Continuing to put U.S. media to shame by giving voice to leading U.S. intellectuals not heard in their own country's corporate news, Real News Network founder Paul Jay interviews (10/22/08) author of the immensely popular A People's History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn. Even after expressing intense skepticism of third-party candidates' hopes for presidential election, Zinn looks to a currently all-too-relevant period of U.S. history to nonetheless emphasize their importance:

Third parties can have an effect on the existing parties. In the 1930s there wasn't a third party that won, it was the fact that there was a movement throughout the country. Part of it was Socialist and Communist, but a lot of it was working people and tenants and so on. And they had an effect on the Democratic Party, which up to that point had not been a very militant or very energetic party--as a result, it had lost elections in the 1920s to nonentities like Harding and Coolidge. But I think it will take the kind of energy that we had in the '30s to not necessarily create a third party that will win office, but that will transform the Democratic Party.

See the newest FAIR Media Advisory: "More Than a Two-Person Race: Corporate Media Largely Ignore Other Presidential Candidates" (10/21/08)

In Michael Powell's piece in the New York Times (10/22/08) on Barack Obama "changing his tempo," I found this passage to be a little creepy:

Mr. [Jim] Webb, a red-haired, proudly Scots-Irish pol with a John Wayne cadence, introduced Mr. Obama in Roanoke and began: He's one of you.

Mr. Webb offered a complicated formula that involved putting to the side Mr. Obama's Kenyan father, then tracing the lineage of Mr. Obama's white mother, who was born in Kansas to parents whose grandparents came from Kentucky and whose ancestors somewhere in their wanderings from Ireland and Scotland presumably settled for a spell in southwestern Virginia.

Mr. Webb finished with a broad smile. He has divined the backwoods white bonafides of an urbane, mixed-race Chicagoan.

"They say he's not like you." He shook his head, sternly. "Barack Obama is just like you."

The crowd puzzled for a second, then clapped at his effort.

What, exactly, makes this a "complicated formula" that Powell thinks "puzzled" an audience? Some of Obama's mother's ancestors used to live in Virginia. If John McCain's maternal line passed through Virginia, and a Virginia politician mentioned this as a reason his state's voters should identify with him, would Powell see this as at all complicated or puzzling? Probably not--because noting McCain's ancestral roots in a given state wouldn't involve "putting to the side" any "Kenyan father." It's only with a "mixed-race" candidate like Obama that acknowledging that he had a mother can be portrayed as a slick feat of misdirection.

James Rainey of the L.A. Times (10/22/08) quotes a colleague dismissing the size of Barack Obama's crowds as an indication of the Obama campaign's chances in November:

"Fall Out Boy gets crowds this big," Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal said at the Miami rally, referring to the pop punk band. "But I don't think they are going to end up in the White House.

"You can't learn anything about the outcome based on how big the crowd is," Weisman continued. "These are the people who are already convinced."

Of course, this is silly--you don't compare the size of political rallies to rock concerts, but to other political rallies, and compared to other political rallies, Obama's are quite large. But does Fall Out Boy really get crowds as big as Obama's?

Weisman reported that the Miami rally drew 30,000. A few moments of Googling turned up this from a South African music blog:

And then came FOB. From song one to the last song an hour and a half later, they rocked and rocked and rocked a bit more. They played only one show in SA and last night was it. They also noted that the Jo’burg concert will be the biggest crowd that they play to the entire year. I think there were close to 20,000 people in the audience.

According to the blog, then--and I have no reason to believe that its any less accurate than the Wall Street Journal--the biggest crowd Fall Out Boy played to last year was one-third smaller than the crowd Weisman attributed to Obama--which was not a particularly big crowd as Obama rallies go.

It's reminiscent of the argument made by right-wingers that an Obama rally in Portland that drew 75,000 was preceded by a free concert by The Decembrists, so the turnout didn't really reflect Obama's drawing power. Fans of the band pointed out that a typical Decembrist show will fill a club with a capacity of 1,200.

Actual Fox News lower third, spotted today by Janine Jackson:

"Obama Plan Treats Anyone Making Over $250,000 as Wealthy"

Providing a transcript of Andrea Mitchell perpetuating a "phony moral equivalency" on Meet the Press Sunday by calling Barack Obama's newest campaign video "a remarkably negative ad," Brad Jacobson (MediaBloodhound, 10/20/08) says Mitchell's insistence that "Obama's ads are somehow just as negative as McCain's" has her "unintentionally entering Onion and Saturday Night Live territory":

With all due respect to planetary travel, what planet is Mitchell on? This kind of nonsense should be beneath a serious news organization's chief foreign affairs correspondent. It's the kind of comment or, as they call it in the "real parts of America," lie that we'd expect from Fox News wingnuts, their talk radio minions and desperate McCain Pfotenhauers. As much a lie as calling Obama a "socialist" or saying he "pals around with terrorists." Yet Mitchell states this falsehood as fact and no one on the panel, including host Tom Brokaw, calls her on it....

