I made chicken soup tonight. Tried a few different things.

Best. Soup. Ever.

And I made a little extra broth, so I’ve got some I can use to make stuffing with.

Can’t wait for lunch tomorrow. The soup wasn’t ready until 8:30-ish, so I had something else for dinner. But I tasted it, of course. Man, it’s good.

Yes, it’s light around here today, but boy, I’ve been blogging up a storm over at Jewcy. Gilad Shalit, the palestinian reunification law in regards to terrorists (14% of suicide bombers used the reunification law to get into Israel), and Hogan’s Heroes.

Go. Read. Make them want to hire me for a second week.

But also according to Guardian, it appears. I must confess that I started to look at the Guardian only a few years ago. It begun with my sensitive self being irked, angry and sometimes vivid. Now I got used to it, and it is most of the time just a quiet amazement. Were I able to distill it into nirvana, I would have already been the happiest (and, probably, the richest) of all mortals. Anyway, today Guardianistas have done it again.
OK, you would say, so what - the usual on-line editor blooper. Could be, but let’s try the article.

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s president, has promoted loyalists to key positions and said he will shut down a pro-opposition television station on the eve of his third term in office.

Mr Chavez has signalled more radical policies by tightening his grip in the run-up to his inauguration on Wednesday, the start of what he said would be a new phase in his “socialist revolution”.

This is just for starters - now try to savor this morsel:

Venezuela’s foreign ministry rejected the criticism and said shutting RCTV would guarantee freedom of expression.

If you are able to translate it into plain English, please feel free to do so in the comments area.

Last week he fired the vice president, José Vicente Rangel, a powerful and totemic political veteran. Jorge Rodríguez, a former chief of Venezuela’s electoral council, was appointed vice-president and the president’s brother, Adan Chavez, was named education minister.

Mr Chavez also announced a plan to merge his movement’s amorphous grouping of more than 20 political parties into a single body, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

And if, after reading the above, you have some miracle potion to dispel my foreboding that Venezuela is up the excrement creek with no paddles, please feel free to do so too.

And my last question: how exactly does the author of the article, one Rory Carroll, imagine socialism?

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

This postwas originally published on May 24, 2002.

The Times is running scared

Meryl Evans forwarded me this story, which did, indeed, bring a smile to my face. (Thanks, kiddo.) The New York Times boycott is apparently working, and working well, as are selected boycotts around the nation, including one of NPR. Jewish groups are urging a boycott of the Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times due to biased coverage of Israel. The article cites, among other things, the two skewed pictures the Times printed in the article about the Israel Day Parade–the ones that made it appear there was a much bigger crowd of Palestinian protestors than there actually was. That would be the one the Times actually almost apologized for.

Intense public reaction to coverage of the violence of the Middle East conflict has prompted unusually harsh attacks on several news media outlets and has led to boycotts of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Broadcast news operations, including CNN and National Public Radio, have also been criticized. The general manager of one public radio station, WBUR-FM in Boston, said it had lost more than $1 million in underwriting and pledges this year — nearly 4 percent of its annual budget — because some supporters of Israel encouraged people not to give.

[...] The swift communications of the Internet era apparently help fan the intensity of the criticism.

[...] James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, echoed such criticism, but said he would not encourage a boycott. To do “what the Jewish community has done, to incite their members to boycott, to feel so injured that people work themselves into a lather over press coverage does damage to the possibility of discourse,” he said.

Okay, let’s recap: The boycott is working well enough for the Times to run an article about it, and for an NPR station to lose a million dollars in pledges and contributions. The Internet is partly responsible for the boycott’s swift enaction and success. And a leader of an Arab American organization says that boycotts are a bad thing. Discourse, he says. Talk. (Not that any Arab organization would boycott Israel, no. Nor, indeed, would the enitre Arab world. Nuh-uh.)

So the obvious bias is already there–mean ol’ Jews boycott the Times, good ol’ Arab Americans–or at least their leaders–want to talk.

But here’s where the article gets really, well, boycott-worthy.

While the the pro-Israeli Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or Camera, studies newpapers for evidence of bias, Palestine Media Watch has been monitoring the coverage of newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Like pro-Israeli critics, the pro-Palestian groups focus on issues of balance and equivalence and on common vocabulary. Ahmed T. Bouzid, the president of Palestine Media Watch, argued, among other things, that the word retaliation was often used about Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets, which, he said, “frames it as a reaction to something, not an action initiated by Israelis.” He said he was pushing to eliminate mediocre journalism, not charging bias.

Look at the first words of each paragraph. Notice how the pro-Palestinians are groups, but the pro-Israelis are critics. Notice that “While the pro-Israeli Committee … studies newspapers for evidence of bias [emphasis mine]“, “the pro-Palestinian groups focus on issues of balance and equivalence [emphasis mine] and on common vocabulary.”

Indeed. Look what happens when you focus on common vocabulary. Look at the stealth bias. The quote from the Palestinian group? “He said he was pushing to eliminate mediocre journalism, not charging bias.”

Un-friggin’-believable. Even in an article about media bias, the Times is biased.

The New York Times. Don’t buy it, and drop your subscription. You need to read it? It’s free on the Internet.