By now, you've probably already heard of Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who came out as undocumented in the New York Times Magazine. Memeorandum and Mediagazer, sites which aggregate political and media news, are exploding with his story. Matthew Yglesias even dropped his academic pretensions for a bit to shed a tear or two for Vargas. I say that with love.

If you're as moved as Mathew Yglesias has been moved, and there's only one thing you do in reaction to Vargas' story call Barack Obama through Presente.org and ask him to stop deporting people like Vargas.

Media Matters has a good round-up of the nativist conservatives that are committing demographic suicide by going berserk over this story. I'll write more on the nativists, later, but Vargas' story has highlighted, yet again, for me, how far progressives and the mainstream media have to go before they can begin to cover these stories accurately and with a semblance of humanity. Let's start with Heather Horn staff writer at The Atlantic:

Whatever you think of the illegal immigration issue, it's hard to dispute that there's a fundamental injustice occurring if Vargas gets let off the hook, while hundreds of thousands of other illegals get deported. Even those who want to see productive illegal immigrants granted amnesty might admit that making exceptions purely based on prominence isn't right. What if there's someone as intelligent and productive as Vargas--but not as famous--out there right now?

Heather Horn - The Atlantic (22 June 2011)

Wow. I don't even know where to start. While I somehow doubt Horn's concern for the "hundreds of thousands" that are being deported I've already told people who are concerned to call Barack Obama and ask that his administration use discretion to stop deporting people like Vargas. Recognizing that, I'll start simple with Horn's use of the term "illegal". More people have referred to Vargas as an "illegal immigrant" at this point than I care to count. Not only is that phrase dehumanizing, it's legally innaccurate. No human being is illegal. The word illegal should be used to describe acts, not to define people. Horn, however, goes a step further than dehumanization and legal innaccuracy and gets into butchering grammar with her use of the word "illegals." Sorry Ms. Horn, the word "illegal" is not a noun. Maybe you and the nativists who dehumanize people with the term "illegals" should start taking English lessons from undocumented people like Vargas. If you haven't signed the pledge to Drop The I-Word, please do so.

To Horn's central point about fairness, I'll bring in Nick Baumann at Mother Jones:

I'm sympathetic to Matt Yglesias' view that we should empathize with all people who come to the United States in search of a better life, even if, unlike Vargas, they do so knowing that what they're doing is illegal. But I've also worked with foreign-born journalists who've paid thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and waded through miles of red tape and seemingly senseless regulations—including, sometimes, returning to their home countries for a period—in order to work in this country.* (This applies outside of journalism, too, of course.) I wonder how they're feeling about Jose Antonio Vargas this morning.

Nick Baumann - Mother Jones (22 June 2011)

It's difficult for me not to descend into sarcasm after reading this. Does Baumann really think that foreign journalists envy Vargas' position, right now, or for the last decade and a half, for that matter? Would Baumann care to get any of those foreign journalists on record so we know who those heartless bastards are? I thought the supposedly liberal Mother Jones magazine really took a step forward when reporter Tim Murphy stopped using the word "illegal," but Baumann just put the magazine another huge step backward in the anti-migrant direction with this post. Finally, I'll refer to Bryan Preston over at Pajamas Media whom I believe most succinctly provides the nativist view:

He took at least two jobs that otherwise would have gone to others who are here legally.

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Yeah, the Washington Post won a bunch of Pulitzers yesterday, and so did Pro Publica, the new non-profit investigative organization. (Hank Williams won, too.) But I really have to give props to the scrappy little tabloid that could, the Philadelphia Daily News.

Even though their newspaper is operating in the shadow of an April 27 bankruptcy auction, and functioning with a threadbare staff, the Daily News pulled it out and won the Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting yesterday for their investigation into a squad of corrupt narcotics cops that sounds like something out of "The Shield."

With good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, journalists Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman did a very unpopular thing - they stood up for justice, at great personal risk. This is the kind of reporting that's all too rare today, and now they have a Pulitzer to show for it:

The newsroom was quiet this afternoon, save for the sound of a nervous editor repeatedly clicking his mouse while staring at a computer screen.

Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

Finally, at 3 o'clock, the silence was pierced by a euphoric cry of, "YES!"

With that, word spread instantly: Daily News reporters Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman were named winners of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for the "Tainted Justice" series, their takedown of allegedly corrupt narcotics cops.

Their investigation into Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and other members of the Narcotics Field Unit began last February, when an informant told the reporters that the cops sometimes lied on search warrants.

Other serious allegations were uncovered during their reporting, which prompted an FBI investigation and numerous changes to police policy.

More than 50 convicted drug dealers are now fighting for new trials, alleging that officers fabricated evidence against them.

Laker, 52, and Ruderman, 40, are the third and fourth journalists to win a Pulitzer in the Daily News' 85-year history.

[...] Laker and Ruderman were visibly overwhelmed by the news of their award. They hugged, laughed and jumped up and down while colleagues cheered wildly around them.

"I always felt like this is something that happens to other people, and not us," said Laker, who joined the People Paper in 1993.

"We couldn't have done it without our police sources, who were fantastic and who I adore," added Ruderman, who joined the paper in 2007, following a five-year stint at the Inquirer.

[...] Daily News editor Michael Days said he believed all along that Laker and Ruderman deserved the Pulitzer Prize for the investigative work they did on "Tainted Justice."

"They went through thousands of search warrants and knocked on hundreds of doors," he said. "Nobody worked harder than those two."

Because the paper is operating under the possibility of layoffs or even closure, this win was especially bittersweet:

Ruderman says winning the award is a journalist's dream come true:

"Yeah, I feel like I can die or go into P.R. or something terrible like that. I just feel like I accomplished something that I never dreamed I'd accomplish."

Laker agrees it's a dream come true, but adds it's more rewarding to give voice to the voiceless, remembering one night when she tracked down a woman who'd allegedly been sexually assaulted:

"She got out of the car and came over to me and she started to cry. And she hugged me and she said 'I've been praying for this day.' And at that one moment, I thought this is why I do what I do."

Yes, this is why good reporters (not the Beltway careerists) do what they do. We have far too few of them. Congratulations to Laker and Ruderman!

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We made a mistake the other day when Paul Begala left Ari Fleischer dumbstruck by saying:

BEGALA: We -- our country executed Japanese soldiers who water- boarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime that we are now committing ourselves. How do you defend that?

We chided Begala slightly because we thought he wasn't quite right on the facts:

Actually, Fleischer could have countered Begala by pointing out that we didn't actually execute the Japanese soldiers convicted of the war crime of waterboarding American prisoners -- we just sentenced them to 15 years' hard labor.

But now, Begala makes clear he knew whereof he spoke:

But I was not referring to Asano, nor was my source Sen. Kennedy. Instead I was referencing the statement of a different member of the Senate: John McCain. On November 29, 2007, Sen. McCain, while campaigning in St. Petersburg, Florida, said, "Following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding."

Sen. McCain was right and the National Review Online is wrong. Politifact, the St. Petersburg Times' truth-testing project (which this week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), scrutinized Sen. McCain's statement and found it to be true. Here's the money quote from Politifact:

"McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as 'water cure,' 'water torture' and 'waterboarding,' according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning." Politifact went on to report, "A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps."

The folks at Politifact interviewed R. John Pritchard, the author of The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Complete Transcripts of the Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. They also interviewed Yuma Totani, history professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and consulted the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, which published a law review article entitled, "Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts."

We apologize to Begala for the error.

We'll be waiting a long time, I expect, for all those right-wingers out there who claim waterboarding isn't torture to apologize to the world.

