h/t Bob Cesca

This is yet another in a long series of stunningly arrogant moves by BP:

When CBS tried to film a beach with heavy oil on the shore in South Pass, Louisiana, a boat of BP contractors, and two Coast Guard officers, told them to turn around, or be arrested.

"This is BP's rules, it's not ours," someone aboard the boat said. Coast Guard officials told CBS that they're looking into it.

As the Coast Guard is a branch of the Armed Forces, it brings into question how closely the government and BP are working together to keep details of the disaster in the dark.

Hold the phone...BP is making the rules???? Kind of hard to argue that we aren't a full-blown corporatocracy, when BP--that's British Petroleum--is leading the United States Coast Guard on this--and this is okay with a branch of our armed forces.

And note how far journalism has fallen that anchor Katie Couric doesn't even blink at that information. Later, CBS reported online that Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) demanded that BP provide live footage of the oil spill:

Earlier Wednesday, Markey demanded the broadcast so independent scientists could more accurately calculate the flow rate. He questioned why such data wasn't readily being made public.

"BP thinks it's their ocean," Markey said while chairing a House Energy and Environment Subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

Markey didn't stop with BP, reports CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. He blasted the Coast Guard for what he described as letting BP call the shots.

Coast Guard officials were on a boat with BP contractors who stopped CBS News cameras from viewing an oily beach, and the Coast Guard - which is in charge of the investigation - admits it's had access to live video since Day One but wouldn't let Congress or the public see it, Attkisson reports.

Markey said there was "no excuse for withholding live video for 23 days."

There's no excuse for much of BP's actions, frankly, Congressman Markey. And it will be a test of the strength of our federal government to actually hold them accountable.

Tonight's debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah "Main Street, Wasilla" Palin yielded few fireworks, but Biden did a good job of keeping the focus where it should be -- on John McCain, his miserable voting record and the fact that a McCain presidency would look a lot like the disaster we've seen from George Bush.

Biden: "Past is prologue, Gwen. The issue is how different is John McCain's policy going to be than George Bush's? I haven't heard anything yet. I haven't heard how his policy is going to be different on Iran than George Bush's. I haven't heard how his policy will be different with Israel than George Bush's, I haven't heard how his policy on Afghanistan will be different than George Bush's, I haven't heard how his policy in Pakistan will be different than George Bush's. It may be, but so far, it is the same as George Bush's, and you know where that policy has taken us. We will make significant change, so once again, we're the most respected nation in the world. That's what we're going to do."

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it does.

Couric: What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?

Palin: Well, let's see. There's, of course in the great history of America there have been rulings, that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but …

Couric: Can you think of any?

Palin: Well, I could think of … any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But, you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a vice president, if I'm so privileged to serve, wouldn't be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today.

To be fair, it's probably easier to come up with a case that you agree with, but that's what skilled and smart politicians do: they re-frame the question the way they want to answer it. I'm just afraid that if the question were phrased the other way around, she still would have been stumped. This is what people mean when they say she is unqualified to be (Vice-) President. Just contrast her answer with Biden's and that becomes crystal clear.

(h/t Heather)

She really is George Bush in lipstick. Katie Couric asks Palin another one of those "gotcha" questions, this time about which publications she reads to learn about the world.

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COURIC: And when it comes to establishing, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and understand the world?

PALIN: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

COURIC: Like what ones specifically?

PALIN: Umm... all of them. Any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

COURIC: Can you name any of them?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news... Alaska isn't a foreign country where it's kind of suggested it seems like, wow how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, DC may be thinking and doing, when you live up there in Alaska. Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

Good Lord. Put this poor woman out of her misery already.

DIGG IT!

UPDATE: Glenn gets it.

In order to learn the source of her political knowledge, Katie Couric asked her three times what specific newspapers she read prior to being selected as Vice President, and Palin -- after trying to answer a couple times with her trademark rambling incoherence ("all of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me all these years . . . a vast variety") -- abruptly decided that the question was an elitist, condescending East Coast media assault on Alaska and chided Couric accordingly, without answering. How could you mock that other than by repeating it verbatim?