Calling this "a remarkably negative ad" is like calling vanilla a remarkably exotic flavor, McCain a remarkably sunny candidate, Palin a remarkably complex thinker, or, say, Andrea Mitchell a remarkably responsible journalist. It's the kind of overt stupidity and shameless mendacity that helped drum up support for attacking a country that never attacked us.

Mitchell's point, such as it is, is that the McCain quote Obama uses in his ad--"I voted, I supported George Bush 90 percent of the time"--was said "in another context." Jacobson provides the full context of the quote:

The president and I agree on most issues. There was a recent study that showed that I voted with the president over 90 percent of the time, higher than a lot of my even Republican colleagues.

Calling an ad "remarkably negative" for using this quote is remarkably bad journalism.

Read FAIR's related Media Advisory: Ayers = Keating?: Media Falsely Balance Obama, McCain Attacks (10/10/08)

Via the Southern Poverty Law Center's HateWatch, the Tucson Citizen's Anne T. Denogean says (10/14/08) it "isn't too surprising" that the Pew Hispanic Center's polling found, among other disturbing results, "one in seven Hispanics said they had trouble finding or keeping a job because of their ethnicity. One in 10 reported that their ethnicity made it difficult to find or keep housing." Under the headline "Anti-Hispanic Rhetoric Growing," Denogean places in context media figures' own complicity, and even active participation, in this spreading racism:

What has happened, [Immigration Policy Center director Angela Kelley] said, "is that some folks are taking advantage of the frustration that the public feels and stoking hate and fears." Hate groups and hate crimes targeting Hispanics and immigrants are on the rise, she said, an assertion backed up by the research of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League and FBI hate-crime statistics. The Immigration Policy Center has taken note of the spread of anti-Hispanic rhetoric from hard-core white supremacists and border-state extremists to supposedly mainstream anti-immigration activists, media pundits and politicians.

See FAIR's Action Alert: Dobbs' Dubious Disease Numbers: CNN Host Stands by Faulty Leprosy Statistics (5/11/07)

After "more than a decade" of having "attempted to cast a light on... 'that curriculum of the corporation, by the corporation and for a corporation's profits... [which] shall indeed hasten the rate of destruction of the earth's resources,'" John F. Borowski offers instruction (Common Dreams, 10/20/08) to

Journalists: Expose the agenda of this corrosive curriculum. Enlighten and motivate citizens to action. Parents: Demand that corporate America be tarred and feathered and chased out of the education business.... That your children be given exciting, lifelong science learning.... Filmmakers: Make documentaries and "student friendly" visuals that document mountain-top removal, extinction of species, peak oil, the insanity of an economic system that is based on devouring our own life support system. (We cannot depend on Viacom, General Electric and Disney to provide this on their corporate TV channels.)

In short, Borowski urges us all to do what we can to ensure "the 'science of death' has no place in our schools, our workplace or in our society."

Blogger JayaPrakash Telangana has posted (Japes, 10/21/08) a Free Press Action Fund call to "make sure media help us spot and overcome national crises, instead of distracting us with celebrities and trivia." Free Press's Martin Kaplan and Norman Lear ask us to "just think…":

If mainstream media spent as much time covering the events that produced the economic meltdown as they spent on pop culture and horserace politics, we might have avoided this financial crisis altogether. That's why most Americans didn't see this mess coming, and why most don't understand the $700 billion plan that is supposed to rescue us.... Consider:

• In early 2007, when the story broke about the mortgage crisis at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the media were busy flooding the airwaves with stories about Anna Nicole Smith's death and Paris Hilton's trip to jail.
• In 2008, when SEC Chair Christopher Cox told the Senate Banking Committee that the SEC required no additional funding for oversight of credit rating agencies--the same agencies that determine ratings for mortgages and other loans--the media were cooing over Brad and Angelina's newborn twins.

The Action Fund names "fighting for diverse media ownership" and "against media consolidation" as just two examples of its efforts "to fix the problems that have turned a once-proud news media into a tabloid circus."

