THOMAS LIPSCOMB WRITES IN EDITOR AND PUBLISHER about why RatherGate and EasonGate are still open:

Whatever CBS and CNN may have done wrong originally, both organizations compounded it by going into a coverup mode worthy of the Nixon White House or Bernie Ebbers’ Worldcom board room. The “suits” simply ran a classic corporate crisis-management operation to prevent the important news about what had really happened in their organizations from ever seeing the light of day.

Both The New York Times and USA Today, faced with their respective newsroom fantasists, Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley, felt obliged to send their news teams back to re-report the stories in question. They then detailed their errors in full. What should CBS and CNN have done? . . .

Whatever CNN wanted to do, like Dan Rather, it didn’t do it. Like CBS it did serious damage to a brand name that had taken decades of fine work to establish. And so CNN’s latest February Nielsen ratings, post-Jordangate, dropped 21%, to about one-third of Fox’s. And this is in a day when even flagship sinecures of indispensable information like The New York Times Co. and Dow Jones are projecting hard times.

Readership and audiences of the mainstream media are dropping like a stone, but the reporting by the mainstream media on Rathergate and Easongate give little sign that anyone understands why. CJR Daily managing editor Steve Lovelady gave a pretty accurate consensus of the mainstream media’s view of what the real problem was: the bloggers did it! Rather and Jordan went down, he said, because: “The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail.”

If it takes “salivating morons” to get major news organizations to clean up their acts and remember Journalism 101, may they slobber on — before the American people stop paying any attention to big media at all. In the end, as The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz points out, Jordan only resigned “following a relentless campaign by online critics but scant coverage in the mainstream press.” Those of us in mainstream media had better ask why we didn’t do a better job ourselves.

Read the whole thing.

REPRINTING PRESS RELEASES: More fake news of the sort I mentioned below.

UPDATE: Aaron Brown discusses journalism with The Baron.

ANTI-JORDANIAN PROTESTS IN BAGHDAD: “Thousands of Iraqi Shi’ites protested on Monday after hearing reports that relatives of a Jordanian suicide bomber suspected of killing 125 people in the town of Hilla celebrated him as a martyr. After breaking into the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad and tearing down the flag, protesters called on all foreign Arabs to leave the country and denounced Jordan’s King Abdullah.” Zarqawi, of course, is a Jordanian. Very interesting. (Via The Corner).

Photo here.

UPDATE: Even Madonna is getting into the act . . . .

CATHY SEIPP WONDERS what’s wrong with Susan Estrich. She does seem to have gone over the top. Seipp says the real question is, “Why are Kinsley and his team only going after East Coast names for the West Coast’s biggest paper?”

AUSTIN BAY says it’s the era of the armed liberal. Indeed. [LATER: A predictable “heh.”]

UPDATE: Lebanon in one sentence. Pretty much!

THE PROTESTS IN LEBANON seem to be just enormous.

I hope that they’re getting the attention they deserve from world media, and especially from Arab media.

There certainly seem to be a lot of them. Crowd counts are notoriously uncertain, but the reports of over a million are certainly going to get attention, especially from people in other Arab countries. (And here’s a comparison of last week’s Hizbollah rallies with the final pro-segregation demonstrations in Mississippi.)

This is exactly the sort of thing we need to see. I hope that the Syrians are wise enough to beat a hasty retreat.

Lots more pictures here.

APPARENTLY, DAVID HOROWITZ IS NOT RECYCLING URBAN LEGENDS AFTER ALL, as Jonathan Dresner suggested in the Cliopatria item I linked earlier. But as Dresner noted, it’s good to have this cleared up, so it won’t serve as a lingering distraction.

HERE’S MORE ON KYRGYZSTAN, while Sam Jaffe observes that Lebanon is looking more and more like Ukraine.

PEOPLE HAVE WONDERED BEFORE why I like Charles Stross. Perhaps this bit of dialogue from The Atrocity Archives will illustrate:

I play dumb: suddenly my heart is hammering between my ribs. “And is this useful?”

She looks amused. “It pays the bills.”

“Really?”

The amusement vanishes. “Eighty percent of the philosophical logic research in this country is paid for by the Pentagon, Bob. If you want to work here you’ll need to get your head around that fact . . . . They’re looking for a breakthrough. Knowing how to deconstruct any opponent’s ideological infrastructure and derive self-propagating conceptual viruses based on its blind spots, for example.”

If only the Pentagon did have a section devoted to offensive philosophy and “strategic folklore”. . . . But then, it is science fiction. Or is it? Heh.

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD ADVICE TO ME:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s health services division has been publishing newspaper ads encouraging students to have emergency contraception – the so-called morning-after pill – on hand during spring break, a move that is rankling abortion critics in the state.

You’d think that anti-abortion folks would approve, unless they just don’t like the idea of people having sex, which certainly seems to be the issue in the article. My own criticism — not echoed in the article — is that they should be encouraging students to take non-emergency contraceptives with them. I mean, if you’re going to be prepared, why not be properly prepared?