I meant to get to this earlier in the week. It's so illustrative of the problems with our corporate media that the guy who wins a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting is ignored - because he was investigating the corporate media for stacking the deck with paid sources to support the Iraq war:

On the April 20 edition of NBC's Nightly News, reporting on the awarding of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes earlier that day, anchor Brian Williams stated that "The New York Times led the way with five, including awards for breaking news and international reporting." But Williams did not note that the Times' David Barstow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting that day "for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended." Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented the unwillingness of the major broadcast networks, including NBC, to report on Barstow's April 20, 2008, Times article. Moreover, NBC joined ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC in reportedly declining to participate in a segment based on Barstow's article that aired on the April 24, 2008, edition of PBS' NewsHour.

In an April 29 post on his MSNBC.com blog, Williams responded to Barstow's April 20 article, describing NBC News analyst military analyst Barry R. McCaffrey and Wayne Downing, who died in July 2007, as "honest brokers" and writing that McCaffrey and Downing were "warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians":

All I can say is this: these two guys never gave what I considered to be the party line. They were tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq. If you've had any exposure to retired officers of that rank (and we've not had any five-star Generals in the modern era) then you know: these men are passionate patriots. In my dealings with them, they were also honest brokers. I knew full well whenever either man went on a fact-finding mission or went for high-level briefings. They never came back spun, and never attempted a conversion. They are warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians.

Glenn Greenwald has more:

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Attytood's Will Bunch brings two telling pieces of journalism news to our attention - first, that Andrew Rosenthal, the New York Times editorial page editor, admits that it's easier to get a slot on its letters-to-the-editor page if you are a conservative:

I’ll be honest: Because of the nature of our readers, letter writers who defend Republican, conservative or right-wing positions on many topics have a higher shot at being published.

And second, that Cynthia Tucker -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- is being moved up and out of her slot in an apparent move to woo back conservative suburban readers. Will says:

[...] For the first time in generations, the state’s leading editorial page finally will have abandoned its mission as a progressive voice in favor of a carefully constructed mirage of “balance” — designed not to tell the truth, whether it’s unpopular or not, as much as to mollify conservative readers.

He lays out the case for why journalists have become far too accommodating to conservatives:

What's the one liberal value that journalists retain as we grow long in the tooth and rise up the salary ladder? Liberal guilt. Politicians have played on this successfully for 40 years, ever since too many newsrooms cowered from Spiro Agnew calling us "nattering nabobs of negativism." As I wrote about in my recent book "Tear Down This Myth," Ronald Reagan's "teflon presidency" was in good measure due to journalists fearful they'd be accused of liberal bias with a too aggressive posture.

At every newspaper, big and small, the short-term social and economic incentives are far too often weighted in favor of "mushy middle" journalism. Even if your editor backs you (and that's not a given), there's still the publisher - and he doesn't want to hear complaints about his paper's "liberal bias" at the next Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

Will points out something I've been saying for years about the so-called "liberal" media: They're usually social liberals, but policy conservatives. While it's rare that a journalist gives a damn about your skin color, who you sleep with or what you smoke, they're still mostly establishment types who don't want to rock the boat - or their 401(k)s. They believe far too fervently in the judgment of an elite class, because they see themselves as part of that elite.

That explains what he describes here:

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We've come a long way, baby! This is good news for so many of the great websites doing good work today:

NEW YORK For the first time, the Pulitzer Prizes will accept submissions from online-only news outlets, but require that they be "text-based" submissions from news organizations that are updated at least weekly and include original reporting.

Pulitzer Administrator Sig Gissler told E&P that "we are expanding the Pulitzers to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet." At the same time, they are "stressing" that all entered material should come from news outlets that publish material at least weekly, "are primarily dedicated to original news reporting, are dedicated to coverage of ongoing stories and that adhere to the highest journalistic principles."

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I love Asian Yakuza movies. Heck, I love a lot of the J-horror flicks too, but I never thought I'd see this in real life. Hello, DHS---where the hell were you?

UCLA Medical Center and its most accomplished liver surgeon provided a life-saving transplant to one of Japan's most powerful gang bosses, law enforcement sources told The Times.

