The American Trial Lawyers Association

These days, it is getting harder and harder to tell the Obama Justice Department from the Bush Justice Department. The current DOJ is standing behind the former administration's law that provides retroactive immunity to telecom firms that spied on US citizens. The law was specifically designed to protect companies who participated in government wiretapping programs from legal claims and is one that President Obama supported as a senator when it was approved by Congress last year. The administration said in to a brief filed late Wednesday afternoon, that electronic communication service providers play an important role in assisting intelligence officials in national security activities, and that the intelligence community cannot obtain the intelligence it needs without assistance from these companies. According to the Justice Department, the law requires a judge to dismiss a wiretapping lawsuit against a telecommunications company if the attorney general explains the firm's role to the judge in a confidential statement. This comes as a major blow to civil libertarians, who were hoping that we finally had an administration in power that understood the basic concepts of liberty.


In other news this week, it looks like CBS News' new vice president for communications has some skeletons in his closet that he would like to keep hidden. In addition to the fact that new VP Jeff Ballabon once said that “Democrats are inherently bad people and Republicans are fundamentally good people,” Ballabon has now been linked to one of those allegedly “fundamentally good” republicans. Ballabon formerly had a close relationship with lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff, first as a client and then seemingly as a friend. Ballabon was an executive vice president with Channel One in 1998 when it came under fire from Republican Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama. Channel One had developed a comfortable niche providing free educational programming to public schools in exchange for running commercials during the programs, many of them for soda, candy, and other junk food. After the anger from the GOP reached a boiling point on the issue, Ballabon hired Abramoff's firm to lobby on their behalf, paying them over one million dollars. Abramoff then proceeded to get some of the most powerful conservative organizations to write favorable pieces about Channel 1. And now this man with no apparent conscience is in charge of all media relations and public affairs for CBS. I guess Fox News wasn't hiring.


And finally this week, according to a new book by two Indiana University professors shows that journalists, by censoring themselves, have been offering more favorable coverage of Republicans than Democrats. This self-censoring is a result of them trying to avoid being accused of having a liberal bias. The professors' new book details their study of the three major broadcast networks' presidential campaign coverage from 1992 to 2004. According to the analysis, the coverage on ABC, NBC, and CBS, favored Republican candidates in each election. The authors examined 62 hours of network news coverage between Labor Day and Election Day over the four presidential elections. Among their findings were that candidates were steadily shown more visually in so-called image bites, while their sound bites shortened in average length. The authors examined one of the most negative forms of image bites, the "lip-flap shot," in which a reporter's narration is overlaid on video of the candidate talking. In their findings, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to be given the "lip-flap shot." Also looked at was the "Goldilocks effect," which is who was given the last say in a piece and therefore were better remembered by viewers. The authors found that Republicans were more likely to get the last word in every presidential election studied except for the 2004 election.

Labels: Barack Obama, DOJ, Domestic Spying, Farron Cousins, Jack Abramoff, Jack Ballabon, Media Bias, Raw Story, Telecom Immunity, Warrantless Wiretapping