Media

Last night, the popular blog Gawker and a few other sources reported that Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, participated in advising the White House on the transition via a George Washington University think tank on homeland security.

It turns out, it was all wrong. Last night, I spoke with Frank Cilluffo, the director of G.W.'s Homeland Security Policy Institute and a Foreign Policy contributor, who explained the errors.

The Institute had authored an advisory paper -- not because the White House commissioned it, but because that's what think tanks do. 

How was Hasan "affiliated"? Cilluffo notes that G.W. lists everyone who RSVPs to Institute events in the meeting booklets (common practice in D.C. think tanks). Hasan was just a member of the public who attended a HSPI event. He never had any affiliation at all. 

Cilluffo remembered calling on Hasan during a Q&A session. The Institute director recalled cutting Hasan off when he wouldn't stop talking, and recognized him when the television started broadcasting his picture yesterday. But, that was it. They have no relationship; the think tank has no relationship with Hasan. 

Gawker has since corrected its post, which is good to see; other blogs (see Spencer Ackerman, for one) have debunked the rumor. But the lie peppered the Internet last night, and continues to today. The media and the public, of course, want answers about this senseless crime. I hope the media waits until it really has them to publish.

At the end of his New York Times column today, Nick Kristof offers a, frankly, adorable apology to the country of Slovenia.

In several columns, I've noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone -- worse than Slovenia! -- gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.

As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don't see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

So true! And, we noted in FP's office, Slovenia is a total Central European jewel: beautiful, prosperous, calm, safe, wealthy, and Mediterranean (tucked between Italy and Croatia, with access to the ocean and the Alps) -- plus, apparently, with universal health care to boot.

Flickr user Ah_Zut

Maybe it's just because we've been discussing upcoming Berlin Wall-related content here at the office, but I find Matt Welch's Reason cover essay, calling the 1989 defeat of communism in Europe, "the Unknown War" a little strange:

November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world, and instead leapfrogging back to what Steve Forbes describes in this issue as the “Jurassic Park statism” of the 1930s (see “?‘The Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs,’?” page 42). There have been more Hollywood hagiographies of the revolutionary communist Che Guevara in the last five years than there have been studio pictures in the last two decades about the revolutionary anti-communists who dramatically toppled totalitarians from Tallin to Prague (see Tim Cavanaugh’s “Hollywood Comrades,” page 62). And what little general-nonfiction interest there is in the superpower struggle, as Michael C. Moynihan details on page 48 (“The Cold War Never Ended”), remains stuck in the same Reagan vs. Gorby frame that made the 1980s so intellectually shallow the first time around.

Sure, it might be nice to see a Hollywood blockbuster or two about the Gdansk shipyard strike (unfortunately for producers, Lech Walesa wasn't quite as dashing as Che) but is there really a lack of end-of-cold-war awareness out there?

The "post-9/11 era" is only just starting to eclipse the "post-Cold War era" as foreign-affairs writing's most ubiquitous cliche. (If you're submitting to FP, please don't start your piece with either of them.) Indeed much of the contemporary debate over globalization takes 1989 as a starting point. 

It seems to me that the images of 1989 -- from Tiananmen to the fall of the wall -- are just as, if not more iconic today than anything from 1968, which seems to be Welch's nominee for history's most overrated year. The tsunami of Berlin Wall media content that's already starting to trickle out in advance of next week's anniversary should drive that point home. As should German Chancellor Angela Merkel's address to congress today in which she described how "the wall, barbed wire and orders to shoot limited my access to the free world" until 1989. How exactly is Welch proposing that we take this anniversary more seriously?

Welch's larger point is that "Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world" as more and more of the U.S. economy is nationalized. But while these trends might not be moving in the direction Welch likes, it seems odd to argue that the free-market vs. government-control dialectic is being "ignored" given the number of times Obama's economic policies have been decried as socialist in the last year. 

GERARD MALIE/AFP/Getty Images

I've been enjoying the public back-and-forth between Rachel Maddow, host of the eponymous MSNBC show, and Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and founder of Keep America Safe, a hawkish PAC.

In the past weeks and months, Cheney has appeared on television, in print, on the Web -- just about everywhere -- talking up her hard-line foreign-policy PAC and asserting that Obama's "‘radical' policies are placing us all at risk." A rhetorical question she posed, which appeared in the New York Times: "Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake, are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?" (Putative White House answer: Yes.) The former State Department official and lawyer instead vocally advocates for policies more in line with the hard right, interventionist, neo-con fringe in the past administration.

This earned the PAC, well, a bit of flack from the left and center, along with slews of plain-old publicity (during its major fundraising drive, natch). Apparently, the push-back rubbed Cheney the wrong way -- and in response Keep America Safe put an advertisement up on its website, criticizing MSNBC for its negative coverage and asking "Why don't they want to talk substance" and "Why don't they want to debate the issues?"

