Joe the Plumber now a war reporter

Joe the Plumber, now a correspondent for Pajama's TV based in Israel says:

"I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting," Wurzelbacher said. "You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, 'well, look at this atrocity,' well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it."

I wonder what my friend Black Joe the Plumber would have to say about that...

Who owns Sanjay Gupta?

Michael Moore took on the insurance industry in the documentary Sicko. CNN's Sanjay Gupta went above and beyond the call of duty to stand up for the insurance industry on Larry King Live. Gupta spouted inaccurate figures in his right-wing smear of Moore's film account of the US healthcare industry. CNN has acknowleged factual errors in the Gupta interview. Now CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta is Obama's pick for Surgeon General. (Generally not an important cabinet portfolio to be sure, but a very poor pick at this time round, if Obama is truly serious about reforming the US healthcare system).



See:

• Sicko truth squad sets Sanjay straight
• 'SiCKO' Truth Squad Sets CNN Straight -- Again
• Michael Moore's letter.

Liberians torture, Americans merely enhance their interregation techniques

Greenwald blogs on a case where a Liberian has been brought before a federal US court on charges of engaging in torture in his homeland. He notes a certain "inconsistency" in how the Liberian case has been described in the US media:

Acts which, when ordered by Liberians, are "criminal torture" meriting life imprisonment magically become, when ordered by Americans, mere "aggressive interrogation techniques." And while not all of the "techniques" used by the Liberians were authorized by Bush officials ("hot clothes irons" and "biting ants shoveled onto people's bodies"), many of the authorized American techniques are classic torture tactics and resulted in the deaths of many detainees and the total insanity of many more.

AP -- with canine-like subservience -- mindlessly recites the Bush administration's excuses (Abu Ghraib was due to low-level rogue bad apples and "there has been no systematic mistreatment of detainees") without even mentioning the ample evidence proving how false those government claims are. That's standard American "journalism" for you: "Our Government says X, and even if it's false and even if it's intensely disputed, we'll just leave it at that." Doing anything more -- as NBC News' David Gregory pointed out -- is "not their role."