Glenn Greenwald, of Salon.com, has for a long time been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration for all the right reasons (or should I say correct reasons, as he can be just as judgemental of Democratic decisions or inaction). In his latest piece written yesterday, Greenwald rightfully chastises the New York Times, Washington Post and AP for their inability to separate fact from fiction.

His discussion, which goes on in great detail describing why terms like ‘policy disputes’ must not be used in place of the actual description (’war crimes’), is very, very valid and should not be discounted in its importance. As we all know, words are powerful things and nothing is more important to a journalist than the words he or she chooses to use in reporting on a story. So, Greenwald has a point when criticizing Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times when he wrote yesterday,

“The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.” (Emphasis courtesy of Salon.com)

Mazzetti’s inability to report the facts is not only a failure to do his job correctly, but an insult to those of us who read that and automatically think, WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?

Greenwald makes a very valid point in summing up this portion of his piece… The rest of it is well worth the read here.

“Hence:  ”war crimes” were transformed into “policy disputes” between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals.  “Torture” became “enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture.”  And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking — doing X when the law says:  ”X is a felony” — became acting “pursuant to robust theories of executive power” or “expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties” or, at worst, ”in circumvention of legal frameworks.”"

In this morning’s Washington Post, columnist Howard Kurtz wrote,

“McCain and Obama could not be more different, but there are similarities. Neither was the choice of his party’s establishment, and each man is, beyond programs and policies, selling himself.”

Um, let’s see now: If there fewer or no similarities, wouldn’t that make them more different?

Just asking.

Sam Zell is a real estate magnate and the head of The Tribune Company which owns the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Chicago Cubs as well as a number of TV stations and smaller newspapers. Slate.com on Monday had a piece titled, “Words, Words, Words” written by Michael Kinsley about the upcoming changes within the Tribune Company’s newspapers, such as the new policy shift taken by Tribune management to measure “Reporters’ Value By the Inch.” In an article written last week on Editor and Publisher’s website, Jennifer Saba says,

“One of the main strategies outlined by Tribune Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels involves measuring the productivity of journalists. “This is a new thing,” he said. “Nobody ever said, ‘How many column inches did someone produce?’”

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson makes a compelling argument today why Sam Zell is eligible for life in prison for his massacre of the LA Times. In response to Slate’s article mentioned above, Meyerson starts,

“On Oct. 1, 1910, a bomb set by James McNamara, an operative of the Iron Workers union, then embroiled in a ferocious dispute with the Los Angeles Times, blew up the Times building, killing 21 pressmen. McNamara was arrested the following April, convicted and later sentenced to life in prison. He died in San Quentin in 1941. The question for today is: Would a similar sentence be appropriate for Sam Zell?”

Meyerson ends this very fair rant by putting things in perspective for us.

“Great newspapers take decades to build. We are discovering that they can be dismantled in relatively short order. The Los Angeles Times was a hyperpartisan, parochial broadsheet until Otis Chandler became its publisher in 1960 and began the work of transforming it into the paper of both record and insight that it’s been for the past half-century. The diminution of such a paper diminishes its city, which is why L.A.’s otherwise disparate civic elites have periodically tried to restore the Times to local control since the Trib bought it at the turn of this century. Instead, in Zell, what Los Angeles has is a visiting Visigoth, whose civic influence is about as positive as that of the Crips, the Bloods and the Mexican mafia. Life in San Quentin sounds about right.”

Ken Silverstein, Washington Editor for Harper’s Magazine and acclaimed investigative journalist took his Memorial Day to write about one of this country’s decorated war veterans and how he has lost his way in serving the people, to instead serve private interests. Below is an excerpt from his blog, but please read his latest piece in Harper’s titled, “My lobby, myself: How John McCain’s hypocrisy is laundered as reform.”

“Over the past few weeks, the media has finally begun reporting the fairly obvious fact that there are a whole bunch of lobbyists working closely with the campaign of Senator John McCain. As a result, a number of lobbyists with embarrassing ties to foreign governments have been forced out of the McCain camp, like Doug Goodyear, whose firm lobbied for the Burmese dictatorship a few years back.”

Silverstein goes on to mention another worthy piece recently written by the Washington Post’s Michael D. Shear and Jeffrey H. Bimbaum about McCain’s man in Washington, the 30-year lobbyist Charles R. Black, Jr.