UPDATE II: Holy crap. It completely slipped my mind that Plain has a degree in journalism. Yes, someone who studied journalism can't name a single magazine or newspaper.

John McCain and Sarah Palin appeared on CBS Evening News Monday night to rebut claims that Palin agrees with Obama's policy of launching unilateral strikes within Pakistan if there is actionable intelligence that high-value targets are in the area. According to McCain/Palin, it's "gotcha journalism" when a politician gives their opinion on any given issue.

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Couric: Is that something you shouldn't say out loud, Sen. McCain?

John McCain: Of course not. But, look, I understand this day and age of "gotcha" journalism. Is that a pizza place? In a conversation with someone who you didn't hear … the question very well, you don't know the context of the conversation, grab a phrase. Gov. Palin and I agree that you don't announce that you're going to attack another country …

[...]

Couric: What did you learn from that experience?

Palin: That this is all about "gotcha" journalism. A lot of it is. But that's okay, too.

How is it possibly a controversial proposition that the United States ought to act, unilaterally if necessary, when the target includes those who are responsible for killing Americans? In bizarro Republican world it's OK to sing a little ditty about bombing a country that never attacked us, but it's not OK to take out people who actually did. This truly is silly season.

Jon Perr notes that McCain did in 2002 what he's now condemning Obama for doing.

Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes asked John McCain if he regretted helping the deregulation of Wall Street back in 1999 and McCain said no because it helped grow our economy to where it is today. Yes, that's his story and he's sticking to it. It helped out economy so much that President Paulson is asking for 700 billion dollars with no strings attached to save McCain's economy that is a step away from turning into another great Depression. Is he kidding me? We have another Enron type scandal on our hands in the financial markets only this scandal is on Super steroids. Paul Krugman shares a few thoughts with on us...

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Pelley: In 1999 you were one of the senators who helped pass deregulation of Wall Street. Do you regret that now?

McCain: No, I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy.

McCain has been an advocate of deregulation most of his career, but Thursday he endorsed the biggest bailout in history - a plan for the government to take on the bad debts of financial institutions.

"We're gonna take over these bad loans. We're gonna take over these bad - these bonds and we're gonna keep you alive. And we're gonna have the taxpayer help you out. But when the time comes and the economy recovers then anything that's gained back is gonna go to the taxpayers first. I'm not saying this isn't gonna be messy. And I'm not saying it isn't gonna be expensive. But we have to stop the bleeding," the senator said.

Pelley: But why would you let the Wall Street executives...

McCain: I'm not.

Pelley: ...sail away on their yachts and leave this on the American taxpayer?

McCain: Well, it's not the greedy Wall Street people that I worry about, although I am, like most Americans, frankly, enraged. It's basically a Ponzi scheme, as you know, that sooner or later was gonna collapse. And I'd like to get that money back from them. But we've gotta fix the average citizen who's the innocent bystander that is in danger of losing their pensions, their 401(k)'s, their IRAs. Their very life savings are at risk here.

He doesn't worry about the greedy Wall Street people. They had nothing to do with it in McCain's mind. They did it because it was raining one day and they got a little bored. My God, please help us. A basic tenet of Conservatism is deregulation. Sorry Sully, yes, you've been conned...Get rid of all the rules that corporations have to follow, which in most cases cuts back on their profits so they can have an unfettered hand to do what they like without consequences. The end result is what we have now. A complete meltdown of our financial institutions.

It's also geared to destroy the New Deal and keep all the acquired wealth of the nation in only a very select group of people and corporations so they can have complete control of our nation. They all say how much they hated England back in the day, but that's what they really want. Kings and Queens and Dukes, oh my! A ruling class of moneychangers while the rest of us bow down to their awesome power.

