Seattle Post-Intelligencer reader Muhammad Omer Iqbal posts on the paper's blog (10/26/08) about media in a "frenzy to denounce Islam and Muslims every time a terrorist activity takes place":

Many Muslims believe that their faith was taken by terrorists when they indulged in some of the most heinous crimes. On the other hand, I am of the opinion that media played an even more important role when it chose not to talk about those Muslims who serve America and play a positive role here. Seven years after the attacks of September 11, it is a disgrace that American media has not been able to help Americans understand about Islam and Muslims.

Exactly how poorly media have informed U.S. residents about the religion is demonstrated by Iqbal's citation of this alarming statistic: "According to a 2007 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 58 percent of Americans said that they knew little or nothing about Islam's practices."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: Isabel MacDonald & Steve Rendall on 'Smearcasting,' FAIR's Islamophobia Report (10/10/08)

Tom Brokaw, the interim host of NBC's Meet the Press, and NBC analyst Chuck Todd expressed bafflement on last Sunday's Meet the Press (10/26/08) at how Latinos had "turned on the Republican Party" and their "friend" John McCain:

TODD: I mean, this, this Hispanic--one of the things we--underreported story of the cycle is how Hispanics have just turned on the Republican Party, hurting John McCain. Frankly....

BROKAW: Who is a friend of theirs.

TODD: Who is a friend of theirs.

BROKAW: Right.

TODD: You know, this is a Shakespearean--you know, the S...

BROKAW:  Right.

It's hard to know exactly where Todd was going in identifying this as "Shakespearean"--perhaps he was likening Latinos turning on and "hurting" their "friend" McCain to the famous scene of betrayal in Julius Caesar, in which the Roman leader's friend Marcus Brutus collaborates in Caesar's assassination?

The analogy suggests that, even as the GOP presidential campaign sputters, McCain is now facing treachery from the very people who were his allies.

Et tu Jose and Maria?

Where would Latinos be if they didn't have pundits like Todd and Brokaw to let them who their friends are!

Back in the real world, where issues have an impact on how people vote--it would appear that the pundits may have the story completely backwards. A new report from the Center for American Progress suggests that Latinos actually stand to lose out economically under McCain's economic policies.

But then, pundits have rarely been known to let actual issues get in the way of their horserace storyline.

Looking at "the media attention granted the right-wing attacks on ACORN," politics writer Glenn W. Smith poses a question to Editor & Publisher readers (10/15/08): "Why does it seem to be a greater sin to be suspected of voter registration mistakes than to publicly engage in voter suppression efforts?" Smith's response to his own query looks to U.S. election history:

One answer to this question might be simple editorial bias. E&P's Greg Mitchell detailed the right's pioneer suppression efforts in his book, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics.

As reported by Mitchell, in the 1934 race for governor of California, Republicans hatched perhaps the most sophisticated voter suppression scheme undertaken up to that time in America. Taking the shrewd advice of a former New York prosecutor, Eli Whitney Debevoise, opponents of Democrat Upton Sinclair leveled wild charges of voter registration fraud. A cooperative district attorney drew up a secret list of 200,000 allegedly illegal registrants.

The Los Angeles Times advanced the suppression campaign, writing on the front page that "it would be far better for a few honest persons to lose their votes than for a hundred thousand rogues to defeat by fraud the majority will of the people." The publicity, the conspirators knew, would frighten those who were afraid they just might be on that list. Rather than risk capture (for a vague crime they had no understanding of), they'd stay away from the polls.

Smith tells us that,"ultimately, the effort ended in some embarrassment when no actual voter registration fraud was uncovered and the state's Supreme Court tossed out the accusations"--though the currently applicable lesson of this tale is that the result was "not before the goal of the publicity was met."

Listen to FAIR's radio program CounterSpin: Lori Minnite on ACORN & Vote Fraud (10/17/08)

As we finally near the end of the U.S. presidential race, Norman Solomon looks back (Creator's Syndicate, 10/25/08) at "a year when the dominant media spin has been upended time after time" and analyzes "the latest twist of political storylines that have been rendered pretzel-like long ago":

In a piece posted October 21 on the CNN website, Stuart Rothenberg and Nathan L. Gonzales note: "McCain's nonexistent coattails run counter to the initial conventional wisdom that said his moderate style and crossover appeal would lift Republican candidates down ballot."

And so, as the long-running media saga of Barack Obama versus John McCain enters its final days, it's apparent that the news media expectations for the 2008 presidential race have been routinely far from prescient--so distant from prophetic, in fact, that media watchers might have done better to flip a coin after asking for predictions about future developments.

