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Wednesday, November 14, 2007 |
FLASHBACK: News Corp And Fox News Have A Long, Chummy Relationship With Rudy Giuliani.  In a new lawsuit, former book publisher Judith Regan, who ran HarperCollins, claims that an unnamed executive at her parent-company, News Corporation, “encouraged her to lie to federal investigators about her past affair with Bernard B. Kerik.” Regan says the “executive wanted to protect the presidential aspirations of Rudolph W. Giuliani.”
Though a News Corp. spokesperson dismissed the lawsuit as having “no merit,” Giuliani and the company — specifically its subsidiary Fox News — have a long-history of friendship and preferential treatment. In fact, Fox’s start was directly aided by Giuliani when, as mayor of New York City, he “intervened” after the company was “blocked from securing a cable station in the city”:
In 1996, when Mr. Ailes and Rupert Murdoch started Fox News, Mr. Giuliani intervened as mayor after Time Warner cable refused to carry the new station in the city. Time Warner, which had 1.1 million subscribers in the city, said it had room for only one more news station, which it had just awarded to MSNBC.
Fox accused Time Warner of trying to protect CNN, which Time Warner was buying. On Sept. 20, 1996, Mr. Ailes called Mr. Giuliani to ask for help. A flurry of meetings followed, but Time Warner did not budge. Three weeks later, the Giuliani administration said it would broadcast Fox News on a municipal-run station, citing the benefits of offering diverse news sources and protecting the 600 jobs Fox had created. […]
But a federal judge blocked his plan, calling it “special advocacy” to “reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint.” The companies came to terms the next year.
As the New York Times noted in August, that friendly relationship has resulted in lopsided, favorable coverage by the cable news channel of Giuliani’s presidential campaign:
So far this year, one political journal found, Mr. Giuliani has logged more time on Fox interview programs than any other candidate. Most of the time has been spent with Sean Hannity, an acknowledged admirer of the former mayor, according to the data compiled by the journal, known as The Hotline. […]
Mr. Giuliani’s on-air time on Fox was 25 percent greater than that of his Republican competitor Mitt Romney, and nearly double that of Senator John McCain of Arizona. Fred D. Thompson, who has yet to formally announce his candidacy, came in second to Mr. Giuliani with 101 minutes of Fox interviews.
Fox’s Hannity, who has a prime-time show Monday through Friday and an hour-long show on Sunday nights, is such a big Giuliani booster that he has even taken to helping the former mayor raise money by introducing him at a fundraiser in Ohio.
Most recently, Fox’s Neil Cavuto hosted Giuliani for an “exclusive” interview in which Cavuto endearingly referred to Giuliani as “America’s Mayor.”
UPDATE: In July, the New York Daily News reported that Regan has “secret tapes of phone calls” between herself and News Corp. executives.
