TV News LIES

The Fox cameras wandered over an incredible scene: the cream of right-wing/neocon punditry -- William Kristol, Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke -- were caught slumped in their chairs during the commercial break, deep in a state of hopelessness and depression. They didn't see the camera train on them, or maybe they were incapable of faking it, as if they'd been on a three-day Ecstasy roll at Burning Man, and now they were paying the horrible serotonin-deprived price. Kristol looked like he was suffering the worst: He was slouched over the table, his grotesque Stewie-shaped head sulking down to his navel, his glazed eyes staring down at the floor. He strained to lift his head when Hume called on him to comment -- and when Kristol spoke, it was in a raspy, slow voice, not his usual smirking, energetic arrogance. To quote a sympathetic right-wing blogger, "Will Collier e-mails to tell me that he hasn't seen Bill Kristol look this bad since his man McCain get stomped in S.C. by Bush in 2000."

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When 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his crew went to China to record the black market dismantling of electronic waste, or "e-waste," the experience was almost as hazardous for the 60 Minutes team as working with the toxic material is for poor Chinese workers.

Jumped by a gang of men overseeing the e-waste operations who tried to take the CBS team's cameras, Pelley’s crew managed to escape and bring back footage of the hazardous activities.

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AUSTRALIA will join China in implementing mandatory censoring of the internet under plans put forward by the Federal Government.

The revelations emerge as US tech giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and a coalition of human rights and other groups unveiled a code of conduct aimed at safeguarding online freedom of speech and privacy.

The government has declared it will not let internet users opt out of the proposed national internet filter.

The plan was first created as a way to combat child pornography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.

Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.

The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.

It is further evidence of the Government's desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry.

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U.S. News and World Report is essentially getting out of the newsmagazine game.

The financially struggling magazine, which cut back to biweekly publication, now plans to go monthly, according to staffers briefed on the decision.

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For the past six weeks, we have chronicled the landslide in newspaper endorsements for Barack Obama (see tally on our site, with an update to come today), now about 250 to 110. Included in this have been well over 50 daily papers that have switched from backing Bush in 2004 to supporting Obama this year. Then there are the embarrassments such as the largest paper in Alaska, The Anchorage Daily News, also endorsing Obama.

Now comes another signal: This morning, Dick Cheney's hometown paper in Wyoming, the Casper Star-Tribune, switched to Obama.

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