Fox News Tells McCain Not To Use Fox Footage On Web Site -- But Lets Rudy (And Romney) Use It
(October 26, 2007 -- 4:50 PM EDT // link // )

Updated Below.

What on earth is going on between Fox News and John McCain?

Yesterday, Fox News lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to John McCain's campaign, demanding that he halt use of a new ad that uses footage from the Fox-sponsored GOP debate on Oct. 21. Fox is alleging copyright infringement. McCain's campaign is refusing Fox's demand.

But I've learned that there's more to this story.

I've obtained a copy of Fox's letter to McCain. And it explicitly demands that McCain not just stop running the ad, but also demands that he pull the ad from his campaign web site, too, and indeed also demands that he refrain from using any Fox footage on his campaign's site.

The letter says: "Fox News demands that John McCain 2008 immediately cease and desist from any further use of the copyrighted material and that access through the Website to the Ad, the Fox News Debate or any portion thereof, and/or any other Fox news materials, be immediately disabled." That seems clear: No Fox footage of any sort on his site at all. That's surprisingly onerous.

What's amusing, though, is that if you head over to Rudy Giuliani's campaign web site, you find that it is absolutely festooned with Fox News footage. It even prominently features footage from the very same debate that Fox is demanding McCain yank down from his site. Here, for instance, is what you find on Rudy's campaign blog:

That's a screenshot of the vid on Rudy's site of the same debate footage. Rudy's site is just covered with the Fox stuff.

What's the deal here? On one level, it's tempting to believe that Fox is going after McCain's use of their footage -- and letting Rudy keep using it -- because Fox chief Roger Ailes is trying to help Rudy. After all, Ailes is a longtime friend and very close ally of the former Mayor. Many have wondered whether Fox News will throw its weight behind Rudy and help him in the GOP primary, and Fox's Sean Hannity, who frequently has Rudy on as a guest, introduced the former Mayor at one of his fundraisers.

It's hard to believe this is what's driving this, though, partly because Mitt Romney's Web site also features a bunch of Fox footage. On the other hand, maybe Fox's cease-and-desist letter is on its way to Romney's headquarters as we speak.

Seriously, though, it's intriguing that a network owned by such a close friend of Rudy is going after McCain so aggressively behind the scenes. They don't seem to want McCain to be using Fox footage to legitimize him with GOP primary voters at all. Fox did pillory McCain over his support for the immigration bill. Whatever the motive here, it seems like there could be more of a story behind this.

I contacted Fox to see what gives, but a Fox spokesperson didn't immediately return a call for comment. Meanwhile, here's the McCain ad that Fox News doesn't want you to see:

Update: Fox News backs off, sends cease-and-desist letters to all the leading GOP candidates.

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Army Acknowledges Leaking Beauchamp Docs To Drudge, Promises Investigation
(October 25, 2007 -- 10:11 AM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

There's been a very interesting turn in the saga of The New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist," the American soldier in Iraq who's been accused of fabricating negative stories about U.S. troops and publishing them in the mag.

For those of you who haven't been following this story, the soldier, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, came under withering criticism a few months ago by conservative bloggers who alleged he'd made up the stories about the troops. The Army conducted an internal investigation into the affair and concluded he'd largely fabricated them. TNR has stuck by Beauchamp, demanding that the Army publicly reveal whatever documents it had supporting the probe's conclusion. The Army has refused.

Well, guess what -- the Army may not be willing to reveal its docs to TNR, the target of its investigation, but it has just acknowledged that someone internally has willingly leaked them to Matt Drudge.

This again calls into question the Army's handling of this affair in a big way. It's bad enough that the Army hasn't been willing to show any transparency with regard to its probe into this. It's worse still that someone -- apparently an Army official -- is leaking some of the probe docs to Drudge, likely as part of an effort to get back at TNR.

