Civilization saved: Film at 11

Well, that settles THAT!

You can understand why the Fair 'n' Balanced Network had the champagne ready for a "Trump style" success:

President Trump declared Thursday "a great day for civilization" as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced terms of a cease-fire agreement that would end violence between Turkey and Kurds in Syria, following a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara.

The deal is for a 120-hour cease-fire, during which time the Kurdish-led forces could pull back from the roughly 20-mile-wide safe zone on the Turkish-Syrian border. All Turkish military operations under the recent offensive known as Operation Peace Spring will pause during that time, and the operation itself will come to an end entirely upon the completion of the Kurdish withdrawal, under the terms of the deal.

"This is a great day for civilization," Trump declared in a tweet following a press conference where Pence and Pompeo discussed the deal. "I am proud of the United States for sticking by me in following a necessary, but somewhat unconventional, path. People have been trying to make this 'Deal' for many years. Millions of lives will be saved. Congratulations to ALL!"

Always good to know that civilization has been pulled back from the brink, even though Fox's enthusiasm doesn't seem to be universally shared:

Hmm. If these two natural enemies can't agree, maybe we should ask an impartial referee. Associated Press, are you there?

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — The U.S. and Turkey agreed Thursday to a five-day cease-fire in the Turks’ attacks on Kurdish fighters in northern Syria to allow the Kurds to withdraw to roughly 20 miles away from the Turkish border. The arrangement appeared to be a significant embrace of Turkey’s position in the weeklong conflict.

After more than four hours of negotiations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said the purpose of his high-level mission was to end the bloodshed caused by Turkey’s invasion of Syria. He remained silent on whether the agreement amounted to a second abandonment of America’s former Kurdish allies in the fight against the Islamic State.

Must be some static on the line. How does it look elsewhere in the neighborhood, Ha'aretz?

Turkey agreed to suspend its military operations in northeast Syria on Thursday, after a meeting that lasted longer than five hours with top U.S. officials.

This came a day after President Donald Trump threatened Ankara with heavy sanctions over the operation, and, according to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, with no concessions to Turkey.

Turkey said the U.S. had agreed to put it in charge of an elusive 'safe zone' in the war-torn region, and to the complete withdrawal and effective disarmament of its Kurdish opponent. 

What's that gurgling sound? Could it be -- the failing* New York Times?

 ANKARA, Turkey — Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday said Turkey had agreed to suspend its military operations in northeast Syria for five days while Syrian Kurdish fighters left the area, immediately raising questions about whether the agreement was a diplomatic breakthrough or a capitulation to the Turkish government.

Emerging from close to five hours of deliberations with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Mr. Pence said that the American delegation had achieved the cease-fire it had hoped to broker in the hastily organized trip to Ankara, the Turkish capital. Hailing the agreement as a diplomatic victory for President Trump, he called it a ‘‘solution we believe will save lives.”

The agreement “ends the violence — which is what President Trump sent us here to do,” Mr. Pence said at a news conference at the ambassador’s residence.

But Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, immediately countered that the agreement was not a cease-fire at all, but merely a “pause for our operation.” He added that “as a result of our president’s skillful leadership, we got what we wanted.”


Enough carping. I mean, look at the other stuff topping the Fox homepage:

Hillarygate, Bidengate, Stupidgate and CNNgate III -- maybe we should just let them have their fun.


* Up 32.5% in the past year at this writing, compared with 5.25% for the Dow industrials.

Which is it, young feller?

Spare a thought for our friends in the trenches of the party press machine, desperate for some guidance as the powers that be argued about bigger things. Is the problem that the Kenyan usurper doesn't have a story (that's the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal, above), or that he does?

The Obama administration rushed Wednesday to portray the swift return of 10 U.S. sailors taken captive a day earlier by Iran as a vindication of the president’s diplomatic outreach to Tehran, but a video showing the disarmed, kneeling American sailors being watched by Iranian guards and one of the sailors apologizing to his captors quickly undercut the administration’s self-congratulatory message.

