PostWatch

Laying Down The Fog Bank

When talking about illegal aliens, mainly use the word immigrant. Write an editorial about a new overcrowding law titled Manassas's War on Immigrants. What kind of mean American could be against an immigrant?

When talking about embryonic stem cells, use it interchangably with stem cell science as if no other kind existed. Rick Weiss in Stem Cell Advance is Fully Refuted:

The scandal surrounding disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk deepened yesterday as an investigator told reporters in Seoul that none of the 11 tailor-made cell colonies Hwang claimed to have created earlier this year actually exist...

The scandal also has delivered a body blow to stem cell science, a field of research born just seven years ago that, despite ethical concerns because of its reliance on human embryos, has generated great public enthusiasm.

Rick Weiss is not this ignorant. He can't be.  Why does he write like this? Why does the Post let him? There is a vibrant and growing world of adult stem-cell research and therapies today that the Post  habitually ignores.

Michael Fumento:

There's no scientific research so promising that it can't be hyped further. Still, the ASCs – which the Democrats won't acknowledge, and which the New York Times  recently claimed have proved futile in treating human illness –  have actually been helping people in the U.S. since 1968. On one website you'll find a list, far from comprehensive, of almost 80 therapies currently using ASCs. This is treatment – not practice or theory.    Incredibly, there are also about 300 clinical trials involving ASCs.    

By contrast, the number of treatments using ESCs is zero. The number of clinical trials involving ESCs? Also zero....

That's from NRO last year. Here's a list of his stem-cell articles. Check it out. This means you, Rick.

Fumento's most recent entry on that list, on Oct. 20, is about curing liver failure:

Until now, the only hope for persons with irreversible liver failure from such diseases as cirrhosis, which kills about 27,000 Americans yearly, was transplantation. This requires permanent use of immunosuppressive drugs which can lead to opportunistic infections and cancer. Most importantly, it requires a new liver. About a thousand Americans are now on a waiting list for one and many will die there.

But scientists from London's Imperial College report in The New Scientist that they have repaired patients' own damaged livers by using bone marrow adult stem cells painlessly collected from their own blood. Five were injected with a drug that stimulated their marrow to produce extra stem cells that were then injected into a blood vessel leading directly to the liver.

It worked. Both liver function and overall health of three out of five treated patients improved significantly within only two months of treatment. The two patients whose health did not improve were left no worse off. ...

Drop me a line if the Post covered this one.

Linked to Wizbang's neato Carnival of Trackbacks

Roggio on Finer & Struck at Radioblogger

I'm late to this party, but my how the world keeps an eye on the Post. Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck wrote Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War, which among other things cast blogger Bill Roggio, who embedded with the Marines, as kind of a Pentagon mouthpiece. Roggio notes multiple errors in the story, and he elaborated on them on Hugh Hewitt's show, as shown in the Radioblogger transcript.

A Balanced Story About Military Recruiting

Ombudsman Deborah Howell put more work into her column about a Nov. 4 military recruiting story than the reporter did in the story itself, Youths in Rural U.S. Drawn To Military by Ann Scott Tyson. But first, some background.

The subhed of that story is closer to its spirit, Recruits' Job Worries Outweigh War Fears; basically the military is exploiting poor rural youth by disproportionately recruiting them. This is the spin you'd expect from the National Priorities Project, which has been campaigning against the war for a long time and is anything but how Tyson described it: "a nonpartisan research group that analyzed 2004 recruiting data by Zip code." In fact, it analyzed data in a joint project with Peacework Magazine,  which filed a FOIA request for the data and handed over analysis and distribution to NPP, whose Cost of War Clock ticks merrily along. Oddly enough, Tyson did not include these and many other items about the nonpartisan National Priorites Project. I blogged about it on Nov. 4 when Tyson's story came out, and on Dec. 5 when Howell agreed, in a column, that NPP could have been described as "liberal leaning."

At the time, I described that effort as "weak tea" because I and reader Chris Alleva had raised many issues about the story, and Howell's Dec. 5 mention was only one brief item in a wide-ranging column. What I didn't realize was how much more work Howell was going to follow through on. As described in her latest column on Dec. 25, The Whole Story:

In looking at the story, I talked to Curt Gilroy, who, as director of accession policy for the secretary of defense, has oversight of all active-duty recruiting; Tim Kane, a Heritage researcher; Betty Maxfield, demographer of the Army; Bruce Orvis, director of the Manpower and Training Program at the Rand Corp.'s Arroyo Center, and Robert Brandewei, director of the Defense Manpower Data Center in Monterey, Calif.

