You’d think there’d be something in this Trib endorsement of Duckworth about her being parachuted into the district by Rahm Emanuel and having no experience in public office.  Wait, that latter sow’s ear is made a silk purse: she’s a refreshing change from politicians!  And Roskam once was venal!  And she’s an apt successor to Henry Hyde, “one of the great voices of conservatism” and a politician since he was in knickers!  Zowie!

What newspapers do #575: They sneak in their points with pointed coverage, as in today’s Chi Trib, where editors give a huge ride to Kim Barker’s story on an aged Gitmo detainee never charged after three-plus years detainment. There’s a huge 9×7 color headshot of the man, back home in Afghanistan.  The story takes up pretty much all of page 8 with a “What is my crime?” head. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in anti-Bushism to see that something went wrong in this case. It’s the sort of miscue or evildoing that, like shit, happens and newspapers hop on — justice system gone awry, etc.

But 1400-plus words? Really, on what happened to one man in the war on Islamic fascists? Or on terror if you want the going terminology? Newspapers go for human interest, of course. But why this one, this way?  (Web site buried it, by the way.)  As a paradigm of what’s bad about our detainee policy, that’s why. But this is not argued, and even if it were, it would be less argued than cried out by the Passionate Observer Who Hates Injustice. Oh the chicanery of it all. Why not just engage in a blogger’s rant? What’s the difference, apart from a sort of reasonable tone meant to mask bias?

While the details of [the aged detainee] Khan’s Guantanamo experience are hard to verify, his complaints raise questions about who has been sent to the detention facility and how thoroughly the charges against them are investigated, just as a law approved by Congress late last month sets up military tribunals to try some of the detainees. President Bush is scheduled to sign the bill into law Tuesday. [Italics added]

Details hard to verify?  Details, shmails, if you have a good story that fits editors’ bias and passes as more or less conventional wisdom.  Raise questions?  Why, if details are not only hard to verify but impossible, else why wouldn’t Trib smoke them out?  Here’s some digging, however:

Sam Zarifi, Asia research director for Human Rights Watch [where anti-Bushite extraordinaire George Soros is much involved, FYI], said Khan’s case appears familiar. He said reviews of unclassified transcripts from tribunals and review board hearings for many of the detainees indicate that some were arrested because the U.S. military does not understand Afghan political rivalries.

“This really fits a pattern of problematic allegations and process at Guantanamo,” he said. “It seemed to be arbitrary who was picked up and who wasn’t.”

It seemed to this fellow anyhow.  The problem here is that a boy (girl) was sent to do a man’s (woman’s) job.  That is, the tools that your working reporter brings to such stories are not adequate, nor maybe is the medium.  Kim (he? she?) worked diligently, talking to lot of people having decided, it seems to me, that she smelled a rat.  A kink in the armor of our people who run Gitmo and prosecute badly. 

It’s daily newspaper-itis here, which is not fatal except when someone uses it to get free of the bee in one’s bonnet.  Barker and Trib’s credibility is at stake here, because they are not disinterested observers.

The city has a new screamer.  Sun-Times has raised the decibels.  And is sounding them in populist manner:

“NOBODY’S WORTH $27 MIL. PER YEAR: Spotlight on Execs’ Monster Salaries on Eve of Big Hike in Your Electric Bill” [Grrrrrrrr]

It’s the Michael Cooke-just-back-from-New York Effect.  See the lede.  It’s journalistic demagoguery:

Stock prices at a near-record high.

Robust profits.

And a top exec who pulled down more than $27 million last year.

Hardly signs of a company on the brink of bankruptcy, according to a growing chorus opposed to ComEd’s impending rate hike for its 3.7 million customers.  [Italics added, chorus being cheered on by S-T]

Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn [proven rouser of rabble who once proclaimed, “There’s no nice way of doing things,” referring to his tactics] is urging people to fight the hike, blaming it on “inflated egos with inflated salaries.”

“It’s hard to get a violin out for anyone who makes $27 million,” he said Sunday, deriding the compensation package of John W. Rowe, CEO of Exelon, ComEd’s parent company.

As if Rowe’s $27 mill would cover the rate hike.  As if it’s a Mom & Pop place.  This from the man who led a constitutional cutback of the legislature characterized by veteran Springfield correspondent Charles N. Wheeler III 20 years after its approval as “perhaps the most regrettable example of short-sighted anger in state history.”  Sun-Times is in his corner.  Has Editor Cooke studied Illinois legislative history?

“Nobody’s worth that much, I’m sorry,” said Pat Lydon, 61, a legal secretary from Old Irving Park who was visiting downtown Sunday [about Rowe’s compensation].

He did, eh?  Wow.  That does it.  Quinn and the Citizens Utility Board and the two governor candidates had me wondering, but now I’m sure.  Thanks, Sun-Times!

The heck with Forbes Mag, saying as reported by S-T, that ComEd under Rowe (since 1984) was the nation’s best-managed utility in 2005.  So what!

 

AP sent out a story 10/14 about Rep. John Murtha’s Wash Post column in which he objects to his and other Dems’ being called “Defeatocrats” by Republicans because they want to pull out of Iraq.

