By: E&P Staff In today's letters, a reader thinks the Gray Lady's Bush-bashing is "undercutting everything good about this country," a call to impeach and arrest the members of the Bush administration over the NSA phone log flap, and a charge that the press is being unfair to embattled pundit Ann Coulter, who allegedly voted in the wrong Florida district.
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Coulter Not Being Treated Fairly By Press?Wow. The election process truly amazes me. One conservative columnist
votes in the wrong precinct, which, given the way Florida controls their voting it would not surprise me if they told her the wrong precinct and they want to keep her from voting and fine her $5000. This is the same election office that refuses to compare voting roles with northern states to see how many of the voters are actually registered and voting in two states every year. A violation worse that what Coulter is to have done as it gives the law breaker two votes as opposed to just one Coulter is accused of making. But [there are] never any stories about that, are there?
Dave HorchakHouston, Tex.
Past Resident of Florida
[Ann] Coulter is alleged to have voted in the wrong Town of Palm Beach precinct. One can assume, because of previous explanations of her remarks, that if she did vote in the wrong precinct she was only joking.
Pavel ChichikovWashington, D.C.
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Tony Snow Jumps Right Into the HotseatI think what you're going to see happening with
Mr. Snow will be something along the lines of an attack press office with those attacks becoming news at places like Fox. The former press secretary got caught flatfooted on too many things, NSA spying, Iraq contracting, Port Security and the every sooo popular Jeff Gannon. The new mode will be to attack and thereby keep the press responding to the attacks and thus overshadow actual events. Most probably the best approach to Mr. Snow is to let him shout to the winds and then, when he falls silent, a controlled methpane release in his direction will right the ship of the fourth estate.
Richard L. FrickerTulsa, Okla.
Thank God for Jim Axelrod and CBS News standing up to this disgusting, lying, dictatorship called the Bush administration. I'll gladly support the mainstream media when they speak the truth and quit caving and parroting the lies.
Anita MayfieldMinnesota
I'm so thrilled to see Tony Snow taking the lead in correcting media stories that don't tell us the truth. That should have been done before by the white House press corps.
Yes, there are so many good stories to tell the American people, but it's clear the mainstream media have focused on what they perceived to be negative things bound to hurt the image of President Bush.
Where were the media reporters when the son of Senator Ted Kennedy was caught intoxicated when they devoted three years of frenzy hounding Rush Limbaugh who was not even accused of any crime? As economic statistics continue to inform us of a booming economy and thousands of new jobs being created, why is the focus still on gasoline prices when President Bush has nothing to do with that? Why, indeed, the liberal lunacy that continues to torment grass-roots Americans?
I hope Tony Snow as the Press Secretary now will change things around. He is one guy who can trade punches with the best and worst of them.
R. G. Lacsamana, M.D.Daytona Beach, Fla.
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In [David Hirschman's]
article, [he] expressed some concerns about personalization of news, saying, "It's not that people don't want their news filtered down to a more manageable portion, most are just worried about what they might be missing if they trust a machine to filter it for them ... Finding [interesting] articles is part of the reason one reads a newspaper to begin with."
[He] elaborated on this with a quote from Peter Bale who said, "Personalizing a newspaper to death would create a very dull newspaper -- you would lose the ability to discover new things, stuff you didn't know you wanted to read."
The argument here seems to be that personalization will pigeonhole people, never showing them anything new.
The point of personalization is exactly the opposite, to aid discovery, to help people find stuff they probably would not find on their own. In well-implemented systems, personalization reaches beyond the obvious and into the surprising.
Someone who reads just one newspaper every day should be worried not about the risk of missing news due to personalization, but all the news articles the reader never saw because they were published in some of the other thousands of sources around the world.
By surfacing interesting articles to interested people, personalization can reveal the full breadth of the options available and enhance serendipity.
Greg Linden***
'NY Times' Hatred for Bush 'Absolutely Pathological'Changed forever? Give me a break. The NYT continues its anti-American, anti-military, anti-business undercutting of everything good about this country.
The NYT's hatred for George Bush is absolutely pathological and is damaging to this nation. The New York Times participates in printing outright lies and distortions every day. Nothing has changed, including you kissing their butt on a somewhat regular basis. Reading your stuff, it is clear that your ideas come directly from the times "reporting."