The latest Pew Survey on News Consumption, which is conducted every other year, was released yesterday, and is chock full of interesting tidbits and results. Most notably, there was a great section of the report on news-consumer knowledge and sophistication.

About half of Americans (53%) can correctly identify the Democrats as the party that has a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. In February 2007, shortly after the Democrats gained control of the House after a dozen years of GOP rule, many more people (76%) knew the Democrats held the majority.

The public is less familiar with the secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice) and the prime minister of Great Britain (Gordon Brown). About four-in-ten (42%) can name Rice as the current secretary of state. The public’s ability to identify Rice has not changed much over recent years: In April 2006 and December 2004, shortly before she was sworn in, 43% could correctly identify her.

The prime minister of Great Britain is not well known among the public. Just more than a quarter (28%) can correctly identify Gordon Brown as the leader of Great Britain.

Overall, 18% of the public is able to correctly answer all three political knowledge questions, while a third (33%) do not know the answer to any of the questions.

I’ll admit, I’m torn about how humiliating this is to the nation overall. For the typical American not to know Gordon Brown strikes me as only mildly distressing — Brown has only been Prime Minister for about a year, and most of the public was probably more familiar with Tony Blair.

But one-in-three Americans got all of the questions wrong. For all the talk about the Democratic Congress, barely half the country knows there’s a Democratic majority.

Maybe my perspective is skewed because I just finished reading Rick Shenkman’s “Just How Stupid Are We?” but at a certain point, the political world is going to have to come to grips with the fact that a striking percentage of the electorate has no idea what’s going on.

As for the other results from the Pew survey, it was also interesting to note which news consumers did better than others.

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Many bloggers have been covering the Couric/McCain editing scandal since it began. CNN's Reliable Sources picked it up for a few minutes and even the MSMers agreed.

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KURTZ: That is not what McCain said right after Katie said, "What's your response to that?" And we see these pictures now of McCain with General Petraeus. That was used to cover an editing break, where then they substituted -- not substituted, but added another answer that McCain had given from elsewhere in the interview.

STEVE ROBERTS: Well, I teach ethics at George Washington University. I would use this as a case study of what you should not do.

I was able to get the text of CBS' own in-house guidelines on their editing practices.

Answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response. In short, we cannot create an answer merely because we wish the subject had said it better.

CBS violated their own standards. At the end of the segment, Howard Kurtz said this:

KURTZ: CBS says that this was, in fact, a mistake made by a young producer under deadline pressure.

CBS's latest excuse for breaking their own journalistic ethics is a farce. Their first response to this story was to say that it was no big deal:

Of the 14-minute interview, a little less than three minutes was used on the Evening News. A CBS spokesperson tells TVNewser, “As all news organizations do with extended interviews, last night’s Obama and McCain interviews were edited to fit the available time and to give viewers a fair expression of the candidates’ major differences. The full transcript and video were and still are available at CBSNews.com.”

Now they blame a young producer for being under time pressure. OK, let's get this straight. <added>Sources have told me that The CBS Evening News is their major "hard news" program of the day and they certainly would not have had a rookie running the show for a major John McCain interview with Katie Couric. And there are many others involved in the editing process that know the CBS guidelines who would have caught this blunder. Sorry, their excuse doesn't pass the smell test.

(full transcript below the fold)

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As C&L and many others have reported last night, CBS news had a huge scoop Tuesday night on John McCain, because he falsely claimed that the surge was responsible for the "Sunni Awakening in Anbar." That is FALSE. The Sunnis changed positions before the surge was ever discussed so---McCain once again makes a major mistake on the one issue his campaign is running on---The Iraq war.

However, CBS probably violated its own rules (Standards and Practice) by altering the video of Katie Couric's interview with McCain that left out his major blunder on this issue and then broadcast it on our airwaves. CBS should not paste together separate answers from different questions to make it appear like an answer was fluid. It was completely taken out of context. I understand that a fair amount of editing has to be done, but what they did failed to meet the legitimacy test.