All said the story and NPP analysis lacked context because they did not report trends over the past several years and did not look at "nationally representative data" or the entire recruit population....

Howell also notes a Heritage Foundation study that came to a different conclusion than NPP. She continues:

A statement from Gilroy and Maxfield said that "incomes and socioeconomic status of recruits' families closely mirror the U.S. population. These findings are contrary to those" in Tyson's article.

Kane agreed that a higher proportion of recruits come from rural areas and the South, which is historically true. "But the key word is proportion. The data in the Post article are accurate, but the inferences are not," he said. "The percentage of recruits coming from poorer areas has declined every year since 2001 and the percentage coming from richer areas has increased."...

This is the kind of analysis you just might not get from nonpartisan research groups like the National Priorities Project.

There's a wide variety of data and interpretations in this column, but here's one item I want to emphasize:

Brandewei took the NPP analysis off the group's Web site and tried to match it with the same data from his agency. He said he could duplicate only two counties, and in the other 18, his numbers and the NPP's diverged by as much as 20 percent.

But there's something else that distinguishes this file from Tyson's: Thorough reporting. The National Priorities Project gets to respond. A variety of recruiting trends are noted. A third-party analyst, Bruce Orvis of Rand, is quoted in apposition to both NPP and the Pentagon & Heritage. In short, this is the story Tyson should have written.

I would have liked to know why Tyson thinks NPP is a nonpartisan group, a problem not mentioned in this column. I also wish I knew why Tyson ran with NPP's version of recruiting and not the Heritage Foundation's--if you don't read the ombudsman's column, I still don't think you can find it in the Post. It's also a little puzzling that Tyson's editor defends the story rather than Tyson herself, though her recent trip to Iraq may account for that.

But Howell provided a real service with this effort. It acknowledges the existence of reputable rebuttals to what I see as an inexcusably one-sided story based on a press release. Partisanship aside, you're simply much better informed about military recruiting in this 950-word column than in Tyson's 1,890-word story. It's disservice to the public that Howell's work, published on a Christmas Sunday, will reach fewer people than Tyson's front-page story that ran above the fold on a Friday and which still runs in the archives uncorrected.

I'm doubly thankful that Howell didn't drop this, as she must have been tempted to do, after two straight Sundays of Bob Woodward columns and the outraged reaction on the left to her unremakable observations about His Royal Highness Dan Froomkin.

So--thanks.

Update: Chris Alleva stops by in the comments, and gives Howell a high-five.

Postwatchers' Potpourri

PostWatch is operating at a nice low holiday station-keeping lull. Meanwhile Powerline describes this Peter Slevin feature on John Yoo as a "hit piece;" Ramesh Ponnuru says this other Peter Slevin story on embryonic stem-cell shenanigans in Missouri is "shabby;" and Tim Graham examines a front-page story on abortion by Evelyn Nieves (Graham: South Dakota is so backward that they're actually trying to make abortion providers tell patients that they're carrying a human life. How mean-spirited).

Merry Christmas!

Image via of e-cards at American Catholic.org
 

And respectful wishes in the spirit of the season for members of the mouse-worshipping cult at Google...

They're Sending a Message, But I'm Not Receiving it

Today Google celebrates the great Western tradition known as... Cat Watching a Mouse in a Wheel?

The Story of a Non-Disinterested Party

For the second day running, Glenn Kessler writes about the alleged urban myth that Osama bin Laden stopped using his satellite phone after its use was leaked in the media, obliterating U.S. intelligence efforts. Today's version is On Leaks, Relying on a Faulty Case Study, on A3:

The allegation that news organizations leaked information about Osama bin Laden's satellite phone, thus shutting down a valuable source of intelligence that might have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has long been a prime case study cited by government officials seeking to impose greater restrictions on the news media....

I'm interested to see the language is much more certain today: Upon closer examination, the story turned out to be wrong, Kessler writes. Untrue Bin Laden Satellite Phone Story Still Has Currency With Media's Critics is the subhed. Yesterday it was: But it appears to be an urban myth..... Causal effects are hard to prove... Yesterday, Kessler has a former director of the National Security Council's counterterrorism staff saying it was the understanding  of the White House and the intelligence community at the time that the leak was damaging, and Lee Hamilton of the Sept. 11 commission pointing to three "very responsible, very senior intelligence officers" saying the same thing.

