Posting on Editor & Publisher's E&P Pub blog (11/17/08), Greg Mitchell has more on "Misleading Parents After Their Kids Are Killed in War":

Battle fatalities are way down in Iraq, thank goodness (though not Afghanistan), but many U.S. troops are still passing away in "noncombat" ways, via accidents, friendly fire, suicides and so on. And in those cases, parents or spouses (and the press) are still often misled or lied to for days or weeks or months before the truth of how they died comes out--in the local press. Here is today's horror story. R.I.P. Mason Lewis. They told his mom he died in a fall. Instead: "Army investigators discovered a poorly maintained bucket loader with no brakes and sluggish hydraulics, operated by an inexperienced crew, led to Mason's death."

Mitchell has closely followed such stories of U.S. military and press deception regarding casualties like Mason Lewis and Afghanistan "war hero" Pat Tillman for years now.

Listen to him on the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Mitchell on Pat Tillman" (5/27/05)

From his perch over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald (11/18/08, ad-viewing required) sees "nothing new" in the current media craze for "bipartisanship": "To the contrary, the last eight years have been defined, more than anything else, by overarching bipartisan cooperation and consensus."

Where is the evidence of the supposed partisan wrangling that we hear so much about? Just examine the question dispassionately. Look at every major Bush initiative, every controversial signature Bush policy over the last eight years, and one finds virtually nothing but massive bipartisan support for them--the Patriot Act (original enactment and its renewal); the invasion of Afghanistan; the attack on, and ongoing occupation of, Iraq; the Military Commissions Act (authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques, abolishing habeas corpus, and immunizing war criminals); expansions of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity; declaring part of Iran's government to be "terrorists"; our one-sided policy toward Israel; the $700 billion bailout; The No Child Left Behind Act, "bankruptcy reform," and on and on.

Greenwald writes that "most of those were all enacted with virtually unanimous GOP support and substantial, sometimes overwhelming, Democratic support: the very definition of 'bipartisanship.' That's just a fact"--and as such, "by definition, it does not remotely constitute 'change.'"

Dean Baker makes a particularly sharp point (Beat the Press, 11/18/08) when trying to "imagine that the economy in Venezuela gets really bad in the next few years." He asks if the Washington Post would then "write about how Hugo Chávez had to cope with enormous economic turmoil?" but decides "that's unlikely. The Post would most likely be running articles that tell readers how Chávez's policies led to an economic disaster."

But a different standard is applied to our economic chieftains who pursue policies that the Post endorses. The first part of a two-part profile of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's actions in the crisis is headlined "A Conversion in 'This Storm.'" The headline implies that the economic crisis is something that came out of the blue as opposed to being an entirely predictable result of the economic policies pursued by Paulson and his predecessors.

The point is extremely simple. There was a huge housing bubble that should have been visible to any competent economic analyst. The bubble was fueled by an enormous chain of highly leveraged finance. (As head of Goldman Sachs, Mr. Paulson personally made hundreds of millions of dollars from this bubble.)

Again stating that "it was entirely predictable that the housing bubble would burst," Baker asserts "there is zero excuse for Paulson being caught by surprise by a 'storm' that he helped create" and that "the Post should not be in the business of covering up for Paulson's massive failure."

See the new issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy

Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi's look back (11/13/08) at his experience covering the '08 presidential campaign features this response to Hillary Clinton adviser Mark Penn calling her "a workhorse": "'Are you implying,' snaps one reporter, 'that Barack Obama is not a workhorse?'"

This is what qualifies as a tough question on the campaign trail. The press performance in this election year would ultimately prove to be the worst of all time by miles and miles. Example: After thousands of reporters sat around for months on end listening first to Hillary's and then John McCain's people blather on about Obama's connection to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, it would take David Letterman--David Letterman!--to challenge either candidate on the matter. "Are they driving cross-country?" Letterman asked, after finally having gotten McCain to squirm about his own relationship with equivalent extremist G. Gordon Liddy.

Taibbi thinks that, "in a society of grown-ups, Brian Williams and Katie Couric and Wolf Blitzer would have done that from the start." Unfortunately, he tells us, "they didn't--they treated the mudslinging like it wasn't vile horseshit to be laughed at, but something real to be discussed with furrowed brows, debated. So it persisted."

See item No. "11. Obama's Dubious 'Associates'" in the FAIR magazine article Extra!: "Top Troubling Tropes of Campaign '08: The Media-Created Narratives that Derail Election Coverage" (11-12/08) by Peter Hart

As well as being infused with a modern-day "white man's burden" mythology not exactly unheard of in media reporting on Somalia, Time magazine's article "The Suffering of Somalia" (11/13/08) follows the well-documented pattern of misreporting on recent U.S. intervention on Somalia (see Extra!,  3-4/08)--downplaying the disastrous role of recent U.S. policy in that country:

Somalia is not so much a failed-state as a didn't-even-try one. It hasn't had a government since 1991, when warlords took over and embarked on a series of intractable clan wars that have produced one of the world's worst humanitarian crises: hundreds of thousands dead and 3 million people desperately in need of aid.

