Search Results for: David N. Gibbs

Apr
01
2013

Celebrating French Intervention in Mali

Media overlooked role of 'War on Terror' in sparking crisis

Ali Ould Ahmed, Malian refugee, in Mentao camp, Burkina Faso: "The intervention of the French army has accelerated our departure, because we are convinced that the Islamists, after losing the battle against the French army, will retreat into the villages and they could kill people."

The French military commenced Operation Serval against separatist rebels in Northern Mali on January 11, 2013. The air and ground intervention was undertaken with the cooperation and support of the United States, as well as several European and African states. U.S. press reporting has provided a simplistic account of the intervention as a heroic effort to protect the civilized world against Islamic terrorist threats. What is missing from this image is how the past interventions of the “War on Terror” helped cause the Malian crisis in the first place. A Washington Post editorial (1/12/13) claimed the French were simply trying [...]

May
01
2011

Chris Christie, the 'Churchill' of New Jersey

Republic governor's union-bashing style wins media praise

Chris Christie--Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/David Shankbone

New Jersey’s most important TV star isn’t on MTV’s Jersey Shore. Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s YouTube showdowns with his critics—especially the state’s public school teachers—have made him a fast-rising Republican star, lionized by the likes of the Weekly Standard (4/26/10), National Review (4/16/10), Glenn Beck (5/14/10) and George Will (4/22/10). Mere months after his election, pundits were weighing his presidential chances in 2012, and Rush Limbaugh (2/12/10) was declaring: “Is it wrong to love another man? Because I love Chris Christie.” That enthusiasm is not confined to the right-wing echo chamber. The NBC Today show (10/20/10) told viewers that “with [...]

Apr
01
2011

Chris Christie, the 'Churchill' of New Jersey

Republican governor’s union-bashing style wins media praise

New Jersey’s most important TV star isn’t on MTV’s Jersey Shore. Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s YouTube showdowns with his critics—especially the state’s public school teachers—have made him a fast-rising Republican star, lionized by the likes of the Weekly Standard (4/26/10), National Review (8/16/10), Glenn Beck (5/14/10) and George Will (4/22/10). Mere months after his election, pundits were weighing his presidential chances in 2012, and Rush Limbaugh (2/12/10) was declaring: “Is it wrong to love another man? Because I love Chris Christie.” That enthusiasm is not confined to the right-wing echo chamber. The NBC Today show (10/20/10) told viewers that “with [...]

Dec
30
2010

Smell Something Rotten?

2010 P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize the worst of U.S. journalism

At the end of every year FAIR rounds up some of the stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance. This year brought no shortage of contenders; indeed, the hardest part of the P.U.-litzers is narrowing down the list. Readers who think we missed one can share their nominations at the FAIR Blog (fair.org/blog). And without further ado.... --Prosecute the Messenger Award: Diane Sawyer (ABC News) On October 22, ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer introduced a report on WikiLeaks' exposure of thousands of classified documents from the Iraq War. ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz summarized the contents of the WikiLeaks files: "Deadly [...]

Aug
20
2010

Hannah Gurman on Iraq, Norman Solomon on Petraeus and Afghanistan

By

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: One war is ending, while the other is the subject of a major PR blitz. Right on schedule, we're told, Operation Iraqi Freedom is winding down, with live TV coverage relaying the images of the final U.S. combat brigades leaving the country. The caveats to the story of the "end" of the war are abundant—tens of thousands of troops and private contractors remain, and some are already suggesting they'll be there longer than we've been told. So how does a war that isn't really ending actually end? Hannah Gurman wrote about the Orwellian state [...]

Aug
18
2010

Tell NBC: Sunday Morning Needs a Real War Debate

Meet the Press features a parade of Afghanistan hawks

The war in Afghanistan has re-emerged as a major news story, thanks to the controversies surrounding the removal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the WikiLeaks release of classified documents. But on NBC's Meet the Press, the opportunity to engage in a robust debate about the war has taken a back seat to promoting the views of the military and supporters of Obama's Afghanistan policies. The most recent example came on August 15, when Meet the Press devoted the entire episode to a profile of Gen. David Petraeus. Host David Gregory's opening indicated it wasn't going to be a feet-to-the-fire interview: [...]

Oct
01
2009

SoundBites

A Little Help for His Friends Robert Novak was certainly a remarkable journalist; how many other pundits would complain about there being too much diversity at a Republican convention? (“What about white people? Not too many”—Crossfire, 7/31/00.) But the many eulogies for Novak upon his August 18 death generally revealed less about the columnist himself than they did about the standards of corporate journalism. The Washington Post’s David Broder (8/19/09), as usual, expressed the conventional wisdom in its purest form: “The self-mocking parody of himself that Bob created as the Prince [of Darkness], a grumpy right-winger, was sometimes taken more [...]

Sep
01
2009

SoundBites

And 10 Times as Many Clueless Pundits Asked by a Canadian viewer, “Has anyone noticed that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?,” Fox’s Bill O’Reilly (O’Reilly Factor, 7/27/09) responded: “Well, that’s to be expected, Peter, because we have 10 times as many people as you do. That translates to 10 times as many accidents, crimes, down the line.” New York Time Capsule Talking about an increase in British Afghan War deaths in recent weeks, New York Times reporter John Burns (7/12/09) wrote, “So far...the reaction in Britain has not run to the kind [...]

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