No more! It's false. It could be false, but the shift in tone is striking.

And about those "Media's Critics" referred to in Glenn Kessler's story. Maybe we should track their communications, because they're largely missing. Partly their fault--Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R), a major critic, wouldn't comment for today's story, and he ain't the only one. But today's file isn't just about the bin Laden episode; it's a rebuttal to any concerns about news media ever harming America's security by exposing classified programs. The Post isn't a disinterested party here, is it, Dana Priest?

Even a few days before Christmas, Kessler could have found somebody authoritative giving voice to the idea that even if the bin Laden incident is a myth, exposing black ops makes it easier for terrorists to kill us. After all, he found someone to make the Post's case:

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said the bin Laden case shows that the news media may play less of a role in intelligence failures than is often assumed. "Cruise missiles concentrate the mind a lot more than news clips do," he said. "It is the underlying reality, not the leaks, that does most of the damage."

End of story. Literally.

 

Red State on Kessler on Satellite Phones

Happy Christmasy Yuletydings to yon PostWatchers. I've been keeping my sacred pledge to blog less during Christmas week.

Meantime, one "streiff" at Red State.org writes about a Glenn Kessler story, File the Bin Laden Phone Leak Under 'Urban Myths.' on A2. The gist is that it just ain't true, as President Bush claimed when defending warrantless NSA eavesdropping, that Osama bin Laden stopped using satellite phones after it was leaked in the media.

I hope I'm not showing my ignorance by saying I'm not familiar with streiff at Red State, a site I browse. But he challenges Kessler at a level of detail I'm not capable of.

Meanwhile I have two observations. One, if you read carefully, the story claims a bit less than the headline promises. Kessler:

Causal effects are hard to prove, but other factors could have persuaded bin Laden to turn off his satellite phone in August 1998. A day earlier, the United States had fired dozens of cruise missiles at his training camps, missing him by hours.

Though aimed at puncturing Bush, this is also a defensive move by Kessler. File Bush's claim under 'Urban Myths'--but of course I could be wrong, other factors could have persuaded.....

Two, the fact that his activity was reported somewhere else before doesn't mean that bin Laden & Co. knew that. It's a big world. The torrent of information that gushes out of our hydrants is almost unfathomable, and the percentage of satellite phone reports compared to All Reporting On Everything would be expressed as a decimal point followed by lots of zeros.

In other words, saying somebody else did it first isn't a defense.

Don't Be Modest, Mosk

In Md. Cabinet Member Says He Objected to Aide, reporter Matthew Mosk covers allegations about former Gov. Robert Ehrlich staffer Joseph Steffen during a Maryland legislative hearing, basically portraying Steffen as a bully hellbent to fire people. I have no idea about that. But I love this:

Steffen was fired by Ehrlich in February for spreading rumors about a political rival....

[Secretary of Human Resources Christopher J.] McCabe said politics did not play a role in the firings. But the secretary, one of five witnesses during more than nine hours of testimony yesterday, did provide the first direct evidence that Steffen was neither a rogue operative nor a bit player.

That's how Ehrlich and his top aides have described Steffen since February, after the governor fired him for describing in Internet postings a whisper campaign against Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley (D), one of the governor's chief political rivals....

But it was reporter Mosk himself who publicized the "internet postings," as we've noted here (and I thought these were emails, not postings on a public board?). And Mosk got his hands on the messages between Steffen and a Free Republic poster still only known as MD4Bush without, according to Mosk, knowing who MD4Bush is. As Soccer Dad noted recently:

David Collins of WBAL TV has done a little more digging and has discovered that the e-mail address of "Freeper" MD4Bush matches that of a former Democratic party operative who is associated with Mayor O'Malley. Now an e-mail address alone isn't enough to convict anyone of impropriety. E-mail addresses could be spoofed. However it seems pretty clear that MD4Bush was a plant who, according to Jim Robinson of FreeRepublic, may be involved in a dirty trick against Governor Ehrlich:

I feel that a (possibly criminal) political dirty trick has been committed against Governor Ehrlich and Joe Steffen and the evidence would lead any rational thinking person to believe that it was perpetrated by officials of mddems.org, perhaps working in concert with a reporter from the Washington Post....

Stay tuned.

Hey, It's Christmas Week

Blogging may be less intense.