Guest blogged by Tom Klammer...

"[T]he role of advocate is, no matter what kind of information comes out, to sort of disparage it, and, you know, they’re fighting for a result, not the truth. And they already think they know the truth..."

That’s what Professor Jeffrey Milyo told me near the end of a radio interview (MP3, 24 mins) I did with him in February. It was something of a parting shot he left for critics of a study he conducted for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on media cross-ownership, but it strikes me that he could have been describing himself.

Milyo is the University of Missouri professor featured in a BRAD BLOG article by Howard Beale earlier this month. The blog featured an enlightening exchange between Milyo and Senator Chuck Schumer during Milyo’s testimony before the U.S. Senate's Committee on Rules and Administration at a hearing to discuss whether photo ID voting laws lead to voter disenfranchisement. As Beale noted, Milyo’s study purported to show that restrictive photo ID voting laws had no adverse effect on voter turnout in 2006 elections in Indiana. Schumer apparently thought it might be instructive to know who commissioned and paid for the study. Milyo said he had received a grant, but hemmed and hawed and couldn’t seem to remember from whom it came.

As it turned out, Milyo's grant money for his study came from an organization created by Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, the former Bush/Cheney '04 national general counsel, and one of the Republican Party's top operatives behind pushing for such photo ID laws around the country. Hearne was, in fact, instrumental in creating the very Indiana law which Milyo's study claims to show, has caused no voter disenfranchisement in the state.

When I interviewed Milyo last February, it was about a different study he had done, this one about cross ownership of television stations and newspapers in the same markets. The findings of this Milyo study were just as dubious, just as friendly to the Bush Administration's political objectives, and just as fortuitously timed...

Guest Blogged by Dennis Domrzalski of f-brilliant...

After waiting nearly a week, the Albuquerque Journal on Sunday finally published a story about Laura MacCallum quitting her job as KKOB Radio’s afternoon drive time anchor.

What a pathetic story it was, though. It shows why the blogosphere is daily becoming more powerful and why more and more people are turning away from traditional media sources for their news. The fact is, those traditional sources can’t be trusted to tell us what’s really going on, especially when it comes to their own industry.

MaCallum quit because KKOB News Director Pat Allen pulled her stories about allegations of vote buying at the recent sate Republican Party’s pre-primary conventions. Allen caved after getting complaints from Heather Wilson’s U.S. Senate campaign and from state Republican Party officials. (See BRAD BLOG's Special Coverage Page on the scandal here.)

The Journal's --- this newspaper is the largest media outlet in the state --- seven-paragraph story, buried on page B4, fails to mention that it was Wilson’s campaign that did the complaining. It didn’t go into detail about the vote-buying scandal, and it said nothing about Allen’s memo to MacCallum that he didn’t think the stories were valid because other media outlets and bloggers hadn’t picked them up...

KKOB's now-resigned, award-winning news anchor Laura MacCallum offers a full statement, in her own words, in the wake of the station having pulled her stories on allegations of vote-buying by New Mexico's U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson's campaign at a recent GOP Delegate Nominating Convention in the state.

Though she wrote it prior to our speaking with her at length yesterday, the full statement was not posted until today. (Many of her comments from that exclusive interview, in which she replies to new explanations by the station's News Director for having pulled her stories, were included in our detailed report last night)

The statement is posted in full on the blog of reporter Dennis Domrzalski, who originally broke the remarkable news of the spiked stories and MacCallum's resignation, last Monday.

A few notable snippets from her full statement --- in which she blasts KKOB, charging "This is not journalism. It is extortion," and "Honesty and guts in journalism, print or broadcast, is becoming a thing of the past." --- are posted below...

As you'll recall, a local Alabama affiliate blacked out last Sunday's 60 Minutes report on the railroading of former AL Gov. Don Siegelman, who still sits in jail today (even if The BRAD BLOG has proof that Karl Rove, who evidence suggests helped put him there, now wants him "Free"!) The only segment of the show that didn't make it to the AL viewers, when 60 Minutes originally aired Sunday, was the Siegelman segment. The local station then lied about the reasons for the blackout, initially claiming a "transmission problem" from CBS. The network has denied it, and the local station has recanted that explanation and come up with something equally thin. (We covered it all in detail, along with the full video of the 60M report, back here.)

The following interesting point comes from a New York Times editorial today covering the boondoggle...

It's February 8th, 2008, and it's now official: One member of the broadcast MSM has officially joined the ranks of those "crackpots" and "conspiracy theorists" over at The BRAD BLOG!

