Category: Journalism

Oh Young-jin the chief editorial writer at the Korea Times is at it again.  This time he wrote an editorial titled “Ugly Foreigners” that described three cases of road rage in Korea involving foreigners.  For those that don’t know the ROK recently implemented a new law that made road rage incidents like the one described illegal.  The article is actually good information for foreigners living in Korea to know.  However, there was no need to give the editorial that title so to me it seems that Mr. Oh published the title as click bait which has worked.  Now the Korea Times has been flooded with emails accusing Mr. Oh of racism.  Oh has actually had to publish not one, but two editorials defending himself against racism.  What I continue to love about Mr. Oh is not his penchant for click bait articles, but the fact that he continues to use the email address of foolsdie5@ktimes.com.  It seems that if Mr. Oh wants people to take him seriously he might want to start with using a professional email address.

https://twitter.com/CurtisMelvin/status/650824237184385024

https://twitter.com/CurtisMelvin/status/650825007451533312

In fairness in my opinion the Korean media has actually gotten better since its low point in 2008 when they intentionally caused the US beef mad cow crisis that led to weeks of protests and violence all based on media lies:

President Park Geun-hye on Monday stressed the need for media to provide accurate and unbiased information, seemingly backing up the ruling party’s offensives against Korea’s major Internet portals for “prejudicial” delivery of news.

While attending an event hosted by one of the country’s major daily newspapers, Park also highlighted the role of media outlets in pursuing her key initiatives such as labor market reforms.

“The digital revolution brought significant changes to the media outlets … and we are exposed to the danger where inaccurate information could spread out momentarily. In this situation, the media should play a more important role in discerning accurate information and offering it to the public,” Park said.

“Now we are making a big stride toward overhauling the nation. I believe that media outlets play a significant role in steering the nation toward disruption and innovation. I sincerely ask them to serve as a beacon that can act as a guide for the rest of us,” Park added.

Her remarks came shortly after Saenuri Party claims that major Internet search engines such as Naver and Daum Kakao had skewed news coverage from media outlets in favor of the opposition.  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.

The Korea Times has come to the conclusion that they were had by the article that was published recently on their website that included a profile picture of a sex offender.  What I love about the apology is that it written by Oh Young-jin the paper’s chief editorial writer who uses the email addresses “foolsdie@gmail.com and foolsdie5@ktimes.com”.  It seems if you want people to take your paper seriously than using a professional email address would be a start.

We want to explain to our readers three “incidents” regarding articles published on our editorial pages and share our thoughts about them.

The three, in counter-chronological order, include a contributing article which an unidentified person submitted with the mug shot of a registered sex offender; a column with a touch of plagiarism; and a piece about East-West cultural differences. We don’t identify them to prevent copycatting of the first case and to protect their privacy for the second and third cases.

The bogus article was submitted to our paper’s longest-running series of essays that are open with few restrictions to people of all walks of life. This triggered many inquiries and tips from readers, prompting us first to take the photo off our website and then the article after it was obvious beyond any doubt that it was a practical joke.

First, we concluded it was beyond an apology and is inexcusable so we intend to take this occasion as a bitter lesson. As a result, we will double our vetting process and, if necessary, consider resorting to law enforcement authorities if this kind of prank takes place again. This is an effort to protect our paper’s integrity so as to live up to our stated mission of keeping our readers informed to the best of our ability. At the same time, we thank readers for reporting the bogus article to us and sharing their concern. [Korea Times]

You can read the rest at the link.

I have always found this amazing how this Japanese journalist is tried for reporting in the Japanese media what the Korean media was reporting themselves about President Park:

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A trial has begun for a Japanese journalist charged with defaming South Korea’s president by reporting rumors that she was absent for seven hours during a ferry disaster in April because she was with a man.

A spokesman from the Seoul Central District Court said Thursday that Tatsuya Kato of Japan’s Sankei Shimbun was present in court as his lawyers and prosecutors introduced evidence.

The indictment has raised questions about South Korea’s press freedom. Critics accuse South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s conservative government of clamping down on journalists in an attempt to control her image.

Prosecutors indicted Kato in October over his Aug. 3 article about Park’s whereabouts on the day the Sewol ferry sank and killed more than 300 passengers, mostly teenagers on a school trip.