The Army's acknowledgment of this leak comes in Howard Kurtz's article today about this whole affair. Kurtz was following an item that appeared yesterday on Drudge revealing some of the docs from the investigation. At the end of Kurtz's article comes this, concerning TNR editor Franklin Foer:

Foer said the Army has refused to turn over supporting documents in the case, despite a Freedom of Information Act request, and then "selectively leaked" material to Drudge. In an e-mail to the magazine yesterday, Army spokesman Maj. Kirk Luedeke said he was "surprised and appalled that this information was leaked" and that the military would investigate.

In other words, an Army spokesman basically acknowledged here that while they're not willing to reveal the docs supporting their case to TNR, which is the actual target of its probe, someone internally is willing to give some stuff to Drudge, almost certainly with the intent to carry out payback against the mag. I'm not necessarily defending TNR here -- as Kevin Drum notes, this remains murky -- but the bottom line is that this Army conduct stinks really, really badly.

In the snippet I quoted above the Army promises to "investigate" this leak to Drudge. Somehow one doubts that this will be "investigated" with anywhere near the zeal of the Army's probe into TNR and Beauchamp. Somehow one highly doubts that we'll ever learn what their "investigation" into the leak to Drudge has found.

Update: Glenn Greenwald points out the larger context here: The increasingly politicized U.S. military's use of, and message coordination with, the winger noise machine.

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Washington Post Aggressively Fact-Checks Pathological Exaggerator Rudy Giuliani
(October 24, 2007 -- 10:34 AM EDT // link // )

A couple weeks back I said some churlish stuff about The Washington Post's new Fact-Checker section. The question was whether such an elemental function of journalism really needed to be ghettoized in one section when it should be part of the constant every-day flow of stories.

Well, I'm happy to report that I was wrong. The Fact-Checker has a very aggressive fact check of Rudy Giuliani that's definitely valuable and worth a read.

In sum, Fact-Checker deftly skewers Rudy's ongoing and deeply inane Hillary-bashing -- and his recent assertion that he has little in common with her -- by showing conclusively that he's basically in sync with her on many key issues. The Fact Checker concludes that "Giuliani still remains fairly close to Hillary Clinton on social issues, such as gun control, abortion, and gay rights," and awards Rudy "two Pinnochios" for "significant omissions and/or exaggerations."

Which presents a chance to ask this key question about Campaign 2008 once again: When will Rudy's chronic exaggerating and dissembling enter the official media narrative of the Presidential race? Al Gore, as you all know, was labeled a "serial exaggerator" for far, far less. Rudy is actually more than a serial exaggerator -- he's a pathological exaggerator who's perfectly capable of lying while keeping his face straighter than a ruler. So why don't we hear Rudy described in such terms?

The answer, I submit, lies in the undeniable double standard that your pundits and commentators adopt when judging the character of Dems and Republicans. Ever since the 2000 Bush-Gore campaign, it's been standard operating procedure for pundits and commentators to use the flimsiest of passing anecdotes, as well as outright false ones, to leap to an instant judgment about the entire character of Dem candidates. Gore's earth tones? He's a phony. Kerry's ordering of swiss cheese on a Philly cheese steak? He's an effete snob. Hillary's southern drawl or her cackle? She's scripted, calculating and pandering.

By contrast, with some exceptions, there's generally a profound reluctance on the part of pundits and commentators to reach overall character judgment of GOP candidates based on such stuff. John McCain, for instance, has pandered to a nauseating degree to the religious right in this campaign; the reaction of some pundits has been to actually excuse him for this by saying that he doesn't want to be doing this but knows he has to.

You hear similar things, though to a less pronounced degree, about Rudy: He's saying all this stuff because he has to in order to prevail in a GOP primary. You rarely hear his exaggerations and dissembling -- okay, his lies -- described for what they are, much less hear any pundits reflect on what this tells us about Rudy's character.

Not sure how to change this. Anyway, props to The Fact-Checker for taking a stab at telling the truth about pathological exaggerator Rudy Giuliani.

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Breaking: House Dem Leadership Doesn't Cave, Nixes Vote On Whether To Condemn Pete Stark
(October 23, 2007 -- 12:01 PM EDT // link // )

There's been a bunch of talk in the blogosphere and elsewhere of late about the weird tendency on the part of the Dem Congressional leadership to run for cover whenever Republicans throw a fit about something -- the latest example being the controversy over Dem Rep. Pete Stark's now-notorious comment on the House floor that Bush is sending soldiers to Iraq "to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement."