In fact, Solomon finds corporate coverage even worse than random, recalling "the days seven years ago when, in early autumn, the news media suddenly began comparing George W. Bush to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the immediate wake of 9/11" in support of his contention that "the current 'unpopular Republican president' and 'unpopular Republican brand' would have become even more unpopular sooner without the basic leanings of the news media."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Bozo to Churchill" (5-6/02) by Mark Crispin Miller

Blogging at the Women In Media & News website (10/24/08), Diane Farsetta does her usual outstanding job in exposing the hand of big-time PR in U.S. media.

According to the PR trade publication O'Dwyer's, the Council for a Democratic Iran spent $300,000 on its new lobbying and PR firm, the Livingston Group, in the third quarter of 2008 alone.... There isn't a lot of information available about the Council for a Democratic Iran.... But the group’s founder, Dr. Behrooz Behbudi, seems to be aligned with military hawks.

Last year, the Vancouver Sun reported that Dr. Behbudi had "bought $250,000 worth of ads in major North American newspapers denouncing Iran's Muslim leaders as 'terrorists' and 'fascists,' and warning they are a direct threat to the U.S. and Canada." He also referred to the March 2007 arrest of 15 British sailors by Iran as "an act of war." The Sun noted that Dr. Behbudi is an oil entrepreneur who counts Oliver North and Pat Robertson (who baptized him) among his friends. He is "a high-level figure in the U.S. Republican party," according to the Sun, who displays pictures of himself with current President Bush and former senator turned lobbyist Bob Dole.

Farsetta contrasts this massive pro-war effort with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Dr. Shirin Ebadi's recent speech that "called on the people of the United States and Iran to continue what she called a historical friendship, dating back to the early 20th century" and "urged us to reject the antagonistic posturing of our governments and engage in people-to-people solidarity." Calling it "an inspiring and important presentation," Farsetta notes that "it's too bad that Dr. Ebadi doesn’t have a high-powered PR firm, to help her really impact U.S. foreign policy."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Perilous Journalism in the Persian Gulf: Strait of Hormuz incident's Uncritical Coverage" (3-4/08) by Isabel Macdonald

Local CBS reporter Cynthia Fodor's revelation that she "had to submit which topics we wanted to discuss ahead of time" to get an interview with Sarah Palin has Think Progress's Ben Armbruster (10/27/08) putting the censorious nature of Palin's handlers into perspective:

Fodor's revelations come at a particular disturbing time. Just last week, press freedom advocates Reporters Without Borders released its annual Press Freedom Index, which found that the United States ranked 36 out of 173 countries--a spot also shared by Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But this isn't the first time the McCain/Palin campaign has attempted to control Palin's interviews. Earlier this month, a local Bangor, Maine affiliate declined an interview when Palin's handlers said they would grant the interview only if the McCain campaign could choose the reporter.

For a look at the kind of coverage the Palin camp's approach has wrought, see item No. 3, "The 'Smearing' of Sarah Palin" in FAIR's Media Advisory: Top Troubling Tropes of Campaign '08: The Media-Created Narratives that Derail Election Coverage (10/20/08)

Dean Baker nails the New York Times' Ben Stein again for "telling people that it is important to save money in order to protect themselves against the sort of downturn that the economy is now seeing." Baker writes (Beat the Press, 10/26/08) that while it's obvious "people should try to put some money aside, most people get paid less than Mr. Stein and do much better work":

Does anyone remember back in July when Stein told readers "we're dodging the worst"? How about the great piece from a bit over a year ago telling us about the "Chicken Littles" who were getting so worried over the problems in the subprime mortgage market?

Yeah, it's a good idea for people to save money, but most people have to work for a living. They have to perform on their jobs. The dishwashers can't break the dishes day after day and still have a job. The cab drivers can't get into accidents day after day and still be allowed to drive a cab.

It is only people like Ben Stein who have the right to completely mess up on their job all the time and still collect a paycheck, and indeed, a paycheck that is far higher than that received by the vast majority of people who actually do their job.

Basically, Baker finds it "a bit hard to see someone like this lecturing people who work for a living on the virtues of saving." But then, these days this sort of incompetence seems almost to be an advantage in gaining a big media venue for one's opinions.

In a lengthy Sunday piece, New York Times reporters Robert Worth and Eric Lipton detail new U.S. plans for ramping up military aid to the Lebanese government. The piece relies heavily on quotes from U.S. and Lebanese officials, who unsurprisingly support this effort; one Israeli source is the most critical voice, wary of arms shipments to a regional foe.