Congrats to Pittsburgh's WTAE's Team 4 for their excellent, responsible, and appropriate reportage on the serious concerns facing Pennsylvania's Allegheny County voters in the upcoming election. Their investigative report asks "Is Your Vote Safe With County Voting Machines?" and the clear, well-reported, fair and balanced answer comes back as an unambiguous, no punches-pulled: Absolutely not!

The report's "conspiracy theories," confirmed by video, photographs and on-the-record statements from both public officials and Election Integrity experts, as detailed by Team 4's Jim Parsons on WTAE-TV's evening news yesterday (transcript and video both here), include some of these well-known-to-BRAD-BLOG-readers, if still-stunning and rarely-reported-in-the-MSM, items...

guest blogged by skippy the bush kangaroo...

hi, everyone, skippy the bush kangaroo here, and jon swift and i would like to thank the bradblog for allowing us to use this guest post to tell everyone about our blogroll amnesty day celebration this weekend.

in a nutshell, we believe blogroll amnesty should be an occasion to bring our readers' attention to other blogs thru generous linkage; diverse and new blogs which our readers may not be aware of, but would find interesting.

individual blogs like simply left behind, or blue gal or man eegee. group blogs like the moderate voice or correntewire or first draft. media blogs like make them accountable, or tireless blogs that always practice generous linkage, like the side show.

we know that the bradblog is one of the few sites that concentrates on investigating and reporting hard news, specifically about election integrity. we're especially honored, therefore, to be guest blogging here today...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt is a professional propagandist. Any remaining doubt that Hewitt was not a legitimate journalist was removed earlier this month by former White House counsel, Dan Bartlett, who had the following exchange with The Texas Monthly:

But pointing out the obvious fact that wingnut bloggers and talk-radio hosts are hardwired to do White House bidding is hardly newsworthy.

What makes Hewitt an interesting study today is that his overwhelming support for presidential candidate Mitt Romney has exposed his propagandist ways to even his "conservative" listeners, one of whom recently noted on air, before being cut off by Hewitt, the host's apparent "man crush" on the Presidential Candidate...

Guest Editorial by Kenneth Anderson

Endlessly mundane and always uninformative, the moribund struggle for party nominations in what we so disrespectfully still call the "presidential campaign" inhabit a realm of such vacuous inanity one can palpably sense malignant tumors of ennui forming within.

While would-be Republican candidates spar for the GOP nomination by appealing to brain stem functions (that is, when they're not extolling us with tales of their heavenly devotion), Democrats carry themselves at only a marginally elevated level. This is not to say that there are not candidates --- on both sides --- who would like to raise the bar and address actual issues and policy, but those are shunned by our craven and cack-handed media mavens, who never seem to tire of their perceived role as king-maker in what has become --- for the world's "greatest democracy" --- an embarrassing spectacle of the most base and primitive dimensions. I suspect if media moguls could get Romney and Huckabee to square off in a cage fight, well, that would be next on the tour of the candidates. Who needs all this talk? Though the American public demand campaigns of substance, there appears too little of that on the political horizon, while furry idiots like Wolf Blitzer express puzzlement at the term "triangulating" as it pertains to Hillary Clinton.

What we constantly hear from the corporate media, though it is never stated quite so bluntly, is that those with the money become the kings. The American political campaign system is now a big-money bonanza for media corporations. These corporations prop up candidates with the most money knowing full well that that money will come straight back to them in the form of campaign advertising. The media are now simply advertisers for the biggest political spenders, which is perhaps the reason why the campaign cycle is now virtually continuous. It is a positive feedback loop, reinforcing in the minds of the public that the only viable candidates are the ones with the money, the polls reflect this, more money pours in for those "viable candidates," which in turn cycles right back to the media money machine.

Which is why I am constantly amazed that the so-called "progressive" blogs have chosen to endorse corporate-backed candidates like Hillary Clinton.

Though Dennis Kucinich espouses ideals resonant with most liberal voters, he is as marginalized by progressives as much as the mainstream media as "unelectable," though no one ever seems to understand or explain exactly what that means. Is it his ears?

By all appearances, blogs such as dKos, MyDD, etc, have now simply become another arm of the Democratic party and their backing of the major, big-money candidates simply because they are deemed "electable" entirely betrays the original purpose of their fora.

Blogged by Brad from St. Louis, MO...

In light of our story this morning on the Mainstream Corporate Media's failure to air the charges of an extraordinarily credible FBI whistleblower, whose charges are described by the legendary Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg as "far more explosive than the Pentagaon Papers", the following, we suppose, should come as little surprise. Yet, in reviewing the points below, the mind still reels...

Rest of story...

(Hat-tip to NYU's journalism professor, Mark Crispin Miller)

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

"I'd say what she has is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers," Daniel Ellsberg told us in regard to former FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds.

