ZNet has Noam Chomsky's in-depth analysis (11/25/08) of the recent U.S. presidential election--its likely ramifications, and its overall democratic qualities as compared to other countries. Chomsky here addresses the corporate media aspect:

In the liberal Boston Globe, the headline of the lead story observed that Obama's "grassroots strategy leaves few debts to interest groups": labor unions, women, minorities or other "traditional Democratic constituencies." That is only partially right, because massive funding by concentrated sectors of capital is ignored. But leaving that detail aside, the report is correct in saying that Obama's hands are not tied, because his only debt is to "a grassroots army of millions"--who took instructions, but contributed essentially nothing to formulating his program.

At the other end of the doctrinal spectrum, a headline in the Wall Street Journal reads "Grassroots Army Is Still at the Ready"--namely, ready to follow instructions to "push his agenda," whatever it may be.

Obama's organizers regard the network they constructed "as a mass movement with unprecedented potential to influence voters," the Los Angeles Times reported. The movement, organized around the "Obama brand," can pressure Congress to "hew to the Obama agenda." But they are not to develop ideas and programs and call on their representatives to implement them. These would be among the "old ways of doing politics," from which the new "idealists" are "breaking free."

The folks at Free Press recount (11/25/08) how, "when St. Paul police launched a violent crackdown on journalists covering the Republican National Convention," the media reform group "needed an on-the-ground organizer to pressure city officials to drop the charges against the journalists"--luckily they "knew just the person to call: Nancy Doyle Brown of the Twin Cities Media Alliance":

With only two days to organize, Doyle Brown called media reform advocates throughout the city, rallying support for the petition delivery and the press conference. Free Press coordinated with its local members to prepare for the event and ensure a strong media turnout....

Not long after the petition delivery, the county announced it would not pursue any felony charges against journalists. Then, on September 19, authorities in St. Paul announced that they would not prosecute journalists arrested during the RNC.

Brown professes to have been "shocked and outraged" when she "saw the progressive city of St. Paul become a police state overnight. The RNC was a grave reminder that maintaining our freedoms requires constant vigilance." Indeed, she reminds us that "there are a hundred more subtle ways that press freedom is compromised every day in this country, from allegiance to corporate advertisers to newsroom staff cuts and overreliance on official sources."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Heidi Boghosian on Convention Protests" (9/5/08)

TV reporter Michael Schneider updates us (Variety, 11/25/08) on Fox's race to the ethical bottom of media programming. The real losers? Kids, as usual:

In an unprecedented move, Fox will program two hours of longform commercials on Saturday mornings starting in January. That's believed to be the first time a major network has slated full-blown, program-length advertisements on its schedule.

Move follows an out-of-court legal settlement with children's TV producer 4Kids, which had been programming Fox's Saturday morning kids block under a time-buy agreement.... Fox opted to return two hours of the block to affiliates, and program the other two with infomercials.

Not that your average kids TV fare is something so great anyway...

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Abandoned Children: Networks Passing the Buck on Educational Responsibilities" (7-8/02) by Janine Jackson

Salon's Glenn Greenwald contrasts (11/26/08, ad-viewing required) Joe Klein in the current Time magazine declaiming George W. Bush's "ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the 'Mission Accomplished' sign" as a "defining moment... of the Bush failure" with Klein's May 4, 2003 Face the Nation response to Bob Schieffer calling the image "one of the great pictures of all time": "Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day." Greenwald goes on to tell exactly why he finds it "simply intolerable to watch those who cheered on many of the worst excesses try now to pretend that they were skeptical, adversarial critics all along":

I'm glad that many people, including some journalists, seem to have learned some lessons from the Bush era now that he's almost certainly the single most unpopular president in modern American history. People who regret their mistakes and learn from them should be welcomed and encouraged. But a vital aspect of what happened over the last eight years is the role the media--our leading media stars--played in glorifying and venerating George Bush, and that can't be re-written or forgotten.

Truly learning from one's mistakes--as opposed to wet-finger-in-the-air abandonment of previously revered leaders when they are revealed as failures and lose their power--requires, at the very least, an acknowledgment of one's own role in what happened. There have been very few mea culpas from establishment media journalists, many--most--of whom, to this day, think they did nothing wrong ("It was all Judy Miller!").

Greenwald's premise is simple enough: "Journalists with influential platforms have responsibilities, the primary one of which is to be accountable for what they say and do."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Mitchell on NY Times' Mea Culpa"(5/28/04)

Obama's selection of a host of Clinton-era centrists for top posts have been greeted with cheers in the press.

ABC's George Stephanopoulos gushed that "we have not seen this kind of combination of star power, brain power and political muscle this early in a cabinet in our lifetimes."

Last week, even conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, who makes a point of his disdain for what he calls the "O-phoria," praised Obama's transition as "impressive," saying, "He's off to a start that nearly justifies the hype."

As a new FAIR advisory points out, a central trope in this media praise is the notion that Obama's nominees are "non-ideological."

Of course, the notion that figures like Rahm Emmanuel are beyond politics is nonsense. As FAIR points out,

Many of these nominees have a distinct record of support for the corporate-friendly NAFTA trade pact, gutting public assistance programs under the guise of welfare "reform," and pushing various deregulatory policies in the financial sector (including the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act).