But perhaps most bizarre is this construction (emphasis added):

An important moment for the army came in the summer of 2007, when it fought and won a three-month battle with Islamists in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in the northern city of Tripoli. That struggle, in which 168 soldiers and an unknown number of militants were killed, vividly underscored the need to re-equip the army. With no combat helicopters or precision weapons, the army had to resort to dropping bombs by hand from its Vietnam-era Huey helicopters, a hopelessly inaccurate method that resulted in the near-leveling of the camp.

Although the United States rushed them 40 loads of C-17 transport planes full of ammunition and other gear, army commanders bitterly resented the failure to provide them with more sophisticated arms.

So the evidence to support sending the Lebanese Army more weapons is the fact that they bombed a refugee camp?

Today New York Times reporter John Harwood wonders what happened to the idea, voiced in the aftermath of the 2004 election, that the country would see a long era of Republican dominance:

How did such a turnabout happen so fast?

In part, the answer stems from developments so rare that, as the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has said of the financial crisis, they occur "once in a century." Hurricane Katrina shattered the administration's reputation for competence in domestic affairs, just as problems in Iraq eroded its credibility on national security issues. Not even partisan critics of Republican policies anticipated how a burst housing bubble would devastate Wall Street and damage the entire economy.

There does seem to be a temptation among some pundits to argue that the problems of the Bush years have less to do with policy, and more to do with, as Harwood suggests, an unusual streak of bad luck. But what is the evidence for that?

Harwood says Katrina "shattered the administration’s reputation for competence in domestic affairs." What record of competence would that be? Harwood writes that "problems in Iraq eroded its credibility on national security issues." Problems? The "problem" with the Iraq War is the Iraq War. And the idea that "not even partisan critics of Republican policies" could have predicted the disasterous fallout from the housing bubble... well, ask economist Dean Baker, for starters.

Looking past the election, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham explains in this week's issue that the incoming administration could use some advice:

Even stipulating that giving advice is easy and taking action is hard, though, it is pretty clear that what we are calling the "Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue" (the economy, the wars, the lack of public confidence in the direction of the country) requires the best minds around.

We came up with several this week.

Who are Newsweek's "best minds?"

-Richard Haass, Republican foreign policy professional (as Meacham notes, he "served two President Bushes");

-Nicholas Burns, who also served two Bush presidents-- he was W.'s undersecretary of state for political affairs. Burns also served in the Clinton administration;

-Henry Kissinger, whose lengthy career probably does not need to be summarized;

-Michael Bloomberg, Republican mayor of New York fresh from his success in eliminating term limits for his office (against the wishes of New Yorkers)

-Vernon Jordan, known primarily as a close adviser (legal and otherwise) to Bill Clinton, is an investment banker who sits on a number of corporate boards.

That's really the "best" advice Newsweek could scare up?

The story of the McCain worker who faked an assault and blamed it on an imaginary Obama supporter sheds a queasy light on the thinking at the top of the right's most important media outlet. John Moody, the executive vice president responsible for the editorial direction of Fox News Channel, had this to say (on a Fox News blog) about the assault claim before it was exposed as a hoax:

If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator  Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.

Voters would "suddenly feel they do not know enough the Democratic nominee"? What is the chain of thought there?  Voters would realize they didn't know whether Obama encourages his supporters to commit assault?

One might think that what Moody meant is that the story, if true, would have made some voters realize that they weren't sure whether or not Obama was a scary black man.  But he specified that these voters would be revisiting their support for Obama "not because they are racists."  So that can't be it.

As the editor of a magazine of media criticism, I make it a rule never to edit the words of someone we're criticizing in such a way that our readers would understand the quote differently if they saw the original context. We don't want people looking up what we're criticizing and saying, "Oh--so that's what they meant."

Stan Nelson of the Pueblo [Colorado] Chieftain violates this rule in the criticism he offers (10/25/08) of FAIR's recent report, Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation. Nelson presents this edited quote from our report:

"Why," asks FAIR, "is it necessary to invoke cultural stereotypes . . .? The widespread assumption in the U.S. media is that people . . . in the Muslim world are fundamentally unlike Americans."

Nelson goes on to translate "invok[ing] cultural stereotypes" as "pass[ing]  cultural information"--and what could be wrong with that? But here's the full quote from the report:

Why is it necessary to invoke cultural stereotypes to explain why you won't accept an envelope full of cash after mercenaries kill your child? Or to explain quite normal opposition to being bombed, detained or aggressively searched? Because the widespread assumption in the U.S. media is that people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, are fundamentally unlike Americans.

It's the invocation of cultural stereotypes to explain things that require no explanation that we took as a sign that Muslims are seen as inherently different; leaving out that aspect of the quote fundamentally changes its meaning.

