Roger Ailes Defends Beck and Fox on ABC's 'This Week'

Roger Ailes, President and CEO of Fox News, made a rare appearance as a member of the "Roundtable Dicussion" on ABC's This Week earlier this morning. Rounding out the panel was Washington Post columnist George Will, Founder of the Huffington Post Arianna Huffington, and economist Paul Krugman. There was some discussion on the election of Scott Brown to the Senate, health care, and the media, but I knew that things were going to be interesting when Ailes began the segment by offering to pose nude for $100.

By watching this discussion it is crystal clear to see why Fox News operates as it does. Ailes defends the crazy rhetoric of Glenn Beck, his network's coverage of President Obama, and the idea that Fox is a "fair and balanced" network. Also funny is how Ailes rails against other media outlets for being slanted and then proceeds to defend Beck's misinformation and spout the same Republican talking points that hosts on his channel espouse.

In Ailes' defense of Glenn Beck he tries to turn the tables on Arianna Huffington by claiming that her website calls him awful names. Ailes, just like Bill O'Reilly has done, accomplishes this by quoting from the "user comment" section of the Huffington Post and trying to project the views of some anonymous commenter onto the founder of the site. These are the fun tactics that we have come to expect from Fox and Ailes shows that not only is this part of his business model, but the views that he finds acceptable for his network. Below are the full videos of the Roundtable segment from this morning:

Obama's Rendition Program

Scott Horton has a piece up at the Huffington Post about Raymond Azar, the apparent first case of rendition that has been carried out on Obama's watch. Horton's whole piece is worth the read, but here are some clips:

According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by "at least eight" heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company's U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.

[...]

On a ride to the infamous Bagram air base in Afghanistan -- site of the torture-homicides involving U.S. interrogators exposed in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side -- Azar contends that a federal agent pulled a photograph of Azar's wife and four children from his wallet. Confess that you were bribing the contract officer, the agent allegedly said, or you may "never see them again." Azar told his lawyers he interpreted that as a threat to do physical harm to his family.

[...]

Before boarding the Gulfstream, Azar was shackled, blindfolded and had earphones placed on his head. Occasionally, the earphones and blindfold were removed so that his interrogation by FBI agents could continue. The 16-hour flight was broken by a refueling stop in Tbilisi, Georgia -- which has long served as a pit stop for rendition flights into and out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. During the flight, according to papers filed by the Justice Department, Azar confessed to the charges against him--essentially that he was aware of corrupt payments made to a U.S. government contract agent to help Sima International secure or extend its contracts with U.S. government agencies.

Azar's attorneys are now seeking to suppress that confession, arguing it was secured by torture and that Azar, a native Arabic speaker, did not understand English well enough to have given it.

Traditional Media Meet New Media

Nico Pitney is a blogger for the Huffington Post and has been live-blogging for the past several weeks on the crisis in Iran. He has developed sources within Iran, monitored social networking sites, posted images, posted videos, etc. and helped to provide a better understanding of this complex and ever-changing situation.

Before President Obama's latest press conference, which Pitney was slated to attend, he posted a note on the live-blog that he was soliciting questions from Iranians and that he would choose a question to ask should he be called upon during the press conference. President Obama did call on Pitney during the press conference and Pitney asked under what conditions would Obama accept the election of Ahmadinejad.

Pitney fully acknowledges that the White House contacted him prior to the news conference to say that the President may be interested in fielding a question from an Iranian, but both the White House and Pitney say that there was no pre-set question discussed. After all, Pitney has become known over the last few weeks for his extensive and up-to-the minute coverage. This threw the usual group of White House correspondents into a rage, especially Dana Milbank of the Washington Post who wrote the following:

Pitney asked his question, as arranged. Reporters in the room looked at each other in amazement at the stagecraft they had just witnessed. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel looked at the first row of TV correspondents and grinned.

The Huffington Post writer's question -- "under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad?" -- was a perfectly legitimate one, and, according to people involved in the arrangement, Pitney didn't share his specific question in advance with the White House.

Still, the private agreement -- to call on a questioner under condition that he ask his question on a particular topic in a particular way -- is very close to what the left justifiably deplored when there were accusations (denied by the media) that the White House was pre-screening reporters and their questions before news conferences.

