Pangloss

Absolutely it'll further his agenda. Has the impact of the papers been any less diminished by the additional revelation that it put people in danger? Of course not -- the media still gobbles them up, having had them dumped in their lap through no action of their own. If there were a smoking gun in there about either the current or previous administrations do you think they'd stop short of reporting it because people are already in danger from the papers' release? Already we've seen reports about civilian deaths that weren't previously reported, so it's already furthering his agenda. And as for "making him look good", what does a committed ideologue care about that? The goal is the goal, what else matters? The man shows up on camera with unkempt hair and no makeup, with his ideology on his sleeve -- I don't think he's in it for the money or the attention.

More on this from the Washington Post today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/29/AR2010072904900.html Assange, apparently moving past a raw dismissal as "rumor" that any names exist in the papers at all (guess his people didn't read them that carefully after all), today moved to a new defense, which is a pretty sweet piece of spin: I guess his people flew to Afghanistan and verified that each and every one of those 100 names (and all of their families) have changed their names and are no longer living in those areas. Riiiight. The Post story has additional information about the people in question: And why the US may not be able to save them from Taliban retribution: I guess Julian Assange didn't take that into consideration. But then, that's not his job, now is it? This isn't just about Julian Assange. It goes right to the core of the progressive notion of Transparency Uber Alles. This is a lesson in why there are limits, and why it's not actually true, this ridiculousness notion that everyone has a "right to know" everything that the government knows. I hope they learn it. ----------------- Edit: Fair enough, I acknowledge that this may be the case. I don't think it changes my opinion of Assange very much. Even if it's true, the evidence indicates that he blew it (failed to protect people), and frankly that's why it wasn't his job in the first place.

The White House says they never saw them. The reason is that he is willing to release classified information that puts people at risk in order to further his ideological goal. He may not be Osama bin Laden, but I wouldn't put trial for "war crimes" or "crime against humanity" out of the ballpark. Anybody who wants this guy off the hook will need to come up with something better than the benefit of the doubt. Uh, I think it's quite clear that they like to make examples of people who assist the US, especially by providing the US with their actual plans before they use them, causing their own people to die or be captured. Yes, I think they care about that very much. The fact that some informants may have been moved to the US is just interesting speculation. Hm, I wonder if there might be a resource available out there somewhere that the Taliban might be able to access that could tell them where those individuals might have gone. If it's not in these papers I'm sure Julian Assange will be happy to locate it and pass it along to the New York Times.

I'm simply going by what you said earlier: Why do you feel that they should have known that the data needed to be screened? Also, I'm not convinced that they "withheld several thousand documents for being sensitive" and just "missed some". I'm not convinced they did any screening at all, and weren't actually quite happy to expose as many names as possible. All we have is his word on it, and he's already given us a significant reason not to trust his word. Regardless, in his interview on the Today show yesterday he dismissed as rumor the idea that there are any names in the documents in the first place, in spite of the fact that reporters had no trouble finding them in about 24 (admittedly well-motivated) hours. He had months.

No, I don't believe that's correct. The general beef I gather from the news stories I've seen is that these are casual, "neighborhood" informants, some of whom also turned in Taliban information in exchange for favors. These people are not removed from the country -- we see stories on this all the time, jackson. Okay, fair enough, but I'm not sure he's a whole lot elevated above a terrorist. He knew people could die because of his actions, and decided that his ideological goal was more important than their lives. The really sad thing is that some people see Julian Assange as a hero.