Rep. John Murtha, a decorated Marine veteran who favors withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, wrote an essay for Sunday’s Washington Post blasting Republicans for referring to him and other Iraq war opponents as “Defeatocrats.”

Why not?  He’s in the news for his anti-war statements.  But would it be fair to cite his Abscam history here too?  To do so would ruin or at least hurt the story, and drama’s the thing.  So say it this way without Abscam. But there’s supposed to be a public-trust factor here: fairness and accuracy and the like.  And Abscam is in the news too.  Consider this from Wash Times on Oct. 5:

Rep. John P. Murtha’s Republican challenger “>has accused him  of negotiating a $50,000 bribe and of trying to cover it up for 26 years. 

A recently released FBI video recorded in 1980 shows the Pennsylvania Democrat talking with an FBI agent posing as a representative to an Arab sheik who offers Mr. Murtha $50,000 in cash in exchange for private immigration legislation.

“When you see the video, there was every intent of taking the bribe,” said Diana Irey, a Washington County, Pa., commissioner who is running to unseat Mr. Murtha. “For 26 years, John Murtha has been living a lie.”

This story is nowhere to be found in Chi Trib or any other newspaper in the EBSCO database, which I found compliments of the Oak Park Public Library, where I hold a card. Why not found?  At best because it did not seem significant to any editor, while Murtha’s battling the White House — that’s news? — does.  At worst?  Skip it.

 

Columbia U. Republicans recovered from disruption of their last speaker a week ago to host three reformed violent radicals:

Each of the speakers stressed the impact of indoctrination in their youth. Hilmar von Campe explained that the Nazi system of political indoctrination operated not by issuing commands but by controlling key institutions — such as the media and military — that effectively manipulated public opinion. The Nazi idea, he said, “was for you to do voluntarily what they wanted you to do.” Under the influence of such indoctrination, von Campe came to believe that World War II was not a war incited by Nazi aggression but a patriotic war to preserve German sovereignty. As a soldier, “I was in my mind defending the country, not fighting for the Nazis,” von Campe said.

I told my students at De Paul U. a few years ago that they were being manipulated, which was news to them.  That control of the media fits with today’s overwhelming leftist bias.

Another speaker got to the point about academia today in the U.S.:

Shoebat noted that the radical recruitment and indoctrination he underwent as a young man [among Palestinians, indoctrinated in anti-Jewish thinking] was also happening in the United States. This happened through clandestine support by Islamic radicals for Middle Eastern terrorist groups; through preaching by radical clerics; and, more subtly, through American universities. In the latter connection, Shoebat singled out several professors — including Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of International Law at Princeton who once referred to Ayatollah Khomeini as a “moderate” and described Islamist Iran as a “model of human government,” and Columbia’s own Rashid Khalidi, who routinely deplores Israel as a “racist” and “apartheid” state — as examples of professors who prefer to suppress the truth about Islamic fundamentalism rather than confront it.

What was it they used to say about anti-Catholicism as the anti-semitism of the intellectuals?  For the political left, it’s just anti-semitism.

Here’s a group worth noting and giving wholehearted support:

The Free Muslims Coalition is a nonprofit organization made up of American Muslims and Arabs of all backgrounds who feel that religious violence and terrorism have not been fully rejected by the Muslim community in the post 9-11 era.

The Free Muslims was created to eliminate broad base support for Islamic extremism and terrorism and to strengthen secular democratic institutions in the Middle East and the Muslim World by supporting Islamic reformation efforts.

The Free Muslims promotes a modern secular interpretation of Islam which is peace-loving, democracy-loving and compatible with other faiths and beliefs. The Free Muslims’ efforts are unique; it is the only mainstream American-Muslim organization willing to attack extremism and terrorism unambiguously. Unfortunately most other Muslim leaders believe that in terrorist organizations, the end justifies the means.  [Italics added]

Islamic reformation sounds good to me.

“[A] squalid playpen for political cronies who pillage it for jobs and contracts” is what Chi Trib calls Cook County govt. in an editorial endorsing Tony Peraica (R-Riverside) for county board president. 

This sorry government, with a $3.1 billion budget that’s bigger than those of many states, needs to be fumigated and streamlined. With those two priorities paramount, the Tribune today opens its endorsements  . . .

There’s more.

[M]illions of tax dollars that could go to helping people are wasted on slow-mo patronage humps, do-nothing bureaucrats and clout-heavy vendors. Democrats and Republicans alike have to stop their complicity in this swindling of poor people who rely on Cook County.

Trib promises the challenger no rose garden.

[E]xpect to hear Peraica accused of many things [between now and Nov. 7]. You won’t, though, hear him accused of being less than maniacally diligent about his public work. For four years he has teamed with Republicans and reform Democrats on the County Board to downsize featherbedded offices, expose county corruption and stymie John Stroger’s planned tax hikes.

Maniacally diligent, yes.  No candidate has worked harder to be elected or made more sense in the process.  If this be an endorsement, make the most of it.  Meanwhile,

The Democratic politburo prays that a disgusted electorate won’t show up, so that party loyalists armed with palm cards can elect Stroger.

