Tim Blair

One wonders what the reaction would be if the Bush administration refused White House credentials to unfriendly reporters.

Totally agree with you Dean. Furthermore one wonders will stories filed from Zimbabwe by these reporters refer to anything other than cricket scores?

As I recall the bush white house does not accredit any australian reporters.
Even if they did,bush seems to treat real questions with disdain.
Mugabe has his own tame media as does bush with fox news et al.
I would have suppported regime change in zimbabwe by bush like a shot(so to speak),but there is no oil, is there?

marklatham wrote:

"Mugabe has his own tame media as does bush with fox news et al."

So bright-boy, name me 4, or 6, or 10 major media that would comprise the "et al".

Would that list include CBS? NBC? CNN? ABC? PBS? The New York Times? The Washington Post? Time or Newsweek magazines? Damn, I'm out of major media organizations in the USA.

So come on bright-boy, name me just ONE more media arganization that is, and was, in the the tank for Bush.

Why should we listen to anyone who posts under tha name of a loser?

Try "Doc Evatt". At least he had a job before politics.

I guess the moral of the story is that it's now no longer sufficient for journalists to kiss Mugabe's Arse : you've got to be like the Independant and Guardian, and give Tongue while you're doing it. Show some real enthusiasm.

Hmm, I can't imagine anyone calling the Daily Mail (a very, sometimes fatuously, conservative newspaper) friendly to Mugabe's regime, so find it odd that they were admitted.

"I would have suppported regime change in zimbabwe by bush like a shot"

So what's the difference between Mugabe and Saddam? I take it Mugabe
isn't forking out for Palestinian suicide bombers?

I believe the agreement calls for the Guardian, Independent, Reuters, etc., to actively root against the England squad.

Player selection, tactics, batting stances, will all be called into question.

Zimbabwe will involve England in such a quagmire of a match that it will be self-evident that PM Blair should never have allowed the Test to be scheduled, based as it was on lies and racist assumptions of English cricket mastery.

All your googlies are belong to us!

ABC and SBS would be in like Flynn- Malcolm Fraser too,Mugabe's old mentor and sponsor.Wonder what really happened to those trousers and would you choose him again as an eminent person talent scout.

Off the top of my head crawford-the wall street journal?
I could go to archives and name many others and quote quotes-but you arseholes don't listen anyway.
But this conservative smear about the "liberal media" is in 2004, a crock of shit.
Go faux news!

Hey, that's not fair. You've implied that The Daily Mail might be 'friendlier' to a tyrranical regime. Yeah, right. And I'm sure the Mail backed Hitler and Mussolini too, back in the Thirties. Yeah, and probably Franco. What's that? The Mail did back those guys? Oh. Sorry

Solidarity? Not a chance if there's a profit to be made.

Off the top of my head crawford-the wall street journal?

That's one. At least three more to go!

"it's all about oooiiilllllll!!!!"

it took all the way until the third post for this to come up...the trolls are slipping.

To be fair to The Guardian, their writer Andrew Meldrum was expelled by the Zimbabweans last year (when Australia toured) when he wrote about Mugabe's abuses.

Why Hussein and not Mugabe? That's new. Usually it's "why not North Korea?" But the answer is the same.

You get Hussein for the same reason you answer all the easy questions first on an exam. This way you don't run out of time trying to solve the hard ones and miss questions you knew you could get right.

Ironically, Mr. Troll, you left out National Review, Townhall.com, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, etc. etc. However, I note that these columnists are often the only conservative voices on the op-ed pages of the papers that carry their work. I also note the times that conservative publications have questioned Bush's policies regarding energy, immigration, and aspects of the war. This makes them many orders of magnitude more honest than the hordes of lefties at the nets and the major newsies.

Further, there's no bones about the opinion of the opinion pages of the Journal - but where do the MSM put their analysis? In the news articles themselves. They then claim that such slanted "journalism" is, itself, the news, rather than the actual facts of the matter.

It was a dark day when newsmen suddenly decided that being a reporter wasn't good enough, and started all that pretentious mumbo-jumbo about "journalism" and "the first draft of history." It was the first step to subordinating the message to the personal prejudice of the messenger.

