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Here are a few sentences from their reports:

… The [Afghan] war, which, according to January opinion surveys, is opposed by more than half of the American people, is nearing its ninth year, having killed many thousands of Afghan civilians and yet short of bringing any sign of stability to the war-torn country…

… The US attacked Iraq under the pretext that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, but an official CIA report in 2005 confirmed that there were no such weapons in the country…

… The prominent American academician [Noam Chomsky] also took aim at the double-standards that US policy-makers employ towards the three nations that did not ratify the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, namely Israel, India and Pakistan.

The United States provided these three nations with the nuclear technology, in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions. All these nations have built nuclear weapons, with Israel, which is in possession of more than 200 nuclear warheads in the Middle East region…

I could quibble with the presentation of these facts. Yes, things have gotten worse, not better in Afghanistan, but things weren’t that great under the Taliban either. “Pretext” is a strong word that implies deceit — while many would use that terminology, many others would argue that the U.S. and many other nations did truly believe that Iraq possessed WMDs. And regarding nuclear weapons, the U.S. did not necessarily provide nuclear know-how to all three of those nations. (I’d guess that North Korea gave it to Pakistan.) And, of course, no one has ever confirmed that Israel has 200 nuclear warheads — but they probably do.

Still, I’m sure that an average Iranian reading the New York Times would see a similar frame. Certain facts pointed out and others ignored. And some facts that may not be totally supported with empirical evidence.

So, where do we go from here? Not sure, but reading Iran’s news is probably a good start.

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For all its lurid aspects, the Woods scandal may have constituted a watershed in American journalism: A major news story in which many “respectable” news outlets ditched traditional newsgathering methods and standards of fair play and piggybacked on aggressive but not always accurate tabloid reporting. The distinction between “mainstream” and “tabloid” may never have been so blurred as it was in the whirlwind of reporting on Woods…

… Was Woods addicted to painkillers at the time of his accident? Gerald Posner, The Daily Beast’s chief investigative reporter, suggested as much, without substantiation, and CBS’ “The Early Show” and NBC’s “Today” show invited Posner on to repeat the claim. Did Woods offer his wife some kind of financial inducement for her silence and continued matrimony? Yes, said numerous news sources (the Chicago Sun-Times, US Weekly, the New York Post, the Boston Globe, Posner again on The Daily Beast), although there was little agreement about how much she would supposedly earn (anywhere from $5 million to $80 million). Was the couple leaving the country and moving to Sweden? Foxnews.com said so. Was Nordegren about to file for divorce? Dozens of news organizations vouched for it, with some sources claiming the filing would occur by the end of the year. Yet Woods and Nordegren remain in the United States, and no divorce action has been launched.

The wildest and most unsupported claims involved the number and identity of Woods’ mistresses. Some media outlets–the Orlando Sentinel, New York’s Daily News, the Philadelphia Daily News, Toronto’s Globe & Mail and dozens of others–kept a running tally, periodically adding names and photos as the women surfaced, based on little more than the women’s say-so or the word of anonymous sources. The list eventually grew to include two porn actresses, whose motivation for being associated with such a high-profile sex scandal was never seriously questioned…

… [National Enquirer Editor] Levine finds himself surprised, appalled and somewhat amused by the way much of the mainstream media handled the Woods scandal. The Enquirer’s original story, he notes, took months of reporting. It involved many hours of interviews, polygraph tests, stakeouts, document dives and travel. It was checked and re-checked. But many members of the MSM, he notes, exercised no such care in reporting subsequent aspects of the story. “It would have taken us a couple of years to properly investigate each of these women’s claims as thoroughly as we did the first” woman’s, Levine says. “The stories were all over the place. There was just some outrageous coverage.”

That’s right. The editor of the National Enquirer doesn’t think much of the way the “respectable” media covered Tiger Woods. Anyone paying close attention would concur that he has a point. It might be that the biggest scandal to come out of the Woods affair wasn’t the one about a golfer. It was the one about the news media.

We need to stress to today’s journalists that it’s OK to be late on a story — as long as you’re late for a good reason. Fact-checking allegations and verifying sources is always a good reason.

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… I was watching a morning chat show on TV recently.

It featured a girl aged about 14. Her one aim in life was to have surgery so that she would look like Katie Price. Her reasoning seemed to be that if she looked like the glamour model, she would become as famous as her idol.

How depressing that the loftiest ambition a child of 14 can summon up is to have breasts the size of barrage balloons. It was bad enough that she regarded ‘being famous’ as a worthy goal – not ‘being talented’, you note.

When Ozzy was starting out as a musician in Black Sabbath, for him and his contemporaries fame was simply a by-product of doing something they loved, not an end in itself. Of course, they wanted to be successful and to make money, but they certainly didn’t expect it and that wasn’t the reason they were in a band.

I’m not sure about the last bit — I’m pretty sure that people throughout time have sought fame. But, fame for fame’s sake does seem particularly acute in our society today.

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As I start my paperwork I ask Albert why now. Why at twenty past eleven in a driving rain has he decided he has to go up to Thirteen?

‘It’s twenty-six past eleven,’ he says.

Fine. Twenty-six, forty-six, a hundred and six. Why now?

‘I can’t listen to them anymore.’

‘You’re hearing voices?’

He nods and bobs his shoulders and the ambulance rocks like a small boat.

‘What are they saying?’

‘Bad things. Mean things. Telling me I ain’t worth nothing.’

‘They telling you to hurt yourself?’

He nods his head and the ambulance crests another wave.

‘They telling you to hurt other people?’

Albert looks away; a nervous child caught lying to his parents.

‘Albert. Are they telling you to hurt other people?’

‘They want me to purge myself. I’m rotting inside and I have to be ripped open so the foul can come out. I have to be relieved of this burden.’

There’s just not a whole lot you can say to that.

‘Huh.’

‘But they want me to wait. To do it at ten seconds ‘til midnight.’

I check my watch. 11:28.

‘You’ll probably still be here then,’ he says. ‘You’ll probably try to stop me. I’ll probably have to kill you.’

The next fifteen seconds pass in silence. Albert, of course, does not sense my unease. That I have picked him up dozens of times in the last several years, that we have talked and joked and extended to one another a certain degree of mutual respect does not, in his mind, preclude sudden senseless violence.

At least he’s given me a warning.

Read the rest.

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