Daily Archives: September 4, 2004

6 posts

The Media’s Failure of Fact-Checking at the Republican Convention

[ For more on Republican deception at the Convention, see this AP story. –BL ] 3 September 2004 | FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) It is the function of journalism to separate fact from fiction. In covering the Republican National Convention of 2004, the media made isolated efforts to point out some of the convention speakers’ more egregious distortions, but on the whole failed in their vital role of letting citizens know when they are being lied to. To take the example that dominated the convention perhaps more than any other claim: Professional politicians and political correspondents alike know that […]

George W Bush’s missing year

‘Who was this guy who came in late and left early?’ After thirty years of silence, Mary Jacoby finds out what the future President really did in 1972 September 2, 2004 | Salon.com Before Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family’s political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison. In the spring of 1972, George HW Bush phoned his friend and asked a favour: Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W Bush? […]

Chilling Free Speech: Secret Service Confiscate Sticker, Intimidate

Things getting sticky for owner of sticker 1 Sept 2004 | The Salt Lake Tribune by Matthew D. LaPlante Derek Kjar is not the president’s biggest fan. But the 19-year-old Salt Lake County man says he does not intend to harm President Bush with anything more than a vote for John Kerry come November. Just to be sure, though, agents from the Secret Service recently paid Kjar a visit, telling him that his neighbors had alerted them to a potentially threatening bumper sticker on his car. The sticker, which can be found on a number of Web sites, features a […]

U.S. press puts Iraq dead on back pages

2 September 2004 | United Press International WASHINGTON — U.S. newspapers are moving stories of American troops dying in Iraq to the back pages, the Washington Monthly has reported. The magazine noted in its September issue that on July 9, the Los Angeles Times put the story of five soldiers being killed on page 7 and the New York Times put it on page 8. On July 22, the magazine said, The Washington Times headlined a story “U.S. Troops Dying Two Per Day Since Turnover in Iraq,” but only put it on page 10. Also, “stories of the wounded, nearing […]

Bush Called on Double Standards: U.S. Loses Trade Cases and Faces Penalties

1 September 2004 | New York Times by PAUL MELLER and ELIZABETH BECKER BRUSSELS, Aug. 31 – The World Trade Organization on Tuesday authorized the European Union and seven other leading American trading partners to impose more than $150 million in retaliatory sanctions on exports from the United States. The ruling comes after Congress refused for two years to repeal a tariff subsidy for American companies that the W.T.O. found to be in violation of global trade laws. The decision by the trade organization, based in Geneva, is the latest example of several cases where Washington has been found to […]

Canadian Oil from Tar Sand: Mr. Sandman, Bring Me Some Oil

[ Oil reserves elsewhere are not what they once were … It is not easy and it is not cheap, and through most of the 1980’s and 1990’s, it was not attractive to pursue, because there was plenty of crude oil available from more convenient sources and the market price was too low to reward large-scale tar sands development. –BL ]31 August 2004 | New York Times by SIMON ROMERO