Okay, but whatever his motivation, it's not as if he couldn't know that something like this could happen. This is a person who's deliberately acted, putting his ideological preference ahead of safety, ahead of national security (of many nations), and ahead of other people's ideological preferences. Julian Assange has wielded extraordinary power for the purpose of affecting change in society, and he's acted against at least the common-sense rules of civilized society, and against the authority of a democratically elected government that represents the will of the majority. He has forced other people to do something (learn about these papers) which we neither asked nor likely would have wanted to do, had we known about this risk. (I believe forced is the correct word, because he leveraged the mechanism of the media to do something it would not normally do.) With that in mind, here's a question to ponder: In what way is Julian Assange different from Osama bin Laden? ---------------- Edit: By the way, when the war appropriations bill finally came up for a vote yesterday in the House, more than 100 Democrats voted against it -- three times the number of nay votes as the last vote a year ago. Not a single Democratic leader spoke for the bill in the formal debate, and all of this happened in spite of a last-ditch plea from President Obama. Were it not for all but 12 Republicans voting for it, it would not have passed. http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-gaggle/2010/07/27/anti-war-left-grows-in-congress-with-latest-war-funding-vote.html Interesting bit from the above article:

The story today is that this leak has "outed" hundreds of Afghan informants by name and location. And not just people who helped Americans, but actually people who turn-coated the Taliban, giving inside information on plans and positions which lead to American attacks and captures. People the Taliban will surely now proceed to locate and kill. And all because Julian Assange hates war. That is some serious moral compromising for a pacifist. Wow. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20011886-503543.html

The old link is working for me now as well as the new one; thanks AC. It's a good article, and it answers a question that I was pondering when I first heard commentators talk about what I call the "withholding" argument (that business owners are holding back from growing their businesses). People starting saying this a while back, but they didn't have any data to back up the assertion that it's worse than before. Now it appears that they do. It's a significant statement. Thanks for passing it along.

That article may have been moved, can you try again with the link, agentchange? Thanks. Do you really feel that business owners are holding back because they don't like the president's ideological agenda? It's not been my experience that business owners are in the business of making less money when more money is available.

Currently there's a halt on all offshore drilling at "deep water" sites (not just new sites, but existing production). The original halt on sites over 500 feet deep was stopped by a lawsuit that continues, but a judge refused to support a moratorium, so the administration issued a second moratorium banning new activity by floating platforms, which is not yet being fought in court (some say it will be more difficult for the industry to attack legally). Is the moratorium necessary? I think this is a good question, and I haven't been able to fully decide, though I'm leaning toward "no" and I'm going to throw that opinion out there to spark discussion. My reasoning is that although I completely agree with the concerns being expressed about the industry not taking sufficient precautions (and the government not implementing its own rules of oversight!), we actually don't know that the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon spill is going to be all that great. It's clearly sufficient to disrupt the local economy, but money generally fixes problems like that, so the more important question is whether it is sufficient to permanently disrupt the ecology, and I don't think that question has a clear answer at all. Since the spill was cut off most of the oil has disappeared, and nobody really has a clear understanding of whether it will even cause any more problems. For all we know the fish and clams and whatnot could be edible again in months, and what has been predicted to be a disaster that will be years in recovery could just as easily be only months in recovery -- nobody knows. What we do know is that the economy of the gulf region is severely affected by a stop in deep water drilling. The cutoff has also resulted in a small but significant decrease in domestic oil production. I realize that although these numbers are large, they're a drop in the bucket of the economy as a whole. But they're not so small when you look at the economy of the gulf region, already slammed by the vast impact that the spill has had on general commerce. In some ways the spill has been a lot worse than Katrina, because of its ongoing nature and the likely long-term impact on public perception (e.g. seafood). Lifting the moratorium would not mean ending corrective action, and it would not mean restarting new drilling. Existing sites could be continued while oversight agencies seek to demand and implement updates to emergency plans and new contingency planning that take into account the problems at Deepwater. What do you all think? (Edit: Link to the above quotes.) http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0727/Offshore-drilling-moratorium-good-for-the-Gulf-bad-for-the-economy

ABC News had a piece tonight saying that the documents indicated that 95% of the bombers in Afghanistan have come from the same madrasa in NE Pakistan. So I guess they won't anymore. I realize people think it's vastly important to get all the information, which 'wants to be free', but there really is a reason that some things are kept secret. The problem is that politicians just can't resist the temptation to put things in the lockbox to save their bacon, instead of using it only for stuff that saves all our bacon.

