Blog searching

Thinking about newspapers this morning. Andrew Marr bases his TV show on the Sunday newspapers, see my blog about reading the Guardian.

Could it be possible to do a TV show based on blogs? Maybe this is the future for Youtube. Meanwhile I stick mostly to text.

Just as a test, here are a few from searching on Keogh, Kilfoyle and Iraq.

Winter Patriot has a long post about the gagging order on the Al Jazeera trial. Very comprehensive and of interest to any journalist.

Unbossed.com has a quote from the Washington Post report in 2005

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said that it was clear the White House saw al-Jazeera as a problem, but that although the CIA's clandestine service came up with plans to counteract it, such as planting people on its staff, it never received permission to proceed. "Bombing in Qatar was never contemplated," the former official said.

Comment from Unbossed

The fact that the CIA was exploring options to infiltrate Al-Jazeera shows how obsessed the WH was with the network. The plan has a Nixonian ring to it. The former official here sounds a lot like Colin Powell, so you need to take the assertion that bombing Qatar "was never contemplated" with an especially large grain of salt.

The trial has established that Colin Powell was at the meeting but so far as I know he has not been asked recently what he remembers about it.

Although there is reporting online, newspapers are still not reporting the trial to any great extent. One comment at Unbossed remarks -

I haven't seen much else so far in the US news media about this trial, so it wouldn't suprise me if journalists here ignore it almost entirely.

That's a pretty sad commentary on the state of journalism in America.

On the Andrew Marr BBC prog Gordon Brown spoke about Labour government mistakes during the last ten years and made no mention of Iraq. The 75p pension rise and the millenium dome were admitted. Follow up questions anyone?