Media

When FOX Attacks...

Shortly before former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke's testimony to the September 11th commission, "the White House violated its long-standing rules by authorizing Fox News to air remarks favorable to Bush that Clarke had made anonymously at an administration briefing in 2002.

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Clear for Bush

The Clear Channel radio network says it didn't have a political agenda for canning shock jock Howard Stern, who has become an outspoken critic of President Bush. But new political contribution data shows that the network has given "$42,200 to Bush, vs. $1,750 to likely Democratic nominee John Kerry in the 2004 race," reports Jim Hopkins. "What's more, the executives and Clear Channel's political action committee gave 77% of their $334,501 in federal contributions to Republicans.

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Lights, Cameras, Capture!

"It's not in the budget, but we're doing what we have to do," said the senior vice-president for news at CBS. "Clearly, if and when Osama is found, having resources over there is going to be critical," said ABC's senior vice-president for international news. Thousands of Pakistani troops and "a dozen or so" American intelligence agents are carrying out an intensive raid against Al-Quaeda leaders believed to be in Pakistan's South Waziristan region.

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State of the News

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced a detailed report on "The State of the News Media 2004." It points to eight major trends, including the following: "Much of the new investment in journalism today - much of the information revolution generally - is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. Most sectors of the media are cutting back in the newsroom, both in terms of staff and in the time they have to gather and report the news.

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Army Runs J-School

The U.S. Army is training Iraqis, many of them translators, to be journalists. In workshops taught by military public affairs officers, students learn "things like news gathering, writing fair and balanced stories, interviewing techniques, ethics, the Associated Press Style Guide, and the role of the press in a free society," according to the U.S. Army website "Soldier Stories." "[The students] met for six hours a day, six days a week for about five weeks.

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Stern's Schwing Voters

Declaring a "radio jihad" against President Bush, radio shock jock Howard Stern "has emerged almost overnight as the most influential Bush critic in all of American broadcasting," writes Eric Boehlert, "as he rails against the president hour after hour, day after day to a weekly audience of 8 million listeners. Never before has a Republican president come under such withering attack from a radio talk-show host with the influence and national reach Stern has."

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Another WMD Post-mortem

The Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland has published a new study on "Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction," and the picture isn't pretty. "Most media outlets represented WMD as a monolithic menace, failing to adequately distinguish between weapons programs and actual weapons or to address the real differences among chemical, biological, nuclear, and radiological weapons," the report states.

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Saudi Clerics Bash U.S. Funded Channel

Two Saudi clerics have said that Muslims should not watch, work for, or advertise on the new U.S. funded Al-Hurra satellite channel. In a written fatwa, Sheik Ibrahim al-Khudairi said the channel was "founded by America to fight Islam, and to propagate massive decay to Americanise the world." Al-Hurra, which means the free one, is the latest Arabic-language media project run by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. According to U.S. officials, the channel, which will cost U.S.

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Flacks Back Shock Jocks

"If we start losing small, independent broadcasters because they can't afford the risk of getting fined on some arbitrary application of a vague standard, all we'll have left are a few big media companies." So reads a letter from the Public Relations Society of America to Federal Communications Commission Chair Michael Powell.

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