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Unfairly Unbalanced

In response to the recent Outfoxed movie, Damian Menscher wrote the following to the comment email inbox at the Fox News Channel. As there is currently a move to challenge Fox's use of "Fair and Balanced" in the courts, and because of the ongoing debates surrounding 9/11, I thought this would make a nice post. All views are of course his, although I obviously support them by posting them here.

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 02:49:21 -0500 (CDT)
From: Damian Menscher <....>
To: comments@foxnews.com
Subject: FNC reporting errors

I've noticed several times on your news show that the claim is made that
the 9/11 Commission Report found a connection between the terrorist
attacks and Iraq. This view is supported by republican guests and
rejected by democrat guests. I am disturbed that your "Fair and
Balanced" reporters are siding with the republican party on this issue,
especially given that the facts show otherwise.

After a guest suggested that viewers read the report for themselves, I
decided that was the only fair way to settle the issue. After all, the
question of whether the 9/11 Commission Report found a link between
al Qaeda and Iraq is easily and unambiguously settled by reading it. I
found the following paragraph on page 334 of the report:

Responding to a presidential tasking, Clarke's office sent a memo to Rice on September 18, titled "Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraq Involvement in teh September 11 Attacks." Rice's chief staffer on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, concurred in its conclusion that only some anecdotal evi- dence linked Iraq to al Qaeda. The memo found no "compelling case" that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks. It passed along a few foreign intelligence reports, including the Czech report alleging an April 2001 Prague meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer (discussed in chapter 7) and a Polish report that personnel at the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad were told before September 11 to go on the streets to gauge crowd reaction to an unspecified event. Arguing that the case for links between Iraq and al Qaeda was weak, the memo pointed out that Bin Ladin resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein's regime. Finally, the memo said, there was no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with Bin Ladin on unconven- tional weapons.

I was not able to find any other reference to the links between al Qaeda
and Iraq in the report. Unless I'm missing something, I conclude that
your news anchors are either uninformed or deliberately misleading the
viewing public.

Given that the facts show the democrats to be correct, it seems your
news anchors will have to stop pushing the republican claims. I have
just informed you of your error--if you continue to press the issue
with empty claims of evidence it will only be demonstrating the
intentional bias alleged by the creators of the movie "Outfoxed."

I intend to pass this email on to other news media, but would like to
give you the opportunity to respond with any evidence (include a page
number please) of a connection cited in the Report. I will include your
response in my upcoming news release.

--

Message to Fox: feel free to just leave your response in a comment here if you like.

Posted on July 27, 2004 01:14 PM

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