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Is a backlash building against
A handful of developments this fall suggest a brewing backlash against opinionated news, most personified by those cable segments that set people up to argue political points, or outshout each other. ---------
Is a backlash building against opinionated news?
One event drew a lot of attention: Jon Stewart's public scolding of CNN's ''Crossfire'' hosts. Others received little notice, like ABC News President David Westin's impassioned defense of objective reporting in a speech delivered at Harvard University.
Take a stopwatch to a day's coverage on a cable news network and measure how much time is spent on people talking about the news than on actual reporting, Westin said. Compare that to five years ago and he bets there's a lot less time spent on reporting today.
''There are very understandable reasons why,'' he said in an interview. ''It is easier and cheaper and, frankly, more vivid and attractive to an audience to put on very strongly expressed opinions.''
TV executives are rewarded for it, too. Fox News Channel dominates its industry due largely to an opinionated prime-time lineup that took its cue from the growth of talk radio in the 1990s. ''Hardball'' is MSNBC's most popular show.
But Westin said there's a danger to repeatedly set up two people to argue a point without any real investigation into which view has more credence. Sometimes one side gets more attention than it deserves, he said.
''It looks like it's fair and balanced, and therefore is accurate,'' he said.
Instead of letting both sides simply trade accusations, ABC's ''Nightline'' tried to reconstruct events that happened in Vietnam 35 years ago when the Swift Boat veterans' accusations against John Kerry became a campaign issue, he said.
It was a disgust over this kind of format that fueled Stewart's cranky appearance on ''Crossfire'' Oct. 15, where he got into a bitter and personal tussle with Tucker Carlson.
Cable news has become a street fight, Stewart later said on ''60 Minutes.''
''What has become rewarded in political discourse is the extremity of viewpoint,'' he said. ''People like the conflict. Conflict, baby! It sells. `Crossfire'! `Hardball'! Shut up! You shut up!''
Sam Feist, CNN's senior executive producer for political programming, said he sees a place for opinion within a 24-hour news network. He doesn't agree that CNN has cut down on its reporting.
By opinionated news?
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BUSH WON. THE WORLD LOST
So did reason, the poor, gun control, the belief that the truth will out This, too, shall pass.
The United States will muddle through, as it's muddled through before, because the idea of America, and the system that sustains it, is bigger and braver and more enduring than any single subpar president or collective brain cramp of the populace.
But it's so damn sad anyway. Once again, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, the only thing to fear was fear itself, only this time fear won. Bombast won, the Big Lie won. And of course George W. Bush won, with his staunch certainties in a scary world and his skilled retailing of ''moral values'' to an increasingly conservative base. Because this is what happened in the U.S. election: with jobs disappearing, deficits running rampant, their kids being killed in Iraq saving the world from nonexistent weapons, Americans rushed to the polls to keep gays from marrying and women from having abortions. The culture war somehow trumped the Iraq war -- evidence of an America not only fiercely divided but in deep denial.
The world, by the way, lost. So did reason, the poor, African-Americans, stem-cell research, the air and water, gun control, the cause of basic competence, the belief that the truth will out.
I thought John Kerry would win and I was wrong. I thought so because the majority of Americans told pollsters they didn't like where the nation was headed. The ship of state was steaming straight for an iceberg, the captain too stubborn to change course -- but in the end the people were too frightened or too distracted to change captains.
This, too, shall pass. Eventually, with who-knows-what consequences.
Yes, these are very sour grapes. This is a sour day, and whoever won was bound to unleash as much wrath as rejoicing. It's time now for Americans to unite and yet it won't be easy behind this president, who divided to conquer. His isn't the America I grew up in, whose values I was weaned on. That America wasn't run for the rich, the corporate, the Christian. It didn't attack other countries without egregious cause, didn't torture foreign prisoners. It was a beacon, not a bully. Of course, that was the idealized America of history textbooks, of John Kennedy's Camelot and Ronald Reagan's ''shining city on a hill.'' I was in Europe in the early '70s, during Vietnam and Watergate, and locals fulminated against the imperialists and baby-killers; Americans stuck Canadian flags on their backpacks. We've been pariahs before and lived to shine another day.
So this, too, shall pass. Maybe Bush, for all his stay-the-course rhetoric, will discover moderation in his second term. Maybe this man, so unreflective, unrepentant, captive of the neo-cons, blind to what anyone else thinks or the price anyone else pays -- maybe the president who never admits mistakes will, in the post-campaign calm, acknowledge he made some whoppers and try to put things right.
Maybe. We can hope. But then we've hoped before.
By United States will muddle throug
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Army tanks and fighting vehicles
Army tanks and fighting vehicles blasted their way into the last main rebel stronghold in Falluja at sundown on Saturday after American warplanes and artillery prepared the way with a savage barrage on the district.
Earlier in the afternoon, 10 separate plumes of smoke rose from southern Falluja, as if etched against the desert sky, and probably exclaiming catastrophe for the insurgents.
