Source The Strata-Sphere viaWatcher
Journalists Rank amateurs playing the intel……

As you may know the members of the Watcher’s Council each nominate one of his or her own posts and one non-Council post for consideration by the whole Council. The complete list of this week’s Council nominations is here. Here’s what …

You have more chances of being killed by lightning than even coming within 500 miles of a terrorist act. There are rapists, murderers, psychopaths and lunatics of all sorts in all societies and throughout the history of mankind. They’re just flies waiting to be squashed, a bunch of children with pistols compared to any organized army. There are easily over a thousand problems more pressing than those retards.

Stop being so terrorized for you precious little person all the time. There’s nothing more between bin Laden and Ted Kaczynski than a vast ocean. Get on with your lives, you’re wasting it being scared.

Which people has the media gotten killed?

One might say from that instance in Lebanon, they could well have gotten our Marines there killed. Here is what people fail to understand:
Sure, it is reasonable to expect that we would be ATTEMPTING to intercept communitcations, but an enemy never knows how successful we might be at it. If you are exposing that we have been intercepting diplomatic traffic the enemy might know that all that traffic takes a single path or uses a single cable someplace and so they switch to some different means of communications. We might not have access to the new route the communications are taking. It could take us years to gain access again. Or they might change how it is encrypted.

Same with Osama’s satellite phone. We could have nabbed him long ago if the Washington Post hadn’t told him that we were monitoring his phone. He has since stopped using satelling phones. How many people have died as a result of allowing Osama to remain at large? Hard to know.

Finding a particular individual is very difficult. We have fugatives on our most wanted list right here in this country that are difficult for the FBI to find. When you are able to gain access to a communications channel used by someone you are looking for, it is more valuable than gold. When you lose access to that channel, you might never find it again.

Some people have what I consider to be an asinine vision of our intelligence community and think we can just waive a magic wand and find anyone we want instantly. Apparently our media thinks there is nothing wrong with exposing an intercept program. It is quite possible we could have been tipped off about about the Beirut bombing. We will never know.

I also believe our media has assisted current terrorist groups and have prolonged the war in Iraq.

in regards to these spineless suckers of valuable oxygen that infest 43rd street and other media locales…

They are arrogant, self-anointed and unelected. If you haven’t yet, listen to the podcast stream from the powerline link.

At every junction, the meme exhibited by the leftists on the panel is very self-centered:
– presuming the Constitution protects “them” (press) and not a whisper that it protects “free speech”,
– conflating likely damage caused by these leaks with non-related events,
– turning this criticism of their treason into a whining “everytime-we-speak-the-evil-administration-wants-to-hurt-us” drone…

And they’re soooo smooth about it, always offering their responses in such a reasoned way, soothing, grammatically correct and sophisticated utterings are these… I can see where dhimmicrats, leftists and other let-the-government-run-my-life types can cozily follow these “elites” right over the cliffs – like the true lemmings they are.

Many valuable points in this wonderful strata-gram and in the comments – we need to remember that Journalists are wordsmiths, nothing more or less. They are not experts at anything, really… they’re just good at oscillating between baffling us with bullshit on the one hand, and blinding us with (their self-anointed, oh-look-at-me…) brilliance on the other.

The day when they reap what they sow cannot come soon enough for me.

CGVet58
(USN 1976-1984, USCG 1984-2000, LTjg Retired)

God has granted us Freedom, we owe Him our Courage in return

Which people has the media gotten killed?

Bad ideas are killing innocents all the time. Not just Pol Pot’s ideas, but general ideas that nice people have.

For instance, why did we have all those ‘going postal’ massacres? Those school shootings? Copycat crimes, like copycat suicides, that should have been prevented by responsible reporters. The knowledge was there, but the scoop-driven sensationalist media culture drove reporting frenzies every time. Want ten million bucks of free publicity and worldwide name recognition? Look at Lee Harvey Oswald. Look at Thomas Hamilton (Dunblane), and watch ‘A Curretn Affair’.

Bad ideas, badly misguided ideas, drive our media culture. Maybe its time the people took an interest in preventing the next unnecessary massacre whether by foreign terrorist or domestic idiots.

… these headlines are what you would have been reading.
Sad – but true.
On a related note, make sure to check out Thomas Sowell’s piece on the NYT’s revelation of how the US gov’t has gone about tracking financial transactions o…

“This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities,” Ms. Graham said.

“This kind of result, albeit unintentional,

Well just let me say, I don’t think it is unintentional or intentional, I think it is “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” As in this here ‘scoop’ is worth it if all we do is lose a few American troops. I really think the NY Times and WaPo hate American and the military and do whatever it can to do it harm or make it look bad. Are they traitors, A resounding’ Hell yeah’

It is going to take some time to get through the heads of journalists that these actions are not appreciated. Their first step, a patronizing attempt at “educating” the public on why they think it is important and their condescending “justifications” for doing it, is to be expected. It is the same response we get from somone caught with their hands in a cookie jar they have been free to go into for a long time. So far their response has been “it’s what we do”, “they already know”, and “according to our calculations, the risk should be minimal”. Well, I don’t want the NYT increasing the risk of terrorist attacks on my community (and when I say community, I mean all my fellow Americans here in the US and abroad) at all, even minimally so. Because in this case the risk is infinately greater than the benefit. The benefit from the most recent stories is pretty much zero.

When you do a risk/benefit analysis, you want the benefit to be greater than the risk. Stated as a ratio or a division problem, you want the result to be less than 1. In this case, the result is infinity as we have published something that could cause future risk for absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the American public.

The professional journalism trade is living in a bygone era. Their decisions reflect a mindset of the 1960′s and early 70′s. Our society has changed, they have failed to keep up. If they don’t act as responsible citizens, I fear that the citizens will be forced to impose restrictions that might not be the best for anyone in the long term. The journalists are at risk of strangling themselves by abusing rights entrusted to them. In the long term, the marketplace will decide but that is a slow process.

When people are demonstrating outside the NY Times instead of outside the Pentagon and the NYT tries to pass it off as simply a great misunderstanding, some kind of failure to communicate, I will hope it comes to their minds how completely the tables have turned. I believe we are witnessing a fundamental sea change of a real grass roots uprising against an institution that has gone too far. Looking at modern polls that show the trust by the people of various institutions in this country, they might wish to take note that the positions of the media and the military are probably 180-degrees from where they were in 1970. People trust the military and distrust the media. They should be learning something from that.

“It is important for everyone to realize, I think, how low the level of discourse in the legacy media has fallen. So: listen and weep.”

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014584.php

…..

I seriously don’t know how these people sleep at night. They give themselves the right and obligation to tell us what they think we need to know regardless of how much danger it puts us in. Its REALLY scary that there are people who are actually PROUD of this “truth to power” crap. It’s high time we spoke TRUTH TO POWERLESS!

Carol

Maybe printing stuff that “everyone knows about already” isn’t such a good idea after all. …

Buried in a post defending the Mainstream Media’s right to publish sensitive information, the New York Times (free reg. required) lets a particularly nasty cat out of the bag. That negligent reporting can, and HAS, gotten people killed in the past an…