That’s the classic newspaper editors’ definition of a story that reports what everyone already knows.

Here is the lead sentence from Time mag’s latest story from Iraq:

There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not.

What are they, Ripley’s? Believe it or not? Anyone who’s been following the non-MSM-reported news from Iraq over months or years already know that there is no shortage of good news from Iraq, never has been a shortage.

It’s Time’s editorial staff that can hardly believe this. After all, “the war is lost,” according to a senator. So, grudgingly, Time does report some good news, but let’s you know in the very first sentence you can believe it … or not.

That apparently is Time’s standard of “objective” reporting, believe it or not.

… offer excellent commentary on current events.” Someone said something like that, I don’t know who. I didn’t make it up; it just seems pertinent in light of the latest minor kerfuffle over Frank Gaffney’s attribution to Abe Lincoln this quotiation in a Washington Times piece this week:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — President Abraham Lincoln

The only problem, as Editor and Publisher explains, is that Lincoln never said it. It seems that one Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org tracked it down thus:

… “The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln’s. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor [at the magazine Insight] for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote.”

Yeah, blame it on the editor. That’s right up there with ‘my dog ate it.’ Speaking of bogus quotes, remember this one?

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

That was Barbra Streisand slamming GW Bush in September 2002. But, of course, there’s not a scintilla of evidence that Caesar ever said it, nor do the words appear in any of Shakespeare’s plays, to whom the bogus quote is sometimes attributed, presumably from his play, “Julius Caesar.”

Ralph Keyes wrote about misquotations in The Quote Verifier.

Misquotation is at least as common as accurate quotation, and for perfectly good reasons. The primary reason is that when using quotes, the reference we’re most likely to consult is our memory. This is a hazardous form of research. Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them.

As Lincoln said, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Well, not exactly - only papers made of, well, paper can fold. But it seems that New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years… .” He went on to say that the news outlet will likely move entirely onto the internet. James Joyner has details, including this rejoinder to Pinch’s declaration that the Times’ web site will charge readers to read: “Then the New York Times will exist only as a niche paper. Slate, Salon, and others have tried and failed going the subscription-only route.”

What I’ve not seen anyone point out - a scoop coming here, folks! - is that it simply takes longer to scan and read a newspaper online than on paper. You can flip pages, snapshot headlines printed thereon and quickly read the lead paragraph of a paper edition than you can click and wait for a page to load for an online edition - and then you’re seeing only one story at a time, even if the headlines (and only the headlines) for a section are visible on an index page. I don’t think people will pay to go slower.

Somebody’s got to do it, but the Bush administration is derelict in this duty

The idea is not mine, I have to credit Maj. David High, USMCR, a close friend and an occasional writer here. The media are acting a the Red Cell for the public in thinking about enemy threats of the First Terrorist War. I asked David to write this up but he keeps getting deployed overseas. At the moment he is doing Marine stuff in Germany (of all places).

“Red Cell” was the term given, first, to SEAL Teams who were trained and tasked to simulate the enemy during security exercises, especially to test the security of critical compounds such as submarine bases or nuclear power plants. The term morphed in military usage to refer to plans officers tasked to assess how real-world enemies, real or potential, could exploit our own weaknesses, especially military threats. Naturally, this task required the Red Cell staffs to use a great deal of imagination, to get inside the enemy’s head as best as possible.

Now, military staffs have been doing that for thousands of years. I am sure that the Pharaoh’s armies tried to do the same thing. But the recipients of their assessments, from the Pharaoh until today’s Red Cells, have always been military commanders.

David pointed out in a long conversation last fall that America’s general public has not been informed by Red Cell-type analysis until quite recently. The media, mostly the entertainment media, have become the public’s Red Cell.

Two examples that David mentioned: Fox network’s “24” and CBS’s close relative, “The Unit.” I have never seen an episode of The Unit but pretty devotedly watch 24, despite its numerous technical errors. Some things on “24″ are laughable, for example, Sunday night’s use of a search warrant by the FBI to seize personnel records of an Islamic-American organization. The FBI doesn’t serve a warrant and stand idly by while an IT guy copies the warranted files onto a CD. They just rip out the computers and servers and take them to the FBI crime lab. I can overlook such breaches because the basic premise is so terribly, frighteningly credible: an Islamist terror group brings the war directly to the interior of this country, first with conventional explosives used in suicide and other bombings, and then with at least one WMD.

It is a severe but justified indictment that no one else is preparing the American people for such a potentiality or even admitting that such destruction is what our enemies intend. By “no one else” I mean the Bush administration, whose leader seems content simply to recite platitudes such as, “The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is … the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” Yeah, that’s a real rally to arms, isn’t it?

The Bush administration, from the president on down, is unwilling to inform us of the horrifically lethal intentions of al Qaeda and its ideological allies. Apparently, the administration thinks that “nine-eleven” can be recited like a mantra and all Americans will fill in the gaps. This is perhaps one of the most serious errors the president has made so far. I wrote in August 2005 that Bush is failing to keep the public in the loop.

Military theorist Marshal de Saxe observed in 1730, “The courage of the soldiers must be reborn daily. There is nothing that is so variable.” In the same way, a wartime president in a democracy must always remind the people why they fight and expend their blood and treasure. The will and determination of the people to persevere is highly variable.

Right now, “24″ is filling that gap. Victor Davis Hanson gets it, too:

Killer teams that poison the water supply of Los Angeles or blow themselves up in the Mall of America, defy an easy response. Do we hit the Saudis whose charities funded them? The Syrians who gave them the weapons? The Iranians who trained them? Or the Pakistanis who offered them space? All such governments would immediately “deplore” such attacks, offer their condolences, and claim they had no influence over their cheering crowds…

Gerard Vanderleun wrote,

The goals of the Radical Islamic forces arrayed against us are the same as their factotums, the Palestinians, have for Israel. In the jihad against Israel we can see what the Islamic forces have in mind for us: the complete destruction of our systems, the occupation of our land, the usurpation of our government, and the death or conversion of all our citizens. These are the goals of Radical Islam as understood by their fundamentalists and as tolerated by the vast majority of believers. …

Whether the goals of Radical Islam can be achieved is a matter for history to determine. It is the belief that they can be achieved that brings the First Terrorist War upon us.

No way, you say? here is what al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith said in 2002:

“We have the right to kill 4 million Americans - 2 million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans’] chemical and biological weapons.”

“America knows only the language of force. … America is kept at bay by blood alone…”

Last November The SF Examiner wondered whether Americans are sleepwalking into a gathering storm, much as the British did in the 1930s. If so, a lot of the blame rests squarely in the Oval Office, whose occupant is permitting it happen. Yet the stakes could not be graver. I wrote last November why I was a single-issue voter, kicking off with David High’s observation, “If we don’t get the war right, the Medicare prescription plan won’t matter, Social Security won’t matter, nothing else will matter.” The threat is real, people, so watch “24″ to see what our enemies want to do. It and like media will tell you; the administration won’t.

An experienced Middle-East reporter of the Albany Times Union offers, ” 15 rules for understanding the Middle East.”

They are all so incisive and read-worthy (and short) that I’ll not bother to excerpt them. But if you wonder what’s going wrong (from our perspective) in Iraq and the ME generally, this is a primero primer.

Hat tip: The Braden Files, the best little-read blog out there (then again, he posts only twice per month or so).

I’m sure you will agree that this little factoid will just be all over the MSM this weekend.