Enter Maddow. As it turns out, the liberal television host had invited Cheney on her show dozens of times, and Cheney had always declined. So, Maddow called Cheney out, publicly offering to have the neo-con on the popular show to talk shop. Alas, it seems Cheney is more chicken than hawk -- she said she would appear on Hannity instead.

I felt a twinge of disappointment, as I would have loved to have seen the Maddow vs. Cheney debate -- particularly because Maddow is the talking head with the best handle on foreign-policy and security issues. In short: She is a wonk. Before her show hit the big time, she was planning to write a book on the military's effects on Washington politics, a project now shelved. She loves talking about the GI bill. She regularly hosts military and defense policy experts. In a quick scan of her shows and Keith Olbermann's over the past month, she devotes something like twice the time to defense and foreign policy issues. And I'd love to see more figures from across the aisle speak with her.

Getty Images

If Berlusconi had it his way, he wouldn't be bothered with the pesky task of governing Italy. The only reason he puts up with the supremely vexing job is to keep the communists out of power, he told CNN.

"I'm doing what I do with a sense of sacrifice. I don't really like it. Not at all," he said. "Very often there is a lot of dirty dealing; there is really the gutter press, worse than that, the shameless and sickly. It's a difficult life to be responsible for leading the government in a country like Italy."

Note: By dirty dealing, he wasn't referring to bribery. By the gutter press he wasn't referring to secretly taping a judge to smear his choice in socks.

Being hounded by the press takes its toll on the 73-year-old. He claims the press, not that he attended the birthday party of an 18-year-old model who calls him "papi", destroyed his marriage.

The press also has completely made up all of gaffes. The times he called President Obama "tanned" or the time he kept German Chancellor Merkel waiting while he finished a call on his cell phone, or the time he screamed over the Queen of England to get the attention of Obama, none of these were anything but stately and appropriate.

"I never made any gaffes, not even one," he said. "Every gaffe is invented by the newspapers."

MARIO LAPORTA/AFP/Getty Images 

The indisputable logic of the Pakistani Taliban:

Meanwhile, a Taliban group also sent two letters to the Lahore Press Club – one on October 12 and the other on October 14 – warning that if the media “does not stop portraying us as terrorists ... we will blow up offices of journalists and media organisations”.

Argentine President Cristina Kirchner probably still can't believe she signed a newly minted media law on on Saturday, after a hot-blooded 20 hour debate in the Senate that ended with an early morning street party outside Congress. The law, which passed 44-24 effectively limits media monopolies, replacing an archaic law passed by a military dictatorship government in 1980.

But every fairy-tale has to have an evil monster, in this case the media conglomerate Grupo Clarín, which has fiercely opposed the Kirchner government and which, under the new law's rules, will now have to sell off radio stations and television channels:

"The government is going after the media with all its remaining power," Clarín Editor Ricardo Roa wrote Saturday. "It has rushed through a misleading law that seems to be progressive but in reality only sets us back: it will promote a press that is weaker and more docile."

Clarín, of course, has advocates. They question the one year limit to sell assets that the law imposes, and whether this will not drive prices down, allowing pro-government buyers to snap up the stations.

Offsetting these questions is the glowing support of varied sectors of Argentine society and the international, like United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Frank La Rue, who called the new law "an example for other countries."

Perhaps the most interesting reaction was that of the opposition leader, Mauricio Macri, mayor of Buenos Aires, whose party has now proposed a law giving them regulation power over the city's cable TV.

History repeats: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Photo: JUAN MABROMAT/AFP

Danger Room reports that the Taliban have finally embraced online video sharing and launched Istiqlal Media, an official YouTube channel. Terrorist media expert Evan Kohlman comments:

“The Taliban have really been latecomers to the world of online video, and their initial forays haven’t been terribly successful,” Kohlman tells Danger Room. While the group has used YouTube in an official capacity before, placing video of captured America soldier on the site, Kohlman says that the use of embedded YouTube video on their site is a first. In other words, the Taliban is actually more dinosaurish about social media than the Pentagon. Way to be Web 2.0, Mullah Omar!

So what finally pushed the Afghan insurgent group onto YouTube?  Bandwidth, Kohlman explains.

“Recent efforts to distribute high-resolution jihadi media in standard formats — RMVB, AVI, MPEG — have simply overloaded their web servers and exhausted their bandwidth.  Now, it appears that the Taliban webmasters have finally come around and recognized the merits of YouTube, using the U.S.-based service to test out directly embedding video into their sites.  By turning to YouTube, the Taliban gain a free, highly-reliable video broadcast service with the potential to reel in a vast, viral audience.”

And that's not the Taliban's only foray into Web 2.0. The "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" Website allows readers to share posts via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other social networking services. 

The YouTube channel isn't much right now. Just a few non-narrated montages of car bombings and gun battles set to music (Judging from the soundtrack, the Taliban has also embraced auto-tuning.) But it will be interesting to see if YouTube moves to shut it down.