The "apology video," as it seems to be known at the Times, seems to be the core of the problem. No matter how much officialdom might have denied offering an apology, there's this, as reported by Fox:

“It was a mistake. That was our fault. And we apologize for our mistake,” the sailor said, in a brief state TV clip posted on Twitter by a journalist with Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.

Which sounds a lot more like trying to talk yourself out of a traffic ticket than -- what do you suppose a real state-to-state apology would sound like, The Washington Times?

China released the 24 hostages of a U.S. surveillance plane held for 12 days after receiving a Bush administration letter saying the United States was "very sorry" for the plane's landing on Hainan island without verbal clearance. 

Oh. Well, back to that in a second. As a serious national news organization, of course, the Times is careful to let the usurper's minions deny their guilt:

Top administration officials pushed back strongly at the notion the incident was a sign of weakness and an indictment of President Obama’s approach to Iran. Mr. Kerry credited the incident’s fast resolution to the “critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country secure and strong.”

“We can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago,” when the level of trust between the two capitals was far lower, Mr. Kerry added.

Instead of imagining, why don't we just look back to 2001 and see how a real American president handled things:

President Bush stepped up pressure on China yesterday, telling Beijing "it is time" to release 24 U.S. service members held from what China is calling "protective custody" but which the United States says is detention.

"We have allowed the Chinese government time to do the right thing," Mr. Bush said. "But now it is time for our servicemen and women to return home. And it is time for the Chinese government to return our plane."

President Bush would have disappointed, for example, Ted Cruz, who just proclaimed that anybody capturing US service personnel is gonna pay for it. On the whole, though, which case do you figure might have the evildoers feeling more nervous: the one where the US keeps quiet in public and gets its sailors back the next day, or the one where two weeks of posturing ended in an actual apology? 

Thanks, liberal media!

Given the morning paper's avowed intent to "correct all errors of fact," I'm looking forward to how the Tuesday edition addresses this, hem, interesting claim about the state of things in the Fractious Near East.

Needless to say, we're in no position to prove the negative here. I can no more "prove" that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons than I can "prove" that the Free Press doesn't import large amounts of cocaine for the orgies at which it sacrifices innocent young interns to the unquiet ghost of Father Coughlin. I do think it's in order to suggest if the Freep is ready to demonstrate that Iran has nuclear arms, the story ought to be a little higher on the front -- and, conversely, that if it isn't, it should probably stop pretending to cover the world outside the tri-county area until it can distinguish nuclear research from nuclear weapons at better than chance levels. If we can't make people smarter about the world outside, at least we can avoid deliberately making them stupider.

Because ... he died in 1989?

There is, as alert readers might have noticed, a pretty straightforward problem with Thursday's Obama Shock Outrage question: Mistah Khomeini, he dead. Thus it's kind of fun to trace the tale back through the journalistic checkpoints to its apparent beginnings. (Yes, you can draw conclusions about the quality of Near East reporting these sources provide.)

The Fox Nation -- which, oddly, managed to find a picture of the right guardian/jurisprudent for the homepage -- borrows both its film clip here and its text from the Daily Caller, as credited in the insert:

During Thursday’s White House briefing, the Associated Press’ Jim Kuhnhenn interrogated press secretary Josh Earnest over the Obama administration’s unequal treatment of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Not entirely true, but hang on a second:

Kuhnhenn asked the White House flack why the Ayatollah is getting “the benefit of the doubt” from the administration over comments about the Iran deal last week, but Netanyahu does not after his comments that there would be no Palestinian state.

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Today in making things up

Well -- not exactly. Actually, not at all. But with a little head-fakery on an otherwise innocent AP report, the Fair 'n' Balanced Network manages to push a made-up story. And once you've made the Drudge homepage, your work is done.

Here's what the AP reported Friday:

The U.N. nuclear agency said Friday that its attempts to probe allegations that Tehran worked on nuclear weapons were deadlocked — a finding that all but rules out hopes of full nuclear deal between six world powers and Iran by the Nov. 24 target date.

And the version that was Fox's No. 3 tale this morning, under the "Agency claims Iran still working toward nukes" hed shown above:

Hours after the UN’s nuclear agency said that its attempts to investigate allegations that Iran worked on nuclear weapons, an Iranian opposition group claimed to have information showing the country is still working toward nuclear weapons.