''It's a broad attack against the entire southern front,'' said Col. Michael D. Formica, the Army commander in charge of the cordon effort around the city. ''We're just pushing them against an anvil.''--------U.S. Armored Forces Blast Their Way Into Rebel Nest in Falluja
The assault progressed enough for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to conclude that ''coalition and Iraqi forces have completed the move, for all practical purposes, from the north of town to the south'' of Falluja.
''Needless to say, there still will be pockets of resistance and areas that will be difficult, so I don't mean to suggest that it's complete ,'' he said during a visit to Panama. ''Clearly there's a large number of terrorists that have been killed or captured, and that is a good thing for the people of Iraq.''
But as the battle intensified in Falluja, insurgents roamed the streets of the important northern city of Mosul and the nearby town of Ramadi.
In Mosul, a city with a diverse population of three million, American and Iraqi forces tried to quell a three-day-old uprising apparently set off by the battle in Falluja. Kurdish militiamen have been appearing on the streets to take on insurgents, and many residents have begun to wonder whether ethnic conflict could soon break out.
American commanders said security was also worsening in Ramadi, the provincial capital 30 miles west of Falluja. Insurgents flooded Ramadi before the Falluja conflict began. Guerrillas have been attacking from mosques, the commanders said, and roadside bomb attacks have increased.
In Falluja, mechanized units, mainly M1A2 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, entered the southern district, Shuhada, on Saturday, with muzzles blazing, blowing apart buildings, rolling over barriers and confronting insurgents holed up in mosques and other refuges. It was the sixth day of the battle in Falluja.
From the city's southeast perimeter, the sound of heavy artillery and machine-gun fire was almost continuous throughout the afternoon, when M1 tanks and Bradleys could be seen pounding rebel positions near the city's southern end.
In the direction of Shuhada, a battle could be seen raging between an American M1 tank and a group of insurgents holed up in buildings around the minarets of a mosque, about 100 yards away. Muzzle flashes from AK-47 fire could be seen around the minarets.
By Earlier in the afternoon, 10 sep
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Why Ted Kennedy Can't Stand Stil
At 3:27 p.m. on November 5, the senior senator from Massachusetts enters the Senate and strides down the aisle, thick frame filling his double-breasted suit like a stiff breeze fills a spinnaker. The chamber is vacant but for a few tourists and the pantheon of marble busts -- John Adams, Jefferson, Aaron Burr -- in their honored niches above the gallery.
For a moment, the senator slumps in a chair, studying a black briefing book on HR 2710, a bill to raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1981. Large as he is, his immense head still appears outsized, the noggin of a tribune.
He steps to the podium, 99 vacant desks behind him. Holding the notebook at arm's length, he recounts the compromise that congressional Democrats have fashioned with the White House Republicans. He invokes ''the working poor'' and ''the test of fairness.'' When deviating from the text, he stammers a bit. Hand gestures -- little chops and stabs -- substitute for oratorical pizazz. He drones. The gallery shrinks.
But then the senator begins to describe the explosive growth in salaries for industry executives who have resisted better pay for their minimum wage workers, fat cats pulling in high six figures while opposing a six-bit raise. His voice rises, spiking the chamber with outrage and sarcasm. ''Extraordinary! Absolutely shocking!'' He is bellowing, to no one, but with the same vigor as if it were August 1980, and Madison Square Garden were again crammed to the rafters. ''We have debated this issue over a period of 11 days,'' the senator thunders. ''If this body does not know where it stands on the simple, fundamental issue of justice for working people, we are in very difficult times.''
Having spoken his mind, he wheels up the aisle, a fair wind at his back, and exits through the double doors, above which is inscribed in gilt letters ''Novus Ordo Seclorum'' -- A New Order of the Ages Is Born.
TO HIS INNUMERABLE CRITICS, the image of Edward Moore Kennedy declaiming to a phantom audience is an apt metaphor for his long fall from grace, the fitting close to a disastrous decade. Kennedy began the 1980s with a sound thrashing at the hands of Jimmy Carter; his marriage ended in divorce, while tales of boozing and womanizing continued unabated; for six years he languished in the minority after Republicans captured the Senate; the decade was dominated by his ideological antithesis, Ronald Reagan.
He personifies liberalism for a generation -- much as William Gladstone did in British politics a century ago -- but in the America of 1990, that is a backhanded compliment at best. ''After all is said and done,'' says Republican Party Chairman Lee Atwater, ''Ted Kennedy is still the man in American politics Republicans love to hate.'' At least some of the blame for liberalism's decline may be laid at his door, and he has been unable to articulate a compelling vision of America's future acceptable to a majority of the Democratic Party, much less the American electorate. Ruled by his passions, for good and ill, he will forever draw resentment from those who believe he squandered his chance to leave a larger imprint on the society he hopes to better.
This image of liberal impotence, however, can be misleading. For as the 1990s begin, Ted Kennedy sits in the catbird seat on Capitol Hill. He will not be president, and seems to know that; instead, he has channeled his energy and ambition into the Senate, a small, clubby hive of barons that perfectly suits his talents. Now fifth in seniority in the upper chamber, he has built a kind of
By TO HIS INNUMERABLE CRITICS,
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