[Think Progress]
7:21:38 PM 
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WSJ Op-Ed page decries hatred of the president. (Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V) Extreme hypocrisy is far too common to take note of every time one sees it, but sometimes it is so jaw-dropping that it can't be ignored. A remarkably petulant column on today's Wall St. Journal Op-Ed page is a prime example. Its author is Bush supporter Peter Berkowitz, a law professor at George Mason University (he's also a Senior Giuliani advisor -- see update below). Berkowitz's complaint is that "Bush hatred" is so very pervasive yet is so very unjustified, and he frets about "the damage hatred inflicts on the intellect." While he acknowledges that some past Presidents were also hated, he claims "Bush hatred is different," as it's "distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue." The only specific aspect of Berkowitz's argument worth noting is how typically self-absorbed it is. As is so often the case for whining right-wing polemicists with pretenses of high-minded grievances, the whole column is actually about him and his bruised little ego. His entire "argument" is nothing more than the by-product of what he perceives to be the oh-so-unfair treatment to which he was personally subjected during two petty social events -- once at a 2004 dinner of "several distinguished progressive scholars, journalists, and policy analysts" where everyone was mean to him because he defended Bush, and a second time at a Princeton panel earlier this year when fellow panelists criticized him for defending Bush. He harbors such a grudge over how mean people were to him on those two occasions that he has converted his anger into some sort of national crisis whereby Bush critics must learn "to discipline their passions and make them an ally of their reason." But the far more significant aspect of this whole spectacle is that the WSJ Editors -- of all people -- have the audacity to publish a lecture on the grave harms of hatred towards the President. This is the Editorial Page that, throughout the 1990s, did more to infect and degrade our public discourse than anyone this side of Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge. But the WSJ Editors were actually far worse than Limbaugh and Drudge, because they put a stamp of establishment journalistic credibility on those rancid dirt-mongers, elevating them to the realm of the credible and influential. Entire books could be written on the defamatory filth disseminated by the WSJ Editors throughout the 1990s. One excellent book that covered that topic in some depth is The Hunting of the President, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. But in light of Berkowitz's self-involved civility sermon this morning, it is worth reminding ourselves of just some of the profound hate-mongering and truly deranged accusations that regularly spewed from those same pages during the Clinton presidency. First, in November of 2003, Ken Auletta in The New Yorker described the repugnant reaction to Vince Foster's death from WSJ Editorial Page Editor Robert Bartley, whom Foster partially blamed in his suicide note [via LEXIS (WSJ Editorials not available online)]: In the Clinton era, the tone of Bartley's page became more shrill. A federal judge was characterized as "Osama's Favorite Judge," and Tom Daschle, then the Democratic Majority Leader, was "the Senate's most accomplished holdup man." Bartley treated Whitewater as if it were Watergate, devoting to it what turned out to be more than three thousand pages of editorial and op-ed columns, which were later anthologized in six volumes. The page attacked deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, who killed himself not long after an editorial appeared with the headline "Who is Vincent Foster?" He left a note blaming Washington for making "sport" out of politics and singling out the Journal: "The WSJ editors lie without consequence." After the suicide, a Bartley editorial called for a special counsel to investigate Foster's death as a possible murder, and the last sentence read, "If he was driven to take his life by purely personal despair, a serious investigation should share this conclusion so that he can be appropriately mourned." In Salon in 2002, Eric Boehlert focused on the specific dirt-peddling of one particular WSJ editor:The piece [linking Saddam with the Oklahoma City bombing] was written by Micah Morrison, a senior editorial writer at the Journal who gained a certain notoriety during the Clinton years by chasing all sorts of conspiracy theories, most notably that as governor of Arkansas, Clinton was somehow associated with a drug running operation out of a remote airport in Mena, Ark. The Journal Op-Ed page routinely included false trash such as this, summarized by The Washington Times in October, 1996:David Hale, the central Whitewater witness, predicts in his first prison interview -- "it's a certainty" -- that Hillary Rodham Clinton is going to be indicted after the election, according to the Wall Street Journal. The convicted felon and former Little Rock judge also predicts Mrs. Clinton will be immediately pardoned by her husband. Former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker will also be pardoned, he told Micah Morrison, writing for the Journal's commentary page. The aforementioned Gene Lyons, who -- as a journalist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette -- tirelessly covered the Journal's rapid descent into the Rush Limbaugh Sewer, wrote