See the pivot foot move? Clumsy grammar aside, Fox is grafting one set of claims onto another, allowing a for the bogus hed (after the story fell downpage, the switch was even clearer: "UN agency claims Iran still working toward nukes"). Fox is simply having a little more fun with the opposition press conference, which AP discusses in its 11th graf:
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With any luck, it might be true

Wow, that all-purpose image of Sad Panda Usurper is coming in handy these days!

President Obama reportedly penned a secret letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month discussing their shared interest in fighting the Islamic State -- a development one congressional source told Fox News "f***s up everything."

Guess you've got him this time, right?

... A senior congressional source told Fox News that there is not anything definitive as to whether the letter even exists. But the source indicated they don't doubt that it's true because "we've seen [the president] do it before, so there is [a] precedent."

Well, there's some high-quality sou***ng for you. And was it just last week that Fox had a lecture for us on how not to talk about other people's heads of government?

The White House on Wednesday sought to tamp down the controversy over a magazine piece that detailed deep tensions between the U.S. and Israel – and quoted an unnamed senior Obama administration official calling the Israeli leader a “chickenshit.” 

Why, that's just ...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Tuesday accused the administration of “hurling expletives” at the Israeli leader.
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Today in journalism history

Just to help put matters into perspective, here's how the Nation's Newspaper of Record covered political violence in the Fractious Near East on this day in 1947.
 
It's worth noting, among other things, how little is new in the world: the terrorists employ up-to-date communication technology ("a typewritten communique ... saying 'We did it'") and describe their motive: on the eve of "conferences on the future of Palestine," they promise to "'destroy these evil intentions' of Britain toward Palestine."

And this, toward the end of the dispatch:

At the Rafia detention camp twenty of about 800 Jewish detainees were told they had been sentenced administratively to another year of detention. None has been brought to trial. Twenty-nine others were released yesterday.

Is there a particular reason occupying powers think they're going to win hearts and minds by telling prisoners, in effect, that we tossed a coin and you're sticking around another year?

If this really was 1947, I'd read about the presidential address in the World's Greatest Newspaper. At least we still have the Fair 'n' Balanced Network to keep fear at the proper boil.

That corrections policy

"The Free Press corrects all errors of fact," we're told every day on page 2A. OK, let's see how long it takes to fix this self-induced error. The disappearance wasn't "in Israel"; it was in the West Bank near Hebron. There's a difference, and it's the sort that the Free Press used to pride itself -- given the local population dynamics and all -- on getting right.

Owing mostly to the current unpleasantness in Iraq, US news culture is in one of those rare periods in which the stuff normally denigrated as "that Mideast trivia" -- say, how the current borders got to be the way they are -- is all of a sudden abnormally salient. That's likely to fade as soon as a new squirrel distracts our little friends at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, but it's a useful reminder that details matter. We do this journalism stuff, after all, so members of the (potentially) voting public can form opinions that actually reflect their interests. If we can't tell which side of a border something is on, or why that distinction might make a difference in understanding the information that's presented, we really don't have much of a claim on the public dime, do we?

A few sharp victories ...

... some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colourful entry into the capital! Since some poltroon has laid claim to "Daily Beast," we shall have to look instead on what appears to be the Daily Mail's policy for the war.

Boosted by the teaser "Impeachable?" at the Drudge Report, WND sends those readers who can spare a moment from stockpiling gold and freeze-dried food to an EXCLUSIVE review of the new WND epic "Impeachable Offenses?" at the Mail. Little therein will surprise you if you're familiar with the Mail as a print or online product, but the Mail's explanation of the Iran-contra follies in relation to BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!! is particularly enlightening:

It's difficult to read without drawing parallels with the 1980s-era arms-for-hostages deal that brought charges against 13 Reagan administration officials, many of whom received pardons from President George H.W. Bush before they could be tried.

That case, although different in many crucial ways, put arms in the hands of Iranian rebels and was originally conceived as an unlikely scheme to use Israel as a middle-man to supply them. Later on, the plan was modified to use some of the proceeds from the sale to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.

