What happened to Channel 4 news?

Have any of you seen Channel 4 news tonight (13 Nov 06)? Ok, it only applies to those in the UK, but basically, C4 broadcast the news live from Kabul, and started off with a report on the security situation in Helmand province. And it was a strange proof of biased reporting, where by the story is there to prove a point rather than to report facts. I used to have a lot of respect for Channel 4 news, but I think that they are straying towards a US type of news reporting, heavily editorialised and biased. Shame...
I think that British troops were not given a fair coverage, while the story of the mosque is proof of the difficulty of winning the media war. If you watch the report, you will notice how heavily emotive the mosque part is, with assertions such as 'the villagers paid for the mosque themselves' etc while pictures of the destroyed mosque just tell part of the story. At the same time, the UK officer is far from convincing, not really trying to explain the destruction of a holy site (which could have been used by the Taliban as a firing position), and this could be down to him not being fully aware of the story that C4 are running. At the end of the day, the cameraman was probably local, as C4 seem to be increasingly reliant on local reporters. But the bottom line is that the report does not show the coallition in as good a light as it could. And this is down to the UK et. al. ability to manage the media. ISAF needs to get much better at winning the media campaign

Bye Bye Rumi...

Some days ago, I blogged about the likelihood of Donald Rumsfeld being replaced at the Pentagon. And what do you know, he has been replaced. This was probably expected, although it was long overdue. It would have been better for Rumsfeld himself to have resigned after the Abu Ghraib scandal. I still find it unbelievable that someone can have so little integrity and sense of responsibility! One way or the other, the architect of US failure in Iraq is gone. Pity that the consequences of his inability to understand the problem will not go away as easily.

Re-sizing videos

I am just testing here the instructions I received from Theo (thanks Theo) about resizing the videos:

and it works!!!

Cheney and Rumsfeld to Stay

Asked in an interview whether he wanted the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defence to stay past the mid-term elections, George Bush replied in the affirmative! Well what was he supposed to say six days before the Republicans could loose their majority in both houses? That he was going to replace them because their advice got the US in a limbo in Iraq? I wonder whether Rumsfeld will stay though... And what is the procedure for replacing a Vice-President?