in 1996 about the Editors' obsession with insinuating that Clinton bore responsibility for the murder of two teenagers in Mena, Arkansas on railroad tracks:The decline and fall of a great editorial page is a sad thing to watch, particularly when there seems no more stopping it than the onset of delirium tremens in an old friend who just can't stay off the stuff. The stuff in this case is the theory that Arkansas is one big conspiracy, and the old friend is one of the country's most prestigious and once most reliable editorial pages -- the Wall Street Journal's. Animosity towards Bush is based almost exclusively on the policies he has implemented as President. Berkowitz all but acknowledges this, as the social events that have so upset him primarily involved his defense of Bush policies and strong reactions from critics -- little things like starting a war based on false pretenses, introducing torture to our country, spying on Americans in violation of our laws, etc. Indeed, Berkowitz describes the claims of the anti-Bush panelists who were mean to him this way: They argued [that] Bush hatred was fully warranted considering his theft of the 2000 election in Florida with the aid of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore; his politicization of national security by making the invasion of Iraq an issue in the 2002 midterm elections; and his shredding of the Constitution to authorize the torture of enemy combatants. By rather critical contrast, the WSJ Editors who today published Berkowitz's self-righteous screed spent the decade tearing down a President based on the most baseless and patently false smears. And they even explicitly defended the baselessness of their Drudge-like accusations. Their very own Peggy Noonan inadvertently articulated the WSJ's motto during the Clinton presidency with her incomparably corrupt justification for spewing all sorts of fantasies about the Clintons:Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro's intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend. Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. This was all driven by an unbridled and pure hatred that was as ugly and personal as it was fact-free. The WSJ Editors bear primary responsibility for the fact that a lowly, filth-peddling gossip like Matt Drudge is the "Walter Cronkite of our era" and that Rush Limbaugh's filth is now par for our political course. All of that is bad enough. But to have to listen to them send forth into the world sermons against "Bush hatred" is really just way too much to bear.
UPDATE: As Thomas C notes in comments, Berkowitz is an official Foreign Policy Advisor to the campaign of Rupert Murdoch's favorite candidate, Rudy Giuliani, the well-known Beacon of Civility. Berkowitz is not a mere advisor to Giuliani; he's the "Senior Statecraft, Human Rights and Freedom Advisor." This obviously relevant fact is something the WSJ didn't bother to disclose when publishing Berkowitz's Op-Ed on "Bush hatred." It looks the like WSJ has already stepped it up in the journalistic ethics competition to ensure that they stay ahead of their sister outlet, Fox News.
UPDATE II: So very unsurprisingly, Professor Berkowitz seems driven in life by a bruised ego. This conservative stalwart commenced and then pursued extremely protracted litigation against Harvard when he was denied tenure in 1997 (h/t teho). His entire lawsuit was eventually dismissed in 2003. Berkowitz's presidential candidate loves to boast about his devotion to "tort reform" -- complaining about "frivolous lawsuits" and expensive "abuse of lawsuits". But Berkowitz happily takes advantage of the legal system to drag Harvard through expensive litigation all because he was denied tenure -- just like the aggressive tort-reformer Rick Santorum, who supported all sorts of legislation designed to limit personal injury and malpractice lawsuits for other people, all after his wife sued her chiropractor for $500,000 and collected $350,000. The greatest petulance and self-absorption is always found among our self-reliance sermonizing tough guys.
UPDATE III: Ironically, The Washington Post this morning has a front-page article reporting that the one thing the leading GOP candidates have in common -- including Berkowitz's Giuliani -- is their propensity for expressing crowd-pleasing contempt for Hillary Clinton: They mock her proposals, utter her name with a sneer and win standing ovations by ridiculing her ideas as un-American, even socialistic. She has become the one thing the Republican candidates for president can agree on. Hillary Clinton. Earlier this year, the senator from New York was the subject of an occasional laugh line from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. Now, the trickle has become a torrent as the leading GOP candidates seek to one-up one another in a Clinton-bashing contest aimed at energizing their party faithful. "The competition inside the GOP for who's the most anti-Hillary is going to pay dividends," said Greg Strimple, a GOP pollster and consultant who is not working with any presidential campaign. "Looking for that piece of anti-Hillary energy is what you're seeing right now." The crux of today's Republican Party is, more or less, driven exclusively by animosity of this sort. It's defined far more by common hatred of Enemies, foreign and especially domestic, than by any affirmative ideas. It is the Party of Rush Limbaugh, and few things are more absurd than listening to their adherents lecture the world on how distorting and bad the emotion of hatred is.