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer emails:

Is that it isn’t a contraceptive. It works by preventing implantation AFTER conception. If you believe that life begins at conception (a position that even the Catholic Church didn’t take until pretty recently–the medieval Church believed that life began 40 days afterwards), then opposing the morning after pill is completely consistent.

That’s true, but there’s nothing along those lines in the article. Instead there’s stuff like this: “”an insult to women. It trivializes the marriage act to begin with, and I think it’s insulting to the self-esteem and dignity of women.”

Could they have left out the part where she says “it’s abortion!” and kept the rest? Maybe, but even for Big Media that seems rather extreme. And, of course, it’s an argument that I find unpersuasive, since I don’t believe that a zygote is a person. Then again, I don’t find the “trivializing the marriage act” bit very persuasive either.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen St. Onge points to this passage:

The pills work in complex ways, including preventing sperm and egg from joining and altering the lining of the uterus, which would keep a fertilized egg from implanting. The latter is what many abortion opponents find objectionable.

Jeez, if that was there before I don’t know how I missed it, as I was looking for just that sort of thing. But I could have, I guess; I’ve been a bit distracted today. My apologies, if so. Meanwhile Kevin Menard emails with a criticism that I agree with:

The other problem, and the part that annoys me with this ad, is it encourages unprotected sex. This is true of many methods but the whole pitch here is act stupidly and then take this and fix it. Okay but what about the rest of the problems? One college clinic I know of spends spring break stocking up for what is unofficially and politically incorrectly called STD week. Following spring break, they see more STDs than in the rest of the semester. A lot of people come home from spring break with more souvenirs than they realized. STDs are a bigger issue than we admit: 30-50% of sexually active young women have one. The military has 10% of female recruits have untreated Chlamydia. Pushing the morning after pill like that is medically irresponsible as it encourages risky behavior. After all some STDs are forever. Getting knocked up is not the only issue.

Use a rubber, folks. You’ll be glad you did.

CONGRATULATIONS to N.Z. Bear.

ECONOBLOGARAMA: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up!

HMM. I’D MISSED THIS STORY:

At 35 000 feet above the Caribbean, Air Transat flight 961 was heading home to Quebec with 270 passengers and crew. At 3.45pm last Sunday, the pilot noticed something very unusual. His Airbus A310’s rudder — a structure over 8m high — had fallen off and tumbled into the sea. In the world of aviation, the shock waves have yet to subside. . . .

One former Airbus pilot, who now flies Boeings for a major United States airline, told The Observer: “This just isn’t supposed to happen. No one I know has ever seen an airliner’s rudder disintegrate like that. It raises worrying questions about the materials and build of the aircraft, and about its maintenance and inspection regime. We have to ask as things stand, would evidence of this type of deterioration ever be noticed before an incident like this in the air?”

He and his colleagues also believe that what happened may shed new light on a previous disaster. In November 2001, 265 people died when American Airlines flight 587, an Airbus A300 model which is almost identical to the A310, crashed shortly after take-off from JFK airport in New York. According to the official report into the crash, the immediate cause was the loss of the plane’s rudder and tailfin, though this was blamed on an error by the pilots.

Not encouraging. Meanwhile, Billy Beck, who sent the link, also notes another aviation-related item that seems a bit, well, lame.

PUBLIUS has a huge Lebanon roundup. They’re estimating 1.3 million anti-Syrian protesters.

Meanwhile, in the mail is this book on Hizbollah in America — I’m no fan of coauthor Tom Diaz’s work on guns, and efforts to tie domestic gun-control agendas to antiterrorism, but I don’t know how this book stacks up. Despite his gun-control leanings, Diaz is a smart guy, and the Publisher’s Weekly review promises “a minimum of political ax-grinding,” for whatever that’s worth.

A BIG ANTI-SYRIAN MOBILIZATION IN LEBANON, according to this email from Walid Phares.

HEH: “You know it’s a dictatorship when . . . .”

MICKEY KAUS: “It’s not nice to scam Tim Russert!”

THIS is interesting:

Liberal Bloggers Reach Out to Mainstream Media

The bloggers, who describe themselves as liberal or progressive, say the conference calls are intended to counter what they regard as the much stronger influence of conservative pundits online. Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, the host of the two calls so far, views them as a step toward getting their reports out to mainstream news organizations.

While there is no way to know precisely who dialed in, reporters from news organizations including CBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, MSNBC and The National Journal asked for a call-in number, according to one participant.

Hmm. Maybe that explains this phenomenon. But the best bit is here:

Asked what lessons liberal and progressive bloggers could learn from the experience of FreeRepublic, Mr. Taylor replied that while “I’m loath to give them advice,” they might have to outgrow the conspiracy-theory stage of blogging to produce reports that are credible and relevant to a wider audience.

“In the old days of FreeRepublic,” he said, “we had all kinds of black helicopters” and speculation about the effect of the Y2K problem. After the world did not end on Jan. 1, 2000, he said, “We tried to be more realistic.”

Words of wisdom.