So the race comes down to this: Will fed-up Democrats–the thousands of reformers who supported Forrest Claypool in his primary race against John Stroger–now help Peraica? If they do, they can help to finish what Claypool started.

Yes.

================

From Reader Jake:

Having worked for Cook County for 16 years, I agree that it is “a squalid playpen for political cronies who pillage it for jobs and contracts.”  You wouldn’t believe how squalid it is.  If I still lived in Cook County I would certainly vote for Peraica, even though I am a registered democrat.  John Stroger was a con artist, and I’m sure that the same is true for Todd.  Anyway, Todd doesn’t know diddly-squat about Cook County.  Hell, I probably know more than he does.

Chi Trib has some good stuff in its Metro section today, in which it shows what it can do to beat the smaller-staffed Sun-Times locally.

* Excellent religion story tells of Poles come to study and be ordained here for service here.  Anyone who has checked ordination info in recent years knows how few new priests come from the Chicago area.  This would be no-priest-land if it weren’t for outlanders.  No wonder Quigley (prep sem) is being closed.

The story is in nice contrast to breathless accounts-for-sale by the Sun-Times religion woman, who works hard and gets all over breaking stories but gets a lot of space sometimes at the expense of relevance to most churchgoers, I think.  Today’s, for instance, is a silly thing about what Jesus would sound like, a venture into the merely curious to which newsies are tempted no matter their specialty.  Such stories assume there are not enough readers to justify church stories except in crises or emergencies.

* A very good story about the Principal Who Couldn’t make reform stick is in the Trib (but not in Sun-Times).  The principal rubbed too many people the wrong way, and without the writer spelling it out — the story is played quite straight — it looks as if they trumped stuff against her downtown, as one may deduce from this:

Chicago Public Schools officials said Stoxstell was fired for “disregarding directives” from her area supervisor, but there were no allegations of misconduct. A top administrator said that parents were disgruntled with some of her decisions and that staff morale was a problem. Administrators said one decision–to punish students for a food fight by making them eat peanut butter sandwiches instead of a regular hot lunch–played a role in her firing. 

This came after a year in which the percentage of students meeting test standards rose from 19 percent to 33 percent.

* Both papers have the arrest of the apparent murderer of three women, but again the Trib beats S-T with coverage.  Its “Slain mom pleaded with son, [bond] court told” is missing the S-T story detail about his stabbing her “in the throat,” but has much more detail, even allowing for earlier S-T stories.  It’s a horrendous story that deserves such reporting.   

* The Trib and others are being sued by an ex-U. of Ill. and -NBA player now an announcer for mixing him up with another ex-NBA player in reports of an assault of an eight-year-old girl in Florida.  Trib apologized and retracted the next day, but the man is claiming “reckless disregard” for the truth.  Whether that’s so or not is to be decided, but the term is a stopper.  Not that it’s a new one but that it gives pause to anyone reporting anything, whether in danger of law suit or not and it’s at the heart of much of today’s debate about media reliability, stories gone wrong, etc.  What’s reckless and what isn’t? we may ask.

Trib op-ed writer Victor Davis Hanson gets at this issue, I think, with his commentary about the latest Bob Woodward book and two others, accusing them of presenting “pseudo-history,” replete with endnotes and other scholarly paraphernalia.  They use them to give credibility, but the sources are not identified and so their claims are not verifiable.  But historians cite materials available to all, for checking. 

These writers supply only the “veneer” of history, however.  “Seven knowledgeable” sources are Woodward’s foundations, but even in post-publication discussion these do not come forth.  It’s “gossip,” Hanson says.

[W]ho are these “seven knowledgeable” sources? Since Woodward so far won’t name them, how do we really know that they are “knowledgeable” or even “primarily” used? Is the answer because they talked to Woodward (and not to others?), or were [they] pre-selected because they happened to agree with his own views?

In “Cobra II” [another of the books], we wonder why one “former Centcom planner” would talk while others (more numerous?) choose not to. And in “Fiasco” [the third], is the talkative but unnamed “Bush administration official” getting even [with] his rivals by offering only his interpretation of shared past conversations?

These are reasonable questions.

* Meanwhile, Bears players menace reporters at a news conference, and S-T columnist Rick Telander is not amused, even if Bears p.r. people “chuckled” and “Bears family heir and special projects manager Pat McCaskey laughed like a hyena.”  Telander describes a very bad scene.  But you (I) have to wonder, were they getting back at reporters because of that awful Sun-Times front page the other day filled with the Urlacher head shot and the screaming “Pay up, Papa Bear”? 

Urlacher, a bonafide football hero, had been told to increase support payments if he wanted to see more of his and the mother’s child, born out of wedlock.  It’s a messy court case, but the menacing look in a linebacker’s eyes is not to be transposed to the court room, nor is Urlacher to be called “Papa Bear,” even if he’s a father and a Bears player.  That title is reserved for the Bears (& NFL) founder, the late George Halas.  I’m not much of a fan, but that got my cork.

* Finally, we have Mel Gibson telling AP that “even after a couple of drinks you lose all humility . . . and you just become a braggart and a blowhard.”  Who?  Speak for yourself, Mel.