UPDATE IV: Speaking of absurd right-wing hypocrites motivated in life by a bruised ego, reader TD emails to remind me of the $1 million personal injury lawsuit against the Yale Club filed several months ago by conservative tough guy Robert Bork. Bork "is claiming that he fell while trying to step onto a dais to speak" and claims "the absence of a handrail or stairs caused him to fall." He "suffered" a "hematoma" (i.e., a bruise) on his leg, which burst. Needless to say, Bork is a long-time advocate of tort reform.
UPDATE V: Who could ever find anything to hate in this, on the day Peter Jennings (reading from a White House Press release) said Bush was to give his "end-of-the-war-in-Iraq speech"? Throughout the ABC News story, reporter Bob Woodruff refers to the war in the past tense ("Peter, the President landed in a plane that is called a Viking S-3B" that "in this particular war, was used to re-fuel other fighter airplanes"). At the end, Jennings said: "tonight, the President is going to describe how the war has essentially, if not officially, ended." Terry Moran then said in his report that the President, in his speech, would try to "sum up what he believes the war achieved."
 [Salon: Glenn Greenwald]
3:42:31 PM
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CIA Admits to Recording Interrogations of Top al Qaida Captives. WASHINGTON - The CIA has three video and audio recordings of interrogations of senior al Qaida captives but misled federal judges about the evidence during the case against terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, federal prosecutors revealed in a Nov. 9 court filing that was made public Tuesday.
The disclosure is unlikely to undo Moussaoui’s conviction because the agency [...] [CommonDreams.org » Headlines07]
3:25:52 PM
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Anti-Bush Sign Has Bridge World in an Uproar. In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai [...] [CommonDreams.org » Headlines07]
3:04:37 PM
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Krongard Confirms ‘Ugly Rumor’: Brother Attended Blackwater Advisory Board Meeting Yesterday. During today’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the performance of State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) revealed that Krongard’s brother — former CIA Executive Director A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard — sits on Blackwater USA’s board. Krongard vehemently denied the allegation, calling it an “ugly rumor”:
KRONGARD: I can tell you very frankly, I am not aware of any financial interest or position he has with respect to Blackwater. It couldn’t possibly have affected anything I’ve done, because I don’t believe it. And when these ugly rumors started recently, I specifically asked him. I do not believe it is true that he is a member of the advisory board, as you stated, and that is something I think I need to say.
During a break in today’s hearing, Krongard called his brother and confirmed that the “ugly rumor” was in fact true, and promised to recuse himself from any Blackwater investigations:
KRONGARD: This is in response to something I think you found important. During the break I did contact my brother. I reached him at home — he is not at the hotel. But I learned that he had been at the advisory board meeting yesterday. I had not been aware of that, and I want to state on the record right now that I hereby recuse myself from any matters having to do with Blackwater.
WAXMAN: I see. You indicated you had called your brother to ask him earlier whether he was on the board. He told you he wasn’t.
KRONGARD: Well that was about six weeks ago, and I was not aware — and this board meeting happened yesterday, and I found out just during the break that he had in fact attended yesterday.
Watch it:
One of the charges against Krongard is that he blocked a House investigation into whether weapons illegally smuggled into Iraq by Blackwater employees were then “sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.” In a Sept. 18, Waxman revealed that Krongard had ordered his investigators to “IMMEDIATELY” stop cooperating with federal investigators.
Blackwater is a State Department contractor and has received hundreds of millions of dollars of work from the government. The Bush administration has repeatedly rushed to the defense of Blackwater after the deadly September shootout that killed 17 Iraqi civilians, even promising legal immunity to the company’s guards. It also awarded a new $92 million contract to Blackwater just weeks after the shooting.
UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman spoke with Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell, who said that she didn’t know the exact date of when Buzzy joined the Blackwater board, but said “it would be accurate to say that he was invited in late July and accepted soon after.”
Transcript: (more…)
[Think Progress]
3:03:03 PM
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© Copyright 2007 Patricia Thurston.
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