One of those "crucial ways" might be that the "Iranian rebels" were (oh, how do you put this?) the Iranian government. Iran was in the middle of a protracted and very old-fashioned war with Iraq, which we liked rather better despite its occasional tendency to attack American warships and use chemical weapons on the battlefield (which the Iranians did too, though less effectively) and against uppity civilian populations. But the powers that be seemed to think that some advanced antitank and antiair missiles -- this part is generally considered "negotiating with terrorists," which itself is an interesting lesson in how interchangeable "terrorists" and "government" are as concepts -- would help the Iranians encourage their friends in Lebanon to, you know, and if a little extra money is diverted to some actual rebels* in the bargain, who cares? Let's let the Mail provide more context!

... Weapons delivered secretly to overseas agitators, as Iran-Contra later showed, can bring unintended consequences. A generation later, the Muslim sect marching Iran toward nuclear weapons are successors to the rebel group the U.S. armed in the 1980s.

That's certainly a lesson we want to -- umm, march toward with. It could also lead us to wonder again why it is that people get information from the Daily Mail. Except for that colourful entry into the capital!

* The Contra movement was anti-Sandinista (partly because some of it was disgruntled Sandinista) but not anti-communist in any meaningful way; the Sandis and the Nicaraguan communists never really got along anyway.

Two Minutes Hate

No peeking, now: How many times in this 523-word Fox story* do you suppose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the incarnate spawn of Satan there, staring lustfully at his "Crude Behavior"  -- is mentioned?

a) 0
b) 1
c) 5
d) 10

Did I not just get done saying "no peeking"? Yes, your correct answer is "a," none. Why waste space explaining what the illustration has to do with the text when -- you know, Iran! At least it isn't the file photo of Ahmadinejad in a lab coat, wandering among tall scary tubes, that appeared on the front page Feb. 20, Feb. 15 and Jan. 12.**

As Fox turns up the heat for war, it's no surprise to see Ahmadinejad on the Two Minutes Hate list. But let's not put all the blame on Fox here -- at least, not until we check in on the discussion of rational-actor theory over at the National Review Online. Here's the kickoff:

He (the chairman of the Joint Chiefs) has described Iran as a “rational actor.” I write in my column, “Really? Hope he’s right. A lot hinges on that . . .”
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Thanks, liberal media!

Setting aside for a moment the unusual delight of seeing international news on the front pages of the regional press, let's consider where this piece* sits in the great scheme of things.

In US press-and-policy terms, the hed at top is the extreme left: a McClatchy Washburo story in a college-town paper, containing a few reasonably informed voices that actually put the "defiance" into context, sorta, but no immediate demands that Tehran be turned into a pile of rubble with a permanent night-light on top. The center and the right, you can figure out for yourselves.

That's the early 2012 edition of why the American press remains a realism-free zone. There's simply no room for the idea that being thuggish (and Iran is, to the extent we can see through the opacity) isn't the same thing as being childish or insane, or the related idea that if we want a regime to stop doing something, the first step is figuring out why the regime thought it was a good idea in the first place. I don't expect the mullahs' feelings are hurt by the random jingoism of American headlines, and I really wouldn't care if they were. I do think the reading public would be better off if it had regular access to news that had less "defiance" and more "compared to what."

The smaller hed at right is --surprise! -- from the notionally liberal partner in the local JOA. Dear cousins downtown: If you're ready to demonstrate to your readership that Iran has "nukes," you sort of owe that information a spot on the front page. If not, you might want to avoid casual fabrications like the one here. People might take it seriously.

* Heds aren't, we should note, written by reporters

Of inventors and clues

All those nice rules that make heds tighter and shorter -- drop the auxiliaries, drop the articles, drop the linking verbs, and the like -- can also turn a once-simple phrase into a crash blossom on short notice. Such is the issue here as our friends at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network do their best to perform damage control on Newt Gingrich's foray into the Balfour-era politics of the Near East. Gingrich dresses up a familiar set of talking points:

"Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community," Gingrich said.

