Rescuers piled up bodies along coastlines hit by tsunamis that obliterated seaside towns in Asia and Africa, killing 23,700 people in nine countries, the United Nations reported Monday.
Month: December 2004
Tucker Carlson to MSNBC? Struggling Cable Channel Attempts to Outfox Fox
Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, seen currently on CNN and PBS, might find a new home: a prime-time show on MSNBC.
With the departure of host Deborah Norville, MSNBC is reportedly considering Carlson to fill the 9 p.m. timeslot. His show would lead into Scarborough Country, hosted by former Republican Congressmember Joe Scarborough. This pairing, not balanced by any avowedly liberal or progressive hosts, would arguably make MSNBC’s prime-time line-up more right-wing than Fox News Channel.
“The pattern in cable news is to imitate Fox,” said FAIR’s Peter Hart. “But MSNBC is going beyond that— it wants to outfox Fox by surpassing Fox’s partisanship. Viewers deserve diverse opinions from the media, not an uninterrupted stream of right-wing spin.”
Tucker Carlson to MSNBC? Struggling Cable Channel Attempts to Outfox Fox
Precision of base attack worries experts
In April 2003, as the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was ending, the Pentagon projected in a formal planning effort that the U.S. military occupation of the country would end this month.
Instead, December 2004 brought the deadliest single incident of the war for U.S. forces, with more than 80 casualties suffered yesterday by U.S. troops, civilian contractors and Iraqi soldiers when a U.S. base near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was blasted at lunchtime
New jail abuse allegations hit US
One of the memorandums released on Monday provided the account of an agent who observed “serious physical abuses” in Iraq.
It was dated 25 June – two months after the extent of abuse at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison was revealed – and was marked “urgent” and sent to FBI Director Robert Mueller.
It described strangulation, beatings and the placing of lit cigarettes into detainees’ ears.
Another document said an executive order signed by President George W Bush had authorised techniques such as “sleep management”, stress positions, use of military dogs and sensory deprivation.
The big media’s “moral values” myth
Like that tangled mess of Christmas lights still framing the neighbors’ house come late January, the moment is long past due to pull the plug on America’s overplayed and largely phony red-state, blue-state melodrama. There were plenty of tall tales told by the big media in 2004, from the Swift Boat boys to CBS-gate, but the idea that “moral values” — whatever the hell that really means — was the overwhelming reason that voters reelected President Bush, may take the grand prize. (Not least because the right-wing wasted no time in wrapping its long-time agenda in the blaring colors of the “values” hysteria.)
There’s a good chance you haven’t heard about it, but a recent nationwide poll of voters published by Gallup last week — and all but ignored by the big media — showed that “values” actually came in a distant fourth
Kaiser bucks the HMO trend
“What we pay for in medical care is for doing things — for operating on patients, for prescription drugs … insurers earn more when their patients do more,” says David Cutler, a professor at Harvard University. “But nobody earns more when the patients are healthier.”
But Kaiser says its influence is felt in northern California, where costs are 25 percent less than the New York area.
“We’re able to keep our members healthier; therefore, it costs less to take care of them,” says Dr. Francis J. Crosson, executive director of the Permanente Foundation
Imagine that – preventative medicine costs less overall! Isn’t that what advocates for national health care have been saying all along?
CBS and Fox: a year end tale of two networks
Quick: What major television news organization spent much of 2004 under a cloud, beset by bloggers and angry critics scrutinizing its every report for signs of political partisanship, while a string of embarrassing scandals — including a career-threatening firestorm surrounding its most high-profile anchor — eroded its credibility?
If you said CBS News, well, you’re right.
But if you said Fox News Channel, you’d be right too.
Media crisis 2004: summing up and moving forward
Some years back, I read a book about the emergence of the “post journalism era” cataloging the abandonment of a commitment to real news in the news business. It spoke of how packaging and “mechanics” and compression and infotainment defines the new uber-merged corporate media order.
At the time, that indictment seemed alarmist, and premature.
Not any more.
2004 media person of the year: Jon Stewart
In 2004, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” the popular Comedy Central program that lampoons news broadcasts, beat out traditional news shows to win the Television Critics Association’s honor for outstanding news and information programming. “The Daily Show” has been cited as an alternative source of news for a growing number of young people. In October, Stewart engaged in a widely discussed on-air verbal sparring match with the hosts of CNN’s “Crossfire” over journalism ethics.
Many readers submitted comments for posting on I WANT MEDIA. Eric Alterman, the media columnist for The Nation, said of Stewart: “Literally no one upheld the honor better of what remains of the media than did this ‘fake news’ comedian. He is our leader. How pathetic is that?”
Insurers Continue to Price-Gouge Doctors in Massachusetts Despite Dropping Medical Malpractice Payouts
According to Joanne Doroshow, Executive Director of the Center for Justice & Democracy and AIR co-founder, “These findings undermine one of the central claims of interest groups who seek to blame the legal system for doctors’ insurance woes. In fact, the study shows that the causes of and solutions to this crisis lie not with the legal system (i.e., “tort reform”) but with reforming regulation of the insurance industry, which has been unfairly charging doctors excessive rates to make up for their own investment losses.”
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