A visit to the cornerites

Roy Edroso usually does this trawling himself, but he's off traveling on business, and so invites us to view the usual idiots in his absence. Well, I did, Dear Reader, and have come back shaken, not stirred.

Re: Re: That WMD Story [Tim Graham]

From the media-bias corner, my early two cents: the anti-war media has often used inaccurate hyperbole here when they have stated there were “no” weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The discovery of a single canister of sarin makes that claim inaccurate, and the media are supposed to care about getting it right, even when they were not called upon it by top officials. For example, the January 18, 2005 Today show:

DAVID GREGORY: It's clear, sir, there's no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

President BUSH: Right.

The larger point here is that the news media are more interested in certain potential facts than in others. We found the Big Three networks just aired three and a half hours of morning and evening news coverage in just three weeks of the Haditha “Marine massacre” allegations. But they have next to no interest in digging through the Saddam archives, just as they had next to no interest in digging through Soviet archives or East German archives. Everyone should realize that the major media has a bad case of partisan tunnel vision, and not be intimidated out of building a historical record for future generations to understand.

Posted at 12:22 PM

Of course! I too turn on my evening news to view stories about the contents of "archives," particularly ones that scholars have been studying for some time, or ones turned over to the blogosphere, but from which the much anticipated "WMD files" have not emerged. Happily, though, this appears to be a replacement narrative for the increasingly forlorn "they only report the bad news from Iraq."

But, onward through the miasma.

World Cup Watch [John J. Miller]

Ghana just beat the United States at the World Cup. Downside: The Americans are done, and their overall performance in the tournament was disappointing. Upside: Beating a bunch of countries, rather than tying them or losing to them and getting an early ticket home, wouldn't have helped global attitudes toward us. Upside #2: Any Americans who were distracted by the World Cup may now return their attentions to the better and more American sport of baseball.

Posted at 12:06 PM

Damn, and I believed the stuff Bono was saying on the commercial that it "can stop a war." Not at The Corner! "They still hate 'us!' But we didn't win!" All is ideology and ideology is all.