In the following paragraph, Time notes that "those who try to help too often come to grief."

Yet the record shows that the humanitarian situation in Somalia has gotten far worse in the wake of a U.S./Ethiopian military invasion in '06. According to

Foreign Policy in Focus, the U.S./Ethiopian intervention ended what had been a brief six-month period of relative peace and security under the rule of the Islamic Courts. By the end of 2007, the situation had escalated into a full-scale humanitarian crisis, and today, "Nearly half of Somalia's population is starving and the stage is set for a famine on par with the horrific hunger that ravaged the Horn of Africa in the early 1990s."

Time concludes by identifying "the emergence of Iraq-style Awakening militias made up of moderate Somalis, who have taken on al-Shabaab in street battles in recent weeks" as an an "encouraging development":

The chances are that this will grow into a full-scale conflict. Still, an Awakening would also offer Somalia's best hope of keeping its extremists in check. Perhaps only in Somalia could the prospect of more war be a sign of hope.

Actually, the use of U.S.-backed militias to fight official U.S. enemies in Somalia is not a new development. As Extra! pointed out:

In early 2006, the CIA provided big payments to brutal and widely despised warlords who formed the "Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism," a group that clashed with the courts and snatched up "terror suspects" to feed to the CIA, actions that managed to backfire and dramatically increase public support for the Islamic Courts; experts argue that without that U.S. involvement, the Courts wouldn't have been able to build up the public support they needed to bring Mogadishu under their control (Agence France Presse, 6/15/06; Chatham House, 4/07).

As for the prospect of war being "a sign of hope" in Somalia, that's something that Extra! observed the mainstream press was saying back in 2006 too, during the U.S./Ethiopian intervention:

-"In a country with such a troubled recent history, including famine, anarchy, isolation and war, a potentially viable government has suddenly emerged"  (New York Times, 12/29/06)

-"Somalia now has the best chance in 15 years to end anarchy and establish an effective government"(Associated Press, 1/2/07)

On Fox News Sunday (11/16/08), NPR reporter Mara Liasson offered her take (which was essentially the same as neo-con co-panelist Bill Kristol) on why picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State would be good for Barack Obama:

In terms of Obama, I think he wants--it would send a lot of important signals. Number one, she is hawkish, as Bill pointed out. He has to kind of put to rest this notion that he was naive, which, of course, came from her during the campaign.

She’s hawkish, which will balance out his naiveté. If this is supposed to be a reference to the fact that Clinton supported the Iraq War, then it makes even less sense.

The New York Times' Jonathan Hicks (11/17/08), writing about newly elected Staten Island Rep. Michael McMahon:

Mr. McMahon...stresses his working-class roots, telling voters of his Irish father’s lifelong job as an insurance underwriter.

That must be the same working class that Bill O'Reilly comes from.

A new media watchdog series, the IFC Media Project, makes its debut tonight on the Independent Film Channel.  Host Gideon Yago has spent time at MTV and CBS, experiences that he tells the New York Times helped turn him into a media critic:

In an interview last week, he said he had watched "news stories that were super-relevant get the kibosh because Purina had bought the first hour of the morning show and they wanted to do a profile on fat cats."...

Asked if he has become a journalistic cynic, he responded, "That, my friend, is the understatement of the year."

Calling herself "more of an ally than an activist for transgender people," Veronica Arreola admits (Women In Media & News, 11/16/08) to "not being on top of each nuance of the movement" but still is aghast "at most of the media's reaction to [Thomas] Beatie's second pregnancy":

It's not the headlines that upset me; most of them have been fairly tame, like "Pregnant Man Expecting Again." But it has been the delivery on local news broadcasts as well as cable news broadcasts.... One of my local news teams announced it and the anchorman said something like, "And you thought it wasn't a weird day." I saw the news listed on "weird news" on Twitter.

The most genuine "weird" question about Beatie's second pregnancy...--why so soon? The answer appears obvious, he had to go off testosterone in order to get pregnant. The sooner he "finishes" having babies, the sooner he can get back to his hormones.

In Arreola's eyes, "the only thing odd or weird is how someone's personal decision between two adults on how to create a family stirs up other people's transphobia."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Transforming Coverage: Transgender Issues Get Greater Respect--but Anatomy Remains Destiny" (11-12/07) by Julie Hollar

Fair Use infringement and talk-radio vitriol meet in a report (Bay City News, 11/13/08) on hate-jock Michael Savage's latest charming escapades:

Conservative radio talkshow host Michael Savage has been sued in federal court in San Francisco by a liberal film group for making an allegedly baseless demand that YouTube Inc. take down one of its videos.

The video by Brave New Films was entitled Savage Hates Muslims and criticized an October 29, 2007, broadcast in which Savage...comments that Muslims should "take [their] religion and shove it up [their] behind" and should be deported....

YouTube did take down the video and temporarily disabled the entire YouTube channel of Brave New Films, according to the group. Brave New Films claims in the lawsuit that the take-down notice for the Savage Hates Muslims video was baseless because the excerpts were used for political commentary and thus protected by the legal doctrine of fair use.