"From what I understand, from what she has to tell, it has a major difference from the Pentagon Papers in that it deals directly with criminal activity and may involve impeachable offenses," Ellsberg explained. "And I don't necessarily mean the President or the Vice-President, though I wouldn't be surprised if the information reached up that high. But other members of the Executive Branch may be impeached as well. And she says similar about Congress."

The BRAD BLOG spoke recently with the legendary 1970's-era whistleblower in the wake of our recent exclusive, detailing Edmonds' announcement that she was prepared to risk prosecution to expose the entirety of the still-classified information that the Bush Administration has "gagged" her from revealing for the past five years under claims of the arcane "State Secrets Privilege."

Ellsberg, the former defense analyst and one-time State Department official, knows well the plight of whistleblowers. He himself was prepared to spend his life in prison for the exposure of some 7,000 pages of classified Department of Defense documents concerning Executive Branch manipulation of facts and outright lies leading the country into an extended war in Vietnam.

Ellsberg seemed hardly surprised that today's American mainstream broadcast media has so far failed to take Edmonds up on her offer, despite the blockbuster nature of her allegations.

As Edmonds has also noted, Ellsberg pointed to the New York Times, who "sat on the NSA spying story for over a year" when they "could have put it out before the 2004 election, which might have changed the outcome."

"There will be phone calls going out to the media saying 'don't even think of touching it, you will be prosecuted for violating national security,'" he told us.

"I have been receiving calls from the mainstream media all day," Edmonds recounted the day after we ran the story announcing that she was prepared to violate her gag-order to disclose all of the national security-related criminal allegations she has been kept from disclosing for the past five years.

"The media called from Japan and France and Belgium and Germany and Canada and from all over the world," she told The BRAD BLOG.

"But not from here?" we asked incredulously.

"I'm getting contact from all over the world, but not from here. Isn't that disgusting?" she shot back.

-- By Brad Friedman

Attention CBS 60 Minutes: we've got a huge scoop for you. If you want it.

Remember the exclusive story you aired on Sibel Edmonds, originally on October 27th, 2002, when she was not allowed to tell you everything that she heard while serving as an FBI translator after 9/11 because she was gagged by the rarely-invoked "States Secret Privilege"? Well, she's still gagged. In fact, as the ACLU first described her, she's "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America."

But if you'll sit down and talk with her for an unedited interview, she has now told The BRAD BLOG during an exclusive interview, she will now tell you everything she knows.

Everything she hasn't been allowed to tell since 2002, about the criminal penetration of the FBI where she worked, and at the Departments of State and Defense; everything she heard concerning the corruption and illegal activities of several well-known members of Congress; everything she's aware of concerning information omitted and/or covered up in relation to 9/11. All of the information gleaned from her time listening to and translating wire-taps made prior to 9/11 at the FBI.

Here's a handy bullet-point list, as we ran it in March of 2006, for reference, of what she's now willing to tell you about.

"People say, 'why doesn't she just come forward and spill the beans?' I have gone all the way to the Supreme Court and was shut down, I went to Congress and now consider that shut down," she told The BRAD BLOG last week when we spoke with her for comments in relation to our story on former House Speaker Dennis Hastert's original attempt to move a resolution through the U.S. House in 2000 declaring the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in Turkey as "genocide."

"Here's my promise to the American Public: If anyone of the major networks --- ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX --- promise to air the entire segment, without editing, I promise to tell them everything that I know," about everything mentioned above, she told us.

"I can tell the American public exactly what it is, and what it is that they are covering up," she continued. "I'm not compromising ongoing investigations," Edmonds explained, because "they've all been shut down since."

Earlier this month, BRAD BLOG's D.C. Correspondent, Margie Burns, sat in on Senate Judiciary Committee hearings concerning a federal "reporter's shield law," ostensibly meant as a way to offer protection for the sources of journalists, while defining exceptions for national security issues. As the bill was voted out of committee she posed some interesting concerns here about it.

Yesterday, Burns wrote at her own site, the House passed their own version of the GOP-introduced, MSM-supported law, but she notes there's a small --- yet very important --- difference in the House bill's definition of "covered person"...

Well, that's an important difference, indeed. One that could substantially effect bloggers, such as ourselves, and certainly those on blogs both smaller and larger (e.g., even the huge Huffington Post, where bloggers are not paid). Under the law, if the compromise version of both houses is passed using the House definition, it could potentially mean that we would not be "covered person" and thus not protected from being required by law to disclose our sources.

Such a statue could be a devastating blow to the ability of folks like us, not on a regular salaried contract with a major metropolitan newspapers or broadcast network, to guarantee privacy to our sources. Many of the stories that The BRAD BLOG has broken and reported over the years simply could not have existed without such promises to insider and whistleblower sources.