The New York Observer's Felix Gillette brings our attention (10/20/08) to a new self-described "grassroots" website created after "NBC/MSNBC was criticized during the 2008 election for sexism in its coverage." Founder Margot Friedman further explains that "picking a qualified woman and/or person of color to host Meet the Press would help repair some of the damage to the network's brand." Gillette reports:

"The New York Times has reported that NBC will name a new moderator for Meet the Press between Election Day and early December," reads the website DontLetNBCDisWomen.org. "Chuck Todd and David Gregory are in the running. Both men are fine journalists, but they do not represent the racial or gender diversity that their viewers deserve. It is important for viewers to be exposed to a broad range of perspectives and not exclusively those of Caucasian males."

The site goes on to encourage readers to click on a link that allows them to send a message to NBC News president Steve Capus, urging him "to consider a woman and/or person of color" for the MTP job.

While careful to note that her "campaign does not endorse a particular candidate for this position," Friedman judges that "there is no shortage of talented women and/or people of color who could do the job, including CNN's Campbell Brown, PBS's Gwen Ifill or NBC's Andrea Mitchell."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: Misogyny's Greatest Hits: Sexism in Hillary Clinton Coverage (5-6/08) by Jessica Wakeman

Speaking of Mark Halperin, the Politico's Michael Calderone notes that while Time's Joe Klein seems to have been banned from the McCain press plane for being too critical ("We don't allow Daily Kos diarists on board either," a McCain spokesperson says), "other Time magazine staffers, including Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, " reporter Michael Scherer and Mark Halperin (the Page), have not had a problem with access."

Blogger Matthew Yglesias observes:

You might think that if Time were a real news organization, it would stand up for Klein and say that if the McCain/Palin campaign isn't going to let Klein on the plane, then they're not going to send some other journalists to give them kinder coverage. Instead, though, Time operates in conventional MSM style. If you get good access, your stories get good placement. So if, like Scherer and Halperin, you decline to tell the truth about McCain, you get access to McCain and your career benefits. If you do tell the truth about McCain, you lose access to McCain and your career suffers. Which is a great way to run a magazine if you don’t care about informing your audience. Which, I guess, Time's owners and editors don’t care about.

On CNN's Reliable Sources (10/19/08), host Howard Kurtz and Time magazine's Mark Halperin had the following exchange:

KURTZ: Mark Halperin, we learned this morning that Barack Obama in the month of September raised $150 million.... If a Republican had not taken public financing and had raised all that money, and the Democrat was struggling financially, wouldn't we see a lot of stories about one candidate essentially trying to buy the election?

HALPERIN: We would. We'd also see a lot of stories about his going back on his word saying that he would accept the public money and would reach out to Senator McCain to try to work out a deal. So I think this is a case of a clear, unambiguous double standard, and any reporter who doesn't ask themselves, why is that, why would it be different if it's a Republican, I think is doing themselves and our profession and our democracy a disservice.

KURTZ: I think that's an excellent point, and that's the point we're going to end on.

A bigger "disservice" to democracy and journalism would be misrepresenting reality, which Halperin and Kurtz are doing here. McCain is not "struggling financially." He has raised millions of dollars for hybrid "victory" funds that funnel large donations to the RNC and various state parties. Factoring in those donations, it is not at all clear that McCain is significantly behind in the fundraising race. What's more, had Obama accepted public financing, it would seem likely that the GOP would have a major financial advantage.

Even more bizarre is Halperin's contention that if a Republican had raised money the way Obama has, he would be pilloried by the media. The double standard argument makes little sense, because we did see a lot of misleading stories about Obama "going back on his word" when he declined to take public financing, and he was severely criticized by the pundits and editorialists; a "flip-flop of epic proportions," according to PBS liberal Mark Shields, and Washington Post columnist David Broder (6/26/08) wrote that Obama "was rightly criticized for rigging the system in his favor." Such criticisms continue to this day.

As for all the stories we would see about a Republican candidate trying to buy the election: In New York City in 2005, the billionaire Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg outspent his opponent 8-to-1 in order to win re-election.  Did we see a lot of stories about Bloomberg buying the election?  No, we see the city's media moguls pushing to change the election rules so he can do it again.

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz wrote in his column today:

McCain is never going to draw the kind of attention for his mortgage bailout plan that he did for telling David Letterman he "screwed up" by canceling an earlier appearance, or that Palin did in appearing with Tina Fey on Saturday night.