The administration's response was this morning's major headline. Borrowing a few lines from the Bush administration, their two-pronged approach downplayed the importance of the documents while at the same time declaring their release to be a threat to national security. Oh, and of course stressed that the documents pertained almost entirely to the Bush years and not as much to the year and a half since Obama took over. (gee)

Well I guess that depends on whether you equate popularity with accuracy. I don't know that that necessarily follows in the larger concept of "democracy". Isn't the US Constitution, for example, with its checks and balanced that go not only to authoritative power but also to popular power, a pretty good argument in refutation? A statement that you can have something very much like a pure democracy, with the benefits therein, without the pitfall of mob control?

A jury finding is not a fact determination. A trial will ALWAYS make a determination, even when it lacks sufficient evidence. This is why the negation outcome of a criminal trial is phrased "not guilty" instead of "innocent". This is even more the case in CIVIL trials, like the one being discussed here. Don't we all remember that OJ Simpson was found "not guilty" in his criminal trial, but "liable for murder" in his civil case, having to forfeit all his money and property? The standard of evidence was lighter. That finding doesn't tell us if this man waived his Miranda rights or not. And therein lies a very simple problem that is not so simple to answer when you have to actually investigate crime without the benefit of hindsight and a DNA test.

But as you indicated, editorial freedom is not the only factor, so editorial freedom alone won't tell us whether we can eliminate Fox News Channel. I don't think you can say, for example, that all boxes have to be checked, including editorial freedom, and any missing checkboxs eliminates a news outlet. There's too much gray area here. I agree with you (and said earlier) that bias does not determine legitimacy or "of record" status. What I'm saying is that the prevalence of bias across the board, in spite of journalistic practices sanctioning it, tells us that nobody's perfect. And because nobody's perfect we need a relative measurement in order to determine legitimacy and "of record" status. We have to compare the outlets in a quantifiable manner, on a scale, and determine which one -- statistically -- has the least amount of disqualifying factors. Yes, if we eliminate popularity as a qualifying factor (which I agree with) then this is probably the case. But I think it's tricky specifying exactly why TV news doesn't make the cut. Here's an example of why: I'd honestly be surprised to see any news -- TV or otherwise -- whose primary purpose is to provide unbiased, unsensationalized news.

I don't think you've established that a separation of that nature helps. If that policy doesn't stop Le Monde or any other organization from violating that policy on a regular basis then what difference does a stated policy make? Even if Fox News Channel has such a policy, its detractors will just accuse it of ignoring it. But more to the point, a stated policy hasn't stopped the New York Times or the Washington Post from showing at least confirmation bias, as their own ombudsmen have indicated on numerous occasions. Also, I don't think freedom from fear of being fired is any great boon here, and strikes me as more of an ideological choice than a protection of good journalism. How do they fire the ones that don't follow the rules of good journalism, or for that matter just plain suck? Tenure is vastly overrated, and a long-standing weakness in reasoning by the science community. (And in rapid decline.) That having been said, I'm sure they have a policy, and it might be useful to take a look at it. I would imagine that, as discussed in the OP, they largely copied a policy from another major outlet, because they're attempting to generate as much credibility as possible, for what little that may be worth. This well-sourced bit from the Wikipedia article on Fox News controversies is interesting: I've seen other polls that show public confidence in media personalities to be somewhere around the level of defense lawyers and used car salesmen. People are pissed about bias in the media, and it should come as no surprise at all that an outlet that shoves the bias meter the opposite direction is seen by some as the only available option for telling these jokers and pinheads in the media what they really think. Because (IMO) even after almost a decade and a half of FNC being on the air, and a steep, rapid decline in their revenues, they're still not listening. BTW, this Wikipedia article has some good background on the history of efforts to quantify and objectively assess media bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias

Well that's something that's been changing in recent years, possibly due to FNC's influence, but clearly following a trend that has been in the works for a long time. As we recently discussed, CNN presents Anderson Cooper's show as "news", which in one sense it is (the sense that the entire network falls under the News division of the company, I suppose). But it's pretty obviously a commentary show, and it is at times outrageously inflammatory. Every outlet has problems in this area. Nobody gets off the hook on this one, not even Le Monde, which has been accused many times of mixing its news reporting with political preferences.

