When super-pundit Robert Novak stormed off the set of a live CNN show Thursday — just after uttering what the New York Times delicately calls “a profanity” — it was an unusual episode of TV punditry. With rare exceptions, the slick commentators of televisionland keep their cool. But we’d be much better off if they all disappeared.

Novak’s unscripted exit from the telecast may have been a preemptive strike — a kind of semiconscious work stoppage — to avoid squirming under the hot lights. “The moderator of the program, Ed Henry, later said on the air that he had warned Mr. Novak that he planned to ask him ‘about the CIA leak case,’” the Times reports. As a bottom-feeding big fish in the pond of political journalism, Novak wants control over the sunlight in his face…
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A few days ago, the White House launched a new phase of its propaganda siege for the Iraq war.

The opening salvo came on July 27, when the commander of American forces in Iraq said that continuation of recent trends would make possible “some fairly substantial reductions” of U.S. troop levels in the spring and summer of 2006….

Gen. Casey’s statement, which made big news, was the start of a media offensive likely to last for the next 15 months, until the congressional elections. We might call it Operation Withdrawal Scam…

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Also see Norman Solomon’s Ask This on Nieman Watchdog.

The acclaimed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has often voiced enthusiasm for violent destruction by the U.S. government. Hidden in plain sight, his glee about such carnage is worth pondering.

Many people view Friedman as notably articulate, while others find him overly glib, but there’s no doubt that he is an influential commentator with inherently respectable views. When Friedman makes his case for a shift in foreign policy, the conventional media wisdom is that he’s providing a sober assessment. Yet beneath his liberal exterior is a penchant for remedies that rely on massive Pentagon firepower.

And so, his July 27 column…

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Midway through this month, the Karl Rove scandal was dominating the national news — until the sudden announcement of a Supreme Court nominee interrupted the accelerating momentum of the Rove story. Since then, some anti-Bush groups and progressive pundits have complained that the White House manipulated the media agenda. But when it comes to deploying weapons of mass distraction, the worst is yet to come.

Changing the subject is, of course, a key aspect of political damage control. Media spin is often most effective when it displaces one storyline with another…

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After he died on Monday, front pages focused on the failures of William Westmoreland as commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Overall, the coverage faulted him for being a big loser, not a mass killer.

The Washington Post noted that Westmoreland “was called a war criminal.” But the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese people each week during his four years as the top American general in Vietnam counted for little in the media calculus. The main problem, readers were encouraged to understand, was that Westmoreland pursued a losing strategy. “Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called Westmoreland possibly ‘our most disastrous general since Custer,’” the Post reported.

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