How kind of Mr. Banda to sort out the British newsgroups for those of us who are not familiar with each one's particular ideological bent. Now I know which ones to avoid.

breaking news .... england cricket team cancel flight, (and maybe abandon whole tour?)

MrB - that would be something, huh? But hopefully they won't bail on the whole thing, and just skip Mugabeland.

marklatham wrote:

"I would have suppported regime change in zimbabwe by bush like a shot(so to speak),but there is no oil, is there?..."

No oil but plenty of black folk for a racist like Bush to tread over. You believe one fallacy about Bush why not another?

BTW if you really want to see a U.S. intervention in Zimbabwe I suggest you show a little patience. It’s not that the U.S. has its hands full by any means but we have to take things slow for the blue-faced (oxygen deprivation?) among us.

marklatham

Here’s a story I know you’d love to see:

The Bush administration is funding research into automobiles that utilize blood for fuel. “The current process of obtaining small amounts of oil by spilling large amounts of blood on foreign soil is highly inefficient. Why not put that same blood to use right here in the U.S. We avoid the cost of transporting blood overseas to obtain oil which must be transported back to the U.S. in a doubly inefficient process”

Have any of you actually been to Zimbabwe? I was there in 2001, and in Africa tribal politics has nothing to do with democracy.

Zims is partioned into two irreconciable tribes.

".....two irreconciable tribes"

Why can't people just get along? I know, they need a hug!

"...in Africa tribal politics has nothing to do with democracy."

Really Louis? Do tell.

Lovemore Banda follows the Zimbabean tradition of fatuous names. Remember President Canaan Banana? President Banana later fell into disgrace for having sex with his bodyguards. I know, I know.. you're going to ask was there a banana involved? (Boom boom)

Presumably The Guardian, the Independent, etc are perceived as friendlier to Mugabe's regime.

That, or they just paid up without complaining too loudly...

It seems the English team has cancelled their flight, (& perhaps the tour) due to "concerns over 13 journalists being refused accreditation to cover the tour in Zimbabwe"

Very clever by the MCC, or whoever is running English cricket at the moment!

Cancelling the tour, which they didn't want to go to anyway, in solidarity with the press. That should make it difficult for the moonbat media to criticise the MCC without appearing to supoprt suppression of the free press.

10/10 for clever weaseling. Infinitely better than their excuse for skipping the Zim match in the last world cup.

I lived there two years and follow the reports closely.

TO say there are two irreconcilable tribes is an oversimplification.

REally there are many interest groups competing, and the largest and most powerful is the Shona/ZanuPF gangster ruling party.

Against this we set the tribal category of the Ndebele (a lot of overlap with Shona due to modern mariage, work and education changes); the professional class as a whole, including many well-educated people of all backgrounds; The commercial farmers, white and black; the non-Mugabe media; lots of major interest-groups that matter.

Ultimately they are all f***ed by the power of the gun. Zanu-PF run a gangster state with commercial involvement at the highest levels and military, 'veterans' and CIO types either in their pockets or virtual warlords. They are not even as beneficial as a parasite class; rather, they destroy production while stealing its fruit.

We have to ask where their Australian poodles are now; has SBS apologised for that documentary accusing the Opposition of plotting to kill Mugabe? What was the name of the person at SBS who authorised its broadcast?

Oh my, all the negative vibes regarding Zimbabwe.

Maybe my recent purchase of a large farm there, as a white American, wasn't such a good idea after all.

I'm not going to worry though.

I'm sure the local government will listen to reason.

Do I really need to? Okay I will...

/sarcasm

Was talking to a dad at cricket a few weeks ago who turned out to be a white rhodesian barrister who was a high court judge twenty years ago in zimbabwe.
He knew all the current political people in zimbabwe,and had great knowledge of the war.
I told him that I used to read national lampoon magazine in the seventies with it's famous bogus letters on the editorial page.

Dear sir,
all we want from the white rhodesians is simple justice and human dignity and some of their children to eat.

joshua nkomo,
downtown africa.

From what I understand they're letting the other jounalists in now, but wouldn't it be a bit ridiculous to use the excuse of "they won't less the press in" than the excuse of the tyrannical regieme in charge to cancel the tour?

I fear we English need to develop a back bone before next summer when the ashes start.