Yet to hear the media tell it, one would think that Obama's centrist appointees inhabit an ideology-free political zone. A few of the more glaring examples flagged in the release:

Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.--David Sanger, New York Times (11/22/08)

Emanuel is a win-at-any-cost partisan but not an ideologue; in his earlier White House stint as a top aide to Clinton, he was a key figure in shepherding through the North American Free Trade Agreement, a crime bill and welfare reform--none of them popular with the Democratic Party's liberal base.--Karen Tumulty, Time (11/13/08)
The records of Messrs. Geithner and Summers suggest views more pragmatic than ideological, on a range of issues that they will likely confront after Mr. Obama takes office in January.--Wall Street Journal (11/24/08)

The release concludes by asking:

What makes these Clinton era centrists' positions "pragmatic" rather than "ideological"? Notably, those positions were all heartily supported by a corporate media that system that clings fiercely to the notion that it, too, is non-ideological (see Extra! 10-11/89).

This news comes from an AFL-CIO blog (via Adam Serwer at TAPPED): 

 
This report likely won’t be on CNN's Headline News, but after five years, former workers at CNN have finally gained justice. In a decision made public today, an administrative law judge ordered the network to rehire 110 workers who were fired because they were union members. CNN also was ordered to recognize the workers' unions, National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians-CWA (NABET-CWA) locals 31 and 11.

Judge Arthur Amchan found that CNN violated the rights of more than 250 employees at the network’s bureaus in Washington, D.C., and New York City when it ended its subcontract with Team Video Services (TVS), whose employees were represented by NABET-CWA. He also ruled that CNN discriminated against TVS employees who wanted to continue working at CNN's bureaus to avoid having to recognize and bargain with the union.

Anyone who followed the results of Venezuela's regional elections last Sunday will know that President Hugo Chavez's party won 17 out of 22 contests up for grabs, garnering 52.5 percent of the popular vote to the opposition's 41.1 percent. Unless, that is, they were relying on New York Times Latin America correspondent Simon Romero.

Despite a well-documented pattern of media misinformation about Chavez, many media outlets, including L.A. Times and CNN, conceded the fact of Chavez allies' victory in Sunday's races.

But not Romero!

Yesterday, the Times published an article by Romero titled, "Chavez Supporters Suffer Defeat in State and Regional Races."

The article's lede:

President Hugo Chávez’s supporters suffered a stinging defeat in several state and municipal races on Sunday, with the opposition retaining power in oil-rich Zulia, the country’s most populous state, and winning crucial races here in the capital.

Today, the Times ran a follow-up piece penned by Romero under the headline "Once Considered Invincible, Chavez Takes a Blow," as well as an editorial that argued that "In Sunday's state and municipal elections Venezuelans showed just how fed up they are with his government's authoritarianism and incompetence."

Over at Narco News, Al Giordano takes on Romero's peculiar alternate reality of Venezuela's vote:

Imagine if elections for all 50 state governors in the United States were held on a single election day and 74 percent of those seats (or 37 out of 50 governorships) went to one political party's candidates. Imagine also that the victorious party's candidates had won 52.5 percent of all votes to just 41 percent for the opposition (the technical definition of an electoral landslide is a victory of ten percentage points or more).

If a New York Times reporter--or any reporter--then wrote the story of the election results and called it a "stinging defeat" for the victorious party, wouldn't he be laughed off of his beat?

But then again, if the New York Times had any journalistic standards when it came to reporting on Venezuela, Romero likely would have been laughed off his beat long ago....

Eric Hananoki and Lauren Auerbach have a new Media Matters exposé (11/24/08) of how,

since the beginning of October, Dick Morris has repeatedly used his columns and Fox News appearances to promote and raise money for the National Republican Trust PAC without disclosing that the organization has paid $24,000 to a company apparently connected to Morris, according to FEC filings. During that time, Morris' email newsletter has frequently included ads that state: "Paid for by The National Republican Trust PAC."

A long list of Morris plugging the group in any venue that would have him is accompanied by evidence they "paid a firm apparently affiliated with Morris at least $24,000 since the beginning of October." Hananoki and Auerbach follow this lead to its smoking-gun end: "The 'Mailing Address' for that firm, Triangulation Strategies, is listed in one of the National Republican Trust PAC's FEC filings as 'DickMorris.com.'"

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has unsettling new results (Kaiser Family Foundation, 11/24/08) from a "study of how the U.S. news media covered health issues over an 18-month period from January 2007 through June 2008." The report "finds that news about health and health care made up less than four percent (3.6 percent) of all news content"--and that's just the beginning:

The study also examines the type of health coverage in the news, and finds that the largest proportion (42 percent) of the stories were about specific diseases or conditions. Thirty-one percent of health news focused on public health issues, including potential epidemics and contamination of food and drugs. The smallest category of stories focused on health policy or the health care system (27 percent) of all health news, or less than one percent (.9 percent) of all news content.

When this .9 percent of coverage does occur, the results often are disastrous; see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Media Miss Bigger Picture in Healthcare Debate: Ignoring 'Mandate' Plans' Record of Failure" (5-6/08) by Roger Bybee

Under the ironic headline "God Damn The God Damn Liberal Media" (A Tiny Revolution, 11/20/08), Jonathan Schwarz points out an astonishing quote

from Scott Horton's new article in Harper's on creating some kind of accountability for the torture conducted by the Bush administration (subscription required):

[I]n a 2006 radio interview, Dick Cheney said simply that the use of waterboarding to obtain intelligence was a "no-brainer."

Cheney at the time declined to refer to this practice as torture, preferring instead to describe it as "robust interrogation," and that reluctance has been echoed in the press. I myself was twice warned by PBS producers, in advance of appearances on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, that I could use the word "torture" in the abstract but that I was to refrain from applying it to the administration's policies. And after an interview with CNN in which I spoke of the administration's torture policy, I was told by the producer, "That’s okay for CNN International, but we can’t use it on the domestic feed."

Schwarz closes, sarcastically: "As always, the question remains: why is the major U.S. media so incredibly left-wing?"

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to 'Waterboarding': Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5-6/08) by Isabel Macdonald