Burns goes on to bullet-point a list of those she feels would and wouldn't be covered by the definition of "covered person" in the House version of the bill, including most bloggers as she sees it.

"In other words," she charges, "a 'covered person' is basically anyone Bob Novak could tolerate, and not covered is everyone who might hypothetically or even accidentally be perceived as a threat to the Novaks of this world. What could be sweeter? --- for Robert Novak."

UPDATE: Nate Anderson at ars technica offers additional thoughts.

In a letter sent to station management, as The BRAD BLOG reported in August, former Democratic Senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel, correctly wrote: "The increasing monopolization of the mainstream media today demands that we stand up for independent-minded, progressive voices out there like KLSD AM 1360 in San Diego."

He was the only Presidential Candidate, to our knowledge, to utter a word about it.

As reports emerge that progressive radio talker Ed Schultz' audience now matches Bill O'Reilly's, one has to wonder what the hell the Democrats --- specifically the rest of the Democratic Presidential candidates --- are thinking, as Clear Channel prepares to flip the only progressive talk station in the nation's sixth largest city over to an all-sports format any day now.

The busy Internet rumors suggest it could happen as early as this week. Station insiders have told The BRAD BLOG it's more likely to happen on November 1st "at the earliest", as the corporate bosses at Clear Channel get ducks in a row for what is currently seen as an "inevitable" flip.

It'll be one less major market for Big Ed, one of the Democratic party's biggest and most effective supporters. Though O'Reilly will, no doubt, remain on the air in San Diego, despite the damage and shame his irresponsible "reporting" brings to our Republic.

In late August, we detailed the first indications that corporate media behemoth, Clear Channel, was preparing to dump the progressive talk format at AM 1360 KLSD in San Diego. Citizens were outraged, signed petitions, wrote letters to station management, created websites and showed up at rallies to protest the imminent shut down of the station.

At the time, we suggested to both organizers of the protests and station personnel that they join with Air America (who has several shows airing on the station) to invite the Democratic Presidential candidates out to San Diego for an Emergency Debate focusing on one of the very reasons our country is in the mess that it is: Corporate Consolidation of the Public Airwaves.

It seems quite clear that such consolidation has not been in the best interest of the people who own the airwaves. And further, it seems clear that the corporate interests who lease access to that spectrum, from the people, don't give a damn about such interests.

And yet, to our knowledge, in the nearly two months since Clear Channel indicated they were preparing to flip the station format, only one Democratic Presidential candidate, Gravel, has understood the importance about speaking out against this outrage.

Guest Blogged by Miriam Raftery

SAN DIEGO - “We believe dissent is patriotic. We believe in the constitution and we believe in the United States of America,” AM 1360 KLSD talk show host Stacy Taylor said on his morning show in San Diego on Monday, drawing cheers from a crowd of more than 500 listeners who showed up at 7am to rally in protest of Clear Channel's plan to convert San Diego’s only progressive radio station to an all-sports format.

Over 1,100 people have signed a petition calling on Clear Channel to keep KLSD’s progressive format since word of the planned format change leaked out late last week. Clear Channel executives have also been deluged with thousands of emails, virtually all in favor of keeping Air America on the air in America’s sixth largest city.

KLSD has received letters supporting KLSD progressive radio received from Senator Bernie Sanders, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Mike Gravel, and Ambassador Joe Wilson, husband of former CIA-agent Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked to the press by a White House source.

“Clear Channel has no agenda to shut down progressive voices,” programming director Cliff Albert said at the rally. Consideration of a format change is motivated solely by falling Arbitron ratings and concerns over advertising dollars, KLSD insiders have disclosed.

But some expressed skepticism.

“I think this is another effort to shut down progressive voices where the message is most effective, especially here in a military town,” said Bree Walker, an Air America host in Los Angeles and former San Diego TV newscaster who recently purchased Cindy Sheehan’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, shared that concern. “I suspect they’ll be starting in San Diego and moving around the U.S. to shut down the progressives,” she predicted...

Guest Blogged by Miriam Raftery

San Diego --- KLSD (AM 1360), the only progressive talk radio station in America’s sixth largest city, may soon convert to a sports format, multiple sources have confirmed.

A banner notice at the top of KLSD’s website this morning confirms that “Yes, there are rumours flying about KLSD changing format. And while various options are under consideration, we also want the progressive voice to remain heard in San Diego. Stay tuned and we will keep you informed. Thanks for listening and supporting KLSD.”

The website has also posted a request for supporters to pledge listening time for KLSD, as local activists have announced an email campaign as well as scheduled demonstrations at the station for next Monday in an attempt to keep the city's only non-"conservative" commercial talk station on the air...