The Chieftain piece also offers this argument for why FAIR's report on Islamophobia "echoes criticisms of media heard from the so-called religious right":

It must be recognized, sympathetically, that Muslims face a tough task to decisively distance themselves from cynical killers, like evangelical and fundamental Christians have had to do with, say, David Koresh's troublesome Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or Fred Phelps' questionable, vengeance-stained, judgmental theology.

However, that is exactly what they should do, or face more of the same unfairness--regardless of whether FAIR is there to call it so. Evangelicals and fundamentalists can testify to that.

It's not clear, exactly, who is calling on "evangelical and fundamentalist Christians" to distinguish themselves from the Koreshes and Phelpses of the world. The general assumption is that groups that do bizarre things like picketing soldiers' funerals or stockpiling weapons for Armageddon have to answer for their own bizarreness; people who happen to share a religious identity with such people aren't usually called upon to "distance themselves"--unless, of course, the religious identity is Muslim.

In any case, note that the proper parallel to Muslims having to explain that they aren't Al-Qaeda is not "evangelical and fundamentalist Christians" needing to do the same for Koresh and Phelps--it's Christians in general having to do so.  Assuming that every Christian, from Jesse Jackson to the Archbishop of Canterbury, probably shares the views of Phelps or Koresh--that's the same kind of mistake as attributing Osama bin Laden's views to the average Muslim.

Reporting on former Chicago detective Jon Burge's long-delayed arrest for "perjury and obstruction of justice" related to police torture in "the Area Two Violent Crimes unit on Chicago's South Side," American Prospect blogger Phoebe Connelly writes (Tapped, 10/21/08) of how "John Conroy (whose exhaustive reporting on the subject is worth a read) mapped out the connection in a 2005 Chicago Reader article" and in his 2001 book, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People. Too bad Connelly's post has to end with

a bittersweet sidenote here about the death of alt-weeklies. John Conroy, the reporter who put the Area Two scandal on the map, was let go by the Chicago Reader last December after they were purchased by Creative Loafing, Inc. To quote Michel Miner, the Reader's media columnist, "The first time Eason [CL's CEO] and I talked, just after Eason had bought the paper this summer, I said that Conroy was, in effect, the canary in the coal mine--as long as he was OK readers would know the Reader was OK." Creative Loafing filed for bankruptcy in September.

Apparently Chicago's media atmosphere was just too noxious for this particular canary--and you have to wonder if justice so long in the coming would arrive at all without the efforts of reporters like Conroy.

Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: John Conroy on Chicago Police Torture (12/21/07)

Free Press Campaign Director Timothy Karr reminds us (Communities United, 10/23/08) that "a huge decision is going to be made on Election Day that could change the lives of millions of Americans," but is "not about Obama or McCain":

On November 4, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on whether to open unused television airwaves to provide affordable Internet services nationwide....

They can transmit an Internet signal over mountains and through concrete walls. But that hasn’t stopped the National Association of Broadcasters from deploying their lobbyists to try to keep us from delivering a better Internet for everyone.

FCC engineers just completed an exhaustive study that shows white spaces can be used to connect millions to the Internet without harming TV signals. But the NAB doesn’t like the results, and they’re trying to get Congress to intervene.

Because "right now, NAB lobbyists are lining up outside the door of your representative in Congress," Free Press thinks it's high time "we ended the NAB’s decades-long effort to control our airwaves"--click here to ensure your representative tells the FCC it "needs to simply follow good science with good policy."

Tim Redmond writes (10/22/08) of how "there aren't many locally-owned independent newspapers left in America," noting that "even the alternative press has become chain-happy.... In... most of the nation's biggest cities, the once-upstart weeklies are owned by big national chains." But, to the great benefit of Northern Californians, the San Francisco Bay Guardian that "Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble founded in 1966 is still the paper that Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble run in 2008." Redmond relates how, when he "first started writing about sustainable cities in the Guardian, I was 28, the paper was 20, urban environmentalism was still considered an oxymoron in much of the mainstream political world--and we didn't have a name for what we were discussing"--and gives us some more recent history:

Look at Proposition H, the Clean Energy Act on the November ballot. Prop. H is a prescription for sustainable energy; the measure would not only set aggressive goals for renewables, it would shift control of the city's energy agenda away from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and give it to the people of San Francisco....

So where is [Gavin] Newsom, who likes to call himself a green mayor? He's against it. Where are the business leaders in town? Standing with PG&E. Where is the power structure? Fighting to prevent a sustainable energy future for San Francisco.

And the big chain-owned daily newspaper is right there with them.