... and in the breathless syntax of the homepage, we get "Candidate draws fire for saying Palestinians 'invented' people." I mean, you could see them inventing the Internet or the compact disc or algebra, but the whole human race?
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"9/11" is not an excuse for silly

Hard to say who's more at fault here -- a Washington Bureau reporter who has no idea what he's writing about, or a desk that fails to challenge the reporter's cluelessness, then amplifies it in a first-person headline. Let's get straight to the point:

When terrorists attacked New York and Washington in 2001, the Middle East was firmly in the control of authoritarian leaders. Some of them were staunch allies of the United States who tolerated the growing threat from Osama bin Laden.

Irrelevant to the extent it's true, and false to the extent it's relevant, but go on.

A decade later, bin Laden is dead, al-Qaida has been set back and the autocrats in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan and, at least for now, Yemen have been swept from power by their own people — a series of sometimes deadly protests and battles now known as the Arab Spring.

OK. This should be a hint. "Spring" doesn't last 10 years. (The "Prague spring" began in spring, but it wasn't spring 1958). Conflating the US invasion of Afghanistan with the "Arab spring" -- let alone the killing of bin Laden and assorted setbacks to the Qaida organization -- is the sort of breathless fawning that gave the Dispatch of old its reputation as a happy prancing tool of the hard Republican right.
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The land of strange corrections

Why do newspapers correct what they correct? Let's observe and speculate a little:

A review of the "Charlotte Squawks" prouduction* in Sunday's State&Local section gave an incorrect song lyric in a number mocking County Manager Harry Jones. The correct lyric was: "Harry makes the moolah rain."

OK, that's good to know. Glitch on a parody lyric in the yearly roast of local notables and you get a correction in your folder. Flatly misstate a contentious yet straightforward issue of foreign policy ("Obama endorses 1967 borders for Israel," say), and -- three weeks and counting?

But enough about the Fractious Near East. What are we correcting with the correction here: Noun? Verb? Party affiliation? Intonation? Let's see (the tune is "Jolly Holiday" from "Mary Poppins," if that helps):

Oh, it's a money giveaway with Harry;
Harry is the gravy train.
Tell him that your lawsuit will be scary,
Harry makes the mulah rain!

If you think it's nearly unheard-of for newspapers to correct spelling errors, take the square root of that and multiply it by "archaic slang terms with multiple recognized spellings" to get an approximate likelihood of this one.

So what's the point? Did somebody think the spelling as originally given meant -- God forbid -- "mullah" or something? As in Our Kids and Teens will be bowing toward Mecca any day now? Because it's totally going to spoil the joke if "mullah," dating to 1939, is among the OED's variations on "moolah."

Insights on how this correction came about, of course, are welcome.

* I don't want to get into the (sic) habit, but it's a correction, dammit. So (sic).

On clues and having them

Let's take a moment and say nice things about the AP for being unusually forthright with those annoying facts (most of them) and their pesky context:

In a Mideast policy speech on Thursday, Obama gave unprecedented prominence to Washington's long-held stand on the future borders of Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. Although his comments did not substantively differ from previously articulated U.S. positions, he sent shudders through the Israeli leadership by acceding to Palestinian pressure to explicitly enunciate this stance.

An essential part of what Obama proposed was that Israelis and Palestinians would also have to agree to land swaps that would allow Israel to hold on to major Jewish settlements, a point Netanyahu failed to mention when he declared the 1967 lines to be militarily "indefensible."

OK, it's not perfect. Talk about the West Bank and Gaza borders has generally left Jerusalem aside as an issue to be dealt with later, and why this is "acceding to Palestinian pressure" -- or why this statement counts as "acceding to pressure" while telling the Palestinians not to mess around at the UN or make too nice with Hamas doesn't -- remains a mystery. But you have to admit it's a pretty good start.

So good, indeed, that the Fair 'n' Balanced Network was stuck with that admission in its lede story until it could improve things with a staff version:
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When in doubt, make stuff up

Minor flaw with the "shocker" hed from the Fair 'n' Balanced Network: It isn't true. It's, um, false. It's made up. It's bogus. If you're wondering why you haven't seen that claim in grownup coverage of today's events, that could have something to do with it.

Here's the relevant bit from today's address (give Fox credit for posting the text, which shows the hed to be an out-and-out lie):

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.
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