Really? I had my intern, Daniel Ward, look up some numbers.  A search on Nexis for "McCain and Letterman and screwed up" turned up one story apiece on the news ABC and NBC, and three stories on CBS--which airs the Letterman show.  Meanwhile, the Washington Post, L.A. Times and USA Today all seem to have covered the "screwed up" story twice, and the New York Times once.  (These figures have all been checked to eliminate false positives, though it's harder to be certain that relevant stories weren't missed.)

How does that compare with coverage of McCain's bailout plan? A search for "McCain and mortgage and $300 billion"--the announced size of his plan--turned up seven stories on ABC and six stories on NBC--so these networks, sensibly enough, seem to have considered the mortgage plan to be substantially more newsworthy than McCain screwing up with Letterman.  (We found only two CBS stories on the mortgage plan, so that network may have considered McCain's appearance on its own late-night show to be of greater import.)

The newspapers likewise seem to have given much more play to the mortgage plan, with nine stories turning up in the Post and L.A. Times, seven in USA Today and six in the New York Times--between 3.5 and 6 times as many stories as were found on the Letterman "screw up."

The comparison to Palin's SNL appearance is a little more mixed--we found only two stories on ABC about Palin and the show after her appearance was announced on October 9, far fewer than that network aired on the mortgage plan, but NBC found the vice presidential candidate's cameo on its comedy program to be worth a startling 15 mentions.  CBS, which didn't do much with the mortgage plan, found time for five stories about Palin on SNL.

The newspapers, though, all printed fewer stories about the Palin cameo, except for  the New York Times, in which we found six on each.  (It's "live from New York," I guess.) With the L.A. Times, we found four Palin-on-SNL stories and three for both the Washington Post and USA Today.

Obviously, you could argue that McCain's proposal to solve the mortgage crisis merited many times more coverage than his Letterman apology or Palin's SNL stunt. But to say that his bailout plan was "is never going to draw the kind of attention" as those fluffier stories is inaccurate--and sloppy.

I've been in the media criticism business long enough to remember when Howard Kurtz had a well-deserved reputation for going the extra distance to check what he printed. What happened to that reporter?

From the New York Times report on Barack Obama's huge rally in St. Louis:

Even Mr. Obama, who can wear self-possession like an overcoat, seemed taken aback.

Translation?

Also in the Times on Sunday, Matt Bai's magazine piece about Obama and white voters included this observation:

Obama was wearing his classic starched white shirt. (How many of those shirts does he have, exactly?)

Is Bai actually surprised by a politician who seems to wear clean shirts? Are there notable examples of recent presidential candidates who didn't?

Bill Kristol writes in his column in the New York Times today that media elites

like telling us what’s going to happen. They’re always annoyed when people cross them. Pundits spent all spring telling Hillary Clinton to give up in her contest against Obama--and the public kept on ignoring them and keeping her hopes alive.

Why do elites like to proclaim premature closure--not just in elections, but also in wars and in social struggles? Because it makes them the imperial arbiters, or at least the perspicacious announcers, of what history is going to bring.

It's certainly true that pundits seem to enjoy prematurely declaring elections to be over--see Extra!, 9-10/03, 7-8/07--though pundits' calculations that Obama had an insurmountable lead in the primaries are not the ideal example, given that Obama did turn out to have an insurmountable lead.

There are better examples of pundits being chronically wrong prognosticators--like the one who declared,

"Fred Thompson knows what he's doing, and he will be formidable"? Oh, wait--that was Bill Kristol.

And it was Bill Kristol again who wrongly predicted that Clinton would lose the New Hampshire primary to Obama--though, in fairness, a lot of other pundits made the same claim.

Media Matters has documented Kristol's wildly off-base predictions about the Iraq War:

--"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."--National Public Radio, 4/1/03

--"As in Kabul but also as in the Kurdish and Shi'ite regions of Iraq in 1991, American and alliance forces will be welcomed in Baghdad as liberators."--Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony, 2/7/02

--"The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably."--Weekly Standard, 4/28/03

The real question is why the New York Times hired Kristol as a columnist in January '08 despite his record as a chronically bad prognosticator.

A Google News search for the term "William Timmons" yields trusty progressive publications like Think Progress, OpEd News, TPM, AlterNet and Democracy Now!, but days after it appeared at Huffington Post (10/14/08), no "mainstream" U.S. outlet has picked up the intrepid Murray Waas' new exposé on how

Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein's government.

Kind of makes the whole Barack Obama/Bill Ayers thing seem even more silly, doesn't it?