A memo obtained from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicates the Washington Post is preparing to “publish articles and an interactive website that will likely contain a compendium of government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work.” You can view the memo below.  The series is likely to launch Monday.

WaPo’s Dana Priest

According to another memo from Art House, the director of communications for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the series will be written up by Dana Priest and culminates two years of research. He postulates Priest is likely to advocate:

• The intelligence enterprise has undergone exponential growth and has become unmanageable with overlapping authorities and a heavily outsourced contractor workforce.
• The IC [intelligence community] and the DoD have wasted significant time and resources, especially in the areas of counterterrorism and counterintelligence.
• The intelligence enterprise has taken its eyes off its post-9/11 mission and is spending its energy on competitive and redundant programs.

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic reports, “Priest’s story is said to focus on redundancies, particularly the number of individual counter-terrorism analytical cells costing the government billions of dollars. Some of the redundancy is deliberate because of the nature of intelligence work. But a lot of redundancy, especially in terms of information technology, is probably just wasteful.”

The Washington Post is also working on a television component with PBS’s Frontline. (more…)

Zuckerman owns and publishes the New York Daily News and owns U.S. News and World Report. Perhaps someone didn’t pass Zuckerman the memo that if you want to be a responsible publisher and give your readership the impression they are subscribing to publications that produce unbiased journalism, you don’t get to write speeches for the President.  And, if you are President of the United States and you want to assure your public that you aren’t using the media as a propaganda arm, you don’t deputize the mainstream press to write your speeches.

But, Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic reports “Obama’s aides don’t remember consulting with Zuckerman.” (more…)

Marc Ambinder poses this question in his April 23 article in The Atlantic : “Have Conservatives Gone Mad? “

Ambinder lays blithe and, according to no less a source than himself, undeniable claim to the liberal journalism’s monopoly on political veritas, identifying “the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama” coming “not from the right, but the left.” On the other hand, he asserts, “mainstream conservative voices are embracing theories that are, to use Julian Sanchez’s phrase, ‘untethered’ to the real world.”

Before examining that assertion, let’s list a few more of Ambinder’s pronouncements about the journalistic right.

The base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking. It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors.

Well, thank goodness he laid that to rest. Q.E.D. Still, if therapy really is a substitute for thinking, Ambinder should consider changing his surname to Freud. (more…)

Should reporters who believe that most of America is stupid and insane be in the journalism business? Let’s consider the question.

Take left-wing journalist Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic. He’s not bad at his job. His insights are often worthwhile and occasionally wise. Yet Ambinder sometimes writes things so foolish that one might expect to read them at the leftist propaganda site Media Matters for America.

His latest adventure in pseudo-intellectual self-absorption passing for journalistic analysis is, “Have Conservatives Gone Mad?” It brims with elitist condescension.

Ambinder observes that:

Serious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that’s plaguing the conservative movement.

The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn’t study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?

(more…)

In a new article, Marc Ambinder, politics editor of The Atlantic, asks: Have Conservatives Gone Mad?  He says yes.

Serious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that’s plaguing the conservative movement. The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn’t study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?

Here are his main points:

• Conservative journalists, including TV personalities (obviously referring to FOX), but excluding those few “serious thinkers” among conservatives, have become “untethered” from the “real world.” Correspondingly, the Republican base – he doesn’t define it – “seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.”
• The “most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes” from the left. He cites MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann among several examples.
• Meanwhile, the media – meaning the only true, authentic and professional journalists like those who work for ABC where Marc once worked, and at CBS where he is now chief political consultant – are reasserting themselves as “gatekeepers.”  That begs the questions: When and why did its assertion cease? And is one journalist, Jake Tapper, sufficient proof of a collective “reassertion?”

(more…)