Critical Montages on CNN's "Inside the Blogs"

Critical Montages was mentioned on CNN:

[JACKI] SCHECHNER: A hefty post over at Critical Montages. That's montages.blogspot.com. Yoshi posting over there. And he's got a lot going on. He's first got an Associated Press chart, for lack of a better word. And he's got the troops in Iraq now, how many there are from each country, countries that have withdrawn and the size of the former contingent. He also says that to him, Berlusconi's decision makes sense. The U.S. troops' wounding of Giuliana Sgrena being the impetus for that, he thinks, in his mind.

The other thing is he makes the connection between Spain's withdrawal -- he calls with the Spain scenario -- Spain's withdrawal last March and the political change that happened in Spain right after that. He sees the upcoming elections in Italy and thinks that Italy's impending withdrawal will affect the Italian political landscape over there. So lots of stuff going on at Critical Montage. ("News Conferencer-In-Chief; Bush Strikes Oil; Twist in Social Security Language," Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics, CNN, Transcript, 16 Mar. 2005)

The Critical Montages posting that CNN picked up is "Italy: Troop Withdrawal and Electoral Fortune" (16 Mar. 2005). If nothing else, it can't hurt to get across an idea that the occupation of Iraq doesn't pay, so "the coalition of the willing" is shrinking, on CNN.

(The segment of Inside Politics during which Critical Montages got on the air is "Inside the Blogs," "the first daily segment on cable or network TV dedicated to people whose reporting and opinions appear on the Web" according to USA Today [Peter Johnson, "It's Prime Time for Blogs on CNN's 'Inside Politics,'" 20 Mar. 2005]. The segment is still new -- it just began airing on February 14.)

As you can see from the transcript, though, the segment has CNN blog reporter Jacki Schechner (together with producer Abbi Tatton) tell the audience what political blogs are saying about the topics that CNN wants to discuss anyway. I wish that "Inside the Blogs" would feature blog entries that talk about what is unreported or underreported in the US corporate media instead. To take just one example from this blog, how about a story on the Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights and Centro de Justiça Global's indictment of MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti ("Rumsfeld in Brasília and Buenos Aires," 31 Mar. 2005)? Search Google News for reports on and analyses of MINUSTAH, and you'll see that the topic has not been investigated at all by the US corporate media.

That's asking too much, though, as CNN, evidently unfamiliar with Japanese names but still unwilling to fact-check, confidently says that this blogger is a man.