Yes, I did understand that earlier, but you didn't present any evidence that the jury had anything to go by other than the man's opinion, so I don't see where some legal decision after the fact, or the fact that he was ultimately found innocent (which it sure seemed to me that you were using as leverage, but if you say not, fine), has anything to do with what the police had to do at the start of the investigation. I'll leave the rest be since I know you're out of town. I wasn't trying to insult you, just make a (bad) joke -- I am sorry about that. Remember: Political discussion can be frustrating, and that's why you don't post as much here! But I wasn't kidding when I said it's nice to see you mixing it up.

Well sure, he found another way to criticize the administration, so of course he flip-flopped on a dime. But sure, I'll give him credit for taking the right stance. Bill O'Reilly actually apologized for his comments; I don't know if Beck did that, but I don't know if he has anything to apologize for.

Okay, well all of those things are the case with Fox News. Those are interesting points but they seem to point back to personal opinion. BTW, Fox News is already cited in scholarly, even peer-reviewed publications. Hell, I've seen the Wikipedia cited in peer-reviewed publications. Sure you can refine that further but I think the search for objective units of measure is ultimately a wild goose chase. At any rate, what you and Cap'n still seem to be saying is that we should all agree that Fox News is not "of record", but you can't say why in any manner that eliminates other outlets from the same judgment.

Well, if we can determine that a news source is (or is not) "news of record" on a subjective basis like "sensationalism", then why can't we also determine whether or not it is "legitimate"?

You tell me -- if it's one or more of y'all's supposition that bias removes legitimacy, then let's see the evidence, and the reason why it doesn't apply to other outlets. You'll need to establish an objective unit of bias measurement and a comprehensive study of why it applies to FNC and not other outlets, so a great deal of data will be required. Otherwise you'll have to admit that the comparison cannot be made and that therefore FNC cannot (objectively) be declared illegitimate on that basis.

But again, that stops the New York Times and CNN from being legitimate as well. Which is not something you all wish to consider -- you seem to agree that bias makes FNC illegitimate, but think that it doesn't make CNN or other outlets illegitimate. Surely you must agree that the NYT and CNN don't always get it right, but no evidence has been presented that they're wrong less often, or are less biased. Where is the evidence? If you are going to use an objective standard like that, why doesn't it apply equally to all outlets?

No, we don't know that. The fact that he was found not guilty of the crime doesn't establish that he did not waive his Miranda rights. It does not. More putting words in my mouth, more obfuscation, more misdirection. What the jury found later does not help the police at the start of the process -- as you've already agreed. I never said or suggested that the jury be ignored, nor have I said that he is guilty of anything. I clearly wrote hypothetically, in the present tense, discussing what we, clearly including the police (unless you do your own "investigations"), know at the start of an investigation. You yourself even agreed with me that the police should investigate crimes, as part of that hypothetical discussion. To summarize: 1) His innocence does not indicate whether he waived his Miranda rights. 2) His innocence does not indicate whether police coerced him. 3) His innocence does not inform us that he should not have been investigated. The reason for #1 is that we have only his word vs the police -- he said, he said. You're asking us to cross a logical boundary there, so the onus is entirely on you to provide evidence for that crossing. The reasons for #2 and #3 are that those things have to take place BEFORE innocence is determined. You're putting the cart before the horse, it's extremely transparent, and frankly you're too smart not to not know better. But hey, you're not the first guy here to put ideology over logic. Welcome to Politics, swansont! I knew we'd get you down here into the mud with us sooner or later.

Nor is the New York Times the "news of record" in any official capacity, Moon. I presented several points which may or may not be usable for determining either "legitimacy" or "news of record" status. Whether that evidence is accepted by a reader or not is up to them. What I was looking for is a discussion on the accuracy of those means of measure.