MORE EMBARRASSMENT FOR THE U.N.:

AUSTRALIAN soldiers drew arms to protect themselves from Jordanian peacekeepers after a Digger blew the whistle on other Jordanian soldiers’ sexual abuse of East Timorese boys.

Corporal Andrew Wratten had to be evacuated and Australian commandos sent to protect Diggers in Oecussi, an East Timorese province in Indonesian West Timor, after he told the UN of the pedophilia that occurred in May 2001. . . .

Corporal Wratten, who was working at a fuel dump in the enclave, was told by a group of children that Jordanian soldiers had offered food and money in exchange for oral sex and intercourse.

The allegations involved East Timorese minors, all boys, the youngest of them just 12 years old.

Another in a long string of disgraces.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE HOOPSTERS: Swoosh!

ASTROTURFING CAMPAIGN FINANCE “REFORM:” John Fund observes:

If a political gaffe consists of inadvertently revealing the truth, then Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, has just ripped the curtain off of the “good government” groups that foisted the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill on the country in 2002. The bill’s restrictions on political speech have the potential for great mischief; just last month a member of the Federal Election Commission warned they could limit the activities of bloggers and other Internet commentators.

What Mr. Treglia revealed in a talk last year at the University of Southern California is that far from representing the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, the campaign finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by liberal foundations like Pew. In a tape obtained by the New York Post, Mr. Treglia tells his USC audience they are going to hear a story he can reveal only now that campaign finance reform has become law. “The target audience for all this [foundation] activity was 535 people in [Congress],” Mr. Treglia says in his talk. “The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere [Congress] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.”

Ironic, isn’t it, that a movement supposedly about getting secret money out of politics seems to have been fueled by just the sort of behavior it deplored.

UPDATE: Reader John Steele emails: “They never deplored money in political speech, they just wanted to make sure that theirs was the only money and speech involved.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Brian Linse says that the difference is that in Armstrong Williams’ case the money came from the government. Well, to taxpayers that’s a difference — but payola is payola, isn’t it, from the perspective of the reader?

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

CULT UPDATE: A while back I posted with a question about an iPod Shuffle for a 9-year-old. In response, I bought one (this one, the cheap model) for the Insta-Daughter. She likes it a lot, and it holds audiobooks just fine (right now it has an Audra & The Antidote album, an Avril Lavigne Album, some Bangles songs, and the audio version of A Wrinkle in Time with plenty of room left over).

“HEAVY UNREST” in Kyrgyzstan.

HOWARD KURTZ writes that USA Today has some of the tightest sourcing rules around:

The veteran Gannett editor has also imposed strict rules on the use of anonymous sources, which some reporters say go too far and limit their ability to compete on stories. No information attributed to a “senior administration official” has appeared in USA Today since December, largely because of Paulson’s crackdown. Even such formulations as “Democrats opposed to Bush’s Social Security plan” are barred unless some names are included, and the use of unnamed sources has dropped about 75 percent.

To grant someone anonymity, Paulson says, “you have to go to a managing editor, identify that source — which was at the heart of the Jack Kelley mess — explain why we trust that source and how it moves the story forward.” Paulson also runs Jones’s picture on the editorial page, inviting feedback — because, he says, past complaints about Kelley never reached or were dismissed by senior editors.

Kurtz notes that some USA Today staffers think that these rules make it hard to compete with other big papers. But Kurtz’s next item makes me wonder if those other big papers don’t need to do some tightening-up of their own:

How did The Washington Post manage to report that a Gridiron Club skit had lampooned commentator Armstrong Williams when the skit never took place?

“It was a goofball mistake on my part,” says Post reporter Neely Tucker, who corrected it after the first edition and apologized to Williams. He says journalist sources told him of the planned skit — working reporters are barred from the annual event — and that he only learned later that it had been dropped.

Remember this when people accuse blogs of reprinting rumors without checking them!

SOON WE WON’T NEED THE RECORD COMPANIES: OurMedia.org has launched. And J.D. Lasica has some thoughts on what it all means:

Marc and I believe that real change in the mediasphere will only come about when millions of us pick up the tools of digital creativity. The tools are now at hand. Let’s go.

I think they’d welcome some additional volunteers, too.

FIONA APPLE HAS A HIT with an album that the record company refused to release. Thanks, BitTorrent!

JOHN F. BURNS sends a report from Iraq that echoes the cautiously positive tone of a number of emails that I’ve gotten from people lately.

Meanwhile, my secretary, whose deployment is coming to an end, sends a report. Click “read more” to read it.

(more…)

THE CIVILLY NAMED BLOG, I Disagree with Maureen Dowd has some interesting stuff on Video News Releases, etc., and who uses them, and how they’ve been covered. As I mentioned earlier, the phenomenon is shown to be older, and more widespread, than much recent coverage suggests. “Fake news” has a long history — even at The American Prospect, as Mickey Kaus is noting in the item below.

MICKEY KAUS:

How is the American Prospect different from Armstrong Williams? . . .If the New York Times took more than $100,000 from General Motors to produce a special issue on Regulation in the Auto Industry, wouldn’t there be a stink? Why is it any different if you substitute “Carnegie Corporation” for “General Motors” and “campaign finance regulation” for “auto regulation”–and American Prospect” for “New York Times”?

I don’t think it is. But it will be covered differently.