In response to Stark's comment, GOP elected officials from every corner of our fair country cued up the outrage machine -- and Dem House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ended up denouncing the remarks. This prompted some folks to point out that perhaps Dems shouldn't cheerfully place a stamp of legitimacy on every story the GOP cooks up.

Well, it needs to be said that the Dem leadership finally got one right. Just moments ago, GOP House leader John Boehner introduced a resolution calling for censure of Stark for his comments. And the Dems shut it down, voting largely along party lines to not let it come to a vote. Only five Dems crossed over and joined the Repubs.

About time.

I'm told by House Dem sources that Dems were instructed to vote to nix the resolution by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. A source forwarded me the email that went out from Hoyer to his troops.

It's true that Stark did just apologize on the floor, and it's true that Pelosi has already condemned the remark. Nonetheless, this can be seen as progress of a sort. Remember, this is the same set of House Dems who largely voted to pass the reso condemning MoveOn. But this time, when the GOP said, "boo, you're anti-troops," the Dems didn't jump. And you know what? The roof of the Capitol won't fall in as a result.

So maybe the next time the GOP pulls this same you-hate-the-troops trick from their magic hat, Dems will look up at the Capitol ceiling and say, "You know, last time we didn't play along with this nonsense, and the roof is still there. So let's not bite this time, either." Maybe.

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Hillary Campaign Helping Matt Drudge Get Stronger -- Will Drudge Return The Favor?
(October 22, 2007 -- 10:35 AM EDT // link // )

Everybody's posting about today's New York Times piece on the odd dalliance going on between Hillary's campaign and Matt Drudge, the fellow who broke the story of her husband's affair and cheerfully traffics in all manner of comically grotesque distortions about her on a near-daily basis.

The story reports that the Hillary camp recently leaked Drudge a big story: Her decisive fundraising victory over Barack Obama. The paper says this shows that she is "learning to play nice" with the man who got the process rolling that almost led to her husband's removal from office. It adds this:

Nielsen/NetRatings has clocked three million unique visitors to the site over the course of a month, and the Drudge Report said its users clicked onto the site a combined 16 million times in the course of a single day last week. The site’s influence, which is not limited to politics, has survived the proliferation of blogs offering all manner of news, analysis and gossip, as well as the advent of one-stop shopping political sites like Politico, which has a big staff of established political reporters.

What sets Drudge apart as much as anything is its ability to attract well-placed leaks and traffic in the freshest and rawest material — though sometimes including what some have considered smears...

Aides in both parties acknowledge working harder than ever to get favorable coverage for their candidates — or unfavorable coverage of competitors — onto the Drudge Report’s home page, knowing that television producers, radio talk show hosts and newspaper reporters view it as a bulletin board for the latest news and gossip.

What this really means, of course, is that Hillary's leak of her fundraising numbers was enormously helpful to Drudge and is the sort of thing that helps him and his biz grow stronger. It's true, as Marc Ambinder notes, that Barack Obama appears to have a pipeline to Drudge too on occasion. Nonetheless, the Hillary-Drudge relationship is the thing that bears watching. And the key takeaway is that when they deem it in their interest Hillary advisers are happy to do stuff -- like this leak -- that helps Drudge to no end.

The Hillary campaign of course can leak to whomever they want to. But we should be under no illusions as to what's really going on here. The fact that he does deliver legit scoops amid the stream of mendacity and low-comedic distortions is partly what enables him to maintain his power and status as a kind of "bulletin board" for the nation's political reporters. And the Drudgification of our media proceeds apace.

The piece, interestingly, also reports that Drudge has often said positive things about Hillary on his radio show -- and has even said that he "needs" her. A Hillary Presidency, you'd assume, would drive Drudge traffic through the roof, and for this reason I submit that it would be premature to predict, as many do, that he'd work all that hard to defeat her in a general election. At any rate, each has much to gain from the other, and neither appears to be all that shy about acting on this fact.

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