In addition, the surgeon performed liver transplants at UCLA on three other men who are now barred from entering the United States because of their criminal records or suspected affiliation with Japanese organized crime groups, said a knowledgeable law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The four surgeries were done between 2000 and 2004 at a time of pronounced organ scarcity. In each of those years, more than 100 patients died awaiting liver transplants in the Greater Los Angeles region...read on

You have got to read this story. It's a Pulitzer Prize winner....I have used the UCLA medical group in the past. Damn, if I would have produced a samurai sword when I checked in---who knows what kind of treatment I might have received.

AttyTood:

As regular readers know, Attytood has been on the warpath urging the authorities in Iraq, under the thumb of the American military, to give Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Bilal Hussein a real day in court...or set him free. Our fear is that -- before broader awareness of the Hussein case mounts -- he will be found guilty in a kangaroo court, without the kind of due process that Americans would expect and that you'd think would be part of that "freedom" package that we delivered to Iraq:

Those worst fears are coming true, of course. Harper's magazine has the inside scoop. For example:

-- The Iraqi judge is also allowing the U.S. military to present evidence by witnesses through remote television hook-ups from undisclosed locations. This is done particularly to be sure that Bilal Hussein would not be able to cross-examine any witnesses.

-- The Pentagon was particularly concerned about the prospect of Bilal Hussein getting effective defense from his lawyer, former federal prosecutor Paul Gardephe. The judge was told to refuse to allow Bilal Hussein’s U.S. lawyer to participate in the case. The judge accepted this advice. Consequently, the U.S. military has a five-man team to press its case, but Bilal Hussein’s lawyer is silenced and not permitted to participate–and all of this has occurred as a result of U.S. Government intervention with the court. The irony of course is that under Iraqi law, the U.S. military has no authority or right to appear and prosecute, but Bilal Hussein’s chosen counsel has an absolute right.

There's a lot of good (as in "interesting," not as in "positive") stuff here, including confirmation that the military is using friendly right-wing bloggers to bypass the tradtional media. Reading this, there is little doubt that this award-winning journalist -- who risked his life to bring images from Iraq's front line to the world and is greatly admired by those who've worked with him, like my Daily News colleague Jim MacMillan -- will be found guilty by this kangaroo court and sent away for a long time. It's frustrating. If the American and Iraqi authorities have real evidence that Bilal Hussein is a terrorist, it should be presented in a fair and open courtroom.

Here's something else that's even more maddening -- America's journalistic community is not stepping forward to try to stop this disgrace from happening. Read on...

Brilliant at Breakfast: You can serve your country if you're mentally ill or a convicted felon, but gay...?  No way!

NPR: Excellent interview with journalist Marcus Stern. Stern and his colleagues at the San Diego Union-Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for uncovering the bribery scandal involving former U.S. Congressman Duke Cunningham. Cunningham funneled tens of millions of dollars in post-9/11 contracts in exchange for millions in bribes.

A Tiny Revolution: I'd never seen this Moshe Dayan quote before

uggabugga: Compassionate Conservatives

Shakesville: Those famous 'sixteen words' are now a song

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Joe Klein thinks you're stupid...Malkin on FOX...Finally, an Iraq strategy that makes sense...Five years of willful WaPo delusion...Blitzer did not ask Bloomberg about police surveillance of political activists before the 2004 GOP convention...Fueling phony fears on Social Security...How often does the press beat the SEC to accounting fraud stories?...Trivial Dowd still debasing civic discourse...As Medicare goes private, the press just stands and watches...Why would any self-respecting newspaper provide a platform for this crazed, habitually wrong, ideologue?

If I Ran the Zoo: BUSHCO's evisceration of the civil rights division of what used to be our Department of Justice

Rolling Stone: America's leading investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, is interviewed by Matt Taibbi

The Poor Man: What the hell? Vice President Dick Cheney travels in an Airstream trailer — inside an airplane, The Spirit of Strom Thurmond. Is he trying to make himself into a cartoon supervillian?

Suburban Guerrilla: Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe richly deserved the Pulitzer Prize because he covered what the White House does, not just what it says.

Connecting.the.Dots: Americans are stuffed with news but starved for understanding

Bitch Ph.D. Just, Wow...