Ron Joseph***
Reactions to NSA 'Shocker' and Editorials CoverageDo the newspapers you cite in
Editorials, from Right and Left, Hit Latest NSA Shocker have the capability to research legal opinions? Why did all of them seem to miss the Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland which I found within minutes on FindLaw.com after typing in a few key words? An otherwise unusually comprehensive article from USA Today is found wanting because of a lack of discussion on the applicability of this legal case from the Supreme Court. ABC's Brian Ross did their homework for them on the evening news last night, but the editorials today seemed to ignore his research as well as Lisa Myer's reporting for NBC. Now, if you wish to argue that this case does not apply to the NSA database, that's fine. But let's have the argument. Why aren't you now reporting on this oversight in the print stories?
Mike Birmingham "Only the most naive and unsuspicious soul could trust that it will remain safe, secured and for the eyes only of those hunting terrorists."
Don't forget, Gen. Hayden was head of the NSA when John Bolton, our esteemed recess-appointment backdoor U.N. ambassador, showed up requesting information the NSA had intercepted on U.S. citizens ... and unrelated to any terrorism inquiry. Some people claim Bolton only asked Gen. Hayden for NSA surveillance intercepts on 10 U.S. citizens, but after all the lies of the Bush administration, we know better, don't we?
And, I figure that Bolton wasn't the only Bush administration official to ask Gen. Hayden to pass along any NSA intercepts concerning "persons of interest," like John Kerry and his campaign staff were before the 2004 elections. Cheney is bound to have made requests of Gen. Hayden. Possibly even Bush. Rumsfeld, too. And Karl Rove, definitely Karl Rove. Douglas Feith? Wolfowitz? Addington? Alberto Gonzales? Hell, Gen. Hayden probably set up an NSA information kiosk in the NSA building's lobby and had a line of neo-cons waiting to have their requests filled. Take a number. Take a number.
It must be nice to have the NSA, under the totally willing Gen. Hayden, helping you spy on your Democratic Party opponents. Listening to their every call. Intercepting their e-mails. Spying on their text messaging. And now the Bush administration is gearing up for the November elections. And even with all their illegal surveillance being exposed, the Republicans probably figure the 2008 presidential election is in the bag. The black bag. A black bag NSA and CIA operation.
The Bush administration is the most dangerous administration in American history. Nixon on steroids. And many of the Republicans pulling these illegal, anti-democracy stunts are the very same Republicans who supported the crimes of Richard Nixon, and participated in the illegalities of both the Reagan administration and the first Bush's administration. I guess it's hard to teach old Republican dogs new tricks ... like honoring our democracy and the rule of law. Hell, they make up their own laws as they slouch along, trampling our nation underfoot.
Impeach them. Arrest them. Throw the book at them. Evil, pure evil seeps from their every pore!
Paul SorrellsAustin, Tex.
Pulitzers Coming to the Online Party Late?Back in the mid-'90s, when The American Reporter became the first daily online "newspaperless" (as poet Gary Gach calles it) with original content from its own correspondents around the world, we broke the story of a plan hatched by the Suharto government to remove future Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri from her post as head of the opposition PDI at a rump convention 500 miles away from the capital. Our correspondent, Andreas Suharto, eventually won a Nieman International Fellowship for a year at Harvard as a result of his coverage, but at the time he had to go underground, living and working out of his car, to escape the secret police search that was going on for him.
Meanwhile, major news agencies were sending rockets to their Jakarta offices to find out why we were scooping them. It was an exciting time for online journalism, and we felt Harono's work merited a Pulitzer fior International Reporting. But by then, the AP -- whose chief at the time was a big power on the Pulitzer board -- and other news agencies and newspapers felt threatened and were already circling their wagons to make sure such nominations were excluded.
The drumbeat against online journalism grew with our readership as we reported firsthand from Oklahoma City (the late AP reporter Bill Johnson, Memphis bureau chief for them when MLk was killed and their principal writer on that story for the next three years, was reporting for us when the Murrah building blew up) , Northern Ireland, Israel, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and elsewhere. Ironically, after warning the world about online journalism, it was the mainstream journalists of ABC News (Bob Hope is dead), the Dallas Morning News (we interviewed Tim McVeigh) the Wall Street Journal (a Secret Service agent saw Bill and Monica making out in the Oval Office), CNN (we killed U.S. POWs in Laos with poison gas) and the AP (Americans killed dozens of unarmed Koreans) that fouled up, not us. We got the scoop on the declaration of the Good Friday ceasefire from Sinn Fein, after years of very thorough reporting by AR's Stephen O'Reilly. The truth about the Pulitzer Committee's
unwillingness to honor publications that appear only online is a sad and sordid, selfish chapter in its history.
Joe SheaEditor-in-Chief
The American Reporter
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