Indeed, Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films also "claims the radio network and Savage engaged in 'knowing misrepresentation' because" just this July, one judge "dismissed a copyright infringement claim Savage filed against the Washington, D.C., based Council on American-Islamic Relations for using four minutes of excerpts from Savage's broadcast."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Fair Use It or Lose It: Copyright Owners' Threats Erode Free Expression" (5-6/06) by Marjorie Heins

WeCanStopTheHate.org's latest push for "media networks... to separate themselves from hate groups and hate speech" quotes (11/14/08) National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguía saying that, with a recent race-motivated Long Island murder, "we have been brutally reminded about the consequences of leaving hate unchecked":

"The wave of hate that is seeping through our communities threatens the fabric of our nation and is costing lives. Americans will not be cowed by those trying to advance intolerance-we must stand up to the presence of hate groups and extremists" ...Murguía added.

Just yesterday, Media Matters for America released a report, ["Women, Minorities, Autistic Children: Conservative Radio's Vitriol Not Reserved for Obama"] which exposes attacks and generalizations made by some radio shock-jocks. The distortions made by some about immigrants and the Latino community have led to a growing climate of hate. FBI hate crime statistics show that attacks against Latinos have been on the rise over the past four years.

"Unfortunately, the climate that led to the tragic death of Marcello Lucero in Long Island is not new or anecdotal. Latinos have personally felt the impact of the wave of hate cloaked under the immigration debate," said Murguía.

Watch WeCanStopTheHate's excellent video "about the code words of hate and what your community can do to combat hate speech."

The Real News reports (11/15/08) on a censorious Canadian monopoly's latest misdeeds:

In early November, Canadian media giant Canwest Mediaworks dropped its lawsuit against Mordecai Briemberg, a lawsuit which alleged that he infringed on Canwest's trademark rights. The case pertained to the creation of a parody of one of Canwest's many papers, the Vancouver Sun. The parody satirized what its creators see as Canwest's biased coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and while there was no evidence that Mordecai had any role in the creation of the paper, Mordecai posits that it was the building of public pressure that caused Canwest to drop the suit, as they had known about the absence of evidence for months. While Mordecai suit was dropped, Canwest has refused to drop its suit against the two others who have taken responsibility for the creation of the parody. Mordecai contends that parody is a cherished tradition of dissent in the society and that Canwest's lawsuits amount to an attack on freedom of speech.

Paul Jay interviews Briemberg on the cases against himself and the creators of the biting spoof paper headlined: "Celebrating 40 Years of Civilising the West Bank."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: Canada’s Media Monopoly: "One Perspective Is Enough, Says CanWest" (5-6/02) by James Winter

The Huffington Post publishes male critic Jeff Cohen's challenge (11/13/08) to "independent media outlets that contributed so mightily to the stunning election result":

With Democrats in control, will these outlets be guided by principle or just partisanship? Will they speak truth to power and expose corruption and injustice over the long haul--no matter who's in charge?...

From the start of the Republic, bold entrepreneurs (often sole proprietors like many of today's bloggers) stood up to censorship, jail and violence to sustain independent outlets that transformed our country....

Study any cause that has improved our country since and you'll find stubbornly independent journalists who challenged injustice in the face of ridicule and scorn from the mainstream media of their day.

Giving props to Rodger Streitmatter's 2001 Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America, in which many of "these journalistic heroes are chronicled," Cohen dispenses hard-won wisdom, culminating in "Stay stubbornly independent: This is the ultimate lesson."

See the retrospective in FAIR's magazine Extra!: "On the Shoulders of Giants: The Unbroken Tradition of Press Criticism" (1-2/06) by Robin Andersen

From the Washington Post
yesterday--emphasis added:

The United States and Pakistan reached tacit agreement in September on a don't-ask-don't-tell policy that allows unmanned Predator aircraft to attack suspected terrorist targets in rugged western Pakistan, according to senior officials in both countries. In recent months, the U.S. drones have fired missiles at Pakistani soil at an average rate of once every four or five days.

The officials described the deal as one in which the U.S. government refuses to publicly acknowledge the attacks while Pakistan's government continues to complain noisily about the politically sensitive strikes.

If this is true, what will reporters do when news of an airstrike surfaces? Given that the default position of the U.S. government will seemingly be to deny everything, will media report such denials as if they are meaningful?

The Washington Post editorial yesterday on Nicaragua begins:

Through much of the 1980s, the United States waged a proxy war to prevent Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party from consolidating a dictatorship in Nicaragua. In 1990, Mr. Ortega finally agreed to hold a presidential election, which he lost....

That history is false. Nicaragua held a presidential election in 1984, which Ortega won. The 1990 vote happened on schedule in accord with the Sandinista constitution. This is a fact that the Post has gotten wrong before in its news pages. Ironically, the Post was credited in Extra! (10-11/87) for reporting on a

"secret-sensitive" NSC briefing paper which outlined a "wide-ranging plan to convince Americans [that the] Nicaraguan elections were a 'sham.'"

There are certainly legitimate questions about Ortega's rule; but if the Post can't get the recent Nicaraguan past right, why should one bother reading what they think of the present?

The paper does admit, though, that "there is no need for another Contra army." Well, there's a relief.