example of this:

Muslims across the world are expressing outrage over those now-infamous Danish cartoons. And some American Muslims are raising concerns about one depiction of the prophet inside the Supreme Court.

A sculpture of Muhammed is included among 18 stone "lawgivers" that have adorned the building since it opened in 1935. It depicts the prophet with a Koran in one hand and a sword in the other.

Conservatives claim to be offended when foreign mobs burn the American flag and issue threats against America. But the one thing they hate even more than that is when foreign mobs burn someone else's flag while ignoring the U.S. completely. And the whole issue of the Danish "Mohammed" cartoons is one such situation. Most protesters are angry at Denmark, burning Danish flags, boycotting Danish products and attacking Danish embassies. Other than an incident involving an angry mob charging a military base in Afghanistan, the U.S. has largely been ignored in this matter. This is true even though a few right-wing rags such as the New York Sun have gone out of their way to reprint the offending cartoons in their pages. But it's been to no avail. The U.S. of A. has shown up to this party as the frumpy plain-Jane, while all eyes and all the attention is focused the cute little Danish friend we came with. Boo, hoo, say conservatives.
And so like it or not, whether the facts warrant it or not, righ-wingers are going to find some way to turn this hubub into an attack on America. Tonight, for instance, Tucker Carlson is running a show on what these riots "mean for America." And now, Brit Hume is telling us that "some American Muslims" are "raising concerns" about a sculpture of Mohammed that can be found inside the Supreme Court. Sounds scary doesn't it?
But wait a minute... what Muslims are raising these concerns? Hume doesn't say. Is it a lot of Muslims? Hume doesn't say. Are they important, powerful Muslims? Again, Hume doesn't say. For all we know it could be a Pakistani convenience store clerk and one of his customers. On the other hand, it could be the members of the two million strong Secret Sleeper-cell Army Of Osama. We just don't know, and Hume offers no details to clear this up for us. Nor does Hume source this claim in any way. So I did what I always do: I ran some google searches.
Now, you'd think that if Mulsims in America were making a big deal out of the Mohammed sculptures in the Supreme Court building, then someone other than Brit Hume would be reporting about it, right? Well, not really. I did find this CNN story on Sandra Day O'Connor that mentions a 1997 Supreme Court case in which a Moslem organization had tried to have the image removed (the court ruled against the plaintiffs). In addition, there's this Garavi Gijarat story titled "Mohammed sculpture at top US court draws mild rebuke." The story appears to reference the same 1997 court case, but quotes Moslem leaders as saying:

"The court ruled that the good outweighed the bad ... and the community`s response was one that was very tempered," said Edina Lekovic, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington. "They (community leaders) came out and said that they disagreed with the court ruling but they appreciated the thought and the intention behind the sculpture."

Is this what Hume is referring to? Again, it's impossible to say. One thing's for certain though: it'd sure be hard to get Americans all riled up about the ominous Islamic Threat from Within by noting that some American Muslims disagree with the sculpture in question, but "appreciate the thought" anyway.

February 8, 2006

Liar

Wow, Brit Hume tells a big fat lie in the very first sentence of today's Grapevine. Is that some sort of record?

The Washington Post, which had no qualms about publishing a cartoon attacking the U.S. military which drew a rare letter of protest from the joint chiefs — has declined to run the controversial Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

While it's true that a recent cartoon of Tom Toles drew a letter of protest from the Joint Chiefs Of Staff, it's simply a lie to claim, as Hume does here, that the cartoon in question constituted an attack on the military. The cartoon (which I reprint below) was very obviously a criticism of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his insensitivity to the suffering and travails of our troops overseas:


Toles drew his cartoon in response to Donald Rumsfeld's statement that, far from being stretched too thin by commitments in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, U.S. troops are in fact "battle hardened." Given these facts, for Hume to disingenuously claim that the cartoon is an attack on "the U.S. military" betrays his loyalty to the Republican party above any feigned loyalty to the truth.

February 2, 2006

Disgraceful: In today's grapevine, Brit Hume takes time to aid the right-wing attempt to use the wounding of NBC anchor Bob Woodruf and cameraman Doug Vougt as an opportunity to bash the mainstream media:

Overexposed?

Some U.S. forces are grumbling about the press coverage of ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, who were seriously injured in Iraq over the weekend, complaining that their struggle in the face of the same dangers has not received the same media attention.

UPI notes that the two men have the sympathy of the military, but one officer in Iraq says it's "frustrating to see something so dramatized that happens every day to some 20-year-old American," adding, "you'd think we lost the entire 1st Marine Division."

And a senior officer tells UPI, "The point that is currently being made [is] that press folks are more important than mere military folks."

You're a real class act, there, Brit... sitting pretty and editorializing in support of the Iraq war from your New York studio while a pair of real reporters suffer massive head-wounds covering the conflict on location. And then you have the gall to suggest that media coverage of the tragedy is excessive. What a prick!