Then on Monday, Stars and Stripes reported that the Pentagon contracted the Rendon Group — a public relations firm that had made millions from the CIA by “creat[ing] the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power” in the media, according to an award-winning Rolling Stone profile — to vet embed-seeking journalists for “positive,” “negative” or “neutral” coverage according to “mission objectives.” For any media organization that can’t afford the several thousand dollars every day for security and transportation in war zones — most of them, basically — that’s, uh, problematic. I’ve embedded in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There were many places in both countries where unembedded reporting by American journalists is a life-or-death gamble.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan told the paper that the only vetting that takes place isn’t for utility to the war effort but for responsibility. “If it’s accurate, that’s a successful news story, whether good or bad,” Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said. But today the paper quoted new documents from Rendon showing that not only does the vetting take place, but so does a discussion of strategies to manipulate reporters:

One reporter on the staff of one of America’s pre-eminent newspapers is rated in a Pentagon report as “neutral to positive” in his coverage of the U.S. military. Any negative stories he writes “could possibly be neutralized” by feeding him mitigating quotes from military officials.

Another reporter, from a TV station, provides coverage from a “subjective angle,” according to his Pentagon profile. Steering him toward covering “the positive work of a successful operation” could “result in favorable coverage.”

To some degree, it’s hard to get exercised by the fact that public-affairs officers try to sway journalists’ coverage. Shocking, I tell you! But denying that it occurs at all is bizarre, and the question becomes whether certain journalists are denied their embeds based on the effort. One Stars and Stripes reporter, Heath Druzen, was kicked out of an embed in Iraq earlier this year after Druzen didn’t highlight developments that the brigade he was with wanted highlighted.

Then there’s this clever bit of argumentative jujitsu:

In a statement e-mailed to Stars and Stripes, Rear Adm. Greg Smith, director of communications for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, wrote: “To imply journalists embedded with our forces only serve to highlight positive aspects of our mission slights the professional journalists who regularly embed with our forces and report what they experience, both good and bad.”

Somehow it doesn’t seem plausible to argue that Stars and Stripes is slandering its colleagues who make it past a questionable embed vetting process. Will Stars and Stripes, a paper available in most every dining hall in Iraq and Afghanistan, be denied further embeds?

[T]hroughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

Allen follows up today by … quoting Cheney again.

Cheney maintains that records released this week show that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques “provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda” after the Sept. 11 attacks. A Democratic official disputed that assertion …

This is pretty amazing. Cheney claimed that confidential documents would back up his case. The documents were released, but didn’t back up his case. The result? “He-said, she-said” stories that don’t point out the crucial fact of Cheney’s deception.

An Iranian appeals court has reduced the eight-year jail sentence for Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi to a suspended two-year term and she will soon be freed, her defense lawyer told Reuters on Monday.

Reuters further reported that Saberi’s parents will pick her up from Evin prison. The appeals court evidently realized that imprisoning Saberi made Iran an international embarrassment.

Update: Italy’s Agenzia Giornalistica Italia reports that Saberi has been released, and The Associated Press confirms.

When I was in college, I studied Southern Long Fist Kung Fu for more than a year and my teacher told me something that I never forgot.

I’d like to think that the F. Scott Fitzgerald rip is intentional. Sadly, the rest of the column is a call for conservative bloggers to “do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber,” as if Palin and Wurzelbacher were shrinking violets who did not embrace their statuses as public figures.

I guess I was right to doubt the government’s claim–made to the [FISA Court of Review] –that it does not have a database of the communications of incidentally collected non-targeted persons, seeing as how this separate collection of journalists’ communications would be just that kind of database. (Unless, of course, the Bush thugs want to admit they deliberately targeted journalists as suspected terrorists.)

We’ll see if they do! For my part, I’ll be seriously crestfallen if it turns out the Bush administration didn’t consider me worth illegally spying upon.

Internet journalist/blogger and Little Green Footballs regular Zombie (not “conservative” per se, but rather anti-sharia/anti-jihad/anti-anti-American/anti-extremist Left) did extraordinary work digging up documents related to Barack Obama and left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers’s relationship — most notably, unearthing the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire and Obama’s review of Ayers’s book on the juvenile court system.

I don’t know many conservatives who’d argue, in hindsight, that more citizen journalism about Bill Ayers (whose Weather Underground days were so mysterious that you can Netflix an Oscar-nominated documentary about them) was what the Right needed in 2008. But Malkin reminded me of Zombie’s other influential work: a lengthy essay titled “The Left’s Big Blunder,” about how the polls were biased, people were lying about their support for Obama, and the media was complicit. He used (among other examples) the test case of a German performing horse, Clever Hans.

Much of the media analysis, and even the strategies of the campaigns themselves, is based on the ongoing poll results indicating voter preferences state-by-state and nationwide. But I suspect that we are observing the Clever Hans Effect on a massive scale, and that the polls are in fact unreliable. Worse than “unreliable,” actually: they are inaccurate because to some degree they reflect not the honest feelings of the respondents but rather what the pollers want to hear. Since, as discussed above, most poll-questioners are likely to be Obama supporters, and since the Clever Hans Effect tells us that they likely slant their questions and/or provide subtle clues as to what the “correct” answer is whether or not they’re trying to be neutral and fair, the end result is that the poll results end up being tilted in favor of Obama. Pundits and journalists and campign directors are deriving supposed “information” from the poll results, and basing their actions on them — even though the polls merely reflect (to a certain degree) what the pollsters wanted to hear.

Barack Obama won the presidency by a 7.2 percent margin in the national vote and a 365-173 margin in the electoral college, picking off states like Indiana and North Carolina from the Republicans. Zombie updated his essay.

The effects described in this essay very likely did happen as I postulated, but not to a large enough extent to overcome Obama’s actual strength and McCain’s actual weakness. In other words, approximately 3% of people responding to polls did lie and say they supported Obama when in fact they did not (a ~9.5% predicted victory on average vs. a 6.5% actual victory).* It’s just that McCain was not close enough in real support for the Hans/Asch/Bradley Effect to make the difference.

This is a… let’s call it an innovative understanding of statistics. According to Michelle Malkin, we can call it “reporting.”

*Obama’s margin grew after this, after all West Coast votes were counted.