The article repeated rumors in South Korean media and the financial industry about a relationship between Park and a former aide who was said to be married at the time. (Associated Press)

You can read more at the link.

Since trying to slur General Petraeus with misrepresented “facts” has proven to be a disaster for the left, what have they decided to do now to take him down?  Well make stuff up of course:

And you though the Moveon.Org ad was something.  You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  There is no hole so deep that the modern left considers it unnecessary to keep digging.  In other words, the demonization of David Petraeus has just begun.

The lefties at the Daily Kos and Think Progress are both giving a lot of play to the following quote that Admiral William Fallon allegedly (much more on that in a bit) made about his underling David Petraeus during their first meeting in Baghdad last March.  The Daily Kos and Think Progress report Fallon called Petraeus “an ass-kissing little chicken-sh*t.”

I know what you’re thinking.  For reputable outfits like the Daily Kos and Think Progress to report such an incendiary comment, the remark must be impeccably sourced.  Well…

The original report of the comment, the scoop if you will, came in something called the “Inter Press Service News Agency,” or “IPS” as the organization bills itself.  What?  You’ve never heard of this IPS and find yourself curious about who and what it is?  IPS describes itself this way on its website: “IPS, civil society’s leading news agency, is an independent voice from the South and for development, delving into globalisation for the stories underneath. Another communication is possible.”  I don’t know what any of that means either, but I figure I’d share it with you and put it our there for deconstruction. [Hugh Hewitt]

The General Fallon quote is making its way across the leftistsphere with no challenge to it authenticity led by the Daily Kos and Think Progress.  However, when General Fallon was asked to comment on this it was determined it was totally untrue.  Not surprising considering the IPS article claims they got the quote from “Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting”.  IPS could not even get an anonymous quote from someone who was at the meeting and instead rely on someone who claimed to have read a report of the meeting.  Also keep in mind I have never seen minutes of a meeting ever taken where the recorder would write such a quote as General Fallon reportedly said.

So who is the person that wrote the IPS article you may wonder?  Well none other than an anti-war, leftist ideologue Gareth Porter.  Never heard of him before?  Well you wouldn’t because his views are so left wing no respectable media outlet will touch him, thus that is why he writes for IPS and blogs for the Huffington Post, and other left wing sites.  This is a guy who is a communist apologizer and even and apologist for the Khmer Rouge before the evidence of their killings became insurmountable.

So basically what the Daily Kos and his like minded leftists want the public to believe is the word of a guy who is a communist apologist who denied the existence of the Killing Fields of Cambodia.  How come Kos and company never mentioned that before quoting him?

Is this man another leftist plant looking to join the Army?:

Crawfordsville Mayor John Zumer is resigning to rejoin the Army.

The 42-year-old Zumer’s last day is Sept. 23. The next day, he’ll return to active duty as an Army journalist with the rank of specialist.

Zumer has four months remaining on his term.

He lost his bid for re-election during the Democratic primary in May. He’s been mayor of the city about 40 miles northwest of Indianapolis for nearly four years.

Zumer says he’d been thinking about returning to the Army for a couple of months.

A Democratic leader said he hopes a caucus will name a replacement before Zumer’s departure. [AP]

Zumer left office after losing a primary election as the incumbent mayor which is really bad.  If you read this message board, you can see some people in Crawfordsville did not like his leftist politics, he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a failed business park, and he was plagued with his own sex scandal.  The city of Crawfordsville ended up having to payoff the woman in the center of the sex scandal. 

He was unpopular and this is what led to him losing the primary and so what better way to rebuild your reputation than joining the Army.  He signed up as a journalist just like the Amnesty International plant Linsay Burnett who just so happened to be published in the New York Times for her anti-war opinions.  Could Zumer possibly be hoping to follow Burnett’s example by going to Iraq and writing some anti-war articles with hopefully one getting picked up by the New York Times? 

If that happened he would instantly repair his political reputation with the left and be set to further his political ambitions after leaving the military.  Only time will tell if he is another Beauchamp, Hutto, or Burnett, but I will be watching.

Here is another article from the media with no mention of the acquittal of US Marines in the Haditha incident. 

A major general and two senior officers have been disciplined for their roles in investigating the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha in 2005, the Marine Corps said Wednesday.

Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, former commanding general of the 2nd Marine Division, has received a letter of censure from the secretary of the Navy for the "actions he took and failed to take" in response to the killings.

The statement from the Marine Corps does not elaborate.

Col. Stephen W. Davis and Col. Robert G. Sokoloski also received letters of censure.

Davis was cited for failure to take action when informed about the slayings. Sokoloski was cited for unsatisfactory performance of his duties. [Elliot Spagat, AP]

The article only mentions the censure of senior officers over the handling of the incident and the last remaining court martial of the Marine involved in the incident.  All of the other Marines have been acquitted, which probably means this last Marine faces a good chance at being acquitted as well.  However you would not know such key facts from reading the AP article because they are totally ignored. 

Then again when has the media ever been concerned about simply reporting facts?  They are about promoting storylines and they did everything they could to promote their storyline of heartless Marines killing poor innocent Iraqis in Haditha for no reason.  Now that the storyline has been shattered it is best not to mention the acquittals in order to keep the storyline alive in the minds of the general public who are not closely following the case. 

This article, Troops Disregard Rules of War, was recently on the front page of CNN and is a total hit piece against the US military in Iraq:

Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by U.S. troops against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.

The documents, released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents. They show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.

This article leads the reader to believe that these incidents are some how new incidents that have not been reported before and only because of the ACLU have they been uncovered.  The truth is that these incidents the ACLU has supposedly uncovered have been well documented before and to top it off are extremely old. 

Take this incident for example:

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.

I know about this incident because I worked with this battalion before while I was in Iraq and know many of the people involved in what happened.  These were good people who used some bad judgment and were held accountable for it by the US military.  However, this incident is not anything knew the details about what happened are widely available.  The New York Times for example has a 12 page article on it entitled, The Fall of the Warrior King.  The other examples in the article are also all old and well documented. 

This is what the ACLU had the nerve to claim in the article:

Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said the documents also show that there is information being withheld from public scrutiny.

"Withheld from public scrutiny?"  There is a 12 page article in the New York Times on the very first incident they list as being supposedly "withheld from public scrutiny". 

The article also brings up the Haditha case and makes no mention of the acquittal of the Marines involved in it. 

Why is CNN considering this news worthy enough of being on the front page of their website?  There is absolutely nothing new in this article other then recycling old stories and trying to make them out as if they have been uncovered by the ACLU and that the military is covering up even more civilian deaths in Iraq. 

This is clearly another hit piece by the media right before General Petraeus’ report to Congress that perpetuates the continuing theme by the liberal media to portray US soldiers as uneducated low lives that are committing war crimes all over Iraq and thus not worthy of the nation’s respect.  Yes I question their patriotism; CNN and the ACLU do not support the troops and they never did. 

The effort to discredit General Petraeus has continued this past weekend by the New York Times releasing an article by Fred Kaplan titled "Challenging the Generals".  Conveniently right before General Petraeus’ report to Congress Kaplan some how gets access to Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff’s briefing to officers attending the Captain’s Career Course at Ft. Knox, Kentucky.  Even more conveniently one of the officers asks General Cody about LTC Yingling’s article earlier this year and the supposed poor performance of generals during the war. 

The rest of the article goes on to bash the current of general officer level leadership and actually criticizes generals for not doing more about not crossing the line of civilian control of the military.  At least Kaplan didn’t advocate a military coup like some on the left have been advocating.  Throughout the article Kaplan tries to make it seem that troops are increasingly speaking out against the generals running the war.  Where have we heard this before?  Does Beauchamp, Hutto, Burnett, Jayamaha, and a host of other leftist plants ring a bell?  This is another manufactured attempt to create the perception of a "grassroots" effort among troops to speak out against the war.  Of course nothing is mentioned of the astroturfing campaign led by the largest liberal public relations firm to promote it. 

Kaplan does make a few good points just like LTC Yingling did in his article but the article is being twisted by the usual suspects as you can’t trust Petraeus’ report to Congress even though the article way at the end actually compliments Petraeus just like if you actually read LTC Yingling’s article instead of excerpts on blogs, General Petraeus and the current crop of officers running the war effort are exactly what he recommends.  Now that is something you will not hear anyone on the left say. 

This is just another example of the slow trickle of articles to discredit General Petraeus who has the world’s hardest job already and the left are determined to make even harder.