Here's what happened. ON CBS Nightly News, Katie Couric started off the segment with question #3 of her interview from their website version of the McCain interview:

Couric QUESTION #3: Senator McCain, Sen. Obama says, while the increased number of U.S. troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?

They then edited out his major gaffe on "the surge" and inserted his partial answer to question #1 and then spliced in a partial answer to question # 3 to make it appear to be a consistent response.

Q1 Sen. Obama has indicated that by his failure to acknowledge the success of the surge, that he would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.

Q3 Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn't make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed.

There will still be attacks. Al Qaeda's not defeated. But the progress has been immense. And to not recognize that, and why it happened, and how it happened, I think is really quite a commentary.

Here's part of his answer from question # 3 that they left on the cutting room floor and which exposes John McCain as not knowing what he's talking about once again about the war in Iraq.

I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane (phonetic) was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn't make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed. They were out there. They were protecting these sheiks. We had the Anbar awakening. We now have a government that's effective...

It completely changes what he meant and actually said to Couric.

Here's the full transcript.

The story on their website is still solid, but the presentation on air was not and is outrageous. There must be some repercussions against this gaffe no matter who is involved and what happened. They need to come out and apologize for their ethical lapse.

Here's CBS's contact info:

TV Show CBS Evening News with Katie Couric

Producer (212) 975-3019 (212) 975-1893

evening@cbsnews.com

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/eveningnews/main3420.shtml

Arensberg Chloe Producer, (212) 975-3691, (212) 975-1893

Contct CBS and demand they a) explain themselves on this egregious action. b) to hold those accountable.

evening@cbsnews.com http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/eveningnews/main3420.shtml

(corrected--the draft published when it wasn't finished earlier)

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Is there any doubt that the media is in the bag for McCain? Maybe I should say---at his barbeques? McCain was profiled on 60 Minutes Sunday night and it was the type of softball profile we're used to seeing for Republicans, but when they brought up waterboarding----well then, it's time to at least be serious. McCain unequivocally says it's torture and brings up the prosecution of the Japanese and their use of it in WWII to make his point.

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Pelley asked him about American interrogation methods today. Asked if water boarding is torture, McCain said, "Sure. Yes. Without a doubt."

"So the United States has been torturing POWs?" Pelley asked.

"Yes. Scott, we prosecuted Japanese war criminals after World War II.
And one of the charges brought against them, for which they were convicted, was that they water-boarded Americans," McCain said.

"How did we lose our way?" Pelley asked.

"I don't know the answer to that. I think one of the failures maybe was not to listen more to our military leadership, including people like General Colin Powell, on this issue," McCain said.

How then did John McCain lose HIS way on torture? Why didn't he ask him the reason he flip flopped and voted in favor of waterboarding if in fact McCain believes it's torture? Isn't that the type of question that America needs an answer to? Howard Kurtz even brought it up on his show and criticized the media over their treatment of it a few weeks ago.

KURTZ: But another Senator McCain was on display this week, one who seemed to differ from the former prisoner of war who has made his signature issue out of opposing torture tactics by American interrogators. McCain voted against the bill to ban tactics such as waterboarding, saying he felt agencies like the CIA needed flexibility in terror investigations. Why has this received so little media attention?

“The New York Times” today has a story about this five days after the vote. “The Washington Post” did it yesterday. But most of the establishment media kissed it off.

McCain closes by saying he can win in November because he's a conservative Republican, but Pelley had nothing in the piece about the contempt held for him by conservatives---especially the talk show hosts that skewer him constantly. And what about the Hagee endorsement? Can't mention that either? Contact Scott Pelley/ 60 Minutes and ask them why these most important issues were either purposefully left out of the segment and why journalistic malpractice was committed.

ADDRESS:
60 Minutes
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

EMAIL: 60m@cbsnews.com

PHONE: (212) 975-3247