So you knew that sparks were going to fly when Pitney and Milbank were both slated to be guests on CNN's "Reliable Sources":



It sounds like traditional media isn't too happy with the advances of the new media. So what happened is this:

- Pitney has become widely known for doing a very good job at live-blogging about the crisis in Iran over the last few weeks.
- Pitney was slated to attend President Obama's press conference.
- The White House contacted Pitney to say that he may be called on during the press conference and that the President may be interested in hearing a question from an Iranian.
- Pitney solicits questions from Iranians via Twitter, Facebook, and the blog in case he does get called on during the press conference.
- Pitney gets called on and asks a solid and legitimate question.
- Milbank complains that Pitney was a "plant" and that the White House had "pre-selected" Pitney and "pre-screened" his question.

I think it is clear that the criticism leveled by Milbank is rooted in his dissatisfaction that a blogger from the Huffington Post was called on to relay a question to the President from an actual Iranian. To be outraged that the White House would pre-select questions from reporters is ridiculous unless one either hasn't been paying attention to the press conferences of the last few Presidents or has been complaining about pre-selected reporters during those Presidencies as well. Milbank has done neither. Milbank's other claim, that the question was pre-arranged, appears to be flat-out inaccurate according to both Pitney and the White House. Ari Melber has some additional insight:

So the complaints of several Washington reporters are not only odd, but hard to take at face value. It is particularly rich for reporters to protest that the White House told Pitney he might be tapped for a question. Every day, a few top White House correspondents have special access in press briefings, while many reporters are never called on (seating charts are powerful). And many Washington reporters routinely, secretly grant the White House blind quotes and restrictive ground rules in exchange for access. By contrast, Pitney transparently told readers about his dealings with the White House, in real time, on his blog. The public would be better served if all media outlets took that tack, publishing any arrangements, restrictions or ground rules along with every article or interview. (Readers would be interested -- media criticism and scrutiny tends to draw traffic across the spectrum.)

Dana Milbank's outrage over what he hints at as a lack of journalistic integrity is interesting considering Milbank's appearance in things like this:



and the Washington Post fired columnist Dan Froomkin because of budgetary constraints. Call me crazy, but I would take Froomkin over videos like the one above any day.


This piece is crossposted here.

General Ricardo Sanchez Calls for a Truth Commission to investigate torture and prisoner abuse

Over the weekend during an event in New York City, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, Ricardo Sanchez, called for a commission to investigate torture and other abuses.

Sanchez was at an event that is intended to be first in a series produced by the Culture Project. Description of the event from their website:

Culture Project launches a unique, new series Blueprint for Accountability that will convene monthly gatherings to pose these questions and provide concrete tools for taking action. We will invest two years into opening a creative investigation into major themes of government, corporate and individual accountability including war crimes and torture, the economy, the environment, corporate media, criminal justice, immigration, health care, education, and global issues such as genocide and human trafficking. Our intention is to create an architectural plan for the restoration of an interactive population where citizens and their leaders are accountable to and for each other.

Rachel Maddow hosted the event and was joined by author Ron Suskind, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights Vince Warren, Ricardo Sanchez, Liev Schreiber, John Leguizamo, Julianna Margulies, Noah Emmerich, and Ramsey Faragallah. The Huffington Post reports the following on the comments of Sanchez:

The General described the failures at all levels of civilian and military command that led to the abuses in Iraq, "and that is why I support the formation of a truth commission."

The General went on to say that, "during my time in Iraq there was not one instance of actionable intelligence that came out of these interrogation techniques."

I interviewed General Sanchez after the event and asked him to elaborate on why he felt the US needed such a commission. "For the American people to really know what happened, " he replied, "...this was an institutional failure, a personal failure on the part of many...."

"If we do not find out what happened," continued the General, "then we are doomed to repeat it."

In other news that happened over the weekend and regarding torture, Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba is claiming that this quote in Britain's Daily Telegraph:

"These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."

has been wrongly labled as meaning that he had seen the photographs that the Obama Administration is currently trying to keep secret. From Salon:

"The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen," Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said -- but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.

While Taguba claims that he wasn't referring to the suppressed images, we still have Scott Horton's report